Samer Achmad Muhammed was training to become a Wahhabi sheikh. He had given himself to the strictest form of his faith, and he hated Christians. If you had told him he would one day belong to Jesus, he would have counted it an insult.
Then he actually heard the message about Jesus, not the caricature he had been taught, but the real thing. That Jesus had died for him. That his sins, the real ones, could be forgiven. That there was peace on the other side of it.
The sheikh who was forgiven Something in Samer gave way. The man who trained to argue against the cross knelt at it. "I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ," he said. "Jesus forgave me for my sins. He gave me eternal life and peace."
In Egypt, thousands are quietly making the same turn, many of them through satellite broadcasts and the patient witness of Coptic believers who refuse to hate back. Samer is one face of a movement the outside world rarely sees.
The peace he was chasing through rules and rigour was waiting for him in a Person. It is waiting for you in the same place.
