A few weeks ago, Andrew and I traveled to the Middle East to visit local Nazarene leaders, hear their stories, and also offer a short writing training. During our visit, I visited several refugees. Here is my account of one of the stories I heard.
Aisha* is a Syrian refugee who has invited me to her home to hear her story. I have no idea of the dramatic escape and near-death experiences she and her husband are about to tell me.
She is a smiling, plump woman with a friendly, round face wrapped in a dark grey head scarf. As we walk to her neighborhood, our friend Manila*, who will interpret the interview, says, “We’re going into a (slum) area, so don’t take any pictures until we are inside her house.”
We dodge passing vehicles and weave through double-parked cars along the curbs. Manila tells me that these slums are home to a mixture of many different nationalities, Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians, Iraqis and Lebanese. They are all poor, and the impoverished area has the expected amount of crime. The road is broken asphalt, covered in fine, white dust. Someone has put the remnants of an old Turkish rug into a pothole to soften its impact. The streets are closely crowded in by tall apartment buildings, with businesses on the ground floors. Electrical cables stretch chaotically from building to building. Here and there a large cross is suspended among them. It’s a busy Friday afternoon, and many people are out shopping or selling.
I ask Aisha where she comes from in Syria. She answers in Arabic: the countryside, near a large city.
“We had a very large house, very spacious, two floors, and a lot of land. We grew many things, and we had a lot of animals. In the end we even bought a camel,” Manila interprets for me. “Two days ago friends sent us pictures of our house, and it’s all destroyed. Everything is gone.” She says this matter-of-factly. “It’s nothing, all the wealth of Syria is nothing compared to finding Jesus here in Lebanon.”
Tears spring to my eyes.
“Now I am faithfully following Jesus,” she adds.
We turn off the sidewalk as Aisha opens a door in the wall between shops. We go up a flight of tiled, dirty stairs. In Aisha’s first floor apartment, we come through a narrow passageway, almost too tight for me with my backpack, into the one main room that she shares with the 10 other people in her family.
The square room, with unnecessarily high ceilings and scuffed walls, is encircled on the floor with three twin mattresses and a futon. A window in the wall is marred by a web of cracks radiating out from a central punched-in spot.
A large, round man, wearing a black track suit, is lying on his side on one of the mattresses. Two small children – a boy and a girl – are on another mattress, engrossed in smart phones. Smiling, the man, her husband Amir*, stands up to shake our hands and welcome us. They gesture for us to sit on the futon.
I realize that all 11 of them sleep and live in this room. I think about the contrast between the large farm they left behind, their two-story house, and now they’re living in this city slum, crammed into one room. I can’t imagine how difficult the transition has been for them.
After we are all seated and comfortable, Manila tells them why we want to hear their story and asks if they have any security concerns. They only don’t want their photo taken, “because we will get killed,” Amir says.
“Our life in Syria was beautiful, simple,” Aisha begins. “We had a farm with all types of animals, a two-story house. It was on nine acres – 9,000 square meters. The house, on its own, was 1,000 square meters. The land, we inherited from our parents and grandparents, but the house we built. We built it when I was pregnant with Farah* (who is now 14 years old).”
“At the beginning of the war, someone offered us $400,000 for the house and land, but we said no because we didn’t think we would leave the house. We didn’t want to sell,” Amir says. “When the planes started to bomb, we just left. We didn’t take anything with us, neither the house or car, not even one cup of tea. We took nothing.”
They had a second house some distance away and so they fled with their children there. They lived there for a year and a half, but Amir said it was like being “primitive people.” They couldn’t use their electricity, because if they turned on lights at night, planes would bomb the house. They had an electric pump for their water well, but couldn’t use it. So they lowered pails into the 60-foot well and raised them up by hand.
“We wanted to be warm. We would find anything: plastic bags, old wheels and put it in a tin and burn it to be warm. So life was a daily struggle.”
After 18 months like this, the war moved into their area, so they decided to run to Lebanon.
It was 7 a.m. They hired a taxi for $5,000 to carry their large family to the border of Lebanon. All along the road, there were military checkpoints controlled by different warring factions, or by the government army.
