It hit Leroy Johnson like a ton of bricks — he knew this village.
He knew it even though he’d never been to it, even though no one had ever been to it before.
He’d seen it back in Alabama four years ago before he’d ever even thought about taking the gospel into the mountains of East Asia.
“I was struggling (back in 2007) with how I could best serve Him and what that was supposed to look like. He gave me a vision one night of me in a village in some country, sharing truth with the people,” Johnson said. “So I began to pray and look at options on how to proceed.”
He had never considered serving overseas before, and he had definitely never considered East Asia. But slowly, he said, God prompted him to go there.
“God began to prepare the heart He called,” said Johnson, an Alabama native who now serves as a Southern Baptist representative in East Asia. “I knew I wanted to work with unreached peoples, and I knew I wanted to go to peoples that were physically hard to reach — I wanted mountains.”
And mountains he got.
“The most precious of those confirmations of His call was the first trail I found in the mountains — a simple goat trail that led to a simple village that led to a stone hut doorstep,” Johnson said.
He found that stone hut after an unlikely chain of events. He rode a bus to a village with no real plans after he got there. And the darkness there, he said, was physically oppressive.
He prayed, “Lead me to the right person who can lead me to the right bus to take me to the right spot in the mountains. Then show me which way to walk.”
He stood in the street, and a man tapped him on the shoulder and pointed him to a bus. Once on the bus, a man who spoke perfect English told him where to go to find “hidden villages.”
Johnson shared the gospel with the man and then got off the bus. After praying and walking for a while, Johnson felt God telling him to look up so he did.
“I saw a trail,” he said, and he followed it. “After a little bit, I began to smell smoke and I rounded a bend to see a village in the middle of nowhere. I began to take pictures of the village but didn’t see any people.”
They were hiding from him.
“I decided to leave. As I was walking, a man came up the trail carrying a bundle of sticks. I asked if I could take his picture, and he said yes — and then invited me into his home.”
That day, the truth about Jesus Christ was shared with the village for the first time.
But God’s work didn’t stop there, Johnson said.
“The familiarity of the place struck me as odd. I obviously had never been there before; in fact, I later found out that no one had ever been there before. And then I realized — this was the village God had shown me in that vision in the summer of 2007, from the trail, to the layout of the huts. I laughed and cried at the same time. He knows what He’s doing.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed for security reasons.
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