February 24, 1999
In Chad, questions led nomad to Christ
___N'DJAMENA, Chad (BP)-- There's a burnished quality to Ahmed's dark skin like it has maybe been polished by sharp Sahara sand.
___Ahmed's family members have been traders and nomadic herders as long as they can remember.
___He says his family was Muslim, but not very good Muslims. Oh, they prayed five times a day and fasted during Ramadan as Mohammed commanded. But, he says with discomfort, there was no love or affection to bind them into anything more.
___That bothered him. "Why is this true?" he asked himself.
___On a visit to Sudan, he sawsomething for the first time--a group of people who seemed to care for each other despite being from different tribes. In fact, when they met each other, they hugged like brothers.
AHMED, a Christian Arab in Chad
___Later, he saw another group of Christians in Chad. Again, he noticed their love for each other.
___"I must know their story!" he told himself.
___He secretly read the New Testament they gave him, and later the Old Testament.
___"After four months, I already knew in my heart it was the truth," he says.
___But he was in a hard place: He knew the truth but didn't know what to do with it.
___Ahmed moved to be near a Dutch woman who taught him more Bible truths. At the same time, Ahmed taught his wife. After months of his teaching and sharing, she, too, realized that Christians were telling the truth about Jesus. They made their decisions public.
___The day he was baptized, the people of his family and tribe came to stop him.
___A trial was conducted, and the sultan told him, "If you don't leave this new way, this new religion, something bad is going to happen to you."
___"No," Ahmed answered. "This is the way of Jacob and Abraham, Ishmael, all the people before Mohammed. It's not wrong."
___The sultan told Ahmed he had brought shame on his people. He accused Ahmed of receiving gold for choosing Christianity.
___"I did not find gold, but I found something worth more than gold--salvation. It's something you don't have. You should follow Jesus Christ," he told the sultan.
___After the trial ended, they let Ahmed go. The sultan warned people to leave Ahmed alone, but many murmured that this infidel must die.
___In the town, people began pointing at Ahmed when he passed. They snubbed his wife. Children threw stones at his kids on the street. But Ahmed persisted in his new faith.
___He took part in an evangelistic crusade by preaching in the town square. The Jesus spoken of both in the Bible and the Koran will come back one day, he warned. "If you want to prepare yourselves for his coming, you should open your hearts," he pleaded.
___Later, some men came to threaten him. They would have attacked him, but "I felt the protection of the Lord like a wall around me. It was Jesus who protected me," he said later.
___Christian workers crowded him into a car with a dozen other people to get him out of town safely that night.
___Since then, Ahmed has continued his studies of the Bible. He still has a burning desire to go preach and tell his people about the God he has come to know through Jesus.
___But it's an awesome burden.
___Among thousands of his tribe, he's one of only a few Christians.
___At the edge of the world's largest desert, how can he tell his people about the "living water" he's found?
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