Day: 23

Mrs. Mukhtar

When I met Mrs. Mukhtar, I was suffering from extreme jet-lag and exhaustion after traveling extensively. After the tragic loss of her husband, I was there to find out how I could help her rebuild her life.

Mrs. Mukhtar had six children, including several older daughters at home. In Muslim culture, a girl without a father is very vulnerable, so daughters stay with the family until they marry. The stress of losing her husband and carrying the load of a large family left her shell-shocked.

Her husband had been a bold and effective witness that won many Muslims to Christ. As a result, fundamentalist Muslim jihadists assassinated her husband for his bold witness to Muslims in Pakistan.

Mrs. Mukhtar was stoic as she recounted the details of the living nightmare she had been dropped into. From the outside, there was no indication that tragedy had engulfed her life just a few weeks earlier. Her lack of any outward emotion made it hard for me to relate to her at first.

When I encounter someone’s unvarnished pain, I tend to respond with empathy. If I see a person’s tragedy, their sorrows, hurts, and scars, I share in their suffering. While listening to her story, I became ashamed of my lack of empathy.  Mrs. Mukhtar had suffered so much. Shouldn’t I feel her pain? Where was that deep sense of compassion that I had experienced in similar meetings with other victims?

I was able to provide financial help for her and her family, but we had to cut our meeting short due to security concerns. Before we left, I asked if I could pray for her, and she consented.

As I began to pray, I felt compelled to place my hand on Mrs. Mukhtar’s shoulder. I knew that this action would be crossing a cultural boundary in her fundamentalist Muslim country, but I felt such a need to connect with her and touch her broken spirit. I followed the Spirit’s leading and began to pray aloud:

“Father, sometimes you ask us to carry loads that are too heavy for us. My sister here has one of those loads. Could you touch her and let her know the peace that surpasses all understanding? Lord, she has a desert to walk through, and I pray she would feel your hand holding hers as she journeys through it.”

As I prayed over Mrs. Mukhtar, her shoulders began to twitch. I continued to intercede for her, and her body started to shake. Soon the gentle, rocking motion turned to outright heaving and muffled cries. I kept my hand on her shoulder after I finished praying, and her tears turned to uncontrolled sobbing.

In Urdu, she cried out in anguish, “How could they murder him? All he did was love people. He loved the Muslim people. I cannot forget him. How am I going to live without him? What if they kill my son, too?”

My Pakistani associate seemed uncomfortable by this strong display of emotion. He patted her on the back awkwardly, telling her, “Don’t cry. Everything will be fine. Please don’t cry.”

But everything would not be fine.

God was still in control, and He would walk with her in her pain, but things were definitely not fine.

Her life had been irretrievably broken.

I sat there with my hand on her heaving shoulder and prayed in the stillness of my heart. Then, my tears started to flow as well. The Word tells us to weep with those who weep, and I did.

A Heart Restored

My tears fell freely that day. I wasn’t ashamed, and neither was Mrs. Mukhtar. Before I left, she took my hand in both of her own and looked at me with her tear-filled eyes. I will never forget the expression on her face or the tone in her voice when she looked up into my eyes and thanked me.

What was she thanking me for? I knew it was more than the money.

I wish I could capture that moment in time. I wish I could show you the depth of Mrs. Mukhtar’s sorrow, as well as the gratitude and connection that shone through her eyes after we cried and prayed together.

When I see and feel suffering firsthand, I experience persecution on an entirely different level. I become intimately acquainted with their suffering and the effect on my heart is incredibly beneficial if not absolutely necessary.

In the West, there is a silliness to our lives. We are in a continual drive for wealth, ease, financial safety, and comfort. These are normal human pursuits but we have perfected the chase for them into an art form and it has a decidedly negative effect on us. The heart of our Western culture creates a continual and forceful pull towards narcissism and self-absorption.

We Need the Persecuted

Carrying the pain of our persecuted brothers and sisters may be a burden, but it is a restorative burden. I believe that it is the cure for the frivolousness that seeps into the Western church from the culture.

The pain of the persecuted needs to become our pain. The Lord touches on this repeatedly in the New Testament when He refers to the universal Church as “the body of Christ.”

On the day I met Mrs. Mukhtar, her sorrow became my sorrow. It still is my sorrow. I left my meeting with Mrs. Mukhtar knowing that her heart had a very long desert to walk through. But she wouldn’t be walking through that desert alone.

Another exhausted and weary heart was softened and restored on that same day.

And it was mine.