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페어팩스에 거주하는 한 터키 출신 자매의 간증이다. 죽음에 대한 두려움과 정죄하고 벌을 주는 하나님에 대한 두려움이 공존하던 그의 신앙(이슬람)에서 돌파구를 찾던 한 영혼이 예수를 만나고 참 자유를 얻었다고 간증하고 있다.
Testimony of HER, a Turkish Woman
I was born and raised in a Muslim family in Turkey. My family wasn't religious, like many other families I knew, so I was not forced to practice Islam. As an adult now, I feel like I was lost back then. But my family gave me good values – like don't steal, be good to other people, respect your elders and love those younger than you. They emphasized these values more than praying 5 times a day and fasting during Ramadan.
But as a kid I was more willing to do what my friends would do. I didn’t want to be different than them. So since 4th grade I loved fasting (as much as I could) at Ramadan, and I tried to go to the mosque to study the Quran in the summer time with my friends. I felt so good at those times…maybe because I wanted to know and love Allah (Muslim God), and thought I was doing what he wanted, or I was having my friend’s acceptance and getting them closer to me.
Seeing some other friends’ mothers covering themselves in the Muslim tradition made me wish my mother would do the same. (I was ashamed of my mother sometimes because she wasn't covering herself like the others. BUT NOW I AM SO GLAD THAT SHE WAS THE WAY SHE IS.)
On and off I did fast and pray until I was in my second year at the university. All of those times there were doubts about what I believed in and did, guiltiness about what exactly I should have done and not done, sadness about not doing enough to please God with the way I lived my life. My feelings and beliefs were up and down all the time. My heart didn't accept what my mind was saying and my mind wouldn't accept what I was feeling in my heart. So I started thinking more about what I believed and what I should have done. The more I thought about God and my beliefs, the more I questioned about my faith and God. And then I felt more and more guilty because in Islam you should not question God. If you do, you sin. But what I saw and heard from people didn't make sense. I loved God with all of my heart and I was also scared. It just didn't make sense in my mind the way we love God or the way God loved us. God, to me was a punishing God. Why should I have been afraid of God? Why is he a punishing God? He created us and then gave bunch of rules to please him? In the end, after a long period of thinking and questioning, my mind won the battle over my heart. I ended up refusing all religions starting from 1998. I still believed in a God, but not the God described by Islam or other religions. I created my own God. My God was loving, caring…he did not try to find a reason to punish me. As long as I was a nice person he would love me.
I searched little bit about Christianity and Judaism. I don't know why, but Judaism was not an option at all. I always had strange thoughts about them (not anymore). Christianity was so opposite of what Islam was saying about Jesus. And also according to Christianity, everybody was born with their sin and you have to get baptized to get rid of your sins. How can a baby be born with sin? It was senseless.
In August 2004, I came to the U.S. - land of my dreams since I was a little girl. Did anything change about my religious view during the first 4 years in America? No, nothing changed…I still held onto my own God. Well, since I came here as an aupair I had a lot of friends...most of them were from different countries and cultural backgrounds, but they all shared one thing in common. That one commonality was ''Christianity''. Yet I don't remember having any conversation about religion with them. There was a friend who used to go to church once in a while...sometimes I went to church with her just to experience what people were doing in the church but I really didn't feel anything. I enjoyed going there because I used to see in movies when I was a kid...people would dress up nicely and go to church every Sunday. IT WAS SO NICE AND EASY.
HOW DID I BECOME A FOLLOWER OF JESUS?
Jesus is the Son of God. Wowww...those words are shocking... I would never ever imagine that I would come to believe in Jesus because of what stuck was in my mind from my Muslim background. ''God was never born and never gave birth'' so there was no acceptance in my mind to take Jesus as Son of God. It was just a story that had been made up by people...
2009 is a very important year in my life…that year I found real love, happiness, and the MEANING OF LIFE...JESUS CHRIST. How did all of that happen? It was just not enough that I believed in my made up God anymore. Life became pointless. I started questioning again, but this time I began to question about life. We are born, grow up, go to school, get married, have kids and die. And when you die everything is over. So what was the purpose of life? We are born and die...for what? Why should I be a good person...for whom and for what? How about everything that is going bad around the world? How about bad people? Are we all going to die in the same way? There must have been something to separate good things from bad things, good people from bad people. Death shouldn't be the end of the story. I started praying to God to show me the way. I prayed so hard every night to give me a sign. Just a little sign and I would be ready for action. I opened up my heart completely. While I was having all of those questions and praying, I started going to an English class across from an American church in Fairfax. My sister Elizabeth (not her real name), who had come to join me in the US, introduced me to this program. I shared all of my thoughts and had long discussions with my sister. We wrestled with the same type of questions about life. Elizabeth had started going to the ESL (English as Second Language) classes to improve her English. The night that I joined my sister was the last day of her ESL class. I began to look around the room and saw a book about ''Purpose of Life'' and a little book called ''Who is Jesus?” It was just the right time to read those books. And fortunate for me, there was a kind and helpful Christian man. I asked him if I could borrow those books, and he gave me both English and Turkish versions of those books. It was great. I read both books and wanted to know more. I started reading the Bible and about Jesus…who he is, what he has done. The more I read, the more I got into it. I just fell in love with his teaching and personality. I could not find a single fault with what he said and did. Everything he did was for other people's own good. Everything he said made perfect sense, but still I had a hesitation about accepting Jesus as Son of God. While we were trying to find our way towards God, my sister began to have dreams. In the beginning they were just regular dreams about her life…like going shopping or meeting someone in the city. But the dreams would come true and we both would get shocked! Then, she started having religious dreams. She would dream about church, going and praying there and taking me with her. She had those dreams for a while. After what I learned and felt about Jesus, hearing about my sister's dreams pushed me closer and closer towards making a decision about my faith. I took her dreams as the sign that I had been begging God to give me. So that was my sign. Someone else could have taken those dreams as a coincidence, but I knew deep in my heart that those dreams were God's answer to my prayers.
