Adil* and Karima* had just finished a prayer meeting at their home and had put their children to bed when they decided to have tea together. Karima went into the kitchen and stoked the fire to boil the water. A gust of wind blew suddenly through the window, causing the flames to light her clothes on fire.
“I’m burning!” she screamed, and in a panic, ran outside into the street. Adil rushed after her and threw a blanket on her to suffocate the flames. But the damage was done.
At the hospital, medical personnel said that she sustained fatal burns on the delicate skin from the neck down, and across her stomach.
“They said, ‘Tomorrow you can take her. She’s dying,’” Adil remembers.
Adil and his uncle, who had started training him in Christian ministry when he was just a boy, prayed at the hospital. Gradually, they both sensed God’s assurance that Adil’s wife would not die.
But God didn’t promise them her recovery would be easy. It was a long and painful journey for Karima – and for Adil, who helplessly watched his wife suffer. She came and went from hospitals for three years. Some people told the family to allow her to come home and die.
While she was still recuperating, Adil received a word from God: Just as in Genesis 12 where God told Abram to move his family to another land, God was now telling Adil to take his family to the nearby nation of Jordan. Adil didn’t even know where Jordan was.
When he told friends that God was sending his family to Jordan, they responded that he was crazy. His wife was still not well. So the couple prayed and fasted for six months. Their certainty only grew. It was confirmed when they received an invitation to come to Jordan.
With their two children and 15 coins in hand, they arrived in a new land. An acquaintance allowed them to take one room in his two-room home.
“It was very, very cold, we thought it was the end of the world,” Adil recalled. “It was much different than [our home country]. We took the kids and we started crying together. What can we do?”
Despite their misery, they obediently stayed for one year, then moved to another city in Jordan where they began to attend a Nazarene church.
“They gained the church’s respect and eventually they started to take part in ministry,” says a local church leader*.
Adil found work in a cancer center at a hospital. Although chaplaincy is not allowed in Jordan, in his administrative role he had many opportunities to share Jesus with people, including some who were dying.
“He was like an angel there,” says the local church leader*.
Adil also studied theology at the Nazarene Bible College. After 11 years serving with the church in Jordan, he was ordained as a Nazarene pastor.
“When God told us to go to Jordan, we didn’t know if we are coming here to work or make money,” Karima said. “But God put us in a place to use us, to shape us.”
Following more than a decade of serving in Jordan, the family sensed God releasing them to return home. They relocated to a city where they had no contacts. One day a man from the utilities company came to their home to check the water meter. Adil introduced himself and boldly asked the man if he was a Christian. The man was not, but was very interested in what Adil had to say. After an hour of conversation, the man invited Adil to his home.
Adil and Karima visited the man’s family and realized his wife worked with Karima in the school. The family eagerly accepted Christ, and the two couples began a Bible study. Soon, the faith group grew to four families.
The couple’s ministry since then has become multi-faceted, including house group planting and discipleship of believers, ministry to the sick, marriage counseling and children’s work.
“We believe that the church has to go out, not stay in,” Adil said. “God led me to some factories. I met some leaders of the factories. They already knew the Lord. I said to them, ‘Do you want your factory to grow more?’ They said, ‘Of course.’ I said, ‘You have to build an altar for the Lord.’ And we agreed with this.”
The management of one factory held an hour of worship and praise time, and a Bible study. The company quickly expanded, requiring a second factory to be built.
Where Adil and Karima live, there are 800 small villages surrounding them. They go with a team of ministry workers to the villages where there are no churches, and lead some to Christ, then disciple them.
They met at least five couples who were planning to divorce, but through counseling, the couples regained loving relationships and built altars to the Lord in their homes.
Karima started a Sunday school for children in one of the villages.
“During Sunday school one boy was feeling dizzy and he fainted,” Karima recalled. “We asked him ‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’ He said, ‘It’s not my turn in my house to have breakfast today.’ From that time, God led us to a mercy ministry [to the poor].”
Sometimes, the family uses their own funds to help people in need. More importantly, they are encouraging the poor themselves to share. For instance, some of the families receive small food packages from the government, including staples like sugar, oil and rice. They ask the families to give up one portion from their packages, and Adil and Karima deliver these items to families in even more urgent need. When they brought some of the donated foods to one elderly woman, she asked them what was inside. They said it had rice, sugar, tea and chicken. The woman lit up at the news, saying that for three months she had not been able to afford any kind of meat.
They also persuaded some doctors to provide medical care to some of the poor families at a lower price.
“God raised Karima from death,” Adil said. “We know what it means when you say, ‘I am in pain.’ If there’s anyone sick or feeling tired, we feel he is part of our family.
“We praise the Lord for this work in our life that we are part of the work of God. We are just dust, and nothing. I pray that He can continue to use us.”
