I had never heard of him, but here he was convincing me to pray for a country I couldn’t even find on a map.
It was October 1959.
I was a sophomore at Wheaton College, majoring in history and planning to attend law school after graduation. One Friday night, four friends convinced me to drive with them into Chicago to attend an all-night prayer meeting.
The leader of the prayer gathering was one George Verwer, a 20-year-old student at Moody Bible Institute whom I had never met before. The focus of our evening was to pray for unreached Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. No one in my group of friends had ever thought about Muslims, much less about doing anything on their behalf.
I had become a Christian a couple of years before this meeting, and was deeply in love with Jesus. I knew about missionaries and was even attending the same school as Jim Elliot and Nate Saint, who had died in the South American rainforest while evangelizing to the Huaorani people a few years earlier. But “missions” still felt like something for other believers to embark on. I didn’t even have a desire to leave the US on holiday.
Nevertheless, my friends persuaded me into spending my Friday night in a room that I soon found out was devoid of coffee, alcohol, or food. Instead, the space was full of people who were hovering over maps of the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, praying for the Lord to send laborers in obedience to his mandate in Matthew 9:36–38.
I walked towards the skinny young man I assumed was George, intending to shake his hand. Instead, he poked his finger into my chest and growled, “What country are you praying for?”
“What’s left?” I said, barely above a whisper.
“YOU’VE GOT LIBYA!” he thundered and sent me to join one of the prayer groups.
I had no idea …
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