by Mark Cutshall

It was a simple question I had asked numerous friends over the years, one that almost always ignited worthwhile conversation. This past summer, Steve Hayner, a pastor-leader I had admired from afar for years, stood a few feet away from me, leading a workshop on church evangelism at Whitworth University’s Institute of Ministry, which my family and I attended in July. Early in his talk, Steve paused and raised the same question I had grown so used to asking others:

“How did you come to know Jesus?
Who told you the story?”

The convenient answer for me was a high school Young Life leader whose words I can still hear. The luxury of Steve’s question was the silence that followed. The quietness in that room must have unhinged something inside that caused me to stop, and reflect. It was the power of remembrance—being content to sit still and allow the story to form inside—that walked me back to the person and the moment when Jesus took hold.

It happened on this same campus 35 years earlier. In those first anxious weeks of being freshmen, my roommate, Peter, and I were visited often by a sandy, frizzy-haired upper classman named John Dilworth. Think John the Baptist in an Adidas gym shirt waving a floppy Bible. John Dilworth had a unique gift. He would walk into our room unannounced and show immense interest in Peter and the questions he was wrestling with. I could tell John really believed the stuff in that book. What he lacked in etiquette he made up for in his uncombed, unvarnished energy for God.

John perfected his gift one night after Peter and I turned out the lights and gone to bed. Without warning, the door flung open, the lights went on and with one and half eyes cracked open I could see John sitting on the corner of Peter’s bed.

“You’ve got to hear this verse, he said. I can still hear the pages crinkling and John leaning into the words: “For I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who died and gave his life for me.”

“Isn’t that good stuff?” And with a pat on bed and an abrupt “Good night, fellas,” he was gone.

That’s the night the light went on for me. That’s the story that formed inside me, again, sitting in the lecture hall chair. During the sharing time, I told the workshop attendees about John’s grand entrance and how the words of Galatians 2:20 brought me to faith in Christ later that fall in college. And then I found myself saying, “I should probably tell John what he did that night.”

The next day, I emailed him and thanked him for walking into our room unannounced and reading those words. His return email was more good stuff: “Honestly, I don’t remember that night. All I can tell you is that the one behind anything I might have said or done was Jesus. You can thank him.”

I really do —for a great question, a reflective moment and the gift of remembrance that opened the door of faith.