Yassir Eric grew up inside one of independent Sudan's three leading families, a household that helped write sharia law into the nation's life. At eight years old his father left him at a desert madrasa five hundred miles north of Khartoum to memorize the Quran. He was raised to see Christians as the enemy, and at sixteen he acted on it: he and his friends brutally beat a Christian classmate named Zakariya and left him for dead.
Then his young cousin Fouad fell into a coma. Two Egyptian Coptic Christians came and prayed for the boy, and Fouad recovered. Eric could not explain it away. The next morning, during dawn prayers, he prayed to Jesus for the first time and asked Him to change him. He bought a Bible and read it every day in secret for two months, still keeping his Islamic prayers while the words did their quiet work.
In February 1991 he confessed his faith in Christ openly. The cost was total. His father, in tears for the first time Eric had ever seen, made him sign away his inheritance. His family disowned him. "Later, I learned that my family held a funeral for me, burying an empty coffin," he wrote. To the family that raised him, he was dead.
God, however, had been writing a longer story. In 2008, at a pastors' conference in Cairo, a man with a limp, a crippled hand, and a frozen right eye approached him. It was Zakariya. He opened his Bible and showed Eric a prayer list with Eric's name written first. "Because you hated me so deeply," he said, "I always prayed for you." The boy Eric had left for dead had been asking God for his salvation the whole time.
Today Eric serves as presiding bishop of the Anglican Church's Ekkios diocese, a global community for believers from Muslim backgrounds, and teaches intercultural and Islamic studies in Germany. His own summary holds the whole gospel in one line: "Jesus loved me when I was his enemy."
No hostility puts anyone beyond the reach of Jesus. He heard the dawn prayer of a young man with blood on his hands, and He answered it. He hears yours too.