There is a promise in Isaiah 55 that has anchored gospel work for centuries: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10–11). Rain falls, and long before anyone tastes the bread it eventually produces, the process is already at work, unseen, beneath the soil. Even faithful preachers across history have confessed seasons when they could not see that process moving, when a sermon seemed to land without visible effect. Scripture’s promise is that the Word does its work regardless of what is visible in the moment. Few stories illustrate that promise as vividly as the story of Juceleis.
It began in February 2022, in a church in Bayamo, Cuba, a city between Santiago and central Cuba, where a PassionLife team was teaching the ministry’s “Four Questions” curriculum on the sanctity of life. Part of that teaching included a personal testimony of past involvement in the abortion industry and the long road toward repentance and restoration. As that testimony was shared, one woman in the congregation grew visibly shaken. When the session ended, she raised her hand and asked to speak.
Her name was Juceleis, and she was an OB/GYN doctor. In Cuba, she had performed abortions professionally. She had also had an abortion of her own years earlier, as a medical student, at her mother’s insistence. Since then, she and her husband had longed for a child, and longing had turned to heartbreak: miscarriage after miscarriage, followed by four or five rounds of in vitro fertilization, none of which succeeded. In a striking detail, she had undergone another round of IVF only days before that service in Bayamo, and the team had prayed over her that day, trusting that pregnancy would hold. It did not. Every round of IVF she attempted ended the same way.
What followed was not a quick fix but a season of real spiritual work. Juceleis was guided into a Bible study built specifically for women carrying the weight of abortion, whether as patients or as providers, toward repentance and restoration through Scripture and prayer. She embraced it fully. In time, two more women joined her, both OB/GYN doctors with the same dual history: abortions performed, and abortions endured. Roughly six months after that first encounter, the three women sat together through a class addressing grief that none of them had been able to name before.
The photographs from that period trace an unmistakable arc. There is Juceleis on the day she and the PassionLife team first met. There is Juceleis standing before her congregation, tearful, delivering a public testimony of repentance while the pastor’s wife holds her. There is Juceleis lighting a candle in memory of the child she lost to abortion decades earlier. And there is Juceleis smiling, genuinely at peace for what seems like the first time, seated among the other doctors who had walked the same class with her. She had come to understand herself not as a woman without a child, but as a mother whose child was already with the Lord. It was a resolution that, on its own, would have been enough to close the story. It was not the end of it.
Six or seven months later, Juceleis and her husband left Cuba. They traveled through Panama and made their way north, entering the United States through Texas with the sponsorship of a family relative, and settled there as legal residents. Her Cuban medical license did not transfer, so she took the only opening available to her: a janitorial position cleaning an OB/GYN clinic. The woman who had once practiced medicine, who had once performed abortions and grieved her own, was now mopping floors in an American exam room.
Five or six months into that job, after years of failed treatments and lost pregnancies, Juceleis began feeling ill. She was pregnant, naturally, with no medical intervention at all. She and her husband named the baby Grace, a name chosen because they understood exactly what it was: an unearned gift. Grace is now eighteen months old.
The physician who owned the clinic soon recognized who was cleaning her office. She drew Juceleis into the practice, and today Juceleis works as her right-hand medical assistant while pursuing licensure as a Licensed Vocational Nurse. The woman who arrived in Texas holding a broom now stands near the center of that clinic’s daily work, and, in a further turn no one could have planned, near the center of a growing pro-life ministry of her own.
Juceleis has since returned twice to the church in Bayamo, to the same pastor and the same pastor’s wife who first sat with her in 2022. On the first trip, she testified that she had left Cuba having been told she would likely never carry a child to term, and that she had since given birth naturally in the United States. On the second trip, she brought Grace with her, presenting her before the congregation as living proof of what had happened.
Back in Texas, that same testimony has become the foundation of a ministry taking shape inside an ordinary medical office and, of all places, a public library. The doctor Juceleis works for now sends her to speak with patients who are frightened, uncertain, and facing decisions about pregnancies they did not plan, many of them immigrants from across Latin America navigating crisis far from home and family. Juceleis tells them her story and introduces them to a circle of women who have chosen to carry their pregnancies and who now walk that road together.
That circle now meets monthly as a “mommy and me” class, hosted free of charge in a local public library, where mothers bring their babies to sit with women who are still deciding. On a recent visit, Juceleis was given a handheld ultrasound device that connects to a tablet, a tool she had specifically requested so that the babies these women carry would feel real to them sooner. Within days, she had set up an examining table inside the library itself and performed an ultrasound on one of the group’s expectant mothers, letting her see her own child for the first time.
None of this reduces to a formula. Faith does not guarantee a biological child, and this story does not claim that it does. What it offers instead is a picture of how a single word, spoken in a small church in Bayamo, Cuba, in February 2022, did not stay there. It traveled through repentance, through migration, through a season of menial labor, through an unexplained pregnancy, and into a public library in Texas, where it continues to reach women, many of them far from their own home countries, who might otherwise never have heard it at all. It stands alongside the best-known conversion stories in the pro-life movement: a woman who once worked inside the abortion industry now working, quite literally, to help women choose life.
It is, in the end, exactly what Isaiah 55 promises. The word goes out. It does not return empty. It accomplishes what it was sent to do, whether or not the one who first spoke it ever gets to see the harvest.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.