Bryce Scruggs said sometimes there are moments when God reminds you, “This is why you were made.”
For him, one of those moments came this summer while he sat on a soccer field in the middle of a slum in Uganda.
“After running around with the kids (during a field day) for a few hours, I sat to rest and talk to the kids around me,” said Scruggs, a member of Calvary Baptist Church, Russellville, who is serving this summer as a student missionary in Africa.
“While sitting there, a guy around my age walked up to initiate conversation.”
Scruggs asked him if he’d been to church that day, and he said no. And with a little more questioning, Scruggs found out that the man thought that when he died, he would just take a long, lonely nap.
So Scruggs asked if he could tell him what he knew to be truth, and he read him Romans 8:1 — that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
“He asked who Jesus was and if this was a man who actually walked the earth,” Scruggs recalled.
And in that moment, which Scruggs said was ordained by God, the student began to walk his new Ugandan friend through the story of Jesus, from Creation to the cross.
“It blew his mind that God had been orchestrating His redemptive plan to the extent that He would prophesy through Isaiah years before the birth of the Messiah how exactly He would do it and how He did do it,” Scruggs said. “Even more so, He was amazed that before time God had a plan for he and I to sit on that field for him to discover why he was made.”
The Ugandan man’s family followed a different faith and expected him to be a leader in the family. But he was so amazed at Scruggs’ words that he took Scruggs’ Bible and agreed to read it and meet up with him a week later to talk about it.
And they did.
In fact, the man was so excited that he came running in the rain and sat holding his backpack over the Bible to shield it from the downpour as they read.
“He had a list of questions that started with the transfiguration, what it meant and why God did it,” Scruggs said.
The two talked about God’s glory, and the man said he understood that the faith of his family was dark and Christ was calling him to the light.
“After more talk to confirm he believed the true gospel, we prayed together for him to accept Christ in his life. After praying, he opened his eyes to say that all he could see what a bright light.”
It’s the reason Scruggs said he went to Africa — and the reason, too, that he was born.
“Giving the hope of Christ from one wretched soul to another is what we were wired to do,” he said.
Are you a student serving the state, nation or world on mission this summer too? We’d love to hear from you. Drop us an email about your experience along with a photo to news@thealabamabaptist.org.
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