Visions Among the Muslims
Again and again, from different sources, I keep hearing rumors and tales of conversions among the Muslims to Christ. What makes these stories stand out is the number of them who convert, as I did, based on a supernatural experience, a vision, a dream, a visit from the Virgin Mary or from Christ.
Here is one told to me privately:
I met an Assemblies of God missionary once who had just gotten back from his first term in the Middle East. I asked how long it took to get his first convert. He laughed and said, “In the city the first day, a man walked up to me and said, ‘Tell me of Jesus and how he can fix what Allah cannot.’ I was stunned and asked how he knew I was there to speak of Jesus. He replied, ‘In a dream, I saw a man with holes in his hands who said his name was Jesus and I was to look for you on this date.'”
Here is one I stumbled across on a blog called Godreports, repeating a story from a charity site called Open Doors.
Until the Syrian civil war, Amir and Rasha (not their real names) lived in peace in the third largest city in Syria, Homs, home to over 600,000 living there. Homs became an opposition stronghold and the Syrian government launched a fierce military onslaught against the city in 2011. The siege left much of the city decimated and thousands dead. Amir and Rasha fled in 2012.
“Since 2012, we have been living in a tent,” Amir told Open Doors. “It is not an easy life. About a year ago my wife’s mother was killed by a sniper when she went out to have some fresh air. My wife’s brother was killed on his way home.”
But three months ago, something remarkable happened to Rasha in the middle of the night.
“I was sleeping and all of a sudden I saw Jesus Christ in white,” Rasha recounted. “He said ‘I am Christ. You will have a beautiful daughter.’
At the time, Rasha was eight months pregnant, and a month later they received a fine-looking, healthy daughter, according to Open Doors.
Amazingly, about the same time her husband Amir also had a dramatic, unforgettable dream. “I saw Jesus Christ,” he reported. “He was dressed in white. He said to me ‘I am your Savior. You will follow me.’”
After the dreams, Amir and Rasha surrendered to the lordship of Jesus Christ. “We decided to follow Him. We named our baby Christina. We left our old Islamic customs.”
They knew they would pay a price for following Jesus among their family and friends. Amir stopped going to the mosque, but Rasha still dresses as a Muslim woman with her head covered by a veil, according to Open Doors.
“Our clan is very big; we’re afraid now. They might kill us,” Rasha said.
Amir is ready to face opposition. “Our family knows we are Christians now. Becoming a Christian is, for them, the same as if I had destroyed the Kaaba in Saudi Arabia. It is because we walked in the darkness and are now in the light. I want to protect my family.”
Because of the risks, they felt they couldn’t continue living in a tent surrounded by other Muslim refugees. “We now have no fixed place to live, we go from place to place,” Rasha lamented.
In Homs, Amir once worked as a carpenter. “I have no work in Lebanon. Our financial situation is bad. Now, because we are Christians, others don’t want to help us. The church is helping as much as is possible.”
While they don’t know what the future will bring, they know where they have placed their trust. “The most important thing is that we know Jesus Christ as our Savior,” Amir said. “He will save us. We regularly pray to the Lord, we freely worship Him, and He protects us. God is with us. God will resolve our situation.”
I had also read this book with great interest, if not rapture: FACE TO FACE WITH JESUS by Samaa Habib
Allow me to quote from a review:
Habib grew up in a Muslim family in a nation 98% Muslim and where radical Muslims considered Christian converts traitors worthy of horrible death.
She shares about the civil war in the country, Sunni and Shia Muslims fighting, seeing atrocities against civilians. At times her family crawled around in the house so they would not be shot through the windows. Her father went bankrupt and there was no more school for her.
Her life would change dramatically when she began attending a Taekwondo class. She was given a children’s Bible and at age fourteen became a Christian. She attended church. She had a dream where Jesus appeared to her. She began to pray for her family. She was beaten by her brother, received threats from her neighbors, and hated by her father. She experienced miraculous protection from God as she was attacked several times.
There was a bombing in her church and Habib was badly injured with burns and a split skull. She died and went to heaven, seeing Jesus. He gave her the option to return to earth which she chose, giving her life to His service. She had a lengthy and miraculous recovery from here severe injuries, even while being persecuted by Muslim doctors and nurses. She continued to witness, first as a waitress, then a model and real estate agent. Miraculously, she went to the U.S. to mission school and then on mission journeys. She continues with the mandate to wake up the Church and encourage Christians to speak the Good News.
My comment: As a rule, I am prone to skepticism, but after I had similar things happen to me on a smaller scale, it would no longer be logical to claim categorically that such things cannot happen.
And if these tales and others are true, instead of being on the brink of the downfall of the West, as I and so many conservatives fear, we could be on the bring of the greatest revival and revivification of a dying Church history has ever known. And if the Church lives, the West lives.
Is it impossible? Is hope unwise? The same power that protected the Apostles and the Early Church, and overshadowed their footsteps with miracles, signs, and mighty works, is sovereign over all men’s lives today no less than then.
What if the maniacal violence we are seeing issue from the Muslim world, and from the Left, are the dangerous death throes of a monster slouching toward dissolution and death, not the blows from a young monster in the early morning of its strength?
Aslan is on the move.
Have any of my kind readers heard any similar accounts? What do you make of them?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
