by Esther Ahmad
“No.” She frowned. “Their book has been changed.”
“Really? Who changed it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, when you find out who changed it and when, you should shout it out. But until then, I don’t think you should spread rumors. Christians are kind and loving, and Jesus is still performing miracles today.”
This made her think. “Have you seen any miracles?”
“Yes—many,” I said.
She paused. “Okay, I want you to pray for me. I want to know if you’re right and Jesus really can heal me.”
She was a diabetic and took insulin, and I prayed for her before her husband joined us.
A month later, this woman called me. She’d just had a checkup, and her blood sugar levels were normal. Her doctor had taken her off insulin.
I visited her again soon after, and we talked about how Jesus still heals today, just as he did in the Holy Bible. I asked her why she didn’t read the Bible when it contained three of the holy books that all Muslims are supposed to read, and she said she didn’t really know why.
We talked more, and our conversations reminded me of the debates. She was an educated woman, and I encouraged her to think deeply, to look carefully at the Qur’an, and to ask questions.
I visited her regularly for three months, and during that time the whole family became Christians. They found a local church that embraced and nurtured them, and soon after, we heard that the United Nations had accepted their appeal. Within months they left Malaysia, ready to start a new life in Europe.
This was a bittersweet victory for us. We were thrilled for our friends, but their departure was also a reminder of how delayed our own process was. We were approaching our seventh year in Malaysia, and so far every stage of our application had taken longer than any other case we’d heard of. Where others had to wait weeks for an appointment, we waited months. When we were told to expect a response in months, we knew it could take years. We tried to find out why, but we never received any official explanation.
In the midst of the waiting, we learned yet another valuable lesson. Whenever we compared our situation to that of others, we would get upset. There was always someone with a smoother application process, better accommodations, or fewer obstacles. But whenever we reminded ourselves of what Jesus went through—from his lowly birth to his agonizing death—we looked at our own circumstances with fresh eyes. What we faced was nothing compared to what the Son of God, who traded the glory of heaven for the pain of the cross, endured. Remembering that helped us to persevere. This perspective reminded us to remain faithful, because we were convinced that when the Lord wanted us out of Malaysia, nothing could stop him.
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I continued sharing about Christ with moms at the playground, taxi drivers, friends of friends, and anyone else I came into contact with. I started seeing more people come to faith, and these victories gave me profound encouragement. The more I shared and the more I prayed, the more I learned to search for the lesson God was teaching in every situation.
One day as I was waiting for a bus with Amiyah, who was about eight at the time, a man approached. He had a long beard and the traditional white cotton robes of a devoted Muslim. I had a sense from the start that this was not going to end well.
“I want to sit there,” he said, pointing at the bench where Amiyah was sitting.
I told her in English to come and sit on my lap.
“You are Malaysian?” he asked.
“No, I’m from Pakistan.”
“Oh! Pakistan,” he said, nodding. “Islam?”
“No.” I shook my head and smiled. “Christian.”
He stared at me for a second, not flinching. Then he threw back his head and spat at me. He missed me but hit Amiyah squarely in the face. She started crying, but the man raged on.
“Why are you Christians here in our country? Get out of here. I don’t like Christians. If I were the prime minister, I . . .”
I stopped listening. I was trying to calm Amiyah down. When our bus came, the man didn’t move. I looked at him, said thank you, and got on the bus with Amiyah.
Later that evening, she told John all about it. He knelt down in front of her, listening carefully. When she was done crying, he took her hands in his and spoke quietly. “The same thing happened to Jesus. They spit on him, beat him, and hurt him. But nothing could change his mind about loving people the way God wanted him to.”
“Why?” Amiyah asked.
John opened his Bible, and together they read about Jesus being beaten and crucified.
“You know,” he said, “I think it does us good to feel some of the pain he endured before he was crucified.”
Even as I ached for my daughter, I felt gratitude wash over me. She would not be immune to pain as a Christian, but she had a father who loved her and accepted her—and who showed her what the heavenly Father’s love is like.
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God chose a remarkable man to be my husband. It took several years after we were married for me to understand just how remarkable.
The longer we stayed in Malaysia, the more grateful I became for John’s faith. He was unshakable. Whenever I felt weary of all the waiting or became fearful that we might get sent back home, John remained steady. He never failed to remind me of all God had done, and he helped me take my focus off my worries and retrain my eyes on Jesus.
What’s more, John felt confident about where we were headed.
There had been two occasions in his life when God had revealed to John certain insights about what lay ahead. The first was when he was fourteen. He felt sure that God was calling him to convert one person and encouraging him that he would one day get married. The details were unclear to him, and he didn’t believe that there would be any connection between the person he converted and the person he married. But this quickly became a passion he carried with him for years: to win one soul for the Lord and to find the person God would have him marry.
