She feared even hearing Arabic until she heard it sung in a chapel

Anastasia Ohkrimenko grew up knowing the terror of Palestinian attacks in a small Jewish settlement on the West Bank.

“The thing that scared me the most was the Arab language when I heard it,” she says on a One For Israel video. “It reminded me of shootings and rocks flying and people I knew who got killed.”

But then she was led by Isaiah 53 to enroll in the One For Israel Bible College. On her first day in Chapel, they played a worship song to Yeshua — in Arabic.

“Every note that they played took off layers and layers of fear, hate, pain, war, everything that was just choking me,” she says. “Every word that they said in that same language — that terrified me to death a few years before — sounded like the most beautiful thing in the world to me.

“And that is the power of the Gospel. It has the power to clean and heal and make us new again.”

Anastasia Ohkrimenko (also spelled Ohrimenco) was born into a Jewish immigrant family from Moscow in the milieu of conflict on the West Bank, the area of longstanding dispute between Palestinians and Jews, which contains many Israeli settlements.

As a kindergartner, Anastasia had no idea about the enduring conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, who still claim the Holy Land is theirs from before the foundation of modern Israel in 1948.

All she knew was that at any moment, an angry Arab might kill her, her family or her friends. The Jews would repeat often: “The Arabs are the enemy.”

Unlike some of her friends, she wasn’t attacked. As she became a teenager, she noted a dissonance between the loving God of the Bible and the description by the rabbis of a vengeful sovereign who would inflict punishment if you violated Sabbath. Read the rest: Anastasia Ohkrimenko One For Israel

Good Sam got blessed 3 years later by the very person he helped

After dropping his family off at church, Chris Wright circled back to pick up a lady walking down the side of the road with a gas can that he had seen on his way to Sunday morning service.

“She was down on her luck,” Chris said on the Today Show. “She had only $ 5 in a purse and was worried about feeding her child. I filled her gas can and drove the woman back to her car. As I started to leave, I felt a nudge to give her what I had in my wallet $40.”

The act of kindness toward TunDe Hector came at her neediest moment, and tears welled up in her eyes.

Three years later, Chris’s mom suffered a life-threatening disease and was hospitalized. After days, she was released but needed a nurse’s aide to monitor her at home.

The nurse’s aide turned out to be the same woman he helped at the side of the road – TunDe. At first, Chris didn’t recognize her and TunDe didn’t recognize Chris because the day he popped by he was wearing sweatpants and a cap on backwards.

But they did get to talking, and TunDe found out that Chris attended Cornerstone Church in Athens, Georgia. That’s when she brightened and recounted the story of how “a young man” from that church had performed an act of kindness to her three years earlier.

“My jaw dropped,” Chris says.” I couldn’t believe it. I saw myself three years earlier being tugged to help a stranger.” Read the rest: What it means to be Christian?

She called it her ‘revenge body’

Vivian Herrera worked out intensely. She wanted her ex to feel sorry for cheating on her. She called the results her “revenge body.”

She uploaded 10,000 sexy shots to Instagram, attended raves and did drugs every other weekend when her ex had custody of their baby. She also fought with him every chance she could.

Vivian didn’t really know God through her church upbringing. By 18, she picked up on the “law of attraction,” the New Age idea that positive thoughts bring positive results, and she was making good money as a saleswoman at LA Fitness in La Habra, CA.

“I was attracting all this stuff, but I was still empty,” she says on her Faith with Vivian channel.

As she grew more self-centered in the quest for money and adulation from boys, she lost all her friends from high school. “All I cared about was money and working out,” she admits. “They wanted nothing to do with me because I was so selfish.”

She fell in love, moved in with her boyfriend and had a child by him, but when he cheated on her, she reacted with volcanic anger.

“I got so mad guys. I went to his job, and I keyed his car,” she admits. “I threw all his stuff. I cursed him. I told him he deserves to go to hell.”

The purpose of her life was to make him regret his infidelity. She trained hard to get a sexy body for a bikini competition that would make him eat his heart out.

“I was getting my revenge body,” she says.

In her headlong plunge into sin she slept around, did drugs, and traveled to Las Vegas as often as possible to party. Instead of worrying about her baby daughter, she danced the night away at raves whenever her ex had their daughter.