“I was crying all the way, covering my eyes, saying, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, if we pass an opposition checkpoint, he could say, ‘take one of the girls,’” Aisha says, covering her face at the memory.
According to the couple, it seems that militants were said to claim girls and young women as they tried to pass through the checkpoints.
“I was afraid for my daughters,” Amir said.
At one checkpoint, a guard was examining their identity cards and then said he wanted to see their 12-year-old girl. “Her picture looks older,” the guard said. “She doesn’t look 12.” While he studied her ID, another soldier came to the car and tried to goad Aisha and the other family members into saying something against the government, perhaps as a pretext to arrest them. The family refused to answer.
Fortunately, the soldiers let them go, and the family passed through many more checkpoints, the taxi driver going as fast as he could. They traveled 14 hours to the northern Lebanese border.
“I was so relieved when we reached the border,” she said.
However, at the border, the Lebanese soldiers tried to turn them away, although Amir said they had been invited by family who were already in Lebanon.
“Where will [they] put you, 12 people?” the guard asked. “You can’t enter.”
Yet, the guard continued looking at the names on the list of family members. He stopped when he read the name, “Issa,” which is the Arabic name for Jesus. “Who is ‘Issa’?” the guard asked.
They showed him the young boy. The guard then said, “For his sake, I’m going to let you in.”
They were finally out of Syria. But the worst was not yet over. Fighting had broken out in the Lebanese northern city of Tripoli, which they had to pass by to get to Beirut, further south.
“This happens sometimes, in Tripoli,” Manila explain.
The traffic was bad because everyone in the area was trying to escape the fighting. Many roads were closed. Their youngest child, a 6-month-old boy, began vomiting.
“We hadn’t eaten anything that day, the driver was going very fast to escape the armies,” Amir says. “And then we came and there was also fighting in Lebanon. I thought, ‘We won’t make it through this day alive.’”
The taxi driver tried to take the road that hugs the coast along the Mediterranean Sea, south toward Beirut, but now it was 9 p.m. and everything was dark. He got lost and somehow wandered into a Lebanese army checkpoint. Amir says he thought the army was about to shoot them because they were trespassing into army controlled territory. But the driver frantically explained they were refugees trying to get to Beirut, so the soldiers redirected them and the family reached Beirut at 3 a.m.
Aisha takes up the story. “We came to my sister’s house [in Beirut]. She has five boys, so there are seven people in her house. And we were 12. We were too many people in the house for a long time.”
Her sister, Yasmin*, had reached Lebanon just four months before. Yasmin's husband, who had gone ahead of his wife and children to Lebanon, ended up abandoning them for a woman he met in Lebanon. Yasmin came alone, afterward, with the boys and has been raising them as a single parent since.
For one year the two families were crammed into a one-room apartment, about the same size as the one we are now sitting in. They divided the room, so each family had half.
That was three and a half years ago, in 2013.
Yasmin was struggling to care for her five sons. When she heard that an evangelical center run by the Baptist church was distributing food packages to refugees, she went to receive one. Aisha went with her. While there, some of the people said, “We want to pray for you.”
Aisha was surprised. “I know how to pray, I don’t need you to pray for me,” she told them. “I’ve come for the food.”
But Aisha became curious about these Christians.
“I would like to know how these people pray, how they act,” she thought to herself. “Also, my husband was sick and wasn’t able to work. I needed help.”
So, she began to visit the center every Saturday. There she met Jabir*, the Nazarene pastor of a Syrian congregation that has been formed near Aisha’s neighborhood. She saw that there was a women’s group that would meet and pray for each other, and talk about their experiences of how God was answering their prayers.
“I became curious to know who is this Jesus? What are these women doing?”
Aisha attended regularly and asked many questions. “Why do they say we need faith in Jesus even if we do good works? Are good works not enough to save us?”
Amir was concerned about his wife’s visits to the group. But he didn’t forbid her, and Aisha enjoyed the meetings, so she kept going. Encouraged by the other women, she also began reading the Bible and prayed with them. Eventually, Amir also trusted the group and Pastor Jabir.
