"Dad, I think we’re being followed.”
Yasemin drummed her fingers nervously on the car door. Her father kept on driving the familiar route to drop her off at English class, singing a praise song to Jesus as he drove.
Yasemin turned around and looked back.
“Dad, we’re being followed.”
He sang louder.
Not missing a beat, he changed songs midverse and belted out lyrics of his own: “I’m going to prison today!”
James knew the signs. He’d already been in prison once for his faith in Jesus. That day made it a second.
In the region where James and his family live in Central Asia, people bend over backward to show hospitality. Go to a neighbor’s home and they spread out a feast, heaping a visitor’s plate high with food.
“In lieu of an armored car, I’ve seen cars left unattended with the trunk open and piles of cash inside,” a friend of James said. “No one would dare bother it.”
In his country, they take care of each other. But share Christ openly and they may torture you.
“James has been blindfolded, handcuffed and held in solitary confinement,” his friend said.
Officials interrogated him, asking why he left his former religion.
At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was put in a small jail cell at night, his hands released just long enough for him to eat a small piece of bread and drink one liter of water. But James hardly slept; he stayed awake praying and singing praises, just as he did in the hot room during the daytime.
But he has seen a lot of people saved — many of them from places where he could never get access to go and share his faith. One of them had heard part of the gospel message nine years earlier, and when he met James in prison he heard the whole message and believed on the spot.
“This man had been waiting for nine years to hear the rest of the gospel, just wanting to meet someone who could tell him,” James’ friend said.
The guards came and began to beat the new believer.
“He cried out for Jesus to rescue him, and he stood firm,” James’ friend said.
James is seeing more people come to faith in Jesus Christ during his months-long imprisonment than in the rest of his 20 years as a believer, his friend said.
When James’ wife Ashti and Yasemin got to visit him in prison, tears ran down their faces. He prayed for comfort for them, then told them he had a job for them to do.
“He said a man had come to believe in Jesus and wanted his wife to know,” Ashti said. “He asked James to get us to go and share with his wife.”
With nerves on edge, Ashti and Yasemin loaded up the car and went straight to her house from the prison.
“I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we were going to tell her or how we would be received,” Ashti said. “But when we got there, she said, ‘I want very much to hear what you have come to tell me — there is light all around you and I want to know why.’”
Ashti knows the difference that the Light — Jesus — can make. She herself came to faith when she encountered the Light during childbirth, seven years after James first believed in Christ.
He was a devout Muslim — even to the point of planning terrorism — before someone gave him a copy of the Gospel of John.
In the middle of the night he lit a lamp, got the book from the shelf and started reading while his family slept. By the following year he was a wholehearted follower of Jesus.
And now James and Ashti’s children have met Jesus, which has helped greatly with understanding why their father is in prison.
But they still struggle with his absence.
James has made such an impact on his fellow prisoners that many of them, after their release, have traveled great distances to let James’ family know he’s safe, his friend said. But they know God put him in jail with those men so that their families could also know the truth, his friend added.
(BP)
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