Jesus is going to speak to humanity using my story of struggle and suffering as an example. I must admit it has not been easy for me to talk about my life. But Jesus has been holding my hand and comforting me during the writing.
I know I am not able to write God’s book. I am only putting one foot in front of the other as Jesus guides me in the writing process.As you read, keep in mind “No one person, no one church, no one country, no one family, no one community or no one anything is to be blamed or to be held responsible for what has happened to me, his instrument and humanity.” He is talking to all of us, each and every human on Earth, through my life and experiences. Keep in mind what Jesus said on the cross. He prayed for everyone, even those who crucified him. He told his executioners they did not know what they were doing. He says to us, “my unconditional love is inclusive, not exclusive.” His message includes all humanity.
I was born and raised forty-five years ago a female child in a Muslim country. My family was secular. I moved to the United States when I was nineteen. I am an American now. I received Baptism in the Catholic Church two years ago. I was born an artist, a painter.
Growing up, I considered myself a non-believer. I did not like religion. I could not stand studying religion and its history in school. It made me feel sick in my stomach. It was about wars. It was about crusades. Men used a “God” to justify invading countries, including the one I was born in, to steal. The history of religion was cruel, bloody, scary and anti-human.
I did not believe that there was a God. I did not believe that a God would cause such nightmares on Earth. It did not make sense to me. I did not understand why anyone would believe in a God of fear.
Before you read more about me and my family, I want you to know a few things. I love them. I was born and raised in a family that was victimized in a world condemned by a man-made curse known as original sin. I lived in a family and society that suffered from massive traumas, especially to women and children.
The country I was born in became Islamic over one thousand years ago, after an emperor figured he could use the religion card in the eastern parts of Earth, as the Christians used the religion card in the Western parts of the Earth to steal. The crusaders killed and tormented the people, burned libraries, forbid our native language and forced us to speak Arabic for centuries.
The nation was put in a coma for hundreds of years. Generations of people lived practically blindfolded. There was no past. The present was a nightmare and the future was in the hands of greedy men and whatever they pleased.
I was born in a family that lived in a country that was brutally exploited and oppressed by Monarchs for over 1,000 years. Women and children were the most victimized of all the population. The people lived many generations in fear, poverty, chaos and division. The name of the country I am from is not important. It is only one country in the Earth’s long history of oppressive and greedy rulers.
The monarch was just one of the greedy, cruel and blood thirsty dictators to surface in the history of humanity. In the country he took no chances with rebellion. He openly made us feel doomed to live in fear and terror. He used the same social methods, secret police style and psychological warfare as Hitler used in Nazi Germany. But he made the rest of the world believe that he was a popular ruler.
I was born in a family that struggled against all odds in the world we lived in. My parents did the best they could. My parents practically created miracles considering the conditions in which they were raised and the conditions in which they were forced to raise their children. I love my siblings and appreciate the good my parents instilled in their children in the world of nightmares in which we lived.
The dictator stole from the people. He sold national resources cheap, pocketed the majority of the profit and shared the rest with the small sect of society that supported his greedy cause. He also made the people consumers of foreign commodities. He became the fourteenth richest man on Earth while the majority of his citizens sank deeper into poverty. As time continued, he became more oppressive and openly cruel.
I was the youngest child in a family that lived generations in a world of nightmares. When I was a small child my siblings were in high school and college. They were exposed to the nightmare while I was still a child at home. My parents could not help the outside world from invading our family.
We grew up learning to fear at all times. We never knew who was a spy for the secret police. It could be your own mother. Families were divided and pitted against one another. Trust was a rare value. Everyone was supposed to fear everyone. To raise a healthy family in that society was hard, if not impossible.
The old generation, the parents, were demoralized. They tried to kick the tyrant out of the country in their youth and failed. It is common for youth to be more daring and to rebel against injustice.
Most forms of rebellion and political opposition was among the new generation in high schools and colleges. The new generation was a big threat to the tyrant’s power. He used his power to terrorize, to divide, to arrest, to torture, to imprison, and to put so much on the youths’ plate that they would have no time to think about rebelling.
The young were required to choose what they would do with the rest of our lives by the end of middle school. They were forced to choose their major of study in high school and college while in middle school. High school was just like being in college. They had an eight year old commitment from the day we entered high school.
I remember how hard high school was for my siblings. People said that it was harder to get through high school with good grades than it was to get through a master’s or a PhD program in first world countries. Sometimes, my siblings seemed to be like chickens with their heads cut off. They were anxious and worked their heads off to get good grades.
Perhaps you wonder how a bunch of adolescents and teenagers, supposed to be hormonally imbalanced and trying to find themselves coped with the situation. You have not heard half of it yet. They had a lot more to cope with in the world.
