A really good night!

Well, the best night of my time here in Cameroon so far is coming to an end, so I thought I should blog about it. Let me start at about 3:30 in the afternoon…

After a nice lunch at the Yongs’ house (Linda wants to have each of us over for a meal to get to know us individually, to prove to us, she said, that she doesn’t think we’re triplets!), I decided to go up to the office the three of us share at the campus’s main academic building. I needed to prepare for tomorrow’s (Friday’s) classes, Acts and Systematic Theology, and also for tonight’s class. Yep, I now have a night class. Because my New Testament Introduction students are in two separate programs---the Diploma program and the Bachelor of Theology degree program---their schedules are difficult to coordinate. We talked again about it earlier this week and decided the only times we could all be together are Tuesdays at 1:30 pm and Thursday evenings from 5 to 7 pm. So tonight was our first night class.

I got to the office around 3:45, and at 4:00 there was a soft knock on my door. It was my student Patrick (not his real name). He had come not to talk about assignments but instead just to share more about his life with me, which made me happy. I started asking about his family and found out he’s married and has eight kids. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once when he said, “I haven’t talked to my wife in a long time. She lives just past the village of Ndop [about two and a half to three hours from Ndu and CBTS], and I haven’t called her in a while because, honestly, I know that when I talk to her, she will start complaining. She always complains. She’ll start telling me about all the problems at home with our compound [that’s what Cameroonians call the multiple houses that are near each other and belong to the extended family].” I asked him if his wife is a believer, and he replied, “Yes, she was in Christ before me.” And that started his testimony…

Now you need to know that Patrick is one of my best students. He sits in the back of the classroom for both of my classes that he’s in (Missions and NT Intro). His brow is always furrowed in intense concentration. He’s always jotting notes. And he usually asks perceptive, interesting questions. He’s also very gentle; in the few one on one interactions I’ve had with him, he’s never failed to be kind, gracious, deferential.

So I was surprised when he told me about how bad of a husband he was for years and years. It turns out that he was baptized in 1969, but he now knows he was not genuinely converted at the time. He told me today that from 1969 to 2000, he lived like a pagan. His wife, he said, used to sleep with her back facing towards him because he would come into their house at all hours of the night smelling like wine and cigarette smoke. He was a chain smoker and an alcoholic. Serially unfaithful to his wife, he loved all the sex, booze, and cigarettes he could get his hands on, he told me… until one day when a Christian (now pursuing a Masters degree in Nigeria) shared the gospel with him. It was at that point that his life started to change.

Patrick vividly remembers waking up early one morning and sitting in a chair next to the front door of his house preparing to go to the bar he always frequented early in the morning. “I would go there without taking food [Cameroonians refer to ‘taking’ food or drink, instead of ‘eating,’ a lot of the time], and I knew a secret way to unlock the front door without the owner knowing about it so I could drink all the wine I wanted before the day even started.” But Patrick said this particular morning, he felt glued to his chair. He kept thinking about what that Christian had shared with him. “I feel now,” he said to me, “that it was the power of the Holy Spirit that kept me in that chair and didn’t let me go out that morning to the bar. Instead, I just picked up a Bible that that Christian had given me, and I started reading. I don’t remember what I read, but it changed my life. I became a believer, and I haven’t committed adultery or gone back to the bottle since that time.” Praise the Lord! His wife, he said, noticed the change and asked him what had happened. Their marriage hasn’t been perfect since then (obviously!), but he said they are both so glad that they share the same faith now. (Patrick did admit to me, though, that it took some arguing with his wife for her to finally, begrudgingly let him go to seminary. He felt God calling him to CBTS when he took a summer course in 2001 with Tom Steller and Travis and Susan Myers from Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis.)

A few minutes after hearing this testimony, I walked into my first NT Intro night class. There seemed to be some excitement in the air, probably because this was new and fresh---getting to have a two-hour class at night. I started lecturing on the Gospel of Mark (we spent Tuesday talking about Mark, and we’ll wrap up our discussion of it next Tuesday), and I’m not sure what happened, but everyone, including me, just got really, really excited about it. I told them about how Jesus’ partial healing of the blind man from Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26) was a picture of the disciples’ lack of understanding---their partial seeing (8:27-30; cf. 6:51-52; 8:14-21)---and then from there we talked about Jesus’ threefold prediction of his suffering (8:31; 9:30-32; 10:32-34) and about how we, all of us in the classroom tonight, seriously misunderstand Jesus’ call to discipleship, as the twelve did, if we treat it as anything less than a call to suffer with Jesus on the road that leads to the cross. I can’t explain it, but as I was lecturing, I felt an unusual joy and spiritual energy and passion and anointing from God. At one point, my class started roaring with laughter, and I shouted at them, smiling, pretending to be annoyed, “What??!!!” They responded, also smiling, “We need to have an altar call!!”

All night long their questions were penetrating, theologically profound, exegetically sensitive, and spiritually rigorous. I loved every minute of it. By the time 7:00 rolled around, we were all ready to keep going. As soon as I dismissed them, one student who’s become a close friend and is near the top of the class jumped up and grabbed my hand. “This is the best class I’ve had in my seminary experience so far,” he said gratefully, beaming at me.

Now, I know that not every class can be this way. I’m sure that by next week, I could be posting a much more somber report. But I am grateful for how God worked tonight and how he used this large group of eager, inquisitive, thoughtful students to increase my passion for teaching the Word and to assure me that, yes, this decision to be involved with Third World theological education this year is one that is bearing fruit. I’m glad God doesn’t hide all the fruit of our ministries from us. It is good when he lets us taste some of it.

-Wes