By Daniel Corado —
The scorching Dubai heat of the sun gave Padma an idea: “God if you can’t help me can you at least like burn me,” she prayed to the Hindu deities. “I can’t go on like this crying each day like it’s becoming harder and harder.”
When Padma had married a Christian, it was only on the condition that she would NEVER convert from her beloved Hinduism. But when she found herself alone in Dubai, her husband working a job in Iran, her loneliness compounded with depression and she cried out to the Hindu gods. There was no answer.
“I was born and raised as a Hindu, like a very, very strong Hindu,” Padma explains. “Literally if you go to my house, back home to my mom’s house, you will feel that you’ve walked into a temple.” Hindu idols are everywhere.
Prayer starts at 4:00 a.m. Chanting and pujas are ubiquitous. They served in the Temple.
“When I got married out of the religion, it was a big shame,” she says. “But I fell in love with a boy, and he was a Christian.”
Her mom opposed. Padma only married on the condition “I will never step into a church, and I will never want to know about Jesus,” she says.
From Bombay, India, her husband got work in Dubai. For the first time in her life, Padma was going to be away from her family and friends. As a prank, some friends took her to a horror movie for her sendoff party. She hated horror movies.
Not long after moving to Dubai, her husband had to go work in Iran. This left her totally alone.
“Fear just gripped me, and everything I did I regretted,” she remembers. “Then the horror movie started tormenting me and haunting me. I would cry every day.”
It got so bad that she signed up for a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. You had to really commit to not quit, to leave your cell phone and consecrate yourself to the course. You signed a contract.
She was so excited and hopeful that she woke up at 2:00 a.m., ready to go to the class starting at 4:00 a.m. This would bring her peace, she thought.
But right from the beginning, she was turned off. The Vipassana singer’s voice sounded “scary,” she says. “It was worse than the horror movie.”
Because she had signed the contract, she was obligated to complete the 10-day course. At the end, everybody raved about how much it helped them. She had barely made it through.
“I’m depressed,” she says. “I’m literally begging and crying, kneeling. My tears are like overflowing each day. I have bruises on my face. But why? Why I’m not feeling OK? I have not seen God. I’ve not felt him. I was back to square one. I’m back home feeling exactly the same.”
She even asked to die.
Then a banker friend who was helping Padma find employment for herself, invited her to church. She caught her off guard on a Wednesday for Bible study.
Padma had vowed never to set foot inside a church but found it difficult to turn down her friend. At the study, her determination to resist hearing about Jesus caused her to stand up and walk out of the Bible study. She waited outside.
Per usual, she was crying.
A brother who went to the washroom saw her and asked her if everything is OK. She pretended that she was fine. But he kindly and gently insisted, could the Bible study leader pray for her?
Padma relented. “Okay, whatever,” she thought. “Jesus, if you’re real, can you save me?”
The Bible study leader gave her a Bible and encouraged her to read the New Testament.
When she cracked the New Testament, she saw two subtitles: Jesus heals leprosy. And: Jesus heals the blind.
Padma cast the Bible in the trash can. “I felt like it was a fantasy story, like a fairy tale,” she says. “I had no faith.
“That night I really cried cried cried and then I slept. I have no idea what time it was nothing,” Padma adds. “And all of a sudden I get up and I sit and I say Jesus you are here and two angels above my bed. I felt him so strong so strong. He touched me. I felt like the fear is gone.”
When she woke up in the morning, she apologized for throwing out the Bible. She went to retrieve it. Without knowing what to do, she got rid of her idols, the Hindu way, by leaving them in water. “I’m not going back,” she said.
“I bought a big children’s Bible with pictures trying to read thoroughly,” she says. “I was confused. Why did Jesus go to the cross?”
Eventually, she began to understand that Jesus’s sacrifice was for the forgiveness of sins for all who believe in him.
“A lot of people think that because I got married to a Christian man and because maybe people have convinced me, they converted me. But in my case, nobody convinced me,” Padma says. “Nobody converted me. In fact, I declined to go to church so many times I threw away the Bible, right? And but in one night, I was so desperate. He just came.
“Jesus is a living God and he has made difference in my life,” she adds. “My life from that day on has changed 180° for good.”
