Jordan (MNN) – Proverbs 13:12 says, ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick.’ That’s precisely how Farrah felt on her wedding day. The story begins a few weeks earlier when “she gets a phone call from her father,” JoAnn Doyle of Uncharted Ministries says.
“He says, ‘If you don’t marry this man, your mother’s going to die.’”
Farrah grew up in Jordan, where the law requires single women to set aside a small amount of money from each paycheck until they get married. Farrah’s father needed that money to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment, so he arranged Farrah’s wedding. “Farrah is forced to marry this man, who’s older and very radical Muslim. On their honeymoon, the abuse began,” Doyle continues.
“This dear woman is beaten; she’s so depressed she wants to die. The only reason she doesn’t take her own life is [her] children.”
Life was utterly miserable until the Syrian war started. “Syrian refugees are flooding into [Jordan] now, and she keeps running into this one woman. [The woman is] a very poor-looking refugee, but her face is shining, and she’s radiating joy,” Doyle says.
“Farrah goes up to this woman and says, ‘What’s wrong with you?! Why are you so different? Why are you happy?’ This woman tells her, ‘I found Jesus. Do you want to know how He’s changed my life?’”
She met with the Syrian woman several times, Doyle says. Through a series of events, Farrah came to know Christ as her Savior.
“Immediately, depression and suicidal thoughts fled. For the first time in her life, the emptiness was filled with peace and with joy.”
Read Farrah’s full story in Women Who Risk: Secret Agents for Jesus in the Muslim World, a new book released earlier this year by JoAnn and her husband, Tom Doyle.
“The night before she was going to be baptized and celebrate the Lord’s Supper, she has a dream about Jesus for the very first time,” Doyle says.
“The next day, Farrah is baptized and celebrates the Lord’s Supper. When she was getting dressed, they handed her a towel to dry off the water, and she said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to take this water off!’ Putting clothes on her wet body, she said, ‘I just want that water to linger so I would not forget He has washed me and made me new.’”
(Header photo courtesy of john crozier/Unsplash) https://unsplash.com/photos/NJzDmlfZWz4
