In late 1981 and early 1982, when I lived in Tokyo, by so called "chance", my parents and I got in contact with a missionary family living just a 10 minute walk from our house. These very friendly people borrowed me books ("we guess, the supply you brought from Germany is already read"), telling about people whose life had been very positively changed by Jesus Christ.
After three books I realized, that those people had got something in their life that I was missing. So I started asking myself how to get that. The fourth book ("Ich muss mit dir reden" ["I have to talk with you"] by Klaus Eickhoff) gave the answer:
"Jesus Christ died to pay for your personal sins, so ask him in a prayer to come into your life and to forgive your sins. He won't let anyone down who really trusts in him." I immediately knew "that's it". I also realized, that in future I wouldn't be able to do what I want, but what's that compared with knowing that someone very important really loves you, your (very) long term problems are solved and you aren't alone? So after about half an hour of thinking, I took the step, and in my first real prayer I invited Jesus into my life. The outward things didn't become easier after that, but I knew that someone in charge had an excellent overview.
Jesus leads most christians to join a group of other believers, usually called church. I was in Tokyo, home was in Germany, but such small distances (9365 kilometres, to be precise) are no problem for HIM. By two independent ways, he showed me the same group of young christians in Gröbenzell (the suburb of Munich where I grew up).
During home leave I did join them and found out, that they were a branch of the Munich EC group (the world union is known as CE = Christian Endavour). To underline this guidance, I met someone in a local train who invited me to this same Munich group...
When thinking about what to study in university, I added a plan towards theology, but finally I stayed with computer science, because that's where God gave me my skills - and for theology, I can't handle well those very sophistcated philosophical thoughts and natural language...
During that time, in 1986 the suburb pastor of the Munich group and I started a teenager group, which is still active, now as a youth group, integrated in the bavarian EC state union.
When the time in university was over, it became clear to me, that I should serve Jesus and his church with my ability to make computers do what the organisation needs. When asking around among friends in the church I attended, the contact to the Deutscher Gemeinschafts-Diakonieverband very quickly led to a fulltime job. I can imagine this to be an intermediate stage, where Jesus is preparing me for some service overseas, perhaps supporting communication in areas with little infrastructure.
As I live there, most of the organisations I know are based in Germany. As internet services of american providers are more readyly marketed here, the number of web sites increases.
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