“But this is your home,” I said to my friend Abdul Rahman. “Why are you leaving your country?”

Abdul Rahman was a new Muslim-background follower of Jesus in Northeast Africa. He’d become my close friend during a training and discipleship program that our team had started.

In this program, participants were given the skills to engage with God’s Word and practiced responding in faithfulness to Jesus. They were also learning how to start new Bible studies to help others discover Jesus Christ through the Word.

After the first couple of training sessions, we discovered that Abdul Rahman was a natural evangelist. Since we had started coaching him, he had gathered together several groups of friends and family members to read the Bible and learn about Jesus.

But midway through the program, Abdul Rahman announced that he was quitting. His mother had been pressuring him to either get married or join the rebel army—neither of which he wanted to do.

Wearied by her nagging, he had decided to run away and leave the country.

We can’t lose this guy, I thought.

“Don’t go, my friend,” I pleaded. Thinking quickly, I told him how my team was opening a language center in Al-Qamar, a desert town several hours away, and we needed to hire an office manager.

“You’re a quick learner,” I said to him. “I think you’d be perfect for the job.”

Abdul Rahman accepted my spontaneous job offer. He moved to Al-Qamar and began the long process of registering the language center with the local authorities.

Meanwhile, he continued sharing the Gospel and gathering people into groups to study the Bible.

Then unexpectedly, I had to leave the country for nearly a year. I coached Abdul Rahman as much as I could over the phone, but the reception was often poor.

My teammates visited Al-Qamar whenever they could to pray with him and encouraged him. Other than that, the believer had no fellowship with other Christ followers and was ministering on his own.

But out of Abdul Rahman’s lonely desert, God brought such fruitfulness.

After a year in Al-Qamar, he had led forty people to the Lord. Some months later, there were one hundred people in al-Qamar professing faith in Jesus Christ. Today, Abdul Rahman is training and discipling several new believers to lead the growing number of people hungry for the Gospel.

I couldn’t have known that my spontaneous job offer to Abdul Rahman would be the key to seeing a movement to Christ flourish in this region!

“**This account comes from a long-term field worker. Names and places have been changed for security.**

Main photo by Tim Cowley|ExpatMediaPro.com

Original article: FrontiersUSA.org/blog/article/a-reason-to-stay