I did not expect much opposition from my family and, indeed, experienced none. Things were going great until 1996 when Jesus touched my wife Anu and my sister Preethy. I tried to persuade Anu that Christianity was all a deception caused by errors in the translation of the Bible, but she claimed to have personally met and been touched by Jesus. She kept on talking about the Holy Spirit, and because I did not know Him then, the concept of Jesus and his Holy Spirit totally eluded me. When she explained the deliverance session at a Christian retreat she had gone for, I thought that she was involved in some sort of black magic. I stopped her from attending fellowship meetings after that.

By all accounts, things were going well for me at that point in my life: I had a well paying job, a good apartment, and was moving up in life. However, I was not very thrilled about this strange desolation and gloom that I had started feeling deep within me. The contentment I'd once felt at the time I had become a Muslim had turned into frustration, and I was seeing through the people whom I once thought were honest and guileless. Even while praying, I could not reach out to Allah as I thought I should be able to do by now. I reasoned it to be so because of the pork I ate in the pizza I had the night before or because of the beer I'd been drinking occasionally during several momentary lapses of faith. Still, this emptiness that God was supposed to fill could no longer be ignored. The peace I once felt when reading the Quran somehow had dissipated. It bothered me that I could not honestly say that I had become a better person after becoming a Muslim. Instead, there were new, deeper and darker prejudices that seem to consume me.

Things went from bad to worse: My step-father ran off with his then 22-year old secretary and our money, my step-brother was killed in a motorcycle accident, and I was getting fed up with a great many things. But, I still believed that Allah would get me through, and I did not even dare to look at Islam and what it was really doing to my life objectively.

When my mother asked me to attend a Christian retreat in 1997, I refused because I considered Christians to be idol worshippers. It was only when she consorted to emotional blackmail that I attended just to make her happy.

I met Pastor Rajesh of the Joshua Generation at this retreat. He sat with me for counselling because I refused to believe in what was being preached. He explained that the Bible says in Romans 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus Is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. But I could not say anything of the sort because such a confession contradicted what the Quran said about who God is and who Jesus was.

According to Islam, Jesus is a prophet in line with many other prophets, "no more than a mortal whom Allah favored and made an example to the Israelites" (Sura 43:59). The only thing that the Quran agreed with is the virgin birth and Jesus being a sinless and miracle performing man. However, it denies exclusive salvation through faith in Christ. Claiming he did not die and rise again, the Quran says Jesus was taken to heaven alive because God does not have true prophets killed.

What Islam excludes and denies is the very purpose that Jesus came for, which is to die for the sins of the whole world.

But back then at the retreat, I earnestly believed that the Quran was God's answer to all the mistakes made in the interpretations and translations of the Bible, and therefore the only true word of God. According to it, Jesus was neither slain nor crucified, but that Allah made it appear to be so: "... it appeared unto them, and Lo’! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But Allah took him up to himself" (Surat al Nisa 4:157-158). I did not want to end up in hell for denying the authenticity of the Quran and denying that Allah was God by assigning Lordship to Jesus.

I asked Pastor Rajesh if he really believed in all that he preaches, and he said that he did. For reasons unknown to me, I was somehow convinced that he was not lying, but it did not matter, because I thought his beliefs were misguided and therefore wrong.

Then I thought of the emptiness gnawing inside of me, and from the depth of my heart I cried out to God to help me and to show me the truth. I wanted to believe in a loving God, and from childhood I knew that the God who created me was gentle and loving. I knew He could fix broken chords in my life, I knew He could take away the darkness and the despair, and I knew that He alone could give me true peace that lasts. I do not know how I knew all this, but this was part of the concept I had of who God should be.

Now, here in front of me was Rajesh telling me that God was all that and much more, but that all this could only be available to me through Jesus Christ. It was too good to be true, except for the Jesus bit.

At the risk of going to hell, I thought to myself, "my creator should be able to understand the intentions of my heart, and know that I only want to know Him and serve Him, and be accepted and be loved by Him. So He should be able to understand if I make a mistake now." So with this in mind, I agreed to take a chance and believe and say that Jesus is Lord.

However, the rest of the retreat did not go well for me. I felt deeply disturbed and to make things worse, when I asked the Holy Spirit to fill me later during the retreat, all I felt was the urgent need to vomit. I felt nothing apart from that. It was very disappointing. I began to doubt again and felt condemned for denying Islam. I thought that by the end of the retreat, God would make himself known to confirm if I had made the correct decision by believing Jesus. The retreat was over and that did not happen, so I decided that I was wrong to think that Jesus was anything more than a prophet like Moses was.