Searching for Spiritual Fulfillment
As a teenager, Sara was an Islamist prayer warrior, a Basiji – a member of a grassroots Islamic volunteer group that answered to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. When she prayed in school, all the other girls always expected her to lead them. She fasted so long one time that she wound up in the hospital. To show her devotion to Islam during services, she and her friends would practice self-flagellation, and Sara always had more bruises than anyone else, yet her deep spiritual needs remained unfulfilled. She found herself asking questions: “Why am I spiritually empty? Why do I feel no personal connection to the god of Islam? Why, during my prayer rituals, do I do everything right and still feel so terribly wrong?”
Encountering Jesus
“As a young girl,” she recalled, “I asked my mom and dad if I could learn how to pray the Muslim prayers. I would lay out my white prayer cloth on the floor, then place another cloth on top, then lay a handkerchief with a stone – a tablet of compressed dirt from Mecca. (We have to put our nose on the stone). After I would finish praying, I would pick up the stone and the handkerchief and underneath would be money; but I didn’t want the money – I wanted the truth.” A movie about the life of Jesus changed everything.
Shortly before Sara was to enter the university, one of her sisters returned to their small town from college. She brought a movie about the life of Jesus and dared to share it with Sara. Sara went into a room away from her family and put the movie into the video player.
“I watched how Jesus loved people,” she said later. “I began to cry. At the end of the film, there is a prayer of repentance. I prayed it six times.” She rewound the tape to the prayer again and again. “I do not think that I realised what repentance meant, but I wanted to be near God.” She fell to her knees and raised her hands. “I was jealous of my sister since she came from college, because she would kneel down and without any Muslim beads, cloth, or stone would lift up her hands and start praying. I wanted to pray and feel close to God like she did.” “God,” Sara would pray, “I want to have a connection. With you.”
To be continued…
Date: 7th June 2025
Martyr: Sara
Location: Iran
Source: Tortured for Christ (The Voice of the Martyr)
Author: Richard Wurmbrand
Suffering Saturday 146
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