“I gathered the pills in my hands” – a missionary moment

Part one of three:

I greet you all in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

I consider it a great benefit to share with you how I met the Lord.

I had an incurable heartache according to the Bible (Jeremiah 17:9). I was only four years old when I lost my mother and I felt a sense of emptiness in my life. I got sick as a result and was hospitalized. The doctor then said that I had a heart problem and there was nothing they could do except to send me home.  My grandmother, who raised me, told me this when I was older.

Even many years later, I always felt an emptiness inside me. My father remarried, and when he was away because of work, my stepmother did not treat me the same way as she treated her real children. Eventually I had to stop studying and started working to support myself. I did what the young people did, thinking that would fill the void in me, but I realized that it was a hole that couldn’t be filled, that I didn’t have enough love.

I started to be violent and liked to play games. One of my real pleasures was to take revenge on my half-siblings. Unfortunately, it didn’t fill the void inside me. As a result of my violence, I was accused by people and ended up in prison. The reason I was born on earth was even more confusing to me after all this. After completing my sentence, I returned to the community but my dad didn’t allow me to stay with him anymore.

As a result of all this, the people around me became distant from me. Fortunately my grandmother was still there and kept praying for me and always encouraging me that God exists and loves me. However, the strength within me to have faith in those things diminished over the years.

One day, in the small house where I lived, around 10 o’clock in the morning, I was desperate and thought that there was no reason for me to live anymore on this earth. There were several medicines left in the box that I used for my treatment for a childhood illness at home. I closed all the doors and took a pen to write a farewell letter to my grandmother and father. I also wrote my girlfriend’s name on it, whom I had loved, but who had also left me. I added writing with toothpaste on a small mirror on the wall for my younger siblings. I gathered the pills in my hands, intending to swallow them all at once.

When I was ready to take the pills, I accidentally bumped the small radio on the table that had run out of batteries and did not work for almost a week because there was no way to buy new batteries. It suddenly turned on, and there was a song that seemed to tell me directly what to do: “You are confused and here you are calling death. Receive Jesus Christ for you, because he is life. There is nothing to hope for in this life, accept him as your Lord and Savior.”

My knees began to tremble and my tears fell. I knelt on the ground and prayed to God.  From then on, I drew closer to my grandmother. She led me to receive the Lord, and I felt blessed. I felt that the deep emptiness inside me was filled.

– Testimony from Tsimavandy Daniel, Malagasy Missionary

Representative photo from AIM Stories