zechariah he was a nice person he was a decent person he was very smart he was the only christian in the whole of the school and i hated him and because i thought as a muslim i must be better than him but he was better than i we start to beat him every single day that we come to school and we agreed on that night we need to kill him it was dark it was cold and we went ahead of him and we were five of us we climbed a tree and we waited there and
from far away we saw that a torch coming and the light became bigger and bigger as it approaches us and the minute that he just went under the tree we jumped at him he was crying he was screaming he was shouting we broke his arm we broke his leg he started to bleed and because he started to scream and begging for help i put my hand in his mouth so that no noise will come out similar when you are slaughtering a sheep you know it's just shivering and the others were beating him i felt very
proud you were actually doing something for for allah you know you want to please him and suddenly he could no longer breathe and we could not hear his voice we left him in the wood between life and death we went back you wash yourself and you pray and zechariah never came back i've never seen him again i was born and raised up in a very very fanatic muslim family when i was a child my father brought me to a quran school i was only eight years old and my father just dropped me there they shaved
my head we sat in a circle the sat in the middle of this circle and he has a very long whip i was forced to memorize the quran every mistake that you do this whip will just come right in the middle of your head you're not allowed to cry because in our culture they tell you men never cry i was crying every single night and they told me you belong to the islamic ummah and that's why you fight for it you stay loyal to it i started to hate people to hate everybody who's not a
muslim and i especially used to hate the jews so i was preparing myself to go and fight for allah in the jihad but every night i went to bed and when we put the light off i did not know what will happen with me if i die my cousin was severely sick and the doctors they said he's going to die they gave him only a couple of days and one day came two people they were coptic christians and one of them want to greet me and then i saw he had a cross and then i
pulled my hand back i said well i'm not going to touch a hand it was a cross and then he said to me we hear that this child is sick who would like to pray for him and only out of politeness i told them okay and they started to speak to god like a person that he speaks to his friend they said god please heal this child the minute that they said i'm in this child opened his eyes for the first time in four weeks he started to move his hands he started to speak he
sat down in his bed and he started to walk and one of those two persons who prayed sat down with me and he said to me you know what the real miracle is that god want to change your heart do you believe that Yeshua is alive and i told him yeah because according to the islamic tradition god took him to heaven and he's alive and he will come back one day and he said to me because he's alive you can speak to him that changed my entire life and when i started to read the scripture
nobody needed to convince me to love the jewish people the only way for muslims to start to love the jews is when they meet Yeshua i loved my family i loved my father i loved my mother and i loved my community and when i decided to follow Yeshua my grandfather and my father said to me you are no longer one of us they made a funeral they invited friends and family they brought a coffin to the cemetery and they said our son is dead to be declared dead with no family i said to god where
are you i hear this voice and this voice told me you know that the grave where your name is written you know that grave is empty and guess what my grave is also empty i went to egypt for the first time after many years and i was in a pastoral conference and one of the sudanese pastors came to me it's an elderly man's gray hair started to speak to me and he asked me where did you come from i told him my story he started to cry and then i asked him why are you crying
and he said to me do you remember me my name is zechariah and suddenly i remembered him the last time i saw him it was in that dark night i could hear suddenly the way that he was screaming even though that was 25 years suddenly i started to see his broken arm and broken legs i started to see the scars which i caused him i started to be full of shame i was a bad person yeah i was terrible so the career looked me straight into the eye again and he said to me answer because
you hated me so much i was always praying for you he opened his bible and the minute he opened his bible i saw that my name was written in the first page i hated him he prayed for me on that day god confronted me he said to me even before you start to think about me i was thinking about you to love those who hate you you need someone whose name is Yeshua you
