The Lord was busy working in other people, too. The little photocopy business on the ground floor of our bookstore building was put up for sale.

Since we were looking for new means of income in order to make our business platform self-sustaining, this looked like a good opportunity for us. The location would be another plus; having the bookstore on the third floor meant people had to look up before they would see our sign. Owning the business at street level would allow our sign to be easily seen by anyone passing by.

After we bought the photocopy business, Freedom, the young fellow who was already employed there said, “I’ll work for you for a month until you hire someone and I’ll stay to train that person. This sounded good to us, so I accepted his offer.

After nearly a month of looking, we hadn’t been able to find anyone suitable among the available believers to do the job, so Freedom made us another offer: “I like you. I think I’ll keep on working for you!”

So he essentially hired himself, and we were not sorry. He was creative, pleasant, hardworking, and honest. Those last two qualities were rare ones around us.

After three months of getting to know him, we began to talk with him about spiritual things. He engaged eagerly. Later he told me the reason for his interest. He’d been a thinker from childhood and had looked carefully into the faith of his fathers. After thinking long and hard about it, he’d rejected it in his early teens and became an atheist.

Then at age eighteen, while serving his military duty, he was on patrol, sitting on a mountainside around a campfire with his fellow soldiers and he said he suddenly realized that atheism was not an honest stance for anyone to take.

“No one can know for sure that there’s no God,” he said out loud to himself. Looking up at the star-studded sky, he added, “Maybe He lives on the back side of the moon!”

That was pretty impressive to me, to see how God had been working in Freedom’s life long before we met. Here was a fellow with a 6th grade education who had more insight than many professors with doctorates who persist in holding onto the intellectually dishonest position of atheism.

Freedom then went back and reexamined his family’s form of religion, but ended up rejecting it again. He was now actively looking for direction.

After moving to our city he had joined a Mafia group in the neighborhood of our shop and was working toward a leadership position. However, as we shared the gospel with him, he became aware of the vast differences between what the Word says, what his father’s religion says and what the Mafia had to offer.

One Monday after attending Salvation Fellowship with us, Freedom surrendered himself to Christ. With him was a friend, Falcon, who had heard the gospel in another city; he also prayed to accept Christ. These two, along with three other new believers became the core of our new fellowship plant. The Lord was answering our prayers!

Picture: Freedom working with me