I had finished a long day of work and studying and stopped on a bench outside a shopping centre before walking home. I was eating sunflower seeds when a man I had never met walked up and demanded some. I politely declined.

Without warning, he struck me across the face. My glasses flew onto the pavement, bent and broken. His friends held him back while telling me to leave before he hit me again. I picked up my mangled glasses and walked home, seeing little more than blurred lights.

When I got home, my wife and I sat together in the living room with my broken glasses resting in my hands. I was angry. Not just because I’d been hit, but because I could already feel my heart beginning to harden. I caught myself looking at people with more suspicion than I had only hours before.

I remember repeating the same sentence over and over.

“I don’t want this one man to become my picture of the people of this country.”

Our neighbours had welcomed us into their homes, shared meals with us, loved our family, and celebrated with us. This wasn’t the place or people we had come to know and fall in love with. It was one broken man making a bad choice. Even so, it took time to trust again.

As I replayed that night, another thought kept surfacing. Ten years ago, I would have struck him back. Growing up, I believed that if someone hit you, you hit back harder. Anger came naturally to me.

But when I became a follower of Jesus at sixteen, He slowly began changing that part of me. Not overnight, but year by year. My anger softened. My heart changed. That night, for a brief moment, I wanted my old self back. I wanted to become the person I used to be.

Instead, I picked up my glasses and walked away.

Sometimes you don’t recognize how much Christ has transformed you until life gives you every reason to become the person you once were.

A few days later, I met separately with two university friends whom I’d been reading the Bible with. One told me, “I want to dig deeper with Jesus.” The other, after we read about the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5 together, looked up and said, “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

That day, I had the joy of praying with both of them as they gave their lives to Christ.

Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if the enemy hoped fear would cause me to withdraw from the very people God had called us here to love. Instead, God protected something far more valuable than my glasses.

He protected my heart.