“I was literally doing anything to numb the pain,” she says. “Living for money, weed, alcohol partying, concerts, it was pretty empty. My life really had no meaning at this point. I was literally just trying to forget the pain that I was in. I knew what I was doing was wrong.”

She had started going to church, but instead of “leaning in” on God in her time of crisis, she walked away from Him.

The rampage was unstoppable, until Covid struck. Read the rest: Covid saved reckless girl hellbent on revenge.

No family, begging on a street corner, a pickpocket found Jesus in India

Sayeed Badshah doesn’t know his birthday, his mother’s name, his father’s name or where he was born.

The last thing he remembers, when he was 3, his mother tried to run away, and the alcoholic father caught them in their flight and beat his mother to death. His two older sisters took him to Mumbai, where he was separated from them.

An Indian constable brought him to an orphanage, where he was abused both physically and sexually until age 7.

“At the age when children are supposed to play with their toys, I went through things that I can’t even describe,” Sayeed says on a Your Living Manna video. “That brought a lot of hatred in my life.”

He ran away and asked for a job everywhere. Nobody took him seriously, until he got a washer job. When he got fired from that, he resorted to begging at stop lights and in the trains. With his only T-shirt, he would sweep the inside of the passenger train and then pass through the crowd asking for a handout.

“That became my life,” he says. “Many a time I would not get even one single meal all day long. I used to wait outside the restaurant for people to throw away their food. I used to fight with dogs and grab food from their mouths.”

Baths were twice a year. He didn’t have a change of clothes.

“My body used to smell,” he says. “Nobody would come close to me.”

Born a Muslim, he went to the mosque and prayed “with all my heart thinking that Allah would give me love, that Allah would save me,” he says. “But I was wrong. Allah did not save me.”

He tried the Hindu temple and prayed. Likewise, no one answered.

A friend said that anything you believe in is god. So he erected a small temple to a stone next to the traffic light where he begged.

“I began to worship that stone every day and put flowers and everything on that stone,” he says. “I was thinking something would happen, but nothing happened. So I kicked the stone and said, ‘There is no god.’” Read Sayeed Badshah, pickpocket from India comes to Christ

Founder of Lexit found by Jesus

Backslidden Jesse Holguin was going to avenge the shooting of his cousin, but as he was kicking down the murderer’s door, the man fired at him from a side window.

“I got shot; I didn’t know I was,” Jesse says on a Prager U. video. “I didn’t hear the gunshot and I didn’t feel it or nothing. I just I was on the floor, and he was trying to shoot me some more and I was trying to pull myself with my arms.”

He fell into gangs because “every single member in my family, every single male was a gang member,” he says.

From a young age, Jesse was involved in shootings.

“As other kids wanted to maybe grow up to be an athlete or wanted to be a movie star or something like that, my goal my whole life since I can remember I was wanting to be a gang member,” Jesse says.

Every weekend, he, his brothers and his homies were getting shot at.

“My family had a good reputation around the neighborhood I was in and all that,” Jesse relates. “I tried to earn my own respect.”

It wasn’t long before he wound up in Youth Authority jail, “our worst nightmare.”

“My first night, I go in the shower and some guy runs in the shower with me with a shank (a knife),” he says. “I’m in the shower a little kid naked. He’s gonna stab me in the shower, and I was scared. But I told him, ‘What? Go ahead, stab me. What’s up? I ain’t scared. What’s up?’”

The front of fearlessness worked. The threatening kid backed down.

“That was just my first day,” he says. “They called it gladiator school.”

Jesse was released from the Youth Authority to a hero’s homecoming. In thug life, serving time is like earning your stripes in the military. Upon release, he was named leader of the entire gang.

“I ended up achieving the greatest that you could hope for in that lifestyle,” Jesse says. “I ended up being the leader of my gang and my gang was a big, powerful respected gang. I had respect. I had women, I had everything. But I still wasn’t happy.”

In addition to being the leader of the gang, Jesse also worked a job. His boss happened to be a Christian and would talk constantly about Jesus.

“I never heard it the way he was sharing it with me,” Jesse says. “So he was sharing me telling him about Jesus and things like that, and I told him, ‘You know what? That sounds good. Maybe one day, if I ever get married and stuff like that, maybe maybe I’ll go to church.’”

But, he added, “I don’t even think I could be forgiven.” Read the rest: Jesse Holguin, founder of Lexit, Christian.