by Esther Ahmad
†
John was often quiet during those early months, and that worried me. Sometimes several days went by when he would hardly speak to me or Amiyah. I sensed that he was becoming distant and preoccupied.
When Amiyah was asleep early one morning, I brought him some sweet chai and held his hand. “I feel bad for all the sacrifices you’ve made,” I said. “You deserve more security than this, and less fear.”
He smiled at me, but the silence remained.
I took a deep breath. The words I needed to say were bunched up in my throat, resisting my efforts. When I finally spoke, my voice was as timid as a fearful child’s. “If you want to leave, I’ll understand.”
“No,” he said immediately. “No, Esther. I’m happy—truly, I am.”
“Really? Sometimes you seem sad, and it makes me sad too.”
He paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “It’s not easy living this way, and it’s not the life I wanted to give you and Amiyah. But I know that this is all for the Lord. This is what he wants for us right now. If this is his will, then I want to follow him. Is that what you want too?”
“Yes!” I said. “I want to live all for God, with you beside me.”
“Me too,” he said, taking my hand in his and smiling for the first time in days. “All for God. You and me.”
God, I prayed, what have I done to deserve such a wonderful Christian husband?
†
It did not happen overnight, the way God had provided my rickshaw fare, but God did meet our needs. John was offered work looking after an elderly, bedridden patient, and we were able to move out of the refugee center and into the free accommodation provided by his job.
We were grateful to have a place to stay, but John’s pay was modest, and money remained tight. There were many times when I’d look at the empty kitchen cupboards, wondering what I would feed our family that evening.
I’d bow down on the floor and call out to God, “Lord, you know everything, and you know I have nothing to feed my husband or my little girl, but still I will show you.” I would get up and throw open all the cupboards. “See? There’s nothing here. I’m asking for my daily bread. Would you please provide for us? I know you promised to carry us in your hand, and I know you alone are the one true God. Please prove yourself faithful to us.”
God never failed to reply. Sometimes he did so quietly, without much fanfare, and John would return home from work with enough money for us to eat for a few days. Other times God’s intervention was almost breathtaking.
One day, when I was staring at the open cupboards and reminding God that we really needed help, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see two women, one of them an Indonesian woman from the apartment below ours. She did not know any English, and the two of us had communicated only by sign language in the past. She waved hello and then had me talk to the other woman, who was holding two large shopping bags.
“Hello,” the stranger said. “I thought God wanted me to give this food away, and I asked this woman if she knew anyone who needed it. Do you?”
I could feel the tears of gratitude welling up inside. Just then Amiyah came to the door, looked at the woman, and said, “Good morning, Auntie.”
“Oh!” the woman said. “You have a young child. I was going to buy some toys, but I put them back. I’m so sorry. Can I give you some cash instead?”
She left soon after, and all I could do was gather Amiyah to me and fall to my knees in thanks. The food held us over until John got paid, but the lesson of how we could trust God lasted far, far longer.
†
Even though Malaysia is a Muslim nation, Christianity is tolerated there—officially, at least. So we were able to find a church nearby and join a midweek small group. At the first meeting, we saw God intervene in one of the most dramatic ways yet.
The group was made up of ten people who were all new to the church. Most were from Malaysia, but one couple, Paul and his wife, Emma, had arrived not long ago from England. We sat around the small but neat apartment and shared our stories by way of introduction. They explained that they had come to Malaysia to work with a Christian nonprofit.
I was glad John spoke for us—I was still nervous that people would find out about my dark past and reject us. But John condensed our complicated story into a few sentences, explaining a little about life on the run in Pakistan and the birth of our daughter. I listened with my eyes closed, hoping nobody would ask whether I was an ex-terrorist.
When John finished speaking, I looked up. Paul was staring at me, openmouthed.
“I know about you,” he said.
I felt an unwelcome tightness return to my throat.
It seemed to me that the entire room had stopped breathing. Though I stared at the floor, I knew all eyes were on me.
Paul went on. “I was in Pakistan a year ago, meeting with some church leaders in your city. They told me about a woman on the run whose father had hung posters around the city. I’d wanted to meet you, but it wasn’t possible, so we prayed for you instead.”
The room was filled with silence.
Instead of fearing that I was about to be found out, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude. God had brought us so far already. And he was with us still.
†
God’s provision came in so many different ways, but there was a common thread running through each experience. In every trial and struggle was an invitation for us to learn as a family how to trust him.
One of those trials came about two years after we moved to Malaysia. The patient John was caring for died, and we found ourselves looking for a new job and a new place to live. The only place we could afford was an apartment that had been vacant for years. It was covered in dust, filth, and strange decorations.
“Why are there so many mirrors everywhere?” John asked when we were moving in.
“They were supposed to get rid of the evil spirits,” the owner said. “But it didn’t work.”
