How a former atheist became an evangelist

This is the testimony of how Evangelist Anh Le was an atheist but had an encounter with God that changed his life.

By Michael Ashcraft –

Ironically, his dad, a devout Buddhist, left the family so that everybody “could be happier.”

Anh Le felt anything but happy. “I felt panicked,” Anh says on a Fishers of Men Halifax video. “It didn’t make me happy. It broke everything I knew.” He even cried out to the supernatural he never knew: “If there’s a God, please stop this now.”

That’s the day Anh became an atheist.

“In my mind I said, look at these religious folks. Not even the religious folks can get it together.” His mom was a nominal Catholic.

Meanwhile at school, Anh learned about the survival of the fittest, a tenet of evolution. “I liked this idea,” he remembers. “I realized there’s no god because you call out to him and he doesn’t answer. You just got to get by. That message resonated with me: I’m going to be so tough, I’ll never be in this position again where I’m being left, where it’s going to break.”

He vowed to find his happiness, to make money and buy the things he wanted.

Soon he discovered pornography, first in magazines and then with the advent of the Internet online in the 1990s. “When I found these magazines, it was like a drug,” he says. “When I got ahold of my first Hustler magazine, I was like ‘Wow.’”

He dove in unabated. But while he desired a beautiful woman, he was too shy to approach beautiful women. “They were like goddesses to me,” he says. “I couldn’t talk around them. I was gazing from afar with just a lust for them. But deep inside I was l like, ‘Why would that girl ever like me?’ I had a low self-confidence.”

The pornography imbued shame in him and brought his self-confidence even lower, he says.

While he had a secret addiction, he projected an image of being a good guy.

In college, he overcame his shyness and began approaching girls, even to the point that he moved in with a girl. “That lust in me destroyed that girl,” he surmises. “She was a Christian. I convinced her not to listen to her mother. I convinced her to move away from her church. She was such a sweet girl, and I just took her and demoralized her.”

Then, because pornography makes you always look at the next and the next and the next, he dumped her after deflowering her. “I took everything pure from her, chewed it up and spit it out,” he admits. “I used her. I broke her heart heartlessly.”

He ignored the promise ring he had given her. “For me, she wasn’t enough,” he acknowledges. “My lust needed more.”

Anh got into clubbing and one-night stands. “It was never enough,” he says. “It led to depression. I was feeling depression, but I didn’t link it to my addictions.”

Strangely, the girls who most attracted him were Christian girls, whom he would pretend to listen to about God but would be “little by little be grooming them away from the church,” he explains.

“How do you know if there’s a God?” he would say to them. “How do you know if God’s real? What if God was just a man-made idea? What if there was something better we could do for ourselves? What if God helps those who help themselves?”

Systematically, he turned them away from their faith and got them into extra-marital sex. Eventually, he realized that atheism meant there was no need to project an image of being a good person. “I make my own beliefs,” he says. “In college you’re taught, What is truth? There is no truth. It’s all perspective. It’s all relative. There is no true good, no true bad.”

Anh was on the hockey team in college and saw all his teammates indulge in unrestrained hedonism. He wanted to become a “bad person.” “Why am I the designated driver?” he asked. “I can do worse. I’m big and bad. Survival of the fittest. You gotta be tough. You gotta get what you want.”

But his depression deepened. “If there’s no purpose in life, why am I working so hard at college?”

One day while passing a church, Anh saw 777 on his odometer and being superstitious thought, Oh good luck!

“Why don’t you go to church?” a random thought invaded his mind. He had avoided his grandma for years to not have to go to church. He fought against the thought.

A month later in a breakup that led to more depression, he passed the same church and saw 777 on his odometer again. “Why don’t you go to church?” flashed across his mind again, and this time he thought, “If I did go, maybe I would meet a cute girl.”

“If there is a God, he’s definitely far away from me and he doesn’t like me and he doesn’t care about me,” he thought. “But if there is a God, I’m going to pay my respects.”

He sat in the back and didn’t talk to anybody, but an older guy tapped him on the shoulder. He was very kind.

“Are you here by yourself?” the elder said to him. “Come and sit with my family.”

His daughter was cute. “I was like dang, jackpot,” he remembers.

Anh kept going to church to get the daughter, but when he asked her out, she said no. “I believe she was praying for me,” he says.

In turn, she invited him to attend a retreat. Thinking it might be a way for him to win her heart, he acceded. If not the first girl, he might find some other girl who was cute.

On the trip to the retreat center, the divide between the seriously committed Christian guys and him became evident. They listened to “weird Christian banjo music” while Anh had techno pop. They cracked innocent jokes that Anh didn’t even understand; he told perverted jokes that he alone laughed at.

