A Veiled Gospel

By Ron Barnes

Berti was a student in our first English outreach in Hungary. He was a grumpy old man who never prepared, never participated, and always seemed uninterested in the English lessons and the Bible devotional I would share each class. In fact, he was usually a distraction in the classes and my teacher would often complain. I was often tempted to give him his money back because he wasn’t learning, and worse, was preventing the others from learning. They too would complain to me about him saying, “he is the hardest, meanest, grumpiest Hungarian man” they knew.

But I let him stay in the classes. Even though he still wasn’t really learning, and still disruptive, I sensed the classes were good for him. If nothing else, it was a social outlet. He continued in the classes for the following four years.

One day, I was meeting with our national partner, Szozo, at a coffee shop down the road from my home, when I got a phone call from my wife. Brenda told me Berti was sitting at our gate in his car, crying, and wanted to know if I was home. I shared this with Szozo and we were both shocked. Szozo too knew him well, as he was my partner in starting the ministry in our town. The “hardest, meanest, grumpiest Hungarian” was sitting in my driveway crying. So of course, Szozo said, “Let’s go!”

We sped home and found him exactly as described. This proud man in melted, teary pieces in my driveway. We brought him in my house and tried to pry what was wrong out of him. He told us his story of leaving our English graduation party “on cloud nine,” and calling his estranged son in an attempt to begin to reconcile with him. He had heard my message on the “prodigal son” that night and decided maybe it was time to start straightening out things with his own son. He invited his son to visit the next day, but his son rejected his invitation and denounced that Berti was even his father. Berti sat devastated, drinking through the night and decided that he would end his life.

Knowing that if he killed himself in his home, because he was a recluse with few to no friends, someone probably wouldn’t find him there for quite some time. He decided to overdose at the end of his driveway, in a busy neighborhood where someone was sure to find him.

He drank some more, swallowed a handful of drugs, and fell asleep. Then, he awoke. He looked at his phone; he had been there for three days. The fact that he laid there out in the open for three days and no one bothered to check on him, compounded with the fact that he couldn’t even kill himself right, sent him deeper into despair. He was truly at the lowest point of his life and began to drink again and create other scenarios that would guarantee his successful suicide.

Then he remembered my words from the graduation; the words I said to my students every week in my devotional during the English classes, “They might not believe what I have to share, but they can believe this, that God loves them, and so do I, and we will both be there whenever they need to call on us.”

So here he was at the lowest moment in his life, ready to see the light. He had already felt its warmth for many, many years and dismissed it. But now he was ready to accept it. The devil’s veil had been removed, and the light of the Gospel began to shine in his life. And he too began to radiate the light, as those who knew him at his worst began to feel the warmth of the testimony of his changed life.

But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord…

2 Corinthians 4:3–5 NKJV