The secret police and the National Guard had a very obvious terrorizing and fear fostering presence in schools and colleges.Students would disappear. People knew they were arrested. Youths were arrested for owning banned books, or for speaking out against the dictator, or for being involved in underground movements. They were arrested if someone reported them falsely for personal reasons. It was a big mess.
Of course, from the time I remember, I was told to never say anything about the dictator or the government to anyone. My mom told me to not even think about them in my head.By the time I was even three-years-old I overheard quite a bit. I would hear my siblings, especially my oldest brother who went to a local college, talking about what the government did to the students.
My brother lived at home or visited almost every day while he was in college. I was very little, not even in kindergarten. My mom had me take naps in afternoon. Often I would lay there and pretend I was asleep, daydreaming.
My mom and brother thought I was asleep while they talked about things happening at my brother’s college. The National Guard was constantly invading, terrorizing, beating to death, raping, arresting and worse to ensure students would submit to the ruler.
One day my brother came home and told my mom that the National Guard invaded his college again and he was hit by a club. His watch was broken when he was struck. My mom was worried. My brother seemed traumatized. It seemed to me going to college was a nightmare.
I once heard that my sister’s husband, who was twenty years older than me and in college, was blacklisted. I was about five-years-old. I overheard my parents, my sister and her husband talking about how the secret police did things like arrest students, and sodomize them with hot eggs and broken glass bottles. Then they sent the students back to class so others would find out and be afraid. Imagine what I felt overhearing these talks. I told my mom I had heard. She told me to never repeat anything we talk about to anyone outside of the family.
I remember my sisters and brothers sometimes smuggled banned books home. The books they were smuggling were taught in high schools and colleges in the United States. They could get arrested, tortured, killed, raped and put in political prison for reading the books.
Though my siblings tried to hide it from me, I sometimes saw the books they smuggled. They were books like, War and Peace, by Tolstoy, or books about the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Any book that suggested democracy was completely banned.
When I was about eight-years-old, my big sister’s husband gave me a book to read. He put me in the bathroom and told me to read the book all the way through. He told me if I had questions he would answer them in the bathroom. The book was a banned children’s book. It was about a big fat fish and a little fish. The little fish was trying to not get eaten by the big fat fish. The big fat fish was big and fat because he had eaten all the fishes, even baby fishes. The big fat fish was mean, and he was greedy. The baby fish was very scared. That’s all. The tyrant banned the book. Go figure. He tolerated nothing and banned even children’s books.
Imagine a child being arrested for reading that book. The child might be kidnapped, tortured and raped every day, until he or she died in political prison. There was no court system or due process. Their families were not informed. Once you were picked up by the secret police and put in that prison you were practically dead.
The dictator wanted everyone to know how cruel he was, like Hitler did in Germany, to terrorize, to traumatize and to make people feel doomed and helpless. That’s how he was able to stay in power and to keep stealing.
Being a woman was all by itself scary. I knew about what was happening to women since I was three-years-old. Gender division was a big method the ruler used to create chaos and more traumas in families and the society.
Honor killing was acceptable. Women were killed by their own families for losing their virginity or even being accused of it. There was a place, like a ditch, where the dead bodies were found. Often, the family members or even strangers would splash acid on women’s faces to disfigure them for life. It was terrifying to be a female. I learned that since age three.
If a woman accused of dishonoring her family by losing her virginity survived, she would end up in the hands of a pimp who legally kept her a prisoner, as a prostitute. There was a part of the city where prostitutes lived. It was legal for men to go and have prostitutes there. It was in some ways like the sin city in Las Vegas. It was a city in our city where prostitution was legal. Prostitutes were runaways from honor killing. They could be as young as eleven and twelve. Drugs, crimes, rape and you name it happened there.
In our neighborhood, a girl I grew up with as a friend who lost her virginity ended up in the prostitution town. I remember before she ran away I asked her how she lost her virginity. She was afraid to tell. I think it was a relative or stranger rape case. She did not even tell me. She was afraid that it would get around and he would retaliate. The girl was abused by her father. She was sure he would kill her. She ran away and I found out she was in the prostitute’s city. There was no other place for a girl to go under the circumstances.
The situation was too close to home. It was very frightening. The fear of being raped, losing my virginity, and having to run away and end up in the prostitution town haunted me.On top of being a child raised in such an unhealthy and traumatic society, I was an unwanted child. My mother was in over her head with as many kids as she had. They were in high school and going to college. She felt it was not fair to have another baby into that nightmare world. And she was physically ill. She suffered from a heart condition.
