How Call of Duty Mobile Brought Jesus to China

The sweat is SO real.

In the middle of the school year, I got a new student as part of an international studies program. Lee, as we called him, was a Chinese student whose parents wanted him to learn about the English language and Christianity. As the high school English teacher and also the Bible teacher, this naturally meant I saw Lee a lot.

However, Lee didn't seem very motivated to learn. He wasn't a bad student, but neither English grammar nor the fundamentals of the New Testament were particularly interesting subjects to him. He would do the work, but he clearly thought it was worthless, and that didn't sit well with me.

I was especially concerned with Lee's apathy towards God, the Bible, and all things spiritual. Though some members of Lee's family were Christians, he had been raised in Communist China, a nation hostile to religion in all forms, and especially to Christianity. He had been taught that the Christian faith was just a fairy tale for weak-minded people, long debunked by Communist scholars. I was eager to show him just how false that conception of the faith was, but getting Lee to listen to me was another matter. So I prayed that God would open his ears and heart.

One day I was supervising the lunch room when Lee waved at me from a table where he and his friends were playing on their phones. "You should play Call of Duty with us!" he half said, half laughed to me. Now, I don't want to sound like a dinosaur, but back in my day we played Call of Duty on an Xbox with a controller, not on a phone with our thumbs. But Lee was so insistent on showing off his amazing skills that I agreed to get the game on my phone that night and play it with him the next day.

True to my word, I download Call of Duty Mobile. And after a few google searches to the effect of "How to connect a controller to your phone," I even got a wireless controller working with the game, so I could play it my way. So the next day, when I came in to supervise, we played and had a blast! I was no stranger to first-person shooter games, but even I had to admit that Lee was not just making empty boasts about his skill. The kid was GOOD. After that, it became our lunchtime tradition to play a few matches of CoD whenever it was my turn to supervise. After some practice, I even got my skills up enough to start winning - much to Lee's chagrin! He wasn't expecting to lose to old Mr. A in front of his friends, I'll tell you that! It wasn't long after we began playing together that I started to notice something funny. Lee was paying attention in Bible class. One day, after listening to me talk about how Jesus set us free from sin, he made the following insightful comment: "People should have limited freedom. Without control, people do evil." ("Spoken like a true communist!" I thought to myself.)

"Well," I replied, "You're right. People do need control. And best kind is SELF-control, in which a person is free do whatever they want, but only chooses to do what is good."

"Woah! Where did you learn that?" he asked, genuinely amazed.

(I paused for a second, mentally preparing for my slam dunk!) "I learned it from the Bible! The Bible says that those who follow Jesus will have joy, peace, patience, and self-control."

"The Bible says that? Nobody in China thinks like that!"

The school year is nearly over now, and Lee has remained tuned in to Bible class (though he's still less than enthusiastic about English, as his thick Chinese accent attests). And even though, by his own admission, he's not sure if he believes in God, he continues to ask me about Jesus and the Bible. He's told me that he's very curious now about Christianity now - so much so, in fact, that he thinks the Chinese Communist Party may be completely wrong about it (an opinion he can only express safely in America, he's always quick to say).

When I asked God to open up Lee's heart, I didn't expect Him to do it through playing a video game. But I daresay that's exactly what happened. Now excuse me while I go practice my 360 no-scopes.