‘What shall I do, Lord?’ I asked.
‘Get up,’ the Lord said, ‘and go into Damascus. There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do.’
My companions led me by the hand into Damascus because the brilliance of the light had blinded me. A man named Ananias came to see me. He was a devout observer of the law and highly respected by all the Jews living there. He stood beside me and said, ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight!’
And at that very moment, I was able to see him.
Then he said: ‘The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth’.

Acts 22:10-14

Do you have an Ananias in your life? At times God brings people into our lives that bring about a transformation that lasts forever. These people we meet give us sight to look to Jesus, they point us to what God wants us to do, and teach us how to grow spiritually and draw closer to the Lord.

In my life, I have had several Ananias, one of whom was my pastor Rafi Shahverdyan.

I grew up in a strongly atheistic family, and I thought that religion and believing in God was for uneducated people. As a ‘smart’ and ‘clever’ person I would never think of such nonsense things. But the Lord opened my eyes to his grace after graduating from Medical University and I became a Christian.

However, I had a lot of confusion and conflicts in my mind. I was ultimately ‘blind’ and didn’t know what to do or where to go. It was then that I met Pastor Rafi who took care of me and gave me a vision of using my medical skills for the Kingdom of God.

Pastor Rafi (pictured centre) was a close friend of Dr Jany Haddad who once asked him if he knew anyone who could assist him during surgeries in Armenia. He organised a meeting with several medics from our church, and this was the first time that I was introduced to Dr Jany Haddad (pictured left).

This meeting was a life changing encounter. I was inspired by Dr Jany’s vision and with the encouragement of Pastor Rafi we started a group of Christian doctors (with only three doctors initially) which became the Armenian Christian Medical Association (ACMA). Within a year more than 50 people who had joined the association!

Pastor Rafi, who was not an ACMA member, was incredible in supporting the association from the very first meeting. He connected us to other doctors, advertised ACMA, prayed for ACMA missions and conferences, preached at ACMA annual conferences and meetings, and counselled ACMA members. One of his main messages to Christian doctors was to demonstrate the Father’s love to their patients, treating them with compassion in a way that other doctors cannot.

He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3

Rafi was one of the few leaders who reminded ACMA members of the danger of burn out due to their medical workloads. He taught that the best place to go for the Holy Spirit’s refreshment was at the feet of Jesus Christ. I learned from him that inner healing is essential and that without inner harmony you cannot work efficiently and serve God.

During ACMA conferences, Rafi could spend several hours praying for every person there and listening to their stories and needs. His arms were always open to hug and comfort the broken ones.

In Armenia there is a national unforgiveness which is rooted in historical persecution with Turkey. As a grandchild of a genocide survivor, I too struggled with this. Pastor Rafi however, was a Christian that looked beyond nationalities. He looked at every nation with the eyes of the Lord and had a heart for them. He organised several reconciliation conferences inviting Turkish Christians, and he went to Turkey several times and sent several missionaries from his church to Turkey.

Pastor Rafi was trying to break the wall that had built up between these two nations since 1915, and was encouraging us as Armenians to forgive and love our neighbours. After one particular trip to Turkey he wrote a beautiful book, Armenian Wine and Turkish Bread – A Real-Life Journey of Reconciliation.

Because of Pastor Rafi, I started to look at the country of Turkey and its people with a different lens, and began to think about starting a Christian Medical group in Turkey. I shared my vision with Pastor Rafi who was delighted to hear of my plans and helped connect me to his Turkish contacts. This was the journey of starting a Christian medical group in Turkey.

Through Pastor Rafi, I was also introduced to Alice, an Iranian dentist, who is now leading a group of Iranian medics.

Pastor Rafi was a person with whom I could share my successes, difficulties and challenges and receive his godly advice and prayers. Our meetings always ended with gifts which were usually books that had either been written by him or had been a blessing to him.

The last book he gave us, in November 2022, was Wipe My Tears, a message of healing to comfort people who grieve. It was a collection of testimonies from people that he had met during his years of ministry. They were people who had experienced much brokenness but had also found healing and restoration in Christ. Their stories were a motivation to believers to help those who are grieving find comfort.

Pastor Rafi had a wonderful family. He was married to the lovely Janet and they had three beautiful daughters and five grandchildren. He was a beloved husband, father and grandfather and by just looking at