In Togo, West Africa, a single verse of Scripture helped an outcast man turn his life around.
Komlan’s village is an ordinary place with mud-brick buildings and dusty dirt roads, in a hilly region of central Togo. If you look up and shield your eyes against the sun, you will see luscious green trees on the slopes, sweeping down to the hard, red soil of the villagers’ farmland.
“I was an alcoholic,” admits Komlan. “I drank so much that I could not take part in any of the community activities . . . and I had been rejected by [the people of] the village.”
Friendless, Komlan would wander the streets, taking on occasional farming jobs to survive in between bouts of drinking. He could not read or write in French, Togo’s official language, or in his native language, Ifè. But then he heard local Bible translators were running free Ifè literacy classes.
“Everyone thought I would never get there,” he remembers. “But in my heart, I was resolved to [attend classes], especially since I didn’t have to pay anything.”
Despite his neighbours’ doubts, Komlan became a regular attendee.
“At the end of the first three months of the literacy course, I could read a little in Ifè.”
When he wasn’t attending classes, he still laboured in the fields.
A different purchase
In Komlan’s village they grow vegetables like cassava and yams—hardy crops, heavy when harvested. It’s thirsty work and not for the easily distracted; swing carefully, or the mattock will take off your toes. After one sweltering session in the fields, the woman Komlan worked for that day paid him 1,000 francs (about $2.40 CAD). That day, he didn’t spend his earnings on alcohol.
“I went and bought the Ifè New Testament,” Komlan recalls.
“I began to read it. One day I read Matthew 5:13–14, which says, ‘You are the salt of the earth. . . . You are the light of the world.’ And I asked myself, in what way could I be the salt and the light of my village? I was rejected by everyone, despised by all!”
But in that moment, Jesus’ gentle words changed Komlan’s heart.
“I gave my life to the Lord Jesus Christ, because of what I was reading.”
Four months after he went to his first literacy class, Komlan opened his heart to Jesus through what he had read in the Bible.
Radical change
Immediately, Komlan’s desire for alcohol began to fade. Even though he felt like a brand new person, to people in his village he was still an outcast alcoholic.
Komlan carried on going to the literacy classes and gradually, step by step, won back the trust of his community. Three years after attending his first class, Komlan began teaching a literacy class in his village.
But God had even more amazing plans for Komlan.
“I also became a teacher of a Sunday school class, taught in Ifè, in my church,” he explains. Today, Komlan is the leader of his village’s development committee, which provided the whole village with its first well.
By a work of God, through a single Bible verse in his language, Komlan’s life has been transformed.
“What I read in Matthew 5 has been accomplished in my life,” says Komlan. “I have become salt and light to my village! I weep with joy and I give infinite thanks.”
Story adapted from an article by David Charlwood at wycliffe.uk.org.