Because He is Love – Part 2

My family always wanted to leave Iraq. My mother dreamt of living in Europe, North America, or Australia since she was a teenager. My dad also wanted to leave since he was a teenager. But we couldn’t leave until 1998 when I was 15 years old. We spent a year in Jordan and my sister, who is 2 years older than me, and I both accepted Christ in our lives there. I think being Roman Catholic teens, having our first communion a couple of years earlier, left us with a lot of questions and very few answers (if any). My sister, being a very social person, got first interested in knowing Christ as a Savior through going to church in Amman, Jordan. There was a pastor there who was teaching about Christ as a Savior and how trusting in Him can change our lives, gives us eternal life, and that He must be Lord over our lives.

I remember one day when my sister came from church she said, “I don’t think we should pray to Mary to intercede for us—Christ is our Lord. Why do we have to go to someone else so the Father can hear us? He loves us.” That annoyed me a lot and I refused the idea of not praying to Mary or the “saints”. In Iraq, we never heard of the idea of surrendering our lives to Christ as Lord and Savior. I don’t even remember a teaching about godly living; you pretty much were a “devote Catholic” which what it meant: you do what you like in life (cut corners here and there when it comes to spiritual living and obedience), but you follow the decrees of the Roman Catholic church. One of those decrees is of course praying to the Virgin Mary and the saint; people did it mainly to feel good about themselves and go back to their “devoted” lives.

I, being an introvert and a skeptic, accepted Christ through reading the Bible then I read few Christian books left behind by an immigrant. The last book talked about who God of the Bible is, and how to become Christian. I often wonder what would have happened if we left Iraq earlier like my parents wanted—say when I was 10, and my sister was 12 years old. Would we have been interested in religion? Would we have questions about who God is? Would we have searched for God? Would we have been mature enough to grasp Christianity?

Without Leaps of Imagination by Fadi

What if we had come to Canada while we were still children? Would we be Christians nowadays? Or would we be in night clubs like so many youth are nowadays? Or may be like the so many confused youth nowadays who each have an opinion that changes every few months in regard to God, religion, truth, eternal life, good and wrong, etc.

To be honest, I don’t even think I was searching for God. It is like a person who has a terminal disease but doesn’t know he has it because he has lived all his life with the symptoms and everyone around him has the same symptoms—so he thought that’s what being normal is like. I don’t even think I read the Bible and the Christian books because I was looking for answers, I think I was just bored to death being in Jordan, a new country to me and knowing no one, and found the subject of Christianity interesting and engaging. So I don’t think it is accurate to say, “Oh I found God.” I think it is more like, “He got my attention.” I am not even sure I can say, “I accepted Him”, because that’s what I did in a moment of time, but when I look at the whole event, arranging the situations, and putting all the pieces together it is more like He pursued me and chose me. My parents wanted to leave Iraq earlier because in their human wisdom thought the earlier we leave the better it is for our well beings. But God with His infinite wisdom saw it fit that we leaves at a certain age and using certain circumstances to accomplish His ultimate goal for our lives—to be saved.

And I wonder why? Why did He even care? We were just another 2 kids out of millions of youth and billions of people. Why even bother? And again there is only one answer: because He loves us. Why does He loves us? Because He is love and He wants to express this love towards us.