Latest News #245 – Iraq
May 30, 2003

A long journey towards knowledge of God

They certainly needed his encouragement, for things hadn’t gone according to plan. Yet the same verse kept recurring: “Don’t ever be afraid or discouraged! I am the Lord your God, and I will be there to help you wherever you go.” (ibid).

During the days of their hardest testing, God was there with his promises and Riad, Munira and their children could unload their anxieties and fears onto him.

The couple hadn’t always been committed Christians. Munira, for example, was brought up as an occasional churchgoer and had never fully understood the good news of Jesus Christ.

But one day her family heard that there was ’something new happening’ at the Evangelical Church in Baghdad. They all went to find out more about it and this time they not only heard the message of Christ they responded eagerly to it.

“It was like in the days of the Apostles,” says Munira, “when Paul told the jailer ’Have faith in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved! This is also true for everyone who lives in your home.’ Imagine! My parents, my two sisters and I all came to Jesus that night. It was amazing! Our whole house was changed!”

In the case of Riad, it wasn’t until 1991, just after the first Gulf War, that he first started taking the Bible seriously. By then he was working as a director at the National Theatre of Iraq. One night he went to the Evangelical Church in Baghdad and heard the pastor preach from the first chapter of Isaiah.

“It was as though God himself had invited me to converse with him,” he remembers. “He was saying, ’Come and talk it over. Your sins are scarlet red, but they will be whiter than snow or wool. If you willingly obey me, the best crops in the land will be yours.’ Suddenly my life turned around: I could only see Jesus.”

Shortly afterwards, he had to take up a post as director of a small theatre in Diwaniyah, in the south of Iraq.

“I didn’t feel alone and it didn’t bother me to be so far away from the big city,” he says. “I had some wonderful months there walking with Jesus and talking about him to others. And the message was so well received! My friends down there had never heard of Jesus. I couldn’t believe it! They didn’t have a clue what it meant to ’follow the Son of God’. I shared with them the little I knew and their lives were changed.”

Those days in Diwaniyah, he adds, changed his life for a second time, bringing the realisation that his greatest desire was no longer to be a theatre director.

“I wanted to give people the very best: Jesus.”

When his appointment in the south was over, he returned to Baghdad and it was then that his relationship with Munira began to develop and some months later they became engaged.

“I didn’t have a penny,” he admits, “I just knew that the promises of the Lord were real and that he would take care of us.”

After their wedding, Riad, in pursuit of his new calling, decided they would leave Iraq while he went to Bible School. After what he describes as “good years” spent getting to know God’s Word in depth, they returned, his aim to pastor a church.

Things began well: a building was purchased which was to be a home for a new church he was to lead. But then one day everything changed: Riad experienced an unexplained rejection by the Church authorities – over the heads of the members – and they barred him from undertaking any church activity, making it very hard for him even to set foot on church property.

Fearing stronger reprisals if he persisted, Riad abandoned what he felt had been his God-given purpose and for a while he and Munira simply had to live in dependence on God.

At the same time as this shattering rejection, ’attacks’ began to come in other forms. Their first child, Samir, 10 months old, entered a distressing time of chronic illness.

It was then that Munira realised how important her own role was – how much, in her words, “a pastor who is under attack needs a pastor’s wife.”

She recalls, “I had never thought that there would be such an incredible attack on a family wanting to follow Jesus and to help others to follow him.”

The couple’s family, relatives and friends all prayed for months to see Samir healed and eventually they were overjoyed to see their prayers answered.

From the perspective of today, Munira can clearly see the other blessings which came to them through that strange time.

“All the attacks brought us very close together as a family. If it hadn’t been for God’s grace and mercy we wouldn’t have made it. Those attacks were both vicious and very real to us, but God kept us safe.”

Riad, for his part, did not completely abandon his plan of becoming a pastor, but instead of leading a church, he became a pastor of a children’s nursery and kindergarten.

“The Lord clearly told me, ’Riad, I’ve prepared you to become a pastor of a people that I’ve got in mind for you.’ I still wonder what this means, but it’s been exciting to be a different kind of pastor – a pastor for children and their parents from all strata of life.”

And now the Scripture he values almost as much as anything is the Children’s Bible.

“The Bible has been such a treasure to us and we know it’s our only hope. Through the Children’s Bible our children and the children under our charge have learned the wonderful stories of the Old Testament and how relevant they are to us. They are taken from the same culture and the same things that we’ve been going through. The children have also learned what is right and wrong. The Children’s Bible is so very important.”

Turning to the subject of Iraq in the post-Saddam Hussein era, he has mixed feelings: excitement at the prospect of experiencing something new, tempered by the uncertainty of what this will be.