I survived massive attacks and trauma to me while in the womb. My mother tried to abort me at home. In that country it was illegal to have an abortion. So for about four months she tried anything that would abort me. She tried so hard she could have fatally hurt herself. Please keep in mind she tried to abort me because she felt she could not give me a good life. My mother was not a selfish mother, or selfish anything. In some ways she was a saint. She would take the shirt off her back and give it to the needy. She had a huge heart. This taught me that a human cannot judge another human for their words and actions. That is why God said to us to forgive one another and to love.
Much to my mother’s surprise I was born healthy. But I looked like her abusive mother. My mother’s mother was the victim of massive trauma in a very anti-women society. She and my mother’s father did not get along. She divorced my grandfather. Being a single mother was nearly impossible. My grandmother remarried. But while pregnant, she found out that her new husband took another wife behind her back. She divorced him for taking another wife. By then, she had given birth to a baby boy. Because the law was anti-woman, the father took the baby from her while she was nursing him. The father had full custody of her boy and she did not see her son again until he was a young adult.
My mother was a small child at that point. Grandmother never finished grieving the loss of her boy. She never got passed the anger phase of grieving. Her life was a nightmare. She was posttraumatic and depressed. So my mother became the target of my grandmother’s anger and depression. My mother felt that her mother abused her. According to my mom, my grandmother had fits of depression and anger, and punished her for nothing.
Marriages were arranged when my grandmother and mother married. Girls as young as nine were given to men twenty years older. In the vast majority of cases the girl did not know the man she married. She had not ever seen the man. Only the family of the man would see the girl and tell the man about her looks. But he would be on top of her trying to have intercourse with her the night of the marriage. If that is not traumatic, what is?! If he saw it was possible to accuse the girl of not being a virgin prior to wedding, he would accuse her of it. If he got away with it, he could divorce her. The girl would be killed by her family, or chastised and chased out to become a prostitute.
Please note that physical punishment of children was normal in that society. Older siblings were considered authority figures. Parents and older siblings had the authority to physically punish children. It was considered the primary method of discipline.
My grandmother believed the world was not a good place for women. It did not take much to figure that out in that society. In her suffering as a woman she reached the point that she decided for my mother to not have any female children. She figured the child will not suffer if they are not born female. She was so serious about her decision. My mother once told me that when her first baby was born my grandmother was with her. When my grandmother saw that the baby was a girl, she slapped my mother in the face in anger. She figured, here is another female to experience the nightmare.
I was five-years-old when I overheard my parents talking about my mother’s attempt to abort me. I chose to talk with my mother about it. Even though I was very young, I understood how hard and painful life was for her and for everyone. I knew women suffered. I was a sharp kid. I overheard a lot and understood too much. I knew my mother’s life was so painful. I found out all that you read by the age of three.
When I told my mother I heard she wanted to abort me, she tried to explain the reason. I had already overheard the details. I put my arms around her to comfort her. She told me that she already had more girls than boys. She was physically too ill to have as many children. She had a chronic heart condition that caused her to suffer even more. To keep children safe in our society was nearly impossible. It took a perfect heart condition, and even with that, it was a battle. She tried to abort me to be fair to me.
After my mother was done explaining I felt so much empathy for her. I was raised in a world that caused us to know the nightmare we lived in from the time we could speak. It was nearly impossible for parents to hide the ugly world from their children. It was in our faces, from the moment we could speak. I heard everything as a child. There was no way for my parents to shelter me and keep me from knowing.
So I understood my mother’s feelings and attempts to abort me. I comforted her. I told her that she did what was best for us both. I told her I was not angry with her. I loved her. I did not want her to feel guilt. She suffered enough. I actually became more protective of her. I became very concerned with her health. I was worried for her fragile health all of my life. I empathize with her pain and suffering so much that I was a pro-choice activist who believed that a woman should have access to legal and safe abortion. I was active in that movement from about twenty to twenty-five years of age.
I saw my mother’s suffering every day, as a mother, a wife, and an oppressed woman in a world of chaos, danger, fear, anxiety and pain. Who would want to raise a family in that world? I thought of that as a small child. I understood my mother. She did the best she knew. She was just as much a victim as I was, caught in a messy whirlpool of our world. I put myself in her shoes as a small child. I realized how frightening and what a nightmare it could be to make it in that world.
My grandmother died when I was very small. I do not remember her. She and her mother never discussed my mother being often physically punished by her as a child. My mother felt my grandmother was cruel to her. She felt she was punished unfairly.
When I was old enough, my mother told me that she felt sorry for her mother knowing she was so badly victimized by the world. She knew her mother had suffered massive traumas. Her mother’s child was taken from her and she could not see him. She chose not to tell her mother that she felt she was abused by her.
