Friday, Dec.

29 pm
Hasnah Burdges Hasnah, a Malaysian, is the eldest daughter in a family of twelve children. She's known the reality of poverty. She's known the agony of abuse and suffering. Fortunately, she's also come to know Jesus. As a child, she experienced abuse at the hands of her father, who was an alcoholic and a gambler. These two factors forced her family into poverty. But, Hasnah insisted, "I love my dad. Please know that." Still, such a childhood caused her many times to feel "that God didn't like me or love me." Hasnah also grew up as a Muslim. To her, good people read the Koran and prayed five times a day. She suffered under the oppression of feeling she couldn't do enough to please God. "I was afraid," she said, reflecting upon God's judgement upon her, "that the bad deed side of the scales was going to win out." Then Hasnah made a change that transformed her life forever. By earning an academic scholarship, she was able to attend school in the United States at Kansas State University. There she met a group of Christians who loved her persistently and fiercely. "They told me that they love me. They shared that in their actions." But Hasnah didn't want to accept their love or the source of their love. She was offended when they told her about Jesus. As a Moslem, she knew Jesus Christ merely as a man. And she considered the Bible something simply fabricated by men, a text full of fallacy. She vehemently denied that Jesus is God. So she pushed her Christian friends away. "I rejected them," Hasnah shared, "but they did not reject me. . . I asked them to shut up, to get away. . . I told my friends never to speak to me about Jesus again. They agreed but continued to pray me into God's kingdom, I found out later." And yet she felt attracted to these friends, their persistent love and peaceful response to her anger. She also wrestled with unhealed wounds of her childhood. She recalled her poverty as a young girl, her times of crying out, "God where are you? Do you care that we are suffering down here? I remember that the only reply I got was silence." Then, early one morning, paging through the Bible and wondering what to make of Jesus, she read John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." She knelt down in her apartment and prayed, "Jesus you are the Christ . . . come and be my God."

Her decision was anything but easy. "That cost me my family," Hasnah shared. "That cost me my friends." But she knows her sacrifice has been worth it. "Absolutely," she said with a smile. Through it all, Hasnah clings to God. Responding to the book of Psalms, "Oh taste and see that the Lord is good!" Hasnah concluded, "My friends, I have tasted him, and he is good indeed."