I loved every minute of my friend’s tears.

Without a knock, I let myself into Harkan’s tiny apartment and sat down across from him. My Turkish Pentecostal friend, a convert from Islam of eight years, was so absorbed in his book that he hardly noticed me for a minute. He was reading an English paperback copy of The Desire of Ages and crying his eyes out. “Man, this is good!” he finally said. “I just finished a chapter on Calvary. Do you know this author? I tell you, this book has been long and hard to get through. It’s like a commentary or something, but it has been really good for me.”

I smiled thinking of how the paperback had ended up in his hands. I had given the classic volume to another Christian family who never took the time to read it. Instead, they had given it as a gift to Harkan. Harkan never knew that I was the original source.

Closing the book and looking at the cover, he said, “This woman was like a prophet or something!” I could hardly believe my ears! Drying his eyes, he shivered as if shaking off the emotion of the scene he had just visualized and gently laid the book down on the arm of the chair.

“I happen to have another book by that same author,” I told Harkan. “The one I have is equally powerful and covers the span of Christian history and then talks about last-day events. Would you like to read it?” Since then, Harkan has been carefully reading through The Great Controversy. Last time I checked, he was somewhere in the French Revolution.

Harkan first attended a Christian church in our city as a teenager because someone had told him he would find good-looking girls there. At church, he picked up a New Testament. He now says he has read the New Testament no less than 100 times. Upon finding out that Harkan was reading the Bible, his brother chased him from their home with a gun, threatening to kill him. Harkan is rich in spirit but poor in the things of this earth. He dreams of being trained in ministry, but opportunities in this country are near non-existent. So I have taken him under my wing as I am able and have provided him with some discipleship training (though, on many an occasion, he ends up feeding my spirit).

We are praying that Harkan will soon be a Psalm 119 believer—long and deep and delighting in the commandments that Jesus so dearly loved. He knows all too keenly what it feels like to be persecuted by Muslims and isolated from family. Now the thought of being persecuted by Christians prejudiced against Seventh-day Adventists and shunned again by the ones who first nurtured him is a huge barrier for him and a hindrance to his serious contemplation of the clear Bible teaching. God has done miracles in our friendship (see the November AF), so we wait and watch, giving the Spirit room to amaze us.

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