The highlight of my semester was seeing a student whom I consistently met with for 9 months finally surrender his life to Jesus. With a Buddhist father and an inquiring mind, Wesley was raised without religious conviction and was agnostic when I met him during his freshmen year. He was intrigued by Jesus, and agreed to meet weekly to study his teachings.
Our friendship grew as we shared good conversations and our love for song writing, but for a long while it seemed like the Gospel was not resonating with him. Finally we had a meeting where I shared with him some basic teaching on prayer, but Wesley seemed uninterested, and I left feeling slightly discouraged. He tried praying for the first time that day on his own. He asked for God to have a certain friend walk by his path as a sign, and when he lifted his head from praying, he was stunned to see that very friend walking toward him! As he tells it, he almost immediately began explaining it away as a coincidence in his own mind, but the event planted a seed of “doubt” about his agnosticism.
Wesley began to be much more responsive to God from that point, and he even began writing songs that seemed to describe a spiritual awakening (one titled “In Finding I Am”). We talked about his budding faith, but he was still tentative to publicly align himself with Jesus. Then on one Saturday early in September he happened to glance at a borrowed copy of “The Case for Christ,” and ended up reading the entire book that same day! He attended church the next morning and responded to an invitation to receive the Gospel! Since then Wesley’s faith has been maturing rapidly, and he has become a beloved member the InterVarsity community. (All of this despite the fact that I accidentally knocked out a couple of his teeth a few weeks ago while playing flag football with him. In God’s redeeming way, he actually used the event and the subsequent hospital visit as a bonding experience and a chance to answer more of Wesley’s prayers—he got to keep all his original teeth!)
- Taylor Bodoh, InterVarsity staff at Florida State University
