The Man Who Wrecked My Life and Didn’t Even Know It

  Let me tell you about the man who wrecked my life. It was the first week of my senior year of college. I went with a group of friends to a back-to-school event. We naturally found ourselves waiting in the free food line. And that is where I met him. Standing next to us in line was a new student who I will call Adeeb. Adeeb was an international student from South Asia who had arrived in the States a few days before. He did not know anyone at the school yet, so we invited him to hang out with us. Throughout that next week, we continued to spend a lot of time getting to know Adeeb. We learned about his culture, his family and his love for the show Friends. Unfortunately, we also learned Adeeb felt extremely homesick. After a week of school, he decided to return to his home country. During one of our last times with Adeeb, one of my friends turned to him and asked, “Adeeb, have you heard of Jesus before?”

Facing the facts

Now let me pause right there for a moment. I had heard many times about the Great Commission and the command to “go.” I had heard of unreached people groups with little to no access to the gospel. I had heard of the 10/40 Window, and I had even heard of the statistical chance of Adeeb ever hearing the gospel in his home country (slim to none). Although I had heard these facts so many times, that is exactly what they were to me — facts. Adeeb replied, “No, who is that?” At that moment, all of those facts were no longer stats on a page. They were a face with a name — a genuine human being with a soul and a family. And he had never heard about Jesus! I watched Adeeb as he spent the next 15 minutes hearing about Jesus for the first time. I kept thinking: if I had only 15 minutes to learn all that I could about Jesus, would I honestly choose to follow him? Adeeb chose not to follow Christ that day. With heavy hearts we said goodbye, not knowing if he will ever have the opportunity to hear about Jesus again in his home country.

Get wrecked

From that moment on, I could no longer take a passive back seat while so many like Adeeb remain unreached. It impassioned me to invest deeply in people’s lives in order for them to know Jesus. It changed the path I would pursue after graduation and brought me across the country to New York City — where unreached people from all over the world have come to live — in order to make his name known. In that short week, Adeeb wrecked my life in the best way possible, and I pray that reading this he will wreck yours too.

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