As he told me his story, I cried twice. Later, I cried at the enormity of it all. Tall order for a man I just happened to casually strike up a conversation with after a meeting at church.
He goes by two names. One, his Arabic name given at birth. Two, a standard name given by birth order that doesn’t carry an Islamic connotation in the Christian-influenced south.
The name he chooses to keep on both sides of physical and spiritual birth is Mahadi.
Tonight in the youth meeting, he asked for prayer over his knee, as it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to walk to church. God laid him on my heart at that moment and I wanted to pray for his healing again after church.
He was open, friendly, and talkative from the moment we started to chat. Before I could even ask him about the pain in his knee, he began explaining the meaning of his two names, and in his explanation, he mentioned that he used to be a Muslim, but still kept his Islamic name. Joy and I were intrigued and started asking him questions about his life.
We found that he came from a desperately oppressed region of the country called the Nuba Mountains, a place that, while politically South Sudanese, is geographically located in Sudan. This strategic and disputed region is full of natural resources, which, unfortunately, makes it horrendously exploited by the Sudanese government, as the Nubans are sympathizers and soldiers for the SPLA, the army that freed the south.
While talking about his people, he alluded to a missionary documentary we had just watched in the church meeting.
“You know in the film they talk about unreached people groups? I know this firsthand because my people were unreached. I was the first person to become a follower of Jesus from my tribe. I have since led my younger siblings to the Lord and we have made a small church. After I finish my education, I am going back to my tribe and preach the Gospel to them.”
I was shocked. I had never met someone with such a claim. We asked him to share his story of Jesus. Over the course of his testimony, he accumulated a small crowd on the packed dirt of the church lawn.
He told us an improbable story of miracles and supernatural protection. He was born into a poor and entirely Muslim tribe in the middle of war. Due to the combat and the oppression in the Nuba Mountains, there were no schools open while he was young. A friend of his late father decided to take Mahadi and his sister to Uganda so they could go to school and get an education.
While living in region of Arua, their host family heard about a Crusade and asked Mahadi if he wanted to go. He decided to attend.
At the Crusade, a man was preaching about Jesus. The message was powerful and compelling, but he didn’t have any plans to become a Christian.
Until a girl that he knew from the community was brought to the preacher. She had been paralyzed for seven years and her family and friends had to pull her around town in a wagon because she could not move at all.
The preacher prayed for her in the name of Jesus.
She walked off the stage.
Mahadi was dumbfounded. Since he had seen and known of this girl from the time he moved to Uganda, he knew that she was completely unable to move. It was a closed issue…
Before the name of Jesus.
Closer to him, a girl he knew personally stood near her father. This girl was deaf. As the pastor prayed, not even specifically for her, she turned to her father and began to mimic, verbatim, what the pastor was saying.
Her hearing was totally restored.
The preacher then asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus.
Mahadi, formerly resolved to never leave Islam, jumped and waved his hand.
He and his sister both became followers of Jesus in Uganda, but, unfortunately,their area was dominated by a religious spirit and no one could teach them what it meant to really follow God sincerely, by the Spirit.
Years later, as a young man of twenty years, Mahadi found himself in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, heading back home to Nuba. Times here were very dangerous, and he fatefully happened to snap a photo of the wrong thing at the wrong time, was detained by the authorities, and labeled a spy for the south.
They interrogated him. Scared to death, Mahadi knew that virtually anyone apprehended at the wrong place at the wrong time could be indicted on trumped-up charges and quickly killed.
He didn’t know what to say, because he knew that he would most likely be killed, and every word could be the difference between life and death. They asked him if he was a Muslim, and he said that he was, his Arabic name lending credibility to his claim. However, his student identification labeled him with his second adopted name, which made the authorities suspicious.
Even though he knew he was denying Jesus, he felt the Holy Spirit telling him exactly what to say. He felt an inexplicable force carefully guiding his answers, and he gave the correct responses on questions to which he had no idea of the answers.
