The Word Of Life

A little background about me

Okay, so, I was born into a Christian family in Syria. We were all orthodox Christians so as a kid I believed in God.

I was born in 2009 in a city called Aleppo. And if you know anything about Syria, it's that there was a war in 2011. The situation got pretty bad in my city, so me and my family had to hide in a basement for about a month, thinking the conflict would end soon, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

To explain the conflict as easy as possible, there was the dictatorship of the Assad regime which used to lock people up in political prisons and torture them to death. Their crime? Disagreeing with the government. The Assad regime used to force people sometimes to pray to our former president, which obviously something that everyone hated, but did it in fear of the government. And there was the Free Syrian Army (I'll call them FSA) which were a bunch of Muslims who decided to get rid of the Assad regime so they don't have to deny Allah.

So the Assad regime and the FSA fought.

Now, just to clear up any misinformation. It wasn't illegal to pray or anything. But if you disagreed with the government, they would kidnap you and force you to admit that Bashar (our former president) was God or you'd go to prison/be slaughtered. There was even a voice recording of a Muslim man being buried alive because he refused to deny his faith. They were saying stuff like:

"Allah! Allah" (the Muslim man)

"Say Bashar is God, you animal!" (One of the military men who worked for the Assad regime)

"Allah! Allah!"

"You *****, say Bashar is God. Don't make me angry."

"Allah, ahh!"

It was deeply disturbing. Now we have no physical proof of something like that happening to Christians because we only make 11% of the Syrian population, so it's very uncommon to hear about us in general. And because we don't really fight for our rights, we just wait for God to avenge us.

Now since I was a baby at the time, I didn't really understand or care. But my parents were worried for 4 reasons.

1.The Assad regime might slaughter us since we were against the government.

2.The FSA winning and forcing us to convert to Islam/ kill us for "carrying the cross delusion". I know it's bad to assume things, but we thought they were like Isis/ Hamas/Huzballah/ect. At the time. Luckily they weren't, but we didn't know back then. That's why we were worried.

3.Food supplies. The regime back then cut all the possible ways to get food to torture us. So we were worried about that obviously.

4.Dying. It was a pretty nasty war. So I don't think this needs an explanation.

Now, why am I saying all of this? Because this establishes the faith my parents have. Because despite all that, our faith in Christ grew back then. And being a baby, I mimicked my parents.

We later on travelled and left Aleppo and went to Tartous. Both are in Syria, but one place is safer than the other.

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I spent my entire childhood loving Jesus with everything I've got. I used to love going to church, it made me feel extremely happy and I enjoyed being in it. The holy spirit filled me up with joy whenever I went there. I found comfort and joy in Jesus Christ, and I used to pray and read a mini version of the Bible too. It was a small red kid's Bible I used to read daily with joy and used to even write some personal notes and prayers.

My parents didn't force me, I wanted to connect with God. I even remembered once when I was 5-7, I pretended to go back in time and save Jesus from being crucified and taking his place to save him and trying to convert imaginary evil people to Christianity. And I was happy doing that. Don't think too much of it, I was just a kid