Hold Her Up Interview with Mrs Merari Pena Vidal

Hold Her Up (HHU) Women: Interview with Mrs Merari Pena Vidal

I am so excited to bring you our very first guest on the Hold Her Up Women Series – Mrs Merari Pena Vidal.

Mrs Vidal is a Christian wife, mother and the owner of Forever Crystals, a faith-based jewellery company which she runs with her husband with shops in Puerto Rico and other parts of the US.

Our interview covered many things including Merari’s faith journey, her business, single season, and marriage. It is packed with so many nuggets of wisdom and life lessons and I can’t wait to share them all with you.

Due to the length of the interview, we have broken it into three blog posts. The first part will focus mainly on her faith journey, her life as a Christian businesswoman and how she met her husband, while the last two will focus on marriage and motherhood.

Here is Part 1 of our interview:

 

How old were you when you became a Christian or have you always been a Christian?

As a Latina, we have always heard about it and my mother used to take me to church. I left my house when I was 16, so at that point, I stopped my relationship with the church or with God whatsoever.

I had an encounter with Jesus when I was 23. It changed my life. I’m not going to say that it changed everything around me, but it changed me, and it helped me to move forward with my faith.

I met the lord in July and about October, I decided it was time to give my life completely to the Lord. That meant at that moment starting a business with a mission attached. It happened one after the other.

 

Do you want to share a bit more about the encounter?

I was at a party in one of the islands, the British Virgin Islands. I was on a boat, and we were driving very fast to come back and the waves were crashing against the boat, and I remember a voice saying “I created you for more and you will not see it if you stay here.”

I remember my church teachers when I was little telling me if you ever wanna speak to God you just have to speak through your heart. I said to the lord,

“If it’s you I give you 30 days, I’m gonna stay away from this life for 30 days. I’m going to leave alcohol, I’m gonna leave the smoking and everything else behind. And if you wanna do something, do it in these 30 days.”

And my life around me hadn’t changed but I had changed.

You started your business at 23, it must have taken a lot of boldness to do that. For a lot of people, there is this sense that they are too young.

I, of course, didn’t know what I was doing. I started as a favour. My father told me a couple of months after I met the Lord that he wanted to go to the missionary field in Cuba. He said the “Good News of Jesus is free but taking it cost money. I’m looking for somebody who can run my business so I can go to the missionary field.” I just felt that was a way of giving back to Jesus what he was giving me – that peace, that freedom, that love I was receiving, I wanted to pay it back somehow. So I said to my father, “Yes, of course, I’ll run the business.”

And that’s how Forever Crystals started, it started as a favour.” It started as a non-profit. And somehow God has grown it into this bigger thing, but it started really little. I didn’t have any money; I didn’t have any knowledge. I didn’t even like jewellery back then, but now I cannot live without it. Whatever God puts in your way, if you offer it back to him, it will grow into something beautiful.

 

Over the years, how has that journey now living out your faith? Obviously after giving your life to Christ and starting your business? One of the realities we hear is that it is hard to be a Christian in business. What was that like for you especially as a woman in business?

I don’t want to say I have it all figured out cause I don’t. It’s been a journey learning ethics and learning the Christian way of business. When I’ve learnt the most is when I’ve failed the most. When I know I’m doing things wrong, and the Holy Spirit convicts me then I do it again one more time and I say “This is the correct way.”

So, I want to start from there because I haven’t done everything correctly. I understand the Nigerian thing, I’m Latina and Latinos like the short way out. They like the shortcuts, they like to do things in maybe not the best way.

Having the contrast makes you live your Christian faith. It doesn’t come easily but helps you make better decisions. Sometimes, it will cost more money, it will not be the most profitable but it will be the correct thing. And God somehow honours that over and over again.

Could you share two experiences that have been the biggest challenges for you being a woman and a Christian? I’ll rephrase that – being a Christian first because that is the true identity and being a woman in business and how you’ve been able to navigate that?

Well, as soon as I started, we always wanted to be a business as mission. We’ve been very vocal about our faith. You’ll see it in our pieces, you’ll see the Bible verses and there have been people who have rejected us because of this.

People who have not wanted to do anything with us. They don’t buy our products because of that. And that’s okay, it’s not for everyone, I’ve just made peace with the fact that not everyone will like what we do and we will be targeted for that. If Jesus was targeted, why should I expect differently? I’m okay with it but at the beginning, it was hard to deal with the rejection especially because of my background. I come from divorced parents, my father was not there, I felt rejected all my life. Therapy and Jesus have gotten me through that. With that, I’ve made my peace with not being liked by everyone.

I have another experience – it’s about being in business especially when I was a single woman because men didn’t know the difference between I’m being nice because I’m a woman in business I want to share what I do with I am interested in you.

What I will tell single women is that you don’t stop being yourself because of what you’re doing but you start being wiser in the way you do it.

In the way I dress, the messages I want to send and the boundaries that I place in my life for them to feel my approach is nothing but professional. I’ve learned boundaries, I’ve learned to dress differently. I’ve learned wisdom comes in very handy in decisions in business.

 

I recently started a business and I’m still single. This was one of the reasons I was interested in your devotional, trying to understand this idea of business as mission. And because I’m a single woman, sometimes navigating that – you’re trying to show what you can do but also make sure that people do not misinterpret that. However, there are people who will still make advances, how did you manage that? You said you created boundaries, could you speak more about the boundaries?

 

I don’t take dinners, I will barely take lunches, and I would always bring somebody else. Those are small boundaries that as women we can take to make life better in business. The way I’ve dressed has drastically changed. Some people will say, “You don’t have to change who you are.” I’m not changing who I am but I’m portraying myself in a different light because I love people so much and I love what I do so much that I want to be careful and I want to bless them with what I do. I don’t want my message to be blocked by how I look or what I do so I want to be very careful.

 

Regarding boundaries, when I got married it also increased because I didn’t want to do anything that would be disrespectful to my husband so I would always discuss them with him

“This is what I’m gonna wear, what do you think? Or “I have to go to this dinner or this lunch, could you come with me?”

The Bible says that in the ‘multitude of counsel there is wisdom.’ And I’ve been very frontward in having a lot of people that I consult about what I do before I do it. Even more, if it’s public.

 

Let’s backtrack to the marriage part, you said you had already started the business before you got married. What was that like – they say women do not ‘find’ they rather accept ‘offers’ from those who find them – what was that like when your husband found you? How did you know he was the one, especially as an already established businesswoman who I’m sure must have been independent?

This is a whole chapter. I met the Lord when I was 23 and I spent 5 years alone. And I think that season was a detox for me, but at the same time I was praying:

“God bring him, wherever he is, I pray over him, bless him, take care of him…”

I met my husband in college, but we got married when we were 28, we are the same age. It was about 10 years between when we met and when we started going out. But those five years were so key in my life because I was detoxing from my old life, I was detoxing from the old way of thinking, from being this empowered woman who wants to do everything by herself because she’s so powerful, and really learning that that’s not true empowerment.

True empowerment is being able to trust in God’s plan for your life and sometimes it will be to submit to a man. And it will be to follow this man and to trust what God has put in him. I remember so many times praying with my husband and seeing how God favoured him in his prayers and his way of thinking. Me saying to God, “I know you’re favouring him to teach me a lesson and I wanna learn it the good way.”

 

For more on this, look out for Part 2 of my interview with the incredible Mrs Merari Pena Vidal.