Episode Summary: 

Have you ever prayed fervently for something for years, or even decades and began to doubt that God would answer your prayers? My guest on today’s episode is Bunny Yekzaman who prayed for over 20 years for her Muslim husband to receive God’s gift of salvation. Her journey took a powerful turn when she learned to pray in faith and release control to God’s timing. Thought it was a painful time in her life, Bunny shares how God redeemed that pain, bringing beautiful sacred scars in place of her painful wounds. 

Quotables from the episode:

• Sometimes we create wounds ourselves and we don’t even realize we are doing it.
• I was raised to not marry an unbeliever. I was told “don’t do this” or “don’t do that” but there was really no education as to why. But there are important principles in God’s word about why we shouldn’t be unequally yoked—it’s an element of protection that God puts around us if we will just obey his word.
• Sometimes we don’t really mean to disobey Him, but sometimes we just really don’t understand that that protection is coming from God.
• I knew not to marry an unbeliever, but I didn’t understand why. Was that really from God, or was that just another rule to follow?
• When I got into college, I met a man who was totally on the other side of the world from me. He was raised Muslim, raised in Iran, came here to go to school, denounced his beliefs, accepted the communist teaching and was teaching that in an undergraduate class at the college I attended. When they told me to stay away from him, it just made me want to run toward him.
• When I realized that I was a believer and he was an unbeliever, I began to think that maybe this was supposed to be my goal: to change this man so I spent 8 years trying to change him. We knew each other for eight months and then got married. Nobody said it would work, and it almost didn’t because I did step into a relationship unequally yoked.
• We think love is going to cure everything, but there is not true love where there isn’t a relationship with Christ.
• So maybe I had this deep abiding love for Jesus and for my husband, but my husband couldn’t understand that because he didn’t know the love of Christ.
• I went for years, trying to prove to him who Christ was and that he needed to know Jesus. I raised our children in the church, and it became a real battle because he began to believe that he was in competition with God.
• I realized that I had stepped outside of God’s will when I married him. I prayed and prayed for his salvation, and I learned how to love my husband with the love of Christ and not expect anything in return.
• He was a great husband and a great father in all other aspects, but it angered him that the children and I were praying for him and that I could have this confidence that when I died, I would go to heaven.
• In the Muslim faith there was an evidence of works in everything they did, so even though he denounced his faith, he couldn’t understand how the gift of eternal life was based on God’s grace.
• It took about 20 years of marriage before I really started seeing change. My children were on a mission trip, and I was at home, on my knees again praying for God to save my husband when I sensed a gentle voice in my spirit saying, “Bunny, don’t ask me again.” The Bible talks about being persistent in prayer, so I didn’t understand what God meant.
• There are three reasons why we often continue to plead with God to answer our prayers: 1) impatience, 2) wanting to be in control, and 3) not believing God for his answer.
• God was showing me that I was asking him for my husband’s salvation, but I wasn’t asking in faith—I was asking in doubt.
• We can have confidence when we pray. There is no shred of doubt that when we ask God according to his will, it will be done. But that means we have to know what his will is.
• If I’m praying for someone’s salvation, that’s God’s will. And if I believe that’s God’s will, and it is, then I can have a confident assurance that God is going to do what he said he is going to do. I can hold onto that promise and it changes the way I pray!
• After that, I stopped praying asking God to save my husband, and began praying, “Thank you God for saving my husband.” I’m thanking God for what he said he would do.
• He wants us to have faith. Faith isn’t believing after we see it, it’s believing before we see it.
• When I realized God’s word is true, I wasn’t trusting in me, I was trusting Him.
• Ultimately, my husband gave his life to Christ, he surrendered to the ministry, went to seminary, and has been the pastor at the nursing home where I work for three years now.
• Get out of God’s way. Get on your knees and thank God in advance for whatever it is you’re praying for, and trust him.
• Don’t pray with an agend