Part of that title may not be completely true. Sasha Taunton is a teenager and doing well I found out. However, since she has been HIV positive since birth you can see why I called her a dying little girl. Most HIV positive people do not have a long life expectancy. The other half of the title was true five years ago. Christopher Hitchens, a world famous atheist, died in December 2011 after spending hours talking with Sasha. He is, of course, no longer dying. But we are a little ahead of the story.
Let us travel in time to around 330 B.C. and watch the armies of Alexander (The Great) conquer the middle east and much of the Mediterranean world. You may recall that this resulted in Greek culture and language being imposed on all the conquered countries. This would prepare the way for the spread of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The common language of that entire part of the world in the first century A.D. was the Koine (the 'e' is a long 'a') Greek. The books that make up our New Testament were written in this language and one of the three inscriptions on the Cross of Christ was in this language. For the purposes of this true story we are interested in two important words that come to us from that language: atheist and apologetic(s).
The first of those words is formed from the word for God (theos) combined with the Greek letter alpha (a) which indicates "no". The second word (apologetic) is derived from "apologia" which means to "defend". It did not originally mean "I'm sorry". Christians use the word to mean "defending the truth". An "apologist" is a Christian speaker who shows the reasonableness of believing in a Personal, Infinite God and in the claims of Christ, especially His resurrection from the dead. We will need both of those words to tell this story. Now, back to Sasha and Christopher.
Larry Taunton is founder of Fixed Point Foundation, a Christian apologetic ministry which, among other things, sponsors debates between well-known atheists and Christian speakers. Larry and his wife (whose name I wish I knew but could not find) found Sasha while on a missions trip to Russia in 2008. Sasha, as we previously mentioned, was born HIV positive. She was abandoned at birth and passed through three orphanages. She prayed for God to send her a family. He heard her cry. When the Tauntons found her she was in an orphanage that had for a "bathroom" a hole in the ground -- with no paper! Since adopting Sasha the Tauntons have founded Sasha's Hope to send help to orphans like her around the world.
When Larry invited the famed atheist Christopher Hitchens to debate a Christian apologist on the Fixed Point Foundation television broadcast it resulted in Hitchens becoming friends with the Tauntons, especially Sasha, and spending much time with them. This was Hitchens first real contact with Evangelical Christians and he found them to be refreshingly different from the merely nominal "Christianity" he had grown up with in England. In his recent book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist, Larry Taunton tells in detail how he discussed with Christopher the possibility of becoming a Christian. If you know anything about Hitchens' blasphemous hatred of anything to do with God and Christianity you see how radical it was for him to even discuss conversion. Larry is emphatic that, to the best of his knowledge, Hitchens never did cross over to Christ. Hitchens was dying of esophageal cancer.
He once actually asked Larry, "Why do you think I do not convert?" Larry answered, "You've created a global reputation as an atheist. Your fortune, your reputation is based on it. I can't imagine how hard it would be to admit you were wrong. You created a prison for yourself."
Sasha's impact on Hitchens was huge. He was visibly moved by the love and faith of this little girl. Brilliant apologists could refute him in debates but Sasha won his heart. We can only hope that he crossed over to Christ before dying and escaped his own prison. Larry said, "At the end of the day, the most powerful apologetic is love".
I am confident that you will remember this the next time you are tempted to argue someone to Christ. Instead, be another Sasha.
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