During this time, Amir became more and more ill. He says that doctors told him blood was disappearing from his body. Manila and I aren’t clear on what he means, but we think he was having internal hemorrhaging. The hospital had run tests on him, and when Aisha returned to find out the results of his tests, the doctor asked, “Where is your husband now?” She said he was at work. The doctor said, “How can he be at work? He should be on a bed, dying.”
Until then, Amir was still getting around, but he would become so weary after walking just 50 meters he would be forced to sit and rest. He was always exhausted. The doctors urged him to the emergency room, where the staff gave him blood transfusions. But he kept mysteriously losing blood, although there was no obvious blood loss that anyone could see.
Aisha continued meeting with the believers, although she herself did not yet believe. “I would tell them, please pray for my husband. I was asking all the Christians to pray for my husband.”
When Amir seemed at the point of death, he was rushed to the hospital, and given four pints of blood. But now his body was refusing the blood. The doctors decided to insert a scope into his abdomen to look for internal hemorrhaging, suspecting that Amir had some type of cancer.
Aisha sat outside her husband’s room and began praying, her faith in God strengthened by meeting with the believing women and Pastor Jabir.
“I forgot everyone around me, I was praying, ‘Lord, they say cancer. I believe your word and I know you’re stronger than this and I trust in you.”
Amir says that at this same time, “I was lying there, and the doctor was looking at the test results and rubbing his eyes. I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m a goner.’ Then the doctor said, ‘What type of human are you?’” Amir asked, “What do you mean?” The doctor replied, “It’s as if someone has taken all the old stuff in your body and made everything brand new. It’s as if you just exited the manufacturer. The picture shows there’s nothing wrong with you.”
The doctors decided to test Amir’s bone marrow to look for other diseases, such as a blood disease. The test would cost $600. They didn’t have $600. They could go to an alternative clinic where the procedure would cost $300. They didn’t have that, either. So the doctor told Aisha to take her husband home. “Create a nice, romantic atmosphere for him,” he told her. “In two to three days he’s going to die.”
“I brought him home. I was depressed, I felt like I was choking. There was no solution,” she says. She was a young woman, only in her 30s, with nine children. She was also a destitute foreigner, and now she would lose her husband.
Aisha went to the evangelical center to see Jabir. She told him that the doctors had lost hope.
Jabir said, “Do you trust God can heal him? Let’s pray for this.”
“I was choking,” Aisha recalled. “The words of the doctor were ringing in my ear, saying, ‘Take him home. There’s no hope left for him.”
Then, a man came and took Amir back to the hospital, giving the $300 for the bone marrow test. It was so painful that Amir filled the room with his screaming. For 15 days he waited at home for the test results and ate nothing. The test result wasn’t even expected back before 21 days and everyone thought he would die before then.
“I sat by my husband at home and told him not to give up hope,” Aisha says.
Jabir came many times to visit. He asked Amir, “Do you believe in the Lord?” Amir answered, “Of course I believe.” Then Jabir told Amir about Issa and how He saves. “I thought about this, and thought it makes sense,” Amir says.
Aisha continues: “Jabir told me we should pray. Up until then, I would go to the meetings, but I wasn’t a believer. Now, I knelt down and prayed the salvation prayer. I said to Jesus, ‘I accept you into my life. I give you my life and my husband’s life.’ I felt my husband was also giving his life to Jesus.’ When we gave our lives to Jesus, Jesus gave His blood to Amir.”
In a few days, he began to feel better. When the results of the test came back, the doctors reported that they found nothing wrong with him. Baffled and intrigued, the doctor asked if he could do another bone marrow test for his own satisfaction, and would pay for it himself. Tired of the tests and experiments, Amir refused, and yet he continued to recover and was fully and inexplicably healed.
I remember their story about how the guard let them into Lebanon because they had a son named Issa. I ask them, “If you didn’t believe in Issa before, why did you name your child this?”
