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By Ibrahim Sankoh, as told to S. Smith, THE GAMBIA
“This is my last hope. If anything goes wrong and this flight to The Gambia is cancelled,” I thought, “I’m going to kill myself by drinking poison. Here in Sierra Leone, I’ve been nothing but a failure.”
Why, at twenty-five years of age, did I want to kill myself? I had parents, brothers and sisters who loved me. I had a good education. Although I was the fifth-born of seven children, our middle-class Muslim parents managed to pay for a good education for us at private Catholic schools in the city of Freetown. My main aim in life, however, was to have fun.
Christian friends in the neighborhood invited me to go to church with them and I enjoyed the youth activities there. Gradually, I became accustomed to going to church and began to listen to what the pastor was saying. I understood that Jesus Christ had died on the cross to take the punishment I had earned when I did bad things and broke God’s laws.
One day I asked Jesus to forgive my sins, but I was not serious about repenting or giving my life to God. I still wanted to follow my own plan for my life—have fun and make a lot of money. There was no time in my active social life for Bible reading. However, when the Sierra Leonean civil war began in 1991, I did take the time to pray. I asked Jesus to keep my family safe, and I knew that He would.
God answered my prayer. No one in my family was killed, although an older brother was slightly injured when a piece of metal shrapnel from a bomb went inside the calf of his leg. During all the years of war, no one else in my family was hurt at all. God also protected our house and gave us food to eat each day. We did not go hungry.
Even though I was thankful to God for answering my prayers, I still did not want to live for Him or obey Him. I continued doing exactly what I wanted to do.
After writing my O-levels in 1995, I wasted the next three years of my life by going to clubs and dances with girls. Since I had no money of my own, I lied to my parents so they’d give me money for imaginary necessities. But I used the money to pay for the social activities I so enjoyed.
My parents advised me to enroll in a training program or get a job, but because I was nineteen years of age by then, they didn’t force me to follow their advice.
Finally, I realized that my life was going nowhere, so in 1999, I enrolled in a Building Engineering course at Freetown Technical Institute. After only one year, I decided I’d studied enough, so I left the Institute with a first-year certificate and opened a stationery shop. The shop was very successful right from the start.
It was I who wasn’t successful. Still leaving God out of my life, for the next two years I wasted all my money on taking girls out to clubs every night and buying expensive clothes and meals. I thought that was the way to be happy, but I had no peace or joy. In my heart was an emptiness—an insatiable desire to keep on “having fun” and buying more nice clothes. I wasted more and more money on unnecessary things, until one day I found there was no money left to pay the shop rent or buy new supplies to restock the shelves. The business had gone bankrupt and my hope for the good life was dead. I looked at myself and saw I was a complete failure.
With my very last leones, I decided to buy an airline ticket to The Gambia and try to start over again where no one knew my past. I decided then that if anything went wrong with the plan, I would commit suicide rather than continue to live as a failure in Sierra Leone.
I did not realize it then, but God was at work in my life. Even though I had been living to please only myself, God still loved me and was waiting for me to come back to Him.
As I landed at Gambia’s Yundum airport on October 1, 2002, I made a serious decision to spend the rest of my life living a righteous life for God. But how could I do that? I had landed in The Gambia without a single penny or butut in my pocket. All I had was the phone number of a man I scarcely knew. Only God could help me now.
A total stranger gave me a ride from the airport to the center of town and also gave me the money to phone the number in my pocket. The man I called was at home. He came to pick me up and gave me shelter and food for the next two weeks.
My benefactor was a Christian and I went with him to his church the first Sunday. I asked him to please take me to the Flaming Bible Church the next Sunday, which he did. I was acquainted with the Flaming Bible Church in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and wanted to visit its sister church.
My second Sunday morning in The Gambia, God spoke to my heart. I felt His love for me and realized that I was a sinner. My heart was dirty with selfish desires, but I knew I had no power to change my life by myself. God needed to set me free from those selfish desires and the wrong way of living that I had chosen.
I confessed all my sins to God and asked Jesus to wash my heart clean from sin. The pastor said that I needed to be delivered from the spirit of entertainment. When he prayed for me, God did a deep work inside my heart. He changed me, just like the Bible says in 2 Cor. 5:17: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone. The new has come.” (NIV). That’s exactly what happened to me that day.
Now my only desire is to let the will of God be done in my life. I’d never before known the peace and joy that continuously floods my heart. I now read the Bible every day to learn God’s blueprint for righteous living. What a joy it is to meet with God’s people to worship the Lord, to study the Bible, and to pray.
When I started going to the Flaming Bible Church, the pastor offered me a small salary to live in the church house and keep it clean and in order. Overjoyed, I accepted.
The following month, I got a job with a construction company, but still did not earn a sufficiently high salary to meet all my living expenses. Instead of worrying about it, I asked God for help. I prayed, “Lord, I don’t want to live a life that’s not worthy of You. Please show me what to do.”
A man whom I’d previously helped lay blocks on a voluntary basis, called to offer me a building contract. This opportunity was God’s answer to my prayer. I hired sub-contractors to help me do the job, and since then, I have never been without a building contract to work on. Sometimes, God gives me three or four contracts at a time.
I can’t find enough words to adequately express my gratitude to God for all He has done in my life. He has changed me from being a nobody—a failure with no future, to being a child of God with a purpose for living. I’m so glad that I know Jesus!
Now I always tell people about Jesus because I want them to have the same peace and joy that floods my heart with happiness every day. I am deeply thankful to God for enabling me to finally walk His way.
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