Believing Story

Sunny recently joined the choir at our church.

Sunny is now living at our house and studying for his final exams for a high school diploma in June. This is the story of how Sunny became a Christian. He is from a mid-sized village outside our city, where a few notable Christians have come from. He had an uncle who was a Christian. As a teenager he started spending more time with a cousin who told him some things about Jesus. Eventually he wanted to read more information and asked for a Bible to read. He started to visit the church in their village. Then he started praying about whether he should become a Christian. One Sunday he felt led to proclaim that he believes in Jesus and the church prayed over him with joy.

As he started attending the church all the time, his parents got upset and decided to send him to live with relations in a village where there is no church. It was a difficult time because at the call to prayer five times a day, everyone would get up and go, but Sunny would refuse to go. He would spend the time sitting where he was and praying Jesus’ name, asking for protection from being forced or hurt. After a while of this, when it was clear the village wasn’t having its desired effect, his mother suggested that if he was going to remain a Christian he better go live with Christians. So, he went to a third village to live with a pastor’s family and go to middle-school. About this time him father died in late middle-age.

Then one day Sunny was carrying in from the field a big bundle of millet on his head, as he was helping with the harvest. As he bent down to carry it through the doorway to store it inside, he felt a big pop in his hip. The pastor’s family helped him to go to a mission hospital a few hours away for an operation to fix a bone problem in his hip. But then when he came home a few days later, all he could do was lay in bed and didn’t have the strength to move. So the pastor’s family would carry him to the bathroom everyday and take care of him. Eventually, they had him go to physical therapy at a nearby mission clinic and he started walking again with a cane. Now he doesn’t have a cane, but the problem has been transferred down to his knee with pain from walking and moving it.

Then his mother got sick. She declined for several months, and Sunny was able to visit her a couple times. He gave her an audio Bible to listen to and told Christians in the village to visit her because she was interested in learning about Jesus. The last time he was able to visit her, he asked her if she wanted to become a Christian, and she said yes! He prayed with her and then told the village pastor. Only a few weeks later she died. But because of his testimony and the pastor’s, they were able to bury her with the Christian traditions. Soon, the old pastor who had taken him into his house died, and Sunny moved to our city to live with the pastor’s son, our language teacher. After taking classes and trying the high school finishing exam twice, he still wasn’t able to pass. Since he was out of chances in the public system, he returned to his village to figure out what to do next. That’s when we heard about his need and decided to get involved with him and help him go to a private school.

-- El Padre