Although his responses made him seem believable, the authorities concluded he was most likely a spy and assigned two guards to escort him to another building where they put their problems away quietly.
As they were leading him, Mahadi saw the building approaching and desperately prayed to God.
“Jesus, if you really love me and have a plan for me, then do not even allow me to cross the threshold of this doorframe. If you do this, I will know that you are real, I will give everything I have to you and serve you all my life. But if I enter that building, I am going to die. Save me, Jesus, if you hear me.”
Mere steps away from the doorframe, one of the escorting guards stopped. A man behind them was calling for the guard. He left Mahadi and the other guard to talk to the man. When the guard returned, the man came with them. He was also a guard and explained to both of them that they had the wrong man, because Mahadi was his relative and he could persoanlly vouch for his loyalty to the country.
Mahadi had never seen the man in his life.
A guard from Sudan – seconds after Mahadi’s prayer and steps from his death – risked his life for a man he didn’t even know. Had the guard been asked a simple question to verify his claim, he would have been found a liar and they both would have been killed.
Mahadi never crossed the threshold of that building.
And in his own words, that was the night he became a true son of God.
Granted, Mahadi does have many more incredible stories of the power and faithfulness of God. And though stories of the miraculous tend to stick with me more than anything else, the stories that I couldn’t forget after our conversation were not ones of miracles and dreams coming true.
What stuck with me long after the sun had gone down, what has accompanied me to bed this evening are the tales of suffering he’s endured.
The details he shared with me were merely an overview of his life. His dark eyes looked through me as he explained his past. It was as if he was looking at a monster through a glass window. The distance from the beast is comforting, but it doesn’t make it any less horrifying.
He told me that life during the war was pure hell. His father, an influential politician, was identified as an SPLA sympathizer and gruesomely murdered in an ambush. Without his father, the family felt lost and didn’t know what to do. In time, his family, as well as the community around him, lost everything. He said that everyone was naked because there was not a stitch of clothing to be found anywhere. This was humiliating for his two mothers, as modesty is a measuring stick for piety among women in Islam, not to mention bearing the shame of having their children see them in such a way.
I choked heavy tears as he said,
“God was so very merciful to me and my family, because He allowed the trees to grow leaves so we could eat them to stay alive. He was so good to us.”
Mahadi told me of his siblings that didn’t survive. During the meager times, his little brother died of an unknown illness and his little sister of measles.
Then he told me of the fate of another brother, and tears ran hotly down my face.
After his father was murdered, a lookout was posted for members of the family. His brother and some other young boys with familial links to the SPLA were riding in a bus when they were caught.
They took them all away and forced them to eat poison. All of the boys died.
They threw his brother’s body out on a trash heap.
They publicly announced that if anyone climbed up on the trash heap to try and give him a proper burial, they would meet the same fate.
For the first time in his narrative, I saw his eyes brim and redden as he held back the tears that were running down my face.
“I had to watch the wild dogs eat him. They tore him to pieces, and the birds dismembered his body. My sweet brother became carrion for the birds and was laid to rest in the bellies of dogs.”
I tried to imagine watching my brother decompose, naked on a trash heap, while wild animals tore his stiffened body to pieces. The thought was too horrifying for me to even imagine and I shook the idea from my mind with horror.
But Mahadi had lived it.
My heart couldn’t take anymore. I knew it probably wasn’t very culturally sensitive of me, but I asked if I could hug him. He said yes.
As I wrapped my arms around him, I hoped he would feel my heart wrap around his. I am still unable to fully grasp the depth of suffering that each person I meet here carries with them, but I wanted Mahadi to know that another person cares deeply for the suffering he has seen. Literally every person I meet has stories just like this, and because they have all suffered, no one easily talks about what they have endured.
I wanted him to know that I care. That what happened to his father, his mothers, his sister, his brothers… This should never, ever have happened.
As he stands before me, I see a love in him that he cannot contain, a thankfulness that he easily expresses, a joy that precedes him.
And in this moment, amidst all the things in this country, in this world, that are hell on earth,
then He is bigger than I even knew.
