In the region where Ahsan (real name and place not revealed for security) and his family live, if you go to your neighbours’ home, they spread out a feast for you and heap your plate high with special food. But share Christ openly, and they may torture you. Ahsan was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Officials interrogated him, asking why he left his former religion. “I am on this way because of Jesus and what He has done for me,” Ahsan responded. At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was put in a very small cell, his hands released just long enough for him to eat a small piece of bread and drink one litre of water. But Ahsan didn’t sleep – he stayed awake praying and singing praises.
When he was arrested, Ahsan knew immediately it was God’s plan to send him to prison. There he’s seen a lot of people decide to follow Jesus – one of them had heard part of the Gospel message nine years before, and when he met Ahsan in prison, he heard the whole message and believed on the spot. When Ahsan’s wife and daughter visited him in prison tears ran down their faces. “He put his hands on their heads and said, “Why are you sad? God has a purpose for me here and He is not finished with it yet.”
Ashan was a devout Muslim before someone gave him a copy of the Gospel of John. In the middle of the night he felt someone call his name, shake him and tell him to get up and read. He lit a lamp, got the book from the shelf and started reading while his family slept. The words jumped off the page at him. By the following year, he was a wholehearted follower of Jesus Christ. Ashan’s wife says, “I had been so angry with him for becoming a believer. Finally after years of trying to get him to come back to Islam, I decided to divorce him, even if it meant I had to leave the kids,” she says.
Then she learned she was pregnant. She headed straight to a clinic to have an abortion – she didn’t want to have the baby of an infidel. “But the doctor said I was too far along to abort, so I decided I would have the baby, but that was it,” she recalls. She packed her bags and left to live with family until she had the baby. Ahsan didn’t see her again until he got a call while she was in labour. But it wasn’t to let him know she’d had the baby - it was to let him know she’d decided to come home. During labour, she met Jesus. “All I could see was light,” she says. And now all her children have met Jesus, too, but they still struggle with their father’s absence.
But they know that God put him in jail with those men so that they and their families could also know the truth. Ahsan was finally released from prison in the spring of 2013.
Source: Baptist Press
BIBLE STUDY: Jeremiah 20:11
Day 25 – PRAISE: God for the many who, like Ahsan, are living witnesses to Christ in the prisons.
Day 26 – PRAY: for the safety of Ahsan, his family and for growth in Christ for all who came to salvation through his witness.