We felt a little strange about the dark history of our new home, but we had no choice. After a day of cleaning, the apartment looked much better. Yet while the dust and filth were gone, we woke up one night to the sound of a disturbance in the kitchen. We rushed in to find that no one was there, but all our pots and pans were on the floor.
A few days later, Amiyah got sick. Soon John and I started to feel ill too, and we knew it was time to start praying more. The three of us started each day in prayer, then prayed again in the afternoon and the evening, asking God to fill the house with his Spirit and dispel all evil. We all got healthy again, and we were reminded that nothing is more powerful than our God.
†
One night Amiyah woke up in pain. There was a thin, bloody wound running all around her neck, and ants were crawling all over her. We took her to the doctor immediately.
After the doctor treated the wounds, she had some questions for us. “Where has she been sleeping?”
“On a mat on the floor,” I said.
The doctor was horrified. “You don’t have a bed?” she asked. “You need to get a bed right away.”
I thanked her for her time and went home, desperate once again. We barely had enough money for rent and food, let alone furniture. The only way we’d be able to get a bed would be if God provided one directly.
The next day when I was in my bedroom alone, I cried out to God, begging him to take care of our precious daughter. Then I went about my day, doing laundry and getting dinner ready. I assumed I would have to wait awhile before he acted, but that very afternoon, I met a woman who was emigrating to the United States.
“Are you from India?” the woman asked.
“No, Pakistan.”
“Are you a Muslim?”
I told her I was a Christian and explained a little about why we had left Pakistan.
“Oh,” she said, pausing for a moment. “Do you have a bed?”
I was taken aback. “No,” I stammered.
“Can I come and visi
t your house?”
“Sure. We can take tea together.”
We walked up the stairs, and I showed her inside. “Please,” I said as she looked around, “you can sit on the mat. I’m sorry I don’t have anything else for you to sit on.”
The woman sat while I went to make tea. When I returned, she was crying.
“I have all these things I don’t need—furniture, a washing machine, a refrigerator—and I’m going to send everything over here.”
“Oh, no, Sister.” I was amazed by her offer, but I didn’t want to take advantage of her. “Please, I just need a bed for my little girl.”
“No,” she said. “I’m sending it all.”
“But I can’t pay.”
“You don’t have to pay. I’m giving it all to you.”
I watched with tears in my eyes as two men filled our house with everything she’d described, as well as a TV, fans, and a table. The whole apartment was filled instantly.
When John returned later that day, he looked around our home in shock. “Where did all this come from?”
I explained the whole story, but John was upset. “Do you think I’m a beggar? I told you to give me some time to work and save, and we’d get what we need slowly.”
“But I didn’t ask anyone for anything. She just saw how little we had and sent it all over.”
“Then call her and tell her to take it back.”
“But this is God’s gift, John. And if he’s given it to us, how can we refuse him?”
John was crying now. “I am not a beggar.”
He went upstairs to take a shower, and I called Paul from our small group. He and John had formed a strong friendship, and I knew that if there was anyone who could talk to John, it was Paul.
He arrived at our home within an hour. “Wow!” Paul stood in the middle of the apartment, an arm around John and a wide smile across his face. “Praise God! Your house is full of blessings!”
John stared around him, seeing the gifts in a new light. “You’re right,” he said. “It is.”
“You have everything now,” Paul said. “I was going to encourage the church to help you get all this furniture month by month, but God works this way sometimes. And his timing is always perfect, isn’t it?”
John nodded. By now his smile was almost as wide as Paul’s.
Paul was right: God had provided everything we needed. Even here, so far from home, God was reminding us just how close he was.
28
“No, God,” I said. “Please, not that.”
We had been in Malaysia for five years. We’d been granted refugee status and had applied to be resettled elsewhere as refugees. Now we were just waiting for the United Nations to give us our final settlement location. John had found a job with a nonprofit, I was homeschooling our daughter, and our family felt loved, accepted, and embraced by our church. Everything was going as well as it could, considering we were far from our families.
Ever since I had become a Christian, I tried to pray more than I did as a Muslim, so I began waking at three o’clock every morning to pray for an hour. One time, when the house was silent apart from my whispered prayers, God spoke. You need to share everything I’ve done in your life.
I knew what that would require. In order to talk about God’s rescue, I would have to explain how far away from him I had been. I would have to reveal the secret I had kept hidden deep within me since the night I said good-bye to my mother and crept out of the house.
“Everything? But John will leave me if he finds out I was plotting to kill Christians,” I begged.
I am with you.
I heard nothing else after that.
I knew the Lord was right—how could I hide the transformation he’d done in my life? And I knew whom I needed to tell first.
“John,” I said later that day, after he had finished eating his favorite meal of fried fish and chapatti. “I want to share something with you. Please don’t be angry.”
He shot me a worried look and put his hand on mine. “It’s okay. If anything happened, you can tell me.”
“You promise you won’t divorce me?”
“What happened?”
