Hidden Treasures, Secret Riches by Andrew White

Author:Andrew White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Destiny Image, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-12T19:46:58+00:00

Note

Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories and Prayers by Mother Teresa (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2010), 21.

9: The Story of Abu Yousef

I want to tell you the story of Abu Yousef. Abu Yousef was an old, frail Iraqi man in his eighties and one of the few people in my community who was completely blind. Abu Yousef has now graduated to glory, but during my time in Baghdad he was a treasured member of my community who I would visit and pray with every Wednesday. Abu Yousef lived in a very derelict and dangerous part of Baghdad called Jedidah; it was a dark, downtrodden area full of poverty. Every Saturday, the Mothers Union, who were a key part of our active prayer and ministry team, would go and visit old Abu Yousef and take food and supplies to him. While they were there, they would always pray for him and encourage him. At times, other Christians from the community would visit him and sit on the little wall in his back yard just to keep him company.

It was a tough life for old Abu Yousef, living alone in a dilapidated shack. Unacquainted with the luxuries of close family, media, and electricity, he was completely blind, penniless, and trapped in the filthiest, down-trodden part of a city ravaged by violence, domination, and war. Aspects of Abu Yousef’s narrative could easily be read as a “New Testament gospel writer’s account” of one of the many contemporary blind, deprived beggars in Rome-occupied Jerusalem. One day during one of the darkest periods of the terrible ISIS atrocities, when homes were being plundered and Bibles were being burned to ashes, Abu Yousef’s life changed forever.

Due to the shortage of Bibles, many people had never enjoyed the luxury of having a Bible to call their own and had already been forced to share. The ISIS burnings thus turned one tragedy into one that was even more bitter. The level of violation, sacrilege, blasphemy, and spiritual crime that took place on top of the physical torture and violence already surrounding us was too much for me to bear. I will never forget the pain and heartache that I felt as Bibles turned to ashes. My only way to gain spiritual and emotional relief was to fly over to Jerusalem to spend time alone and cry out to God for help. I describe in further detail the sudden divinely orchestrated unfolding of events that followed in my book The Glory Zone in the War Zone, but suffice to say here, I returned from Jerusalem to Baghdad completely overwhelmed and overjoyed by God’s goodness. God had been faithful. Right there in Jerusalem He provided an intelligent solution; it was a practical, all-inclusive solution that would simultaneously meet the needs of the blind, the illiterate, and the seeing. Abu Yousef’s life was about to be beautifully transformed until the day he said farewell to Baghdad and went to his mansion in Heaven.

Many, like Abu

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.