“It’s like God chose this name,” Amir answers. Before Issa was born, Aisha had given birth to a son, followed by five girls.
“We were sitting and we were reading … at home. My [oldest] son said, ‘I need to go to sleep now.’ He fell asleep, then woke up in the morning and came to us and said, ‘Mom’s going to have a baby and you should call him Issa.’ I said, ‘Your mother only gets girls, it seems.’
Their son replied, “I had a dream where a guy wearing a white robe came to me. I asked my grandpa, ‘Is this Moses?’ He said, ‘No, it’s Lord Issa.’ And then Issa touched my shoulder. I felt a burst of colors, like a rainbow.”
Later, when Aisha became pregnant, she gave birth to a boy. So the parents named him Issa.
“We believe Issa will come at the end of days and be the judge of the earth. We didn’t know we need to believe in Him now so that when He comes as a judge, He will take us with Him,” Aisha says. “Now we know that He came for us and was crucified for us. We believe that through the blood of Christ, we can be covered. And we know that our eternity was not secure before. Even if we did good deeds, we didn’t know if we will go to heaven or hell. But now, through our faith in Christ and believing His word, we know that we have eternal life. We have a weapon we hold and He protects us from all evil.
“I don’t mind that we lost all our wealth. We found Jesus, which is priceless.”
Aisha and Amir say that it’s not even enough to know Jesus themselves. They feel compelled to share this with others who don’t know Him. She has begun serving with Pastor Jabir in the church he has organized out of refugees who have also decided to follow Christ.
“Once, when we had a big meeting at church, I went up and shared my testimony and said, ‘Me and my family, we want to serve the Lord,’” Aisha says. “And now I’ve been for a while sharing Christ with others, talking about Christ. I want to tell people about Christ, not just know Him personally.
“Two days ago I saw the pictures of the buildings which are broken down [their houses]. Although we were sad because we lost our houses, we thank God, because He has have given me back what I have I lost, repaid me with His Word, with God’s Word. God has repaid us of all the riches in Syria, all our treasures in Syria, He has repaid us with His Word, and God’s always with us, whenever we need anything. God is with us.”
*Names and specific details omitted for security
Aisha* is a Syrian refugee who has invited me to her home to hear her story. I have no idea of the dramatic escape and near-death experiences she and her husband are about to tell me.
She is a smiling, plump woman with a friendly, round face wrapped in a dark grey head scarf. As we walk to her neighborhood, our friend Manila*, who will interpret the interview, says, “We’re going into a (slum) area, so don’t take any pictures until we are inside her house.”
We dodge passing vehicles and weave through double-parked cars along the curbs. Manila tells me that these slums are home to a mixture of many different nationalities, Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians, Iraqis and Lebanese. They are all poor, and the impoverished area has the expected amount of crime. The road is broken asphalt, covered in fine, white dust. Someone has put the remnants of an old Turkish rug into a pothole to soften its impact. The streets are closely crowded in by tall apartment buildings, with businesses on the ground floors. Electrical cables stretch chaotically from building to building. Here and there a large cross is suspended among them. It’s a busy Friday afternoon, and many people are out shopping or selling.
I ask Aisha where she comes from in Syria. She answers in Arabic: the countryside, near a large city.
“We had a very large house, very spacious, two floors, and a lot of land. We grew many things, and we had a lot of animals. In the end we even bought a camel,” Manila interprets for me. “Two days ago friends sent us pictures of our house, and it’s all destroyed. Everything is gone.” She says this matter-of-factly. “It’s nothing, all the wealth of Syria is nothing compared to finding Jesus here in Lebanon.”
Tears spring to my eyes.
“Now I am faithfully following Jesus,” she adds.
We turn off the sidewalk as Aisha opens a door in the wall between shops. We go up a flight of tiled, dirty stairs. In Aisha’s first floor apartment, we come through a narrow passageway, almost too tight for me with my backpack, into the one main room that she shares with the 10 other people in her family.
The square room, with unnecessarily high ceilings and scuffed walls, is encircled on the floor with three twin mattresses and a futon. A window in the wall is marred by a web of cracks radiating out from a central punched-in spot.