My mother had a difficult time performing the role of a mother. She did not feel her mother was a good role model, considering the circumstances. She understood her mother’s position. But she did not feel she knew how to be a mother herself. At the same time, she had to survive a fragile heart condition.
Her way of protecting her children from her not being a good mother was to distance herself from her small children. She was comfortable relating to the children when they were teens and in college.
Please keep in mind that my mother had no access to anything or anyone to help her learn good parenting skills. In our society you gave birth and you did what you could against all odds, until your children were old enough and ready to leave home. My mother created a miracle considering the circumstances. She raised good people. She made sure her daughters gained control so they would not be abused by men like her mother. She made sure her daughters went to college and chose their own husbands.
But with me things were different. Mom had another problem with raising me. I was the only child who looked like her mother. She loved her mother. But she had never reconciled with her. She was afraid she would be not good for me at all. She was afraid of raising me. So she decided I would be better off with a nanny. She thought a nanny would do a better job. I had a nanny for the first two years of my life. Finally, my parents found out that the nanny abused me. She was fired.
I cried a lot. I was getting on my older siblings last nerves. They had to study. I became known as a crybaby. My siblings thought I was going to be a pain in the neck. They did not know about the nanny abusing me. You can say we all started on the wrong foot.
My father also had trouble knowing how to be a parent. His father died at a war when he was only eight-years-old. His mother never remarried. She was a single woman. She did all she could. And that was not much in a society like that.
From age eight my father felt he had to protect his mom and his sister. He had to become a man at age eight. He fell in the hands of men around him who emotionally and physically abused him. They took advantage of the fact that my father did not have a father to protect him. My grandmother’s hands were tied in most ways. She was a female single parent with nearly no rights.
I think the best my grandmother did for her children was to stay single. The chance that a stepfather would be good to stepchildren was nearly impossible in that society. In that society stepparents were known to be abusive.
My father was a workaholic. He became a great provider. That was all that he knew about fatherhood. He avoided being home knowing he did not know how to be a good father. He thought if he made a lot of money and gave us material goods he would be what he could. All he knew about parenting was to pull money out of his pocket to buy us off.
So my parents consciously put my older siblings in charge of me, not feeling able to do the job themselves. I had teenagers and adolescents for my mother and father. They had no idea how to be parental figures. And they were living in a country that terrorized them every day.
Being teens or adolescents was traumatic enough in that world. Just living in that society was enough to blow all your fuses at once. You know what it is like to be adolescents and teenagers. They were hormonal and forced to find themselves in a world of nightmares. My siblings had way too much on their plates to begin with. As a result they were on the edge quite often. They were irritable. They were busy with their own problems and with not much parental support, while my parents did their best to be good parents against all odds.
I lived in a house with rules that changed constantly. My teen and adolescent parents made and broke rules as they wished. They were stressed with being teen and adolescent parents. They lived in a world of fear, terror, massive oppression and chaos, literally, a nightmare. I became the black sheep, the odd ball and the scapegoat. Remember, we all started on the wrong foot from the start. I was a cry baby and on their last nerves for two years while they did not know the nanny was abusing me.
Being bad or good did not make any difference. The two were inconsistent. I was very often punished by teenage parental figures. I often did not know how to avoid being punished. It all depended on the mood of the parental figures. I felt lonely and helpless. More and more I discovered that the world outside of our house was literally a living hell, revolving around the needs of a greedy tyrant and his greedy supporters and friends that helped him stay in power. People who helped him steal to become the fourteenth richest man on Earth, while making the other richest in the world richer.
Even though my siblings were not good parents, I still loved them. I knew they did the best they could. I knew about their sufferings. I knew about everyone’s sufferings. I somehow had the ability to understand and to relate to the root cause of their problems that caused them to hurt me and to hurt themselves. It was a nightmare for everyone. They did what they could. They did not consciously intend to hurt me.
I lost my parental figures, who I loved of course, when they left home to go to college. It was as if I was losing moms and dads. I felt so abandoned. I felt most depressed. I had to grieve losing parents. But they were happy going to college. They did not care what I felt. They did not understand what I felt. I watched them leave home, leaving me like I never existed. They were typical teens excited about gaining independence. But it had a very massive emotional impact on me. It left me in never ending grief.
Looking back at my family and the conditions in our society, I can see that we all were abused, oppressed, terrified, traumatized, robbed and anxious. We all suffered. I cannot imagine how it was possible to raise a healthy family in that world. I lived in the world of fears.
