Retired paratrooper and drill sergeant Bishop Larry Wright hasn’t held or fired a gun in many years. These days he is actually a pastor who preaches at Wright’s Heal the Land Outreach Ministries in North Carolina. During his very first sermon of 2016, Wright had a chance to combine both his military training and religious guidance to disarm a distraught, armed man.

Wright was delivering a sermon on gun violence when a man he didn’t know walked into the church. “At any moment your life could be taken from you,” Wright said before noticing that the man who had just interrupted his service was carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle.

Church-goers believed this to be an act Wright orchestrated in order to demonstrate his point, but that was not the case. Through divine intervention or dumb luck, an armed man had really stumbled into the middle of Wright’s sermon.

The last time a gunman walked into a church in the nearby Charleston, several people were killed. As Wright stepped down from his pulpit, he thought of how he could avoid violence and prevent a tragedy.

Wright diffused the situation by asking a simple question. “Can I help you?”

The man answered, “Can you pray for me?”

The armed man was a fellow military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife had just been diagnosed with a serious illness, and the unnamed veteran stopped taking his medication as he began to worry about money.

Wright took the firearm and patted the veteran down to make sure he didn’t have any more weapons.

“I asked God to help him and bless him,” Wright said. “He fell to his knees, and he began to weep.”

After handing over his gun, the veteran sat in the pews and watched Wright finish his sermon. Though he was briefly detained by the police, no charges were filed against him. In the end, the veteran has actually decided to join the church.

“He embraced me, and I said, ‘Thank God,'” Wright recalled. “He said, ‘It could’ve went a whole different way.'”