Bishop goes from bayonets to Bibles

Sudanese cleric Yassir Eric once hunted a Christian boy with a bayonet. Today he is a bishop preaching love.

At 16, Eric and a group of friends targeted Zakariya, a Dinka student from South Sudan. “I beat him mercilessly … I stabbed him repeatedly with a bayonet,” Eric told Christianity Today. 

“‘Allahu Akbar,’ I muttered in pride as we walked away from his mangled body. We left him for dead, and he never returned to school."

But Zakariya survived – and prayed for the life of the boy who tried to kill him.

Years later Eric was at a pastors’ conference in Cairo, delivering the opening address. Afterward, a man came up to him, walking with a limp.

“Don’t you recognise me?” he finally asked Eric, who noticed his crippled hand and how his right eye didn’t move, frozen in place as if from an old injury. 

“When he said, ‘I’m Zakariya,’ I was speechless,” says Eric. “He pulled out his Bible and showed me the front page. My name was there, first on a list.

“Because you hated me so deeply,” he told me, “I always prayed for you.”

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