The Duty of Love Ghaith This story was sourced by R & M, Multiply workers in Europe who serve with StoryChannel (storychannel.tv), a media ministry to reach Berber-speaking people groups across North Africa (multiply.net/storychannel).
My name is Ghaith and I’m from Tunisia, North Africa. When I graduated from high school, I went to university, and it was a new beginning for me. On our campus, there were a lot of concerts at the start of the year, with a lot of foreign bands singing and dancing. For young university students, it was wonderful and exciting. One of the bands was from North America and, although we didn’t realize it at first, they were singing songs of worship to Jesus. We didn’t mind because we just liked the melodies. When the concert ended, we met with one of the band members. His name was Nate. We discussed a lot of issues with him about the differences between our cultures, our countries, and our religions. Afterward, we exchanged contact information and we kept in touch, even after Nate returned to North America. My email conversations with Nate often came back to the differences between Christianity and Islam. I had always respected other religions like Judaism and Christianity, but I knew almost nothing about them. I believed that there was something good in them, something from God, but I had also heard that they had been corrupted over time. I wondered how that had happened, and even why God would allow it.
I never had the opportunity to meet a Jew or a Christian, so that I could talk about these things. Until I met Nate.
However, I never had the opportunity to meet a Jew or a Christian, so that I could talk about these things. Until I met Nate.
Nate showed me passages from the Bible that I had never seen or heard. They described a religion that was so different to what I had experienced in Islam. In our traditions, in order to communicate with God, you had to clean your hands, wash your face and your feet, which wasn’t really something spiritual. You needed to repeat these same movements, the same rituals, bowing down and reciting prayers from the Qur’an. But it didn’t feel like a relationship with God, at least not an intimate one. From Nate, I learned that Christianity was different, very different from Islam. With Christianity, there is a spiritual relationship with God. It is not about cleaning
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