Leroy Johnson didn’t catch what Peter said, but suddenly everyone in the house was looking at him to respond.
“What?” Johnson asked.
One of the men gestured toward Peter and said, “He said that if Jesus can give new life, then he wants to believe.”
Johnson looked at Peter, a sick, hopeless man at 25.
“When I first saw him, he wasn’t a very striking person. He wasn’t very well spoken. He wasn’t neat,” Johnson said. “He was an average, dirty, poor villager from the mountains of Asia. His hair was greasy and unkempt. His skin was dark and leathered from the sun, and he had dirty feet, dirty clothes and rough hands.”
And Peter was sick.
“This sickness made his whole body weak to the point where he couldn’t do any work. He couldn’t do anything but stay around his house — hopeless,” said Johnson, an Alabama native who now serves as a Southern Baptist representative in East Asia. “This is the state in which I met Peter — the state in which Peter met Jesus.”
When the men told Johnson that Peter wanted to believe, Johnson looked across the table at him and saw his hands trembling, his entire body wrestling with the Truth.
“I wondered what he was thinking in that moment. The day before, thinking he had tried everything to be healed, and the next day, hearing a whisper of hope around a dirty wooden table,” Johnson said.
He got so excited that he started sharing in English, forgetting no one there spoke English.
Then he watched as Peter prayed to receive Christ.
“We (Johnson and some believers from that country) gave him a copy of the Word and encouraged him to stand firm in Christ through every battle yet to come,” Johnson said.
He had no idea how Peter’s mother and the rest of his village would react to his new faith. But a few weeks later, he found out.
“I saw the power of Jesus,” Johnson said. “Peter was still the same dirty, poor villager but he looked alive.”
Peter grinned, hugged Johnson and told him he had been working. And not only that — he’d been reading the Word to people coming in and out of his home to hear about his new faith.
“They see the newness that Peter has been given and are drawn to it,” Johnson said. “I’m confident that He isn’t yet finished.”
Peter is the first believer in the Asian mountains where he lives, a spiritually uncharted area in which Johnson has been hiking, finding villages and sharing Jesus.
“While traveling with a volunteer team here doing some scouting with me this summer, we decided we would hike beside this big river, figuring it would give us water and thinking surely there would be villages beside it,” Johnson said.
They followed the river until it went straight into a cave.
“Everything seemed to be going wrong that week,” he said.
They stopped and ate with some villagers living nearby while they tried to figure out what to do next. Little did they know how divine it was that God led them there, Johnson said.
“I jokingly told one of the villagers it would be nice to have a boat right now,” he said. “So the guy calls a friend, and bam! We have a bamboo raft.”
The raft carried them through the cave and straight to Peter’s village.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed for security reasons.
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