ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (BP)–Quamar has important business to complete with his family.
Some time ago, his mother’s near death triggered a spiritual search that changed his life forever.
His love for his mother was so great that, when nothing else worked, he took the advice of a Bible teacher at the Christian school where he worked as a carpenter. Quamar prayed for her healing in the name of Jesus Christ.
As he stood above his mother, watching her struggle for air, he prayed like he’d never prayed as a Muslim. He prayed as if he believed in the authority of the Savior and had the right to talk to him personally.
Doctors had treated her for several lung diseases and had no clue why her lungs were still failing. They expected her to die if the condition persisted.
Praying, Quamar started crying. “I was feeling such pain for my mother,” he remembers. “I know now that the Spirit of the Lord was touching me as I said these things to Christ. His healing power was touching my mother.”
Visible changes immediately occurred in his mother. Like Peter’s mother-in-law whose healing is recorded in the Bible, Quamar’s mother joined the family in cooking that night’s meal. “She was healed. I didn’t know what to do. I was stunned. I started saying over and over in my mind, ‘How could this be?’
“‘Who is this Jesus that the moment that I used his name, my mother was healed?'” His quest to answer that question would cost him his family.
He began studying the Koran to see what it said about Jesus, and also studied the Bible. He read other Christian books as well. His father was furious. Sometimes Quamar would sit at dinner and not be served while all the others in his family were eating.
Like others in his Pakistani village, Quamar’s family saw devotion to family and Islam as one and the same. Quamar eventually felt Christ saying to him that it was time to make a decision.
(Quamar is not his real name. Like believers in other parts of The Last Frontier — regions where few people have been exposed to Jesus Christ — he asked that his real name not be used in this article.)
Quamar collected a Koran, a Bible, a change of clothes and what little money he had, and left his family. “What a day,” he recalls. “I said goodbye to my home forever. Sometimes when I think about it, tears come back because it was so hard to leave my family behind.”
Answers in his desperate search for truth were rare in Pakistan. A Christian man let him stay in a roofless, unfinished room with a concrete floor, four walls and a bedroll. He studied the Bible and Koran by moonlight. His host’s insights into Christianity, however, were as sparse as his room.
Eventually Quamar started working in a clothing store, and a Christian woman saw him reading the Bible. She told him about a Catholic church. At Mass, he met a man who introduced him to a Church of Christ pastor. Quamar accepted Jesus as his Savior under this man’s influence.
Quamar moved even deeper into Christianity by studying with others who work with Southern Baptists in Pakistan. Eventually he accepted a position leading a young Baptist church. That’s when his father finally disinherited him in a public newspaper announcement.
But now he seeks more than ever to express the power of Jesus Christ to his family — and complete the circle that started with his silent prayer for his mother.
Lately, he has seen glimmers of hope for his family. He has even been able to visit in the family home again. “God may still open a way for their return,” he says. “And one day I may introduce my father and mother to our greater family in Christ.”
Perhaps that introduction will come soon. On his last visit home, his father agreed to meet Quamar’s Christian wife — a former Hindu.
