Where No One Else Will Go

A graduate at age 86, with 18 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, Ohilda Mirabal knows exactly where she’s headed. She has known for years.

It’s not to a church with a full congregation or to a high-profile ministry. At the Lord’s direction, her plan is to go to the places most other people pass by: the rural communities, the isolated caregivers, the people who have called church after church and been told they are too far away.

She knows what that feels like. She has been that person.

Ohilda came to the United States from Cuba with two young children and a sick mother, speaking only Spanish. At the time, her husband was not permitted to leave the Communist island nation with them.

She had trained as an accountant in Cuba, but without speaking English, that credential meant little in the U.S. So, she enrolled in high school to learn the language, and while she was there, an opportunity to train as a nurse opened up. She took it.

She graduated as a registered nurse in New Jersey, eventually followed her mother to Miami for the warm weather, and built a successful career in health care.

Then came an unexpected turn. A physician she worked for discovered she had an accounting background and put her to work managing his finances. That experience gave Ohilda an idea.

She studied for, took, and passed the IRS exam, opened her own bilingual accounting practice, and ran it for 45 years, serving the Miami community in two languages.

She also became a licensed travel agent and insurance agent along the way. For decades, Ohilda was, as she puts it, “very busy — all the time.” But none of it was pulling her toward what she was really looking for.

Through her church, Ohilda began visiting hospitals and care facilities to pray with patients and staff. She loved it — but felt she needed more. A degree, she decided, would allow her to move more freely in those spaces and speak with more authority about her faith. So, at 79, she went to her computer, searched for a theology program, and found Regent University. She had never heard of it. She didn’t know anyone who had attended.

“To me, that was a blessing,” she says. “I love Regent.”

She was well into her studies when grief arrived in waves. Her husband fell seriously ill. Not long after, her son died suddenly — a heart attack, with no warning and no chance to say goodbye. Ohilda made the decision to care for her husband without telling him about their son. She carried that alone for three years, stepping away from her coursework until he passed away.

Then she went back and finished her Regent degree.

“I have never started anything I didn’t finish,” she says. “Age is a number. Everything depends on how you feel and what you think about it.”

The mission she has mapped out for herself grew directly from those three years of caregiving for her husband in a rural Florida community. She called church after church asking someone to come to the house, to sit with her, to talk about God. Every one of them said the same thing: “You’re too far away.”

“My point is to go to the places where nobody wants to go,” Ohilda insists. “That is where people need to hear about God. And that is what I am going to do.”

Ohilda earned her Bachelor of Science in Theology from Regent University in 2026. Financial aid opened that door for her. Your gift opens it for someone else. Make a gift today at regent.edu/giving.