A large, round man, wearing a black track suit, is lying on his side on one of the mattresses. Two small children – a boy and a girl – are on another mattress, engrossed in smart phones. Smiling, the man, her husband Amir*, stands up to shake our hands and welcome us. They gesture for us to sit on the futon.
I realize that all 11 of them sleep and live in this room. I think about the contrast between the large farm they left behind, their two-story house, and now they’re living in this city slum, crammed into one room. I can’t imagine how difficult the transition has been for them.
After we are all seated and comfortable, Manila tells them why we want to hear their story and asks if they have any security concerns. They only don’t want their photo taken, “because we will get killed,” Amir says.
“Our life in Syria was beautiful, simple,” Aisha begins. “We had a farm with all types of animals, a two-story house. It was on nine acres – 9,000 square meters. The house, on its own, was 1,000 square meters. The land, we inherited from our parents and grandparents, but the house we built. We built it when I was pregnant with Farah* (who is now 14 years old).”
“At the beginning of the war, someone offered us $400,000 for the house and land, but we said no because we didn’t think we would leave the house. We didn’t want to sell,” Amir says. “When the planes started to bomb, we just left. We didn’t take anything with us, neither the house or car, not even one cup of tea. We took nothing.”
They had a second house some distance away and so they fled with their children there. They lived there for a year and a half, but Amir said it was like being “primitive people.” They couldn’t use their electricity, because if they turned on lights at night, planes would bomb the house. They had an electric pump for their water well, but couldn’t use it. So they lowered pails into the 60-foot well and raised them up by hand.
“We wanted to be warm. We would find anything: plastic bags, old wheels and put it in a tin and burn it to be warm. So life was a daily struggle.”
After 18 months like this, the war moved into their area, so they decided to run to Lebanon.
It was 7 a.m. They hired a taxi for $5,000 to carry their large family to the border of Lebanon. All along the road, there were military checkpoints controlled by different warring factions, or by the government army.
“I was crying all the way, covering my eyes, saying, ‘Oh Lord, oh Lord, if we pass an opposition checkpoint, he could say, ‘take one of the girls,’” Aisha says, covering her face at the memory.
According to the couple, it seems that militants were said to claim girls and young women as they tried to pass through the checkpoints.
“I was afraid for my daughters,” Amir said.
At one checkpoint, a guard was examining their identity cards and then said he wanted to see their 12-year-old girl. “Her picture looks older,” the guard said. “She doesn’t look 12.” While he studied her ID, another soldier came to the car and tried to goad Aisha and the other family members into saying something against the government, perhaps as a pretext to arrest them. The family refused to answer.
Fortunately, the soldiers let them go, and the family passed through many more checkpoints, the taxi driver going as fast as he could. They traveled 14 hours to the northern Lebanese border.
“I was so relieved when we reached the border,” she said.
However, at the border, the Lebanese soldiers tried to turn them away, although Amir said they had been invited by family who were already in Lebanon.
“Where will [they] put you, 12 people?” the guard asked. “You can’t enter.”
Yet, the guard continued looking at the names on the list of family members. He stopped when he read the name, “Issa,” which is the Arabic name for Jesus. “Who is ‘Issa’?” the guard asked.
They showed him the young boy. The guard then said, “For his sake, I’m going to let you in.”
They were finally out of Syria. But the worst was not yet over. Fighting had broken out in the Lebanese northern city of Tripoli, which they had to pass by to get to Beirut, further south.
“This happens sometimes, in Tripoli,” Manila explain.
The traffic was bad because everyone in the area was trying to escape the fighting. Many roads were closed. Their youngest child, a 6-month-old boy, began vomiting.
“We hadn’t eaten anything that day, the driver was going very fast to escape the armies,” Amir says. “And then we came and there was also fighting in Lebanon. I thought, ‘We won’t make it through this day alive.’”