And while I was reading about Jesus, I came across ''Receiving Life in Jesus''. It was saying ''if after reading the above brief account of the life of Jesus and His death, you too want to become His follower and belong to great family of God, then bow your head now, and pray this simple prayer''. As I read the prayer I felt overwhelmed by my emotions, my eyes filled up with tears, and I started sobbing. Here I am…now one of God's children. However, I was not ready to share this with other people. I felt a little guilty and felt like a traitor, to my religion (and Allah) about Jesus. I felt like I betrayed my Muslim God. But I knew very well I did the best thing ever in my life to accept Jesus and let him get into my life. I talked to my sister about my feelings and she told me that ''it's ok to feel that way; she went through the same thing''. And also she told me ''when the right time comes, you will have no hesitation to share it with other people, and you will feel completely comfortable, happy about your decision''. And I experienced everything she told me. At that point I was so grateful to have a sister who had gone through the same experience. I was so thankful to feel her hands on my shoulder. She encouraged me...God bless her.
MY LIFE AFTER JESUS
I don't know how to describe Jesus…I just love him, adore him, he is my best friend. He is everything to me in this life. He is the first one I share my happiness and sadness with. He is making me a better person. I used to have terrible temper that I couldn't control and hurt people. He calmed me down...it's extremely hard for me to control my anger, so this is one of the biggest thing Jesus is working on me. I am trying not to judge other people, and learning to forgive people who hurt me. Having grown up as a self-centered person, I am now paying attention to other people's needs. The most important change in my life is this - I am not afraid of death. Death will bring me closer to God. JESUS CHRIST, you are the love of my life, the purpose of my living...my hero...thank you so much for being in my life and loving me.
Testimony of HER, a Turkish Woman
I was born and raised in a Muslim family in Turkey. My family wasn't religious, like many other families I knew, so I was not forced to practice Islam. As an adult now, I feel like I was lost back then. But my family gave me good values – like don't steal, be good to other people, respect your elders and love those younger than you. They emphasized these values more than praying 5 times a day and fasting during Ramadan.
But as a kid I was more willing to do what my friends would do. I didn’t want to be different than them. So since 4th grade I loved fasting (as much as I could) at Ramadan, and I tried to go to the mosque to study the Quran in the summer time with my friends. I felt so good at those times…maybe because I wanted to know and love Allah (Muslim God), and thought I was doing what he wanted, or I was having my friend’s acceptance and getting them closer to me.
Seeing some other friends’ mothers covering themselves in the Muslim tradition made me wish my mother would do the same. (I was ashamed of my mother sometimes because she wasn't covering herself like the others. BUT NOW I AM SO GLAD THAT SHE WAS THE WAY SHE IS.)
On and off I did fast and pray until I was in my second year at the university. All of those times there were doubts about what I believed in and did, guiltiness about what exactly I should have done and not done, sadness about not doing enough to please God with the way I lived my life. My feelings and beliefs were up and down all the time. My heart didn't accept what my mind was saying and my mind wouldn't accept what I was feeling in my heart. So I started thinking more about what I believed and what I should have done. The more I thought about God and my beliefs, the more I questioned about my faith and God. And then I felt more and more guilty because in Islam you should not question God. If you do, you sin. But what I saw and heard from people didn't make sense. I loved God with all of my heart and I was also scared. It just didn't make sense in my mind the way we love God or the way God loved us. God, to me was a punishing God. Why should I have been afraid of God? Why is he a punishing God? He created us and then gave bunch of rules to please him? In the end, after a long period of thinking and questioning, my mind won the battle over my heart. I ended up refusing all religions starting from 1998. I still believed in a God, but not the God described by Islam or other religions. I created my own God. My God was loving, caring…he did not try to find a reason to punish me. As long as I was a nice person he would love me.
I searched little bit about Christianity and Judaism. I don't know why, but Judaism was not an option at all. I always had strange thoughts about them (not anymore). Christianity was so opposite of what Islam was saying about Jesus. And also according to Christianity, everybody was born with their sin and you have to get baptized to get rid of your sins. How can a baby be born with sin? It was senseless.
