Someone left a New Testament in Pierre's welding workshop in Niger, and for a while it just sat there. He was a teenager, and eventually he picked it up. What he read did not match what he had been told about Christians. It was full of tenderness, of nearness to the poorest, exactly the kind of world his young heart had been quietly hoping was real.
Years later he moved to Agadez, out toward the desert, and there he found the thing the book had described. A church family drawn from Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, France, and Niger, living out what he had only read about.
No regret, not for a single day Pierre became a lay missionary, and he does not hedge when he talks about it. "I have never regretted converting to the Christian faith," he says, "not even for a single day." That is a bold thing to say in Niger, where jihadist groups make following Jesus dangerous and his own children have stayed Muslim, something he carries with love and without pressure.
Still, no regret. Not one day. He read about a God who is tender toward the poor, and he found that God to be exactly as advertised.
Whatever you have heard about Jesus secondhand, He holds up when you finally meet Him yourself. Pierre would tell you to open the book and see.