The taxi driver tried to take the road that hugs the coast along the Mediterranean Sea, south toward Beirut, but now it was 9 p.m. and everything was dark. He got lost and somehow wandered into a Lebanese army checkpoint. Amir says he thought the army was about to shoot them because they were trespassing into army controlled territory. But the driver frantically explained they were refugees trying to get to Beirut, so the soldiers redirected them and the family reached Beirut at 3 a.m.
Aisha takes up the story. “We came to my sister’s house [in Beirut]. She has five boys, so there are seven people in her house. And we were 12. We were too many people in the house for a long time.”
Her sister, Yasmin*, had reached Lebanon just four months before. Yasmin's husband, who had gone ahead of his wife and children to Lebanon, ended up abandoning them for a woman he met in Lebanon. Yasmin came alone, afterward, with the boys and has been raising them as a single parent since.
For one year the two families were crammed into a one-room apartment, about the same size as the one we are now sitting in. They divided the room, so each family had half.
That was three and a half years ago, in 2013.
Yasmin was struggling to care for her five sons. When she heard that an evangelical center run by the Baptist church was distributing food packages to refugees, she went to receive one. Aisha went with her. While there, some of the people said, “We want to pray for you.”
Aisha was surprised. “I know how to pray, I don’t need you to pray for me,” she told them. “I’ve come for the food.”
But Aisha became curious about these Christians.
“I would like to know how these people pray, how they act,” she thought to herself. “Also, my husband was sick and wasn’t able to work. I needed help.”
So, she began to visit the center every Saturday. There she met Jabir*, the Nazarene pastor of a Syrian congregation that has been formed near Aisha’s neighborhood. She saw that there was a women’s group that would meet and pray for each other, and talk about their experiences of how God was answering their prayers.
“I became curious to know who is this Jesus? What are these women doing?”
Aisha attended regularly and asked many questions. “Why do they say we need faith in Jesus even if we do good works? Are good works not enough to save us?”
Amir was concerned about his wife’s visits to the group. But he didn’t forbid her, and Aisha enjoyed the meetings, so she kept going. Encouraged by the other women, she also began reading the Bible and prayed with them. Eventually, Amir also trusted the group and Pastor Jabir.
During this time, Amir became more and more ill. He says that doctors told him blood was disappearing from his body. Manila and I aren’t clear on what he means, but we think he was having internal hemorrhaging. The hospital had run tests on him, and when Aisha returned to find out the results of his tests, the doctor asked, “Where is your husband now?” She said he was at work. The doctor said, “How can he be at work? He should be on a bed, dying.”
Until then, Amir was still getting around, but he would become so weary after walking just 50 meters he would be forced to sit and rest. He was always exhausted. The doctors urged him to the emergency room, where the staff gave him blood transfusions. But he kept mysteriously losing blood, although there was no obvious blood loss that anyone could see.
Aisha continued meeting with the believers, although she herself did not yet believe. “I would tell them, please pray for my husband. I was asking all the Christians to pray for my husband.”
When Amir seemed at the point of death, he was rushed to the hospital, and given four pints of blood. But now his body was refusing the blood. The doctors decided to insert a scope into his abdomen to look for internal hemorrhaging, suspecting that Amir had some type of cancer.
Aisha sat outside her husband’s room and began praying, her faith in God strengthened by meeting with the believing women and Pastor Jabir.
“I forgot everyone around me, I was praying, ‘Lord, they say cancer. I believe your word and I know you’re stronger than this and I trust in you.”
Amir says that at this same time, “I was lying there, and the doctor was looking at the test results and rubbing his eyes. I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m a goner.’ Then the doctor said, ‘What type of human are you?’” Amir asked, “What do you mean?” The doctor replied, “It’s as if someone has taken all the old stuff in your body and made everything brand new. It’s as if you just exited the manufacturer. The picture shows there’s nothing wrong with you.”
The doctors decided to test Amir’s bone marrow to look for other diseases, such as a blood disease. The test would cost $600. They didn’t have $600. They could go to an alternative clinic where the procedure would cost $300. They didn’t have that, either. So the doctor told Aisha to take her husband home. “Create a nice, romantic atmosphere for him,” he told her. “In two to three days he’s going to die.”
