On Valentine's Day in 1978, I thought to myself, If I'm going to follow Jesus, today would be a good day to start, because it would be an easy date to remember.

I had been thinking about it for a month or so, and wondered, "What would my friends think? What would my Reformed Jewish family think?" Most importantly, I was not ready to give up sinning. I even had a business trip to Chicago planned during that month and I intended to find ways to sin there. I succeeded.

I had long since abandoned Judaism for a philosophy free of any moral restraints that would hinder my pursuit of pleasure. After graduating from college, I got a job taking pictures for the local paper. I was the California News Photographer of the Year; I made more money than I needed; I was healthy, lived halfway between the beach and the mountains, and I had a sharp girlfriend named Karen—a copy editor at the newspaper.

Except for a sense of an inner void, life was great. Then Karen announced that she had become a Christian. Of course you're a Christian, I thought. Aren't all gentile Americans Christian? She explained that she now had a relationship with Jesus, but I didn't understand.

Over the next weeks I watched her closely to see if she would need some kind of medical or psychological intervention. But oddly enough, she seemed calmer, more at peace than before.

I later found out that at about this time, Tom Mills, a photographer for Worldwide Challenge magazine, whom I did not know, had begun praying for my salvation, praying specifically that my family and friends would become Christians, and that I would be curious about it. He even put pictures with my byline up on a board with several other photographers—also the target of his prayers—like some kind of most-wanted list. He made this his ministry since he didn't know many non-Christians.

During the next six months, as those people prayed, my curiosity about Christianity grew almost by the day. So when Karen gave me a copy of Charles Colson's Born Again, I devoured it. A reporter lent me his copy of Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, and for the first time in my life I read the New Testament, a taboo book in the Jewish community.

In the New Testament I encountered a man who claimed to be the Messiah, who brazenly claimed that He would forgive my sins and give me eternal life if I would follow Him. Even a poor Jew like me knew that only God can forgive sins and grant eternal life. So who was this guy?

Finally, on that Valentine's Day in 1978, Karen challenged me to invite Christ into my life. When I told her I would think about it, she angrily confronted me: "You've got a lot of excuses, but do you really have any good reasons to continue rejecting Jesus?" I told her I wasn't comfortable praying with her, but—even though that was true—I knew it was another excuse.

Karen lived in Victorville, Calif., where she couldn't get Christian radio, so I had been taping programs for her and sending them through the newspaper's interoffice mail. I had one cassette that I hadn't sent her, so I put it in the tape player and listened. I don't remember the message, but at the end I prayed and gave my life to Jesus.

Word got back to Tom that God had answered his prayers for me. Our offices were in the same city at that time, so we soon met face to face. When Tom heard about my salvation, he was genuinely excited, even though I sensed some disappointment that he didn't get to pray with me as I received Jesus. However, he invited me to join him in praying for the remaining photographers, which I did. As far as I know, none of them has come to know Christ yet.

One month later, my sister called to tell me that my mom was in the hospital with cancer. I drove the 30 miles to Pomona Community Hospital to tell Mom how Jesus had come into my life. To my amazement and relief, she told me that she had been praying for her children to come to Christ for six months. She had even sent money to a TV evangelist to pray for her kids.

Her revelation shocked me. Over the course of the remaining two years of her life I figured out that she had made a commitment to Christ as a teenager, but living in a Jewish community and marrying a Jewish man, she had never grown in her relationship with Christ. It was only as she sensed the end of her life approaching that she got more serious about Jesus and started praying for her children.

I'm glad that God answers prayer.