Ma Ying – Hope Found in Jesus
When Ma Ying’s six-year-old daughter came home from school one day saying she believed in Jesus, the reaction she received was of dismissal. “Who? What? No. We’re Hui. We’re Muslim,” she told her daughter. That was the first time she heard Jesus’ name. And thankfully, it wouldn’t be the last.
Since Ma Ying is Hui and her first child was a girl, she was permitted to have another child. When he was in his late teens, he was killed in a gun accident while training for an event for the Olympics. “I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t want to live anymore,” Ma Ying recalls, tears growing in the corners of her eyes.
For the second time in her life, she heard the name of Jesus as her coworker shared with her about finding hope in Christ. Through tragedy, Ma Ying would come to believe and trust in the One True God. “He didn’t remove all my sadness. But He gave me reason to live, to hope, and that gave me peace.”
Her daughter, who years earlier first spoke the name of Jesus to her mother, is now a believer because of her mother’s testimony. Ma Ying is now surrounded by a family of believers. She attends one of the few known Hui churches in China, alongside her mother, daughter, and son-in-law. She continues to live among her fellow Hui people, showing an uncharacteristic boldness in proclaiming the Truth among them.
Just four floors above her lives the local Imam. She visits him often and has already given him a Bible. She tells him he needs to believe what is in it, instead of what is in the Koran. Praise the Lord for her boldness! He respectfully tells her that she is sharing with the wrong person and that she should attend prayers at the mosque instead of her church.
“I feel sorry for my neighbors. They go to the mosque to recite prayers, but they don’t know what they are saying. They don’t know what is being read to them. They can’t understand. They don’t even know what they believe.”
Pray for protection for Ma Ying as she continues to boldly proclaim the Gospel among the Hui. Pray that her testimony will continue to bring light to the darkness she lives among and that many around her will come to faith in Christ.