In August 2004, I came to the U.S. - land of my dreams since I was a little girl. Did anything change about my religious view during the first 4 years in America? No, nothing changed…I still held onto my own God. Well, since I came here as an aupair I had a lot of friends...most of them were from different countries and cultural backgrounds, but they all shared one thing in common. That one commonality was ''Christianity''. Yet I don't remember having any conversation about religion with them. There was a friend who used to go to church once in a while...sometimes I went to church with her just to experience what people were doing in the church but I really didn't feel anything. I enjoyed going there because I used to see in movies when I was a kid...people would dress up nicely and go to church every Sunday. IT WAS SO NICE AND EASY.
HOW DID I BECOME A FOLLOWER OF JESUS?
Jesus is the Son of God. Wowww...those words are shocking... I would never ever imagine that I would come to believe in Jesus because of what stuck was in my mind from my Muslim background. ''God was never born and never gave birth'' so there was no acceptance in my mind to take Jesus as Son of God. It was just a story that had been made up by people...
2009 is a very important year in my life…that year I found real love, happiness, and the MEANING OF LIFE...JESUS CHRIST. How did all of that happen? It was just not enough that I believed in my made up God anymore. Life became pointless. I started questioning again, but this time I began to question about life. We are born, grow up, go to school, get married, have kids and die. And when you die everything is over. So what was the purpose of life? We are born and die...for what? Why should I be a good person...for whom and for what? How about everything that is going bad around the world? How about bad people? Are we all going to die in the same way? There must have been something to separate good things from bad things, good people from bad people. Death shouldn't be the end of the story. I started praying to God to show me the way. I prayed so hard every night to give me a sign. Just a little sign and I would be ready for action. I opened up my heart completely. While I was having all of those questions and praying, I started going to an English class across from an American church in Fairfax. My sister Elizabeth (not her real name), who had come to join me in the US, introduced me to this program. I shared all of my thoughts and had long discussions with my sister. We wrestled with the same type of questions about life. Elizabeth had started going to the ESL (English as Second Language) classes to improve her English. The night that I joined my sister was the last day of her ESL class. I began to look around the room and saw a book about ''Purpose of Life'' and a little book called ''Who is Jesus?” It was just the right time to read those books. And fortunate for me, there was a kind and helpful Christian man. I asked him if I could borrow those books, and he gave me both English and Turkish versions of those books. It was great. I read both books and wanted to know more. I started reading the Bible and about Jesus…who he is, what he has done. The more I read, the more I got into it. I just fell in love with his teaching and personality. I could not find a single fault with what he said and did. Everything he did was for other people's own good. Everything he said made perfect sense, but still I had a hesitation about accepting Jesus as Son of God. While we were trying to find our way towards God, my sister began to have dreams. In the beginning they were just regular dreams about her life…like going shopping or meeting someone in the city. But the dreams would come true and we both would get shocked! Then, she started having religious dreams. She would dream about church, going and praying there and taking me with her. She had those dreams for a while. After what I learned and felt about Jesus, hearing about my sister's dreams pushed me closer and closer towards making a decision about my faith. I took her dreams as the sign that I had been begging God to give me. So that was my sign. Someone else could have taken those dreams as a coincidence, but I knew deep in my heart that those dreams were God's answer to my prayers.
And while I was reading about Jesus, I came across ''Receiving Life in Jesus''. It was saying ''if after reading the above brief account of the life of Jesus and His death, you too want to become His follower and belong to great family of God, then bow your head now, and pray this simple prayer''. As I read the prayer I felt overwhelmed by my emotions, my eyes filled up with tears, and I started sobbing. Here I am…now one of God's children. However, I was not ready to share this with other people. I felt a little guilty and felt like a traitor, to my religion (and Allah) about Jesus. I felt like I betrayed my Muslim God. But I knew very well I did the best thing ever in my life to accept Jesus and let him get into my life. I talked to my sister about my feelings and she told me that ''it's ok to feel that way; she went through the same thing''. And also she told me ''when the right time comes, you will have no hesitation to share it with other people, and you will feel completely comfortable, happy about your decision''. And I experienced everything she told me. At that point I was so grateful to have a sister who had gone through the same experience. I was so thankful to feel her hands on my shoulder. She encouraged me...God bless her.
MY LIFE AFTER JESUS
I don't know how to describe Jesus…I just love him, adore him, he is my best friend. He is everything to me in this life. He is the first one I share my happiness and sadness with. He is making me a better person. I used to have terrible temper that I couldn't control and hurt people. He calmed me down...it's extremely hard for me to control my anger, so this is one of the biggest thing Jesus is working on me. I am trying not to judge other people, and learning to forgive people who hurt me. Having grown up as a self-centered person, I am now paying attention to other people's needs. The most important change in my life is this - I am not afraid of death. Death will bring me closer to God. JESUS CHRIST, you are the love of my life, the purpose of my living...my hero...thank you so much for being in my life and loving me.
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