Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to change someone’s life. It reminds me of something that happened while my family and I were visiting the Montreal World’s Fair in 1967. One day I took my mother, who at eighty years of age was still an enthusiastic Christian, to tour the Soviet exhibit. As we entered the pavilion, the director, a tall, clean-cut, good-looking young Russian, came forward and offered a wheelchair to my mother. Then, for some reason, he volunteered to escort her around the pavilion and explain it to her.

For the next two hours, they became quite interested in each other and engrossed in deep conversation as he pointed out to her the various new inventions on display. But as I found out later, they talked about a lot more than just mechanical gadgets. At the end of our visit, he bade us a fond farewell, saying, “Please come again!” He was quite hospitable and seemed to have become very close to my mother in that time that they talked together.

A few weeks later we received a letter from him in which he said, “You have changed my life! I have received Christ as you suggested. You have changed my whole way of thinking, my way of believing, you have changed me! But I have a wife and three children and I am living in a communist society where it is against the law to practice Christianity, so now what do I do?”

My mother’s advice to that young man in the letter she wrote back to him was, in essence, “Change the world! Change the world you’re living in! Start now! Tell others what God has done for you, what His love and His truth have done for you personally, and you can start changing your part of the world—even a communist world!”