“I want you to promise,” I said, unable to stop myself from crying. “If you leave me, I’ll have nowhere to go and no one to go to. And I can’t go back.”
“Esther, I’m not going to leave you. Even if something bad has happened, I won’t leave you. Even if it’s something like adultery. Mistakes can happen to anyone.”
I took a breath and tried to find my voice again. “There’s one part of my life that I’ve kept hidden from everyone, but it has always been open to God. I want to tell you who I was before we met. Do you remember the first church we visited here, when the pastor asked if I was an ex-terrorist?”
“Yes,” John said. “That made me so angry.”
“He was right.”
John stared at me, confused.
I told him everything. When I was finished, he asked me why I had never told him about the madrassa, the call for jihad, and the day I raised my hand.
“I hoped God wouldn’t reveal it,” I whispered.
He was quiet for a while.
As the silence between us stretched out, I feared that he might respond the way my father so often did—by rejecting me and withdrawing his love. Surely this would finally be too much for John. He had given up so much for me, but how much more could he be expected to sacrifice? Could I really expect him to accept the fact that I had been so ready to embrace evil?
When he finally spoke, his words were slow and heavy but filled with warmth. “It’s okay. This is your past. I know how much you love God now.”
“Yes,” I said. “You know that from the first drop of blood to the last, my life is for the Lord.”
We talked a little more, and while the news had come as a shock to him, John was able to forgive me and accept what I’d told him.
“The only thing I’m worried about is telling other people,” he said. “Maybe it’s better to keep the truth between us and God. Other people might not understand.”
“I see what you’re saying,” I said as we sat on the bed. “But I can’t keep quiet anymore. God has told me to tell people, so I have to speak.”
†
John had reason to fear how people would react when I told my story. While being a Christian in a Muslim nation like Malaysia was nowhere near as dangerous as it was in Pakistan, we were still an unwelcome minority. There were plenty of Muslims in Malaysia who reacted to Christians with anger and abuse.
Early on during our time there, I was waiting at a bus stop with Amiyah when a woman in a hijab started talking to her. Amiyah was three and a half, with curly hair, chubby cheeks, and fair skin, and the woman gently rubbed her back and told me in Malay that she thought my daughter was beautiful.
“Thank you,” I said in English.
“Are you Malaysian?” she asked.
“No, I’m from Pakistan.”
“Ah,” she nodded. “Islam?”
“No.” I made a cross with my two index fingers. “Christian.”
The woman’s face soured. She still had her hand on Amiyah’s back and pushed her hard. Amiyah fell forward and hit her face on the ground. I picked her up and saw that blood was pouring from her mouth. Thankfully it was just her lip, but I squeezed her tight to me, desperate to take away the pain.
When she calmed down a little, I looked Amiyah in the eye. “It’s okay,” I said. “When we’re Christians, people will do this to us. We can forgive them just as Jesus has forgiven us.”
It hurt to see my daughter facing persecution at such a young age, but how could I shield her completely from the rejection we will all face as followers of Jesus? And if I was really honest with myself, did I even want to? More than a life free from opposition, I wanted my daughter to know that in the face of hatred she could learn the way of Jesus—the way of love and grace and forgiveness.
†
Our apartment had
lots of windows but no air-conditioning, which meant that every afternoon the air inside grew so hot and stale it was impossible to concentrate on schoolwork. On especially hot days, we would take our books outside and I’d homeschool Amiyah right on the playground equipment. While she studied, I would talk with other moms and tell them about how my life had changed since my dream about Jesus.
It was not easy, and I was surprised by how much harder it was to introduce strangers to Jesus than it had been to talk to my mother, sister, and brother. Some of the women I met at the playground were interested in what I had to tell them, but for every open opportunity, there were many more conversations that ended with hard stares and turned backs.
Sometimes the discouragement got to me. There was one period when John was without work and the cupboards were bare and I missed home, and it hurt when I talked about Jesus and people spat insults in return. I could feel the weight of all the rejection that had built up in the decade since I became a Christian.
It was as if I were a child again. I needed to know that God hadn’t left me, that he still cared about my family and me. I decided to fast and pray, and after three days, I finally heard his gentle whisper. Daughter, my Spirit, who brought you from Pakistan, is still with you. In your painful times and in your joyful times, I am still with you.
I wept. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
My work for you in Malaysia continues. But when you’re done here, nothing will stop you from what I have in store for you next.
“Please, Lord,” I begged, “give me the work you have called me to!”
The next day a friend introduced me to a Muslim family that was applying to be resettled as refugees and needed advice. I visited them at the same asylum center we had stayed in when we arrived.
“Thank you for being so kind and coming to us,” the wife said as we waited for her husband to join us. “But tell me, why don’t you come to Islam? Allah’s mercy should be on you.”
I smiled, remembering how I, too, had learned the three-step plan to convert a Christian.
“I’m already under mercy,” I said. “What do you think about becoming a Christian?’
