This is Lily Freeman’s testimony, a Muslim who had never heard of the Holy Spirit, but converted to Christianity after experiencing personal and spiritual trials.

My name is Lily Freeman and I would like to share with you part of my journey with the Lord Jesus Christ. It wasn’t always easy, but along this continuous journey, I’ve received great blessings.

I was born into a Muslim family in Australia. At 9 years old, my family decided to return to Syria. Their plan was to work hard, save some money and go back to Syria, so that we could grow up in the Islamic culture. They didn’t want me and my brothers to be divided between both cultures.

As you can imagine, growing up in Syria was very difficult. It felt like I had traveled back in time. English was my first language – I spoke a little Arabic, but not enough to put me on the same grade level as everyone else in my class. To make things worse, the teachers were really mean. Power and authority were the only things they worried about teaching and didn’t care whether we learned the subjects or not.

Their priority was to teach us who our enemy was. They taught us to hate him and prepared us to fight for our country’s rights as adults. From a very young age, they planted that seed in our hearts. And so, I grew up hating the Jews for everything they “had done” against my people.

I faced many struggles as a child; my parents worked all the time and left me with all of the household responsibilities. I cooked, took care of my brothers and cleaned the house. I noticed how my parents fought all the time. They blamed me for everything that went wrong. I never felt loved by them.

I began hating myself so much, that one day, I tried committing suicide. I had no desire to continue living under those circumstances. Thank God, I failed. After that, I was too scared to ever try again.

I also questioned my faith a lot. I was scolded many times for asking difficult questions, to which they only had one answer: “That’s the way things are and you’ll just have to accept it.”

It was very difficult for me to adapt to a culture where women didn’t have any rights and were treated without respect. For them, a woman’s salvation depends on her husband, it doesn’t matter if he’s bad – she must obey him. Even if he tells her to do something wrong, she must do it, because she’ll only be saved if she obeys her husband all the time.

I was afraid of God and wondered why he didn’t like women. It was forbidden to marry a man who didn’t belong to the same branch of Islam. But men could get married to any girl because she would have to convert to Islam once they were married. There were many times that I wished I had been born a man because that way my opinion would be respected.

My father would often beat me. I wanted to run away but had nowhere to go. I felt trapped. Many nights, I would lie in bed crying for hours, feeling hopeless. My dream was to be independent one day; I wanted live on my own and get a job to be able to support myself. But that dream would be impossible to achieve in that country because women weren’t allowed to be independent. My father always said that women were like a bird without wings. They’re unable to survive on their own.

* The pictures were blurred to protect the author’s identity