My hiding place

My story is of how God became 'my hiding place', my hope in a place where there was no hope.

My parents came over to England in the early 1960s. I grew up in the city of Coventry in a Pakistani Muslim home. Family life was very strict and traditional; we were not allowed to mix socially with the English children at school.

Although in Asian culture the family is a strong and cohesive force, our family life was not a happy one. The only time I was happy was when I was running wild in the woods with my little friends, at a time when it was safe for children to do that.

Like my siblings I was taught to read the Qur'an. I grew up with a fear of God, but no feeling of being loved by God. Fear was a predominant emotion and peace was non-existent. I became drawn to the Christian gospel in my teens in an academic sense. The more I studied it the more I felt this was the truth. What set it apart from Islam for me was the concept that 'God is love . . . here is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us first and sent his Son as a sacrifice for our sins' (1 John 4). God was wooing me to himself. I was convinced that Jesus Christ was who he said he was: 'the Way, the Truth and the Life'. There appeared to be no equal to the purity of his character in human history. However, I knew that if I made a decision to follow Christ, the consequences would be terrible for my family, and my life would never be the same again, that is, if I still had a life.

Arranged marriages?

My older sister had already made a decision to follow Christ through a personal search for truth. In 1981 I gave my life to the Lord Jesus. My sister and I had been receiving offers of arranged marriage which we kept refusing. In 1982 we felt it was time to tell our father the truth about our faith - the hardest thing we ever had to do. He became silent, he was devastated. He told our mother, our parents' world fell apart. And yes, life was never to be the same again.

My father made plans to take us (my two sisters, my mother and I), back to Kashmir where my parents came from. We had our suspicions about his motives, but felt a conviction and assurance that God not only wanted us to go, but that he would be sovereign over our circumstances. In August 1982 we travelled to our mother's ancestral village set in hills overlooking a 100 square mile reservoir. In the midst of these beautiful and peaceful surroundings our lives were thrown into a whirlpool of terror and grief, a trauma that was to last for the next 10 years.

Pressure to give up

Our Bibles and Christian books were confiscated. The months we spent in that village were a nightmare physically and mentally. It was a scorching summer, there was no running water and no electricity. We had grown up in England and this was another world. We were frequently sick. From the village we moved to the town of Mirpur where most of the Pakistanis in Britain come from. There was a constant pressure put upon us to give up our Christian faith, and this involved emotional pressure, abuse and threats. We lived in an atmosphere of terrifying, unpredictable tension, humiliation and anguish. Our parents thought we had been brainwashed, it was agonising to see their confusion and pain. Throughout that period we faced a relentless and intense spiritual oppression as though we were in the midst of a raging, powerful battle. It was a darkness that is rarely glimpsed, and yet the Lord gave us what the Bible refers to as 'treasures out of darkness'.

The dream

We were in a largely rural place where there was no church or community of followers of Jesus. We missed not having a Bible, but there was no natural means of obtaining one. I decided to ask God: 'Lord, I know it's ridiculous to think we could get hold of a Bible here, but you told us you are a God of the impossible. I know that you can make it possible.'

That night I had a dream that my mother and I went to a neighbour's house. As we entered the hallway I saw a bookshelf on the left with a light shining on a book. As I approached I saw that the book was the New Testament. I asked the girl if I could borrow it. Two days later I went to the same house with my mother. As I entered the hallway I noticed a bookshelf on the left, and as my heartbeat raced my eyes fell on one book . . . the New Testament!

God had kept his word

In these times God's Word became for us 'a lamp for our feet and a light for our path'. The verses came to life, like Romans 8: 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulations, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword? For your sake we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.' And 1 Peter: 'This is cause for great joy even though you suffer a while under many trials. Even gold has to pass through the fire, and more precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test.'

The Captain

One day we received a visitor, a smart and eloquent man who travelled the world for an Islamic organisation. Captain Yousaf was a man with a mission, to persuade us to see the error of our ways and return to Islam. He began a well-orchestrated interrogation that began at 7.00 in the evening, and finished at 4.00 in the morning.

He began in an affectionate manner, then tried emotional blackmail. When he saw the depth of our commitment he proceeded to a scornful and menacing tone. He threatened to hypnotise us and make us forget all we knew about the Christian faith, and began chanting in a frenzy in Arabic. It was a long and scary night. He left in the morning. I asked: 'Lord, would it have been possible for him to separate us from you?' I was led to these words in John 10: 'My sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of my Father's care.'

Return to England

My father began to see how deeply rooted our faith was, and I was allowed to return to England in 1989 after seven years, and my sister returned after ten years, in 1992.

One book I was able to hide from my father was The Hiding Place by the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom. It was no accident that I had only this book. I learned precious lessons from it which will be always with me, like: 'No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still'. 'The Lord lifted us out of a pit, he set my feet upon a rock and give me a firm place to stand' (Psalm 40). At times I could not understand why God was allowing us and our family to suffer so much for so long. Corrie Ten Boom said: 'Every experience God gives us is the perfect preparation for the future that only he can see.' God showed us that as we laid down our lives this was to have a reverberating effect on the lives of countless others and produce a rich harvest for the Kingdom of God.

Burden for Muslims

I have an increasing burden in my heart for Muslims. There are about one billion Muslims in the world and most of them live in regions where it is either difficult and/or at times impossible to share the gospel. However, people have migrated to Britain from these lands. In London we have people from every corner of the globe. The followers of Jesus have a valuable opportunity to reach the unreached world on their doorstep. God is for all peoples. Heaven will reflect this as we see in Revelation 5.9, there will be people from every tribe, language and nation. The Lord Jesus said: 'Go and teach all nations . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.' Muslims are people for whom the Lord died. This is the vision the church in Britain needs to grasp.
I feel compassion for our parents and all Muslims because the Lord died for them, but also because the greatest weapon against the powers of darkness is 'the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord'. This is the message I so want to get across in my role as Development Officer for the Fellowship of Faith for the Muslims.

People have asked: 'How can you forgive your parents?' But God forgave us and expects nothing less from us. In fact, it's a commandment: 'Honour thy father and mother that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is going to give to you.' What is this land? It is reaching the depths of God through crucifying the self. It is abandoning our lives into his hands in the knowledge that he is the Lord God and there is no God beside him.

'Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path . . . Thou art my hiding place and my shield. I hope in Thy Word . . . hold Thou me up and I shall be safe' (Psalm 119).

Khalda tells the story of how God became her 'hiding place'