In his mind, he felt judged. “I started getting angry at these Christians though they never said anything to me,” he says. “Thoughts started coming to my mind like, if there’s Heaven, they’re goin to Heaven and you’re going to…

He forcefully broke off the random thought.

“I had a violent reaction on the inside: No, Hell is not a real place. Hell is a place that is designed by man to control the masses by being brainwashed and controlled by a few elites,” he thought. “I’m not giving in to that. No, Hell’s not real!”

Up on the mountain, they broke out to seek God individually in nature. Anh, with a gallon of condescension, just watched from the bench while each Christian went off to meditate, pray and read scripture.

When they gathered to share what God had told them, Anh was quite surprised by the profound life philosophy they uttered.

Still, the daily practice grated Anh until on the final day of the camp, Anh, who was anxious to get off the mountain and back into the club, thought he’d give it a try. He opened his Bible by chance to John 1:12: “But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name.”

Hmmm, Anh thought, that seemed pretty straightforward – and pretty easy.

So, he uttered a prayer to receive Jesus, but really he did it to ridicule the Christians. He had lost interest in getting girls and wanted to humiliate the guys who were getting on his nerves.

At group share, Anh said he accepted Jesus. He did it sneeringly, as if to prove that the Bible was a hoax and nothing had happened.

He expected more than a few of the guys to be outraged. That’s what he wanted to do.

Instead, everybody was super excited for him. He had accepted Jesus finally!

On the road down the mountain, Anh continued the sarcasm until one of the brothers got upset. “Judging by the things you’re saying, it sounds like you didn’t really put your faith in Jesus,” he said.

To offend the Christians is what Anh wanted. But in that moment, another one of his weaknesses flared, a volatile temper. His fists clenched and he was going to clock him for the gentle rebuke.

“Suddenly time stopped. It was like I was in my body and I wasn’t in my body,” he relates. “It was like you could see time slow down like a coin flipping in the air slowly. Then I heard this booming voice that said:

I know you.

All the anger and rage subsided under a tremendous presence of “something that I didn’t know what it was,” Anh says.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

“What would Jesus do?” another thought flashed through his head.

Jesus wouldn’t hit him. Jesus wouldn’t be mad. Jesus would just let it go.

“I felt so understood, so loved,” he says. “You know who I am.”

All of sudden, he “zipped back into reality.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Anh said with unexpected maturity.

He looked up to the Heavens and uttered: “Jesus, you’re real. Show me what it’s like to be a Christian.”

When he got down off the mountain, he suddenly had the desire to go to church.

As he attended church and read scripture, he began to understand that pornography was not a good and natural thing that guys would automatically want. He began to get the revelation that the girls he was looking at weren’t objects but actually people. God asked him if he would like it if men would see his daughter naked. He didn’t have a daughter yet, but he imagined he wouldn’t like it.

Still, he didn’t immediately overcome the addiction. After a few months of being a Christian, he felt a presence next to him one day while he slipped up and looked at porn.

Then Jesus impressed on his heart: Those are my daughters.

Anh’s response was anything but mild. “Whoa! Dad with a shotgun!” he thought. “Run. A sudden fear.”

“Lord, I’m so sorry. This isn’t honorable,” he prayed. “I didn’t realize.”

As he peered into the Bible, Anh realized he wasn’t only hurting God. “I was hurting myself,” he says. “I was turning myself into a weak man by giving in to my lust, by not practicing self-control. I was becoming a weak man.”

God promised him a beautiful spouse, but he had to learn to wait, Anh says.

He began taking steps of purity.

“Little by little, I began to get set free from pornography,” he says.

With the deliverance from pornography, Anh also got freed from the rage that got planted in his heart the day his dad abandoned the family.

“I realized I was angry at God because that was the breaking of everything I knew,” he says. “As I realized God loved me and cared for me and had a vision and a plan for me and he had a redemption for me and was going to change my life into an amazing, positive, life-giving way, I learned patience.”

Patience began to flow from Heaven and through his heart and sprouted and flourished as a fruit of the Spirit.

In place of depression, joy now flowed. “I became like a little kid running through a plain of lilacs,” he says.

In college, Anh studied to become a molecular biologist and today hosts the Real Life Radio Show. He is based in Orlando.

“When you experience the kingdom of God, it comes with so many benefits: life, joy, love, peace,” he says. “When I came to Christ, I discovered the peace of God. It’s something you can taste and feel.”

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

About the writer of this article: Pastor Michael Ashcraft is also a financial professional in California.