“I brought him home. I was depressed, I felt like I was choking. There was no solution,” she says. She was a young woman, only in her 30s, with nine children. She was also a destitute foreigner, and now she would lose her husband.
Aisha went to the evangelical center to see Jabir. She told him that the doctors had lost hope.
Jabir said, “Do you trust God can heal him? Let’s pray for this.”
“I was choking,” Aisha recalled. “The words of the doctor were ringing in my ear, saying, ‘Take him home. There’s no hope left for him.”
Then, a man came and took Amir back to the hospital, giving the $300 for the bone marrow test. It was so painful that Amir filled the room with his screaming. For 15 days he waited at home for the test results and ate nothing. The test result wasn’t even expected back before 21 days and everyone thought he would die before then.
“I sat by my husband at home and told him not to give up hope,” Aisha says.
Jabir came many times to visit. He asked Amir, “Do you believe in the Lord?” Amir answered, “Of course I believe.” Then Jabir told Amir about Issa and how He saves. “I thought about this, and thought it makes sense,” Amir says.
Aisha continues: “Jabir told me we should pray. Up until then, I would go to the meetings, but I wasn’t a believer. Now, I knelt down and prayed the salvation prayer. I said to Jesus, ‘I accept you into my life. I give you my life and my husband’s life.’ I felt my husband was also giving his life to Jesus.’ When we gave our lives to Jesus, Jesus gave His blood to Amir.”
In a few days, he began to feel better. When the results of the test came back, the doctors reported that they found nothing wrong with him. Baffled and intrigued, the doctor asked if he could do another bone marrow test for his own satisfaction, and would pay for it himself. Tired of the tests and experiments, Amir refused, and yet he continued to recover and was fully and inexplicably healed.
I remember their story about how the guard let them into Lebanon because they had a son named Issa. I ask them, “If you didn’t believe in Issa before, why did you name your child this?”
“It’s like God chose this name,” Amir answers. Before Issa was born, Aisha had given birth to a son, followed by five girls.
“We were sitting and we were reading … at home. My [oldest] son said, ‘I need to go to sleep now.’ He fell asleep, then woke up in the morning and came to us and said, ‘Mom’s going to have a baby and you should call him Issa.’ I said, ‘Your mother only gets girls, it seems.’
Their son replied, “I had a dream where a guy wearing a white robe came to me. I asked my grandpa, ‘Is this Moses?’ He said, ‘No, it’s Lord Issa.’ And then Issa touched my shoulder. I felt a burst of colors, like a rainbow.”
Later, when Aisha became pregnant, she gave birth to a boy. So the parents named him Issa.
“We believe Issa will come at the end of days and be the judge of the earth. We didn’t know we need to believe in Him now so that when He comes as a judge, He will take us with Him,” Aisha says. “Now we know that He came for us and was crucified for us. We believe that through the blood of Christ, we can be covered. And we know that our eternity was not secure before. Even if we did good deeds, we didn’t know if we will go to heaven or hell. But now, through our faith in Christ and believing His word, we know that we have eternal life. We have a weapon we hold and He protects us from all evil.
“I don’t mind that we lost all our wealth. We found Jesus, which is priceless.”
Aisha and Amir say that it’s not even enough to know Jesus themselves. They feel compelled to share this with others who don’t know Him. She has begun serving with Pastor Jabir in the church he has organized out of refugees who have also decided to follow Christ.
“Once, when we had a big meeting at church, I went up and shared my testimony and said, ‘Me and my family, we want to serve the Lord,’” Aisha says. “And now I’ve been for a while sharing Christ with others, talking about Christ. I want to tell people about Christ, not just know Him personally.
“Two days ago I saw the pictures of the buildings which are broken down [their houses]. Although we were sad because we lost our houses, we thank God, because He has have given me back what I have I lost, repaid me with His Word, with God’s Word. God has repaid us of all the riches in Syria, all our treasures in Syria, He has repaid us with His Word, and God’s always with us, whenever we need anything. God is with us.”
*Names and specific details omitted for security
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