Before John and I met, he had another dream that was so detailed and vibrant he never forgot it. He saw his life years into the future. He was working in a medical lab, enduring periods of great suffering, before moving to a new apartment in an unknown country and then finally relocating to a different country overseas.
When I stood in his lab and told him I didn’t think I was a Muslim any longer, John knew the first part of God’s plan was in motion—that I was the one he had been called to convert. And when we walked through the half-empty airport in Pakistan and were waved through by the sleepy-looking border guards, he knew that the second part was under way as well. The day we saw our first apartment in Malaysia, John knew the rest of the plan was in place. It was the exact same apartment he had seen in his dream—the same walls, the same windows, the same feel. John knew God was directing us exactly where he wanted us to be. He knew that the final bit of his dream would one day come true: we would all move to America.
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Without a divine plan in place, it didn’t make sense to believe that any Western country would accept us as refugees, let alone the United States. My past was so complicated and there were so many other refugees who wanted entry into the States—how could we even dare to dream of leaving Malaysia and starting a new life there?
But we knew God had spoken, and we knew we could trust him.
So that’s exactly what we did: we chose to trust God in all circumstances. When we had to spend eight hours waiting in the blistering heat in Kuala Lumpur to find out whether our paperwork had been processed, we trusted that God was in control. When people who had arrived in Malaysia long after we did were informed that they’d been offered a new life as refugees in Europe, we resisted the fear that God had abandoned us. And when we were given reason to suspect that our application in Malaysia was being deliberately delayed, we remained determined to keep faith in God.
After a long process, we were finally granted refugee status, which enabled us to approach the UNHCR, the UN refugee ag
ency. They would help us find a country to be our new home. A worker explained the first choice we had to make: we could either apply to one country or submit an open application to all the countries the UNHCR worked with and take whichever country chose us.
We knew God was sending us to America, but we wanted to give him control, so we opted for the second choice. After almost eight years of waiting, we were told that out of all the possible countries—from Canada to Australia to Denmark to New Zealand to a host of others—our application had been selected by the one country we’d been hoping for. We were going to America.
But not yet. We found ourselves at the beginning of yet another slow-moving leg of our journey. John and I were interviewed at length about our past in Pakistan, and as we’d done when we first arrived in Malaysia, we had to wait many months between the interviews and the applications. Our case was reviewed so many times that I began to wonder whether it would ever come to an end. But no matter how bleak things looked, John was always able to remind me of the hope we had in Jesus.
One night when I was praying in my room, I felt like God had left me. I’d been to the UNHCR the day before to check on our case, and when I was finally called up to talk with one of the Malaysian staff members, things had not gone well.
“You want to talk?” she asked, her arms folded in front of her. I saw that my file was unopened on her desk. “I’m listening.”
“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “My daughter needs to go to school, and we need help.”
“Help? Why should we help you? We didn’t invite you here. We didn’t say we’d help, and we’re not here to educate your children. Stop disturbing us. Go home. We’ll call you if we need you.”
It was not the first time I had been treated rudely, and it certainly was not the worst. All the same, the incident troubled me—not because of what the woman had said but because of what I had seen. Written in bold letters across my file were these words: “Woman converted from Islam to Christianity.”
As I prayed, my face was covered in tears and my throat was raw. I wanted to wake John and have him tell me for the thousandth time why everything was going to be just fine, but he had to work the next day, and I knew he needed to sleep.
As I told God how big the problems were and how powerless I felt and how desperate it all looked, I felt weaker than ever. My mind spun back to the time John and I had stood in front of his pastor, begging him to marry us. I had reminded the pastor of the parable of the lost sheep, repeating to him words that John had said to me many times.
I was no longer a lost sheep. I had been found by God, brought into the fold. I was a Christian. I belonged. And yet I was still weak. I still needed rescuing.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment, and I didn’t hear God’s audible voice in the darkness. But that night something changed within me. I was reminded of my weakness and my dependence on God. That night, yet again, I surrendered everything to him.
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While I had spent much of our time in Malaysia worrying about how we would get out, John’s prayers were usually focused on the people who had looked after us during the two years we were on the run in Pakistan. His heart was broken for them as they faced poverty and persecution, and even though we often struggled to afford to buy food for ourselves, he always made sure we sent them money whenever we could.
The longer we were married, the more I realized how much John and I had in common. His father had died when John was the same age I had been when I left home. His mother was dead now too, and he had not been able to make contact with anyone in his family since we fled the city. My parents might not have been dead, but for all practical purposes, they were dead to me. I couldn’t even risk a phone call to check on my mother’s health, knowing that even if I called from a pay phone, my father would see the country code and come after me and my family. I could not risk putting Amiyah in danger like that.
In many ways, John had lost even more than I had. He had voluntarily left his family and church and community behind for my sake, but I never heard him complain or waver. Whenever I asked him what I had done to deserve such a wonderful husband, he would just smile and wave his hand in the air.
