José A. Bamio

José A. Bamio

I was born in Venezuela, as a child of Spanish immigrants. I received a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering from Furtwangen University, in West Germany, in 1978. Back in Venezuela, I joined the faculty of the Instituto Universitario de Tecnología where I taught electronics for several years. Afterwards, I have worked as engineer and as a manager in a family business. In 2009, I moved with my family to Spain where I currently work as freelance translator.

 

In 1975, while I was in Germany, and as a result of an intensive spiritual quest, I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I remember expressing my complacency to the elder who baptized me because I felt that all my questions had been sufficiently answered, but he wisely urged me to go for new questions. The saints in Germany helped me with my incipient testimony and also introduced me, besides the Scriptures in the Institute class, to the books written by the latter-day prophets and to the works of a certain Hugh W. Nibley. 

 

By reading Nibley, the new world of the Restoration kept expanding in front of me. I was happily engaged in a process of learning by faith and by study: I was learning to have the heavens teaching me through prayer, fasting, obedience, ordinances, service and Scripture study, and on the same time, I was learning how to further discern truth from error and how to reason and correlate truths under the blessed light of the Restoration. In the 1980s, back in Venezuela, and after my mission and temple sealing, I learnt about FARMS and sought eagerly to get any crumb of knowledge I could, that might drop from the rich banquet table (BYU and its scholars). In a time without the benefits of Internet and in a country where the Church was barely starting, the Lord still granted me occasional but wonderful opportunities to receive some of your publications, which fed my mind as well as my soul.

 

After having received so much, I desired to give something in return. This is how I ended up writing a short paper about the Allegory of the Olive Tree, which was gently published in The Religious Educator.

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