I see you

 

Kady was a devout Muslim named after one of Mohamad’s wives.  She relished the annual Hajj when two million faithful people would descend on her home city of Mecca to take the anti-clockwise walk around the Kaaba stone.  Then she started to have dreams in which Jesus appeared to her.  So, she prayed one night, ‘Jesus, if you’re who you say you are … meet me at the Kaaba stone during the hajj.’

During that hajj as she paraded with the great crowd around the Kaaba stone she found herself among a whole group of people who had a vision of Jesus at the same time.  They saw Jesus standing on top of the Kaaba stone with an astonishing, magnetic smile on his face.  A short while later she gave her life to Jesus.

When she told her friend Amina about this Amina felt chills all over.  ‘I’m an accountant, and I don’t have the emotional nature you do.  But what you just old me,’ Amina said to Kady, ‘it warmed my heart.  Do you think that Jesus would ever come to me in a dream?’

That night Jesus did come to Amina in a dream.  He said, ‘Amina, I love you, I am El Roi, the God who sees you.  That is my name.  That who I am.  I hear your cries.  I hear you, and I see you, Amina.’

The next day Amina told Kady about her dream.  That evening there went to a secret church together.  One of the young men there pulled out his phone and explained that the Holy Spirit had strongly put on his heart a reading that they should share together.  It was Genesis 16.  In that passage the angel of the Lord comes to Hagar, the angel of the Lord is Jesus, and Hagar gives God the name El Roi.

Amina leaned against Kady in the secret church meeting and began to cry.  ‘I’m overwhelmed to be here!  First, I had the dream about Jesus, and now I am here with all these people who love one another like family.  My heart has never been so full, Kady …  Because I am a Muslim, I am a daughter of Hagar.  Not only did Jesus come to her; he came to me.  We both wondered if God was seeing us.  And He does see us, Kady.  We’re women, yet He sees us … and He loves us.  In the Qur’an, Allah doesn’t even say Hagar’s name, but in the Bible, Hagar is honoured and loved and even privileged to give God one of His names.  Can you believe it?  My mind just can’t comprehend all of this.  I’m so relieved!  How wonderful that Jesus loves us!