As a boy, Tanveer was sent to memorize the Quran. He was beaten severely each time he failed. Fear settled deep into him. He grew up silent and afraid, then angry, and by his teens he had fallen in with a violent crowd and into drug addiction. His father threw him out of the house again and again.

At the place where he gathered with his friends, a disciple-maker kept meeting with him and praying for him unceasingly. One evening he prayed something bold: that Tanveer’s father would call him home that very night. He did. The believer asked Tanveer to read Scripture on his phone, but for a long time he ignored it.

When he finally began to read, he started at the beginning, and could not stop. In the Quran he had learned only the virtues of the prophets. In the Bible he saw their failures too. He saw how God restored them.

“It was like looking into a mirror,” he said. He even gave a Bible to the woman he loved.

She read it in secret, hiding for hours, and came to faith before he did. “You may leave me,” she told him, “but I will not leave the living God.”

Today Tanveer serves in ministry among his own people, making disciples who make disciples across his country in Central Asia.