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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.

†

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 agency. 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.

†

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.”