I did not believe in God because he was anti-women, cruel, selfish, punitive and not loving. I was told that I had to “fear God.” He was a scary God. The fear factor in my life was too much. I wanted someone to save me from the cruel world. But nobody around me was safe enough themselves to be able to save me. Everyone in that country needed to be saved.
I refused to believe in God. A God that wanted a little four-year-old to live in fear of him was not my God.Although I lived in a Muslim country, I saw a movie about Jesus at age five. I ask you to please pay special attention to it as it will be one the most important ways you will understand my life and this book. The movie was made in the United States and translated to my native language. Keep in mind, my family was in most parts secular. I did not pay any attention to God and religions. I did not believe in them. They were not good and loving. They scared me.
I had a bunch of teens and adolescents for parents, who were leaving me to go to college. I was afraid of them, though I loved them. It was the norm in the society for the children to fear the adults and parental figures.
Everyone and everything was based on fear around me, at home and in society. I did not want to model myself after any of the older people around me. But I was five, the age when any child would need to choose a parental figure or someone as a role model.
After I watched the movie about Jesus, I literally went into a deep zone. I still see the little me only five-years-old, sitting in my hiding place deeply processing Jesus. I was touched so deeply inside me. I was so seriously connected to him somewhere inside me. I felt so much love for him. I had not met love before him. He was love.
Of course, I did not know Jesus as who he really was. I did not know him as a religious figure. I did not know him as he related to God. Jesus was not like others in religion. He did not want me to be afraid. I knew Jesus did not make me afraid. He made me feel safe and loved. I also identified with him for he suffered as I did. And he loved everyone. I had so much in common with him. He was ideal to me. I felt I knew him. I felt he was with me. I felt a bond with him. I wanted to be like him.
Jesus moved in to my subconscious mind. He became my role model. I had subconsciously chosen him for my role model. I remembered what he did in the movie. I remembered his talks about love and mercy. I remembered him being willing to be sacrificed for all humanity, like the saying, “one for all.” But I refused to mix him up with God. He was not the scary, selfish, cruel and mean God that scared a little girl. I did not associate him with God. I still did not believe in God. But I carried Jesus inside me subconsciously from that day on, until I saw him in my dream almost forty years later.
My mother used to say to me, “You live to help people.” It made me happy seeing others happy. I loved to make people laugh, even when I was a sad and small child. Being always a sad and heartbroken child, I vicariously lived through other’s happiness, joy and well-being.
As long as I remember I worried a lot. I worried for the homeless mother with her baby tied to her back that came to our door for food. I worried for the homeless animals. I remember I used to go to sleep next to my mother because I could not get the sufferings of others out of my mind. Those thoughts kept me up all night. I continued to ask my mother, “What is going to happen to the homeless lady and her baby?” and “What is going to happen to the homeless dogs and cats?” I kept asking her those kinds of questions. She kept saying, “They’ll be okay.” She finally went to sleep and I still did not know what was going to happen to the homeless people and animals.
I remember I had a lamb fur coat and matching hat. I was so in love with them. But I grew out of them. I still tried to wear them though the sleeves were up to my elbow and the hat would hardly sit on top of my head. My mother tried to talk me into not wearing them anymore. I refused. I was in love with the coat and hat. She suggested I keep them in the closet, to just keep them, that way I could go to them as I wanted. I thought to myself, “I would eventually do that,” as I kept trying to fit myself in them.
One freezing winter day, with about fifteen inches of snow that turned to ice on the ground, my mother was taking me somewhere with my father. I was about four, getting close to five-yearsold. My mom told me we were going to see the lady who helped my mother with household chores. My mother wanted to drop off some warm clothes for her and her little girl to wear.
The lady who helped my mother with household chores always brought her daughter. She was a year younger than me. She was very small. I knew they were poor. I used to take the little girl to the big room in our house decorated with expensive furniture for entertaining guests. I was not allowed to go and jump on the furniture there. I could do it in our living room sometimes. But I took the little girl to jump on the expensive furniture. I wanted her to be a special guest I entertained. I wanted to make her happy. She loved it. I loved her joy. So we both got a lot fun out of it. I am not sure if my mother ever found out about it. I think she eventually did. But knowing me and my feelings for people who were poor, she let me and the baby enjoy our special time together. My mother had a very big heart.
Anyway, that day, it was freezing cold. Fifteen inches of snow and ice covered the ground. We drove to the home of the lady who helped my mother with household chores. Of course, I had managed to force my body into the lamb fur coat and hat, loving it. When we got there, I found out the lady and her three-year-old daughter lived in an unfinished basement of a house they rented. The floor and walls were wet and frozen. It smelled very bad. They almost had nothing in the basement. A smelly fire worked with