Page 3 - MY GREAT LOVE FOR JESUS LED ME TO TROUTH

or so it seemed to me, saying, "If You are really so powerful and can do whatever You like, then make
me fly when I jump from this wall. Otherwise, I will not believe that You are so powerful because You
could not save Jesus from the cross either." Fortunately, the wall was not so high and I fell to the
ground. With every attempt to fly I became more and more convinced that God was not so powerful
after all. A childish analysis indeed!
When I started high school, my parents allowed me to work with a photographer, a man whom I
accompanied to many places. It turned out that he was also a very famous fortuneteller. Wherever
we went, many of his female clients asked him about events that would happen in their future. For
this task he used to smoke brown tobacco, and as it was being consumed and the ashes fell, he would
"reveal" information to his clients.I also learned that he used to hypnotize people in order to learn
hidden things about their lives and would then respond to their queries.
All of these experiences were stored in my subconscious at a very early age. During this period, my
parents were attending a center that specialized in parapsychology, a field of study concerned with
the investigation of paranormal and psychic phenomena. I accompanied them several times to see
what was happening, and it was in this center that I learned about the concepts of meditation, spirits,
possession and what I thought was dead people speaking to the living.[2] Here I learned to pray twice
daily at a small altar that my father had built with great care and dedication. At one of the gatherings
I attended, the leader of the session prepared a talisman for me, which he said would protect me, so
I took it with me wherever I went.
Meanwhile, I continued to think about the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. At the time, my father had a
book that he read frequently. It was entitled The Life of Jesus Dictated by the Lord Himself. He once
told me that according to this book, Jesus had traveled to places away from Jerusalem, which made
me a little optimistic about finding an answer to my question regarding his crucifixion.
When I graduated from high school, I was awarded a scholarship to study engineering in the USA, which I
happily accepted. However, before traveling in 1977, I had a bad experience that negatively affected my belief
in Christianity. I saw two Christian men helping another man who was undergoing an epileptic seizure on the
street. After that, they searched his wallet and stole some of his money.[3] It is true that individual acts cannot
be considered a criterion whereby to determine whether or not a religion is true and that these men do not truly
represent that type of the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) who are honest and trustworthy,[4] but this
incident affected me deeply. Perhaps this event might seem insignificant to many people, but I had seen my
father punish my brother severely when he once brought home the equivalent of twenty-five cents he had
found on the street and failed to provide him with a satisfactory explanation as to where he had brought it.

[1]"Allah" is the same word that Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use for God. It is a unique word
grammatically, since it does not have a plural form or a gender (i.e., masculine or feminine), which is
consistent with the Islamic concept of God. Allah, who is worshipped by Muslims and who commands