God does answer prayer

When Ahsan*, a new believer from a Muslim background, shared with one of our workers than he had difficulty believing in the power of prayer, he never imagined that he would see his own prayers answered within a few days.

Ahsan had come to faith in Jesus through his brother, Nasir* - a former Islamic cleric. Nasir had started to ask questions about Islam, as things didn't quite make sense for him, and had found the answers he was looking for in Christ.

Conversations in the family home often revolved around matters of faith, and on one occasion David*, an OM worker in the Middle East, was invited to join them.

“We were sitting there and Ahsan was asking questions, just like basic questions coming from people coming from an Islamic background,” David said. “Then he asked ‘what do you think makes Christianity different from Islam?’

“And then he said to me that as Christians, we believe that God hears our prayers and answers them. And then he stopped, and he said, you know, what's interesting about that is like when I tell my Muslim friends that God hears our prayers and he answers them, my Muslim friends say to me, what does that mean? And Ahsan said, ‘To be honest, I don't really know what that means. I don't really see God answering our prayers very much.’”

A vision of Jesus

Two days later, Ahsan was playing with his daughter, tripped and broke his ankle. Doctors told him it was a bad break that would need surgery to insert metal rods into the ankle.

David said: “Ahsan was scared of going into surgery, but then the day before it was planned, one of the older ladies in his underground church called him and said, 'hey, I had a dream, and in my dream, Jesus came to me and said there's not going to be a surgery today.'  

“You know, this is like we hear about these in our stories, but we tell those stories because these are the crazy events — this is not the everyday, and we thought, yeah, this is probably just the crazy talk of an old lady. This is really interesting, but let's take it with a grain of salt."

The lady phoned Ahsan an hour before his surgery as he was in a pre-op room with some of the other members of the church.

“He just said, 'why don't we just pray that there would be no need for surgery today?'” David said.

“Then he's wheeled into the surgical room by the physician. Half an hour later, he came back out, and the doctor said, 'We've taken some new x-rays, and actually, Ahsan doesn't need surgery at all. He's going to need a cast on his leg, but that's it. There's no need for metal rods.’

I was thinking, we know that God is always with us, and we know that He hears us all the time, but sometimes it's like the little two-year-old kid walking with his dad, and he knows his dad is next to him, and he knows his dad loves him. But all of a sudden, his dad reaches down, picks him up, squeezes him into his chest, rubs his nose on his cheek and says: ‘you know how much I love you, right?’

“Five days ago, Ahsan was saying, ‘I feel like God never answers my prayer’, and now He's answered our simple prayer of no surgery in a miraculous way, and with visions, just like that. It really was incredible.

“Sometimes it's absolutely at the most unexpected moments when we feel the presence of God with us and especially unique way.”  

* names changed