27

When I was a child, my father would sometimes let me count the money he brought home after selling spices. I would sit at the table, my eyes level with the piles of bills that covered the surface like autumn leaves. At first I was only allowed to handle the low-value bills, counting them out until I had the right amount to pass over to my father. He’d roll up the pile and fasten it with a rubber band, and I’d watch him load the cash into the safe.

The more I did this, the higher the value of the bills I was allowed to handle. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was counting thousands of dollars’ worth of currency. I just liked being able to help my father.

Years later, when I was a secret believer, my father was out of the country on business. He and my mother each had a key to the safe, but he had accidentally taken both keys with him. I needed money to take a rickshaw to college and buy lunch before visiting John, but there was no way to open the safe to get the cash.

I had been a Christian for only a few weeks, but I knew what I needed to do. “God,” I prayed that night, “when there was no sun, you spoke and it came into being. The world started at your command. You gathered the waters and raised the land. I have no money to get to college and visit John tomorrow, and I desperately want to study the Holy Bible more. Please, can you help?”

The next morning I woke with my hand clenched. I knew without a doubt what would be in my palm even before I peeled back my fingers. Sure enough, it was the exact amount of money I needed.

I rushed to my mother. “Did you give me money last night?” I asked.

She assured me she hadn’t. The whole incident confused her, but I knew exactly what had happened: God had provided.

I thought about that event a lot when we were getting settled in Malaysia. Even though we were no longer living in fear and poverty, we were still desperately short on money. We had used most of our savings to pay for airfare out of Pakistan, and being asylum seekers, we were not officially allowed to work, so the little cash we had left was soon gone.

In some ways, life in Malaysia was even harder than being on the run in Pakistan. Now we couldn’t run to different Christian communities for help. We were no longer unique—we were just a few out of thousands of asylum seekers, part of an anonymous invasion that many people in the country did not welcome.

Malaysia is a Muslim country, but there were some advantages to being there. Not only did this destination raise fewer suspicions for the Pakistani border guards, but we also believed we’d stand a better chance of our case being heard there than in a place like Hong Kong, which I had preferred. We knew that a complex process lay ahead of us, but we hoped we’d be granted refugee status fairly soon. After that, our goal was to apply through the United Nations to be relocated to a Christian country.

As the weeks rolled into months and our application seemed to have stalled right at the early stages, it became clear that the process was even slower and more complex than we had assumed.

We didn’t need just one miracle. We needed a series of them.

†

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 visit 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.