After I came to faith, I went to see a foreign lady living in my city once a week to read the Bible and pray.Leaving home was always a challenge for me since it was hard to explain to my family where I was going and why. After this woman left my country, I didn’t have the opportunity to meet with other believers anymore because my family didn’t know about my faith and they strictly controlled everything I did. I longed to participate in prayer meetings with other believers and learn more, but was never able to because the meetings of the local believers were always in the house of one of the other believers where it was not socially acceptable for me to go as a single woman and my family controlled my comings and goings.

A long time went by and I didn’t meet with any other believer in person. I had a Facebook account and that was where I met another believer who was participating in a Facebook group, which he had started. In the group, we shared our experiences and our testimonies and we prayed together and we asked the questions that we had about faith in Christ and about God. I noticed that this guy loved God in a beautiful way. He didn’t say a lot, but you could feel peace when he allowed himself to speak freely about Jesus and faith in God. Sometimes he talked about the real community of believers in our city that was meeting together, but it was always in a vague and guarded way that really irritated me! I had always been eager to experience the real community oflocal believers and not just the virtual one that I knew online.

Finally,God made a way for me to get married to a believer from the local faith community and he introduced me to the actual church that I had wanted to meet for so long!       I consider my marriage to be an expression of the grace of God. After I married a believer, I literally moved from a world where there was no one else like me, and from virtual worlds and anonymous accounts, to a real believing community.Because of my marriage I am now able to serve and share the Gospel freely from a safe situation and to be discipled by my husband.

I had an Islamic wedding that was arranged by my family, but all those traditional celebrations were nothing compared to the half hour when we met with our Christian family and the elders who blessed our marriage in Christ. My husband and I felt the presence of God in a very strong way and I was very happy about the presence of the other believers and their families. The sight of the children and the worship songs we sang and the celebration of communion on that day was more than I could have hoped for!

With my husband present with me, God also allowed me to get baptized in the presence of my brothers and sisters in Christ that I didn’t even know existed before I got married and another brother got baptized on the same day. It was a really special day. My husband participated in baptizing me and I was so happy that I got baptized as well as my brother in Christ who was baptized at the same event. I really can’t describe what I felt when I heard the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit…”

That day I met my new family in Christ and shared my journey to faith with them and got to know them. We prayed together and spent a beautiful time together. There was also a really special moment, when a girl who could not have been older than 16 was asked to pray before we ate. She prayed a simple prayer in a dialect from another region. She thanked God a lot and asked Him to reign over all the land of our country so that we could hear prayers in the name of Jesus in all of our nation’s dialects.

 

I give thanks for these things all the time to our God who reminds us that, “all things work together for good.”

Journey with us on the way:

Pray for single women believers to have opportunities to fellowship with local faith communities.

Pray that God will increase opportunities for local believers in our country to marry other believers and establish believing households.

Pray that God will reign over every corner of our country and that praise and worship in the name of Jesus will be heard in every dialect of our nation.

إذا كان لديكم مشاركة (شعرية، أدبية، تشجيعية، صلاة، الخ) وتودون مشاركتها معنا فبإمكانكم ارسالها إلى البريد التالي

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From Virtual to Actual