“God has given me this heart,” he’d say. “I am with you.”
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The morning we dragged our seven suitcases through the gates of the UNHCR compound, I was so nervous that I thought I would explode. With every passing minute, I felt my insides twist tighter and tighter. I had good reason to be worried. It was the day we were flying out of Malaysia for the United States, and in one of our suitcases were my notes about the Qur’an. Over the years, I had written hundreds of notes based on my research of the Qur’an and the Bible. If these papers were spotted by an eager customs official at the airport, there was a chance I could be charged with blasphemy. If that happened, I would be right back where I started ten years earlier.
Amiyah was nervous too, but more out of excitement than fear. “Where are they taking our bags?” “Are you sure these windows don’t open?” “How will the plane know when to land?” Answering her questions was a welcome distraction for me.
I made it safely through customs with my Qur’an, but once we were airborne, my insides still refused to relax. It gradually dawned on me that my worries were about more than my defaced copy of the Qur’an. For the previous eight years, I’d held tightly to the belief that America was where God wanted us in the next phase of our lives. Now that we were hurtling there at five hundred miles per hour, I realized I had absolutely no idea what this new life in the States would look like. Besides the fact that we would have a caseworker, a rented house, and some financial assistance until John and I found jobs, everything that lay ahead of us was a question mark.
Just two weeks earlier we had learned where we were going to be living, and until that moment neither of us had ever heard of the state, let alone the city. We looked at each other, wide eyed, not even sure which part of the map to look at.
I was reminded of Hebrews 11:8: “It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going” (NLT). We didn’t know where we were going. But God did. And I had been through enough with God to know that trusting him does not always mean feeling calm and reassured. I had learned that sometimes I just had to take the leap in the midst of my fear, knowing my Father would catch me before I landed.
Amiyah, on the other hand, was now a picture of perfect trust. She watched movies throughout the flight, and John slept much of the way. I spent most of the time staring at the map on the screen in front of me, watching the tiny plane inch its way across the ocean. It was good to be reminded that wherever we were heading and whatever this new life held for us, God was in control. I could see only what the map revealed, but God knew every inch of land and every drop of ocean between here and there. Nothing was hidden from him.
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Ultimately it took us two years to leave Pakistan and eight years to leave Malaysia but only two days to feel at home in America. On the first day and night, we were tired and disoriented, shocked by how much quieter our neighborhood was than Kuala Lumpur had been. Perhaps most of all, we were unsure of what the coming days would hold. Two of our suitcases, including the one with the Qur’an, had gone missing, which added to the sense of unease we felt. We had no way of knowing if someone had intentionally confiscated it or if it was an incidental loss.
But when we woke up the next day and realized it was Sunday, we knew exactly what we needed to do. We needed to go to church.
We spent the day among strangers who instantly became friends. Many of these new brothers and sisters had never met anyone from Pakistan before, and we had never been to a church that felt so relaxed and open before, yet we prayed and worshiped as one. We laughed, talked, and shared stories, and afterward our new friends invited us to eat with them. By the time we returned home, full of gratitude, great food,
and praise, we knew that we belonged.
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We arrived in the United States in the height of summer, but as the leaves started to turn brown and the days grew shorter, we were feeling settled in our new life. Amiyah was getting straight As in school, and John had found work at a local health clinic. When they both were out during the day, I only had to look around the house to be reminded of God’s provision and the wonderful generosity of the church. That first weekend, the house had been almost empty, but within months it was stocked with everything we needed, from closets full of clothes to a washer and dryer, and even a car to drive.
Despite this provision, I would often fall to my knees, desperate for God to help us. John’s wages were small, but large enough to reduce the amount of financial assistance we received from the state. People from church continued to donate items we needed, but at times there simply was not enough money to pay the bills. Over the time we had spent in Malaysia, we gradually felt less and less like refugees. We belonged to our church community, we had work and a little money, and we looked like everyone else in the country. In the States, we were starting over as refugees, and it took time to readjust.
The financial challenges were not the only pressures we felt. Back in Malaysia, Amiyah had started to ask questions about her grandparents, and we always tried to give her answers she’d be able to understand. But by the time we moved to the United States, she was ten and able to comprehend much of the story about how her mom and dad had met. Knowing that she had a grandmother and a grandfather on my side, as well as uncles and aunts and cousins she had never met, left Amiyah feeling sad. She would see her friends at school getting picked up by their relatives or hear about her classmates spending time with their extended families over the weekend, and she’d feel a deep sense of loss. She had never met any of her relatives, but she missed them all the same.
Some pressures we kept from Amiyah. One day I returned home after walking her to school on Martin Luther King Day and found a note from the KKK attached to a rock, telling all foreigners to get out of the neighborhood. I called a friend from church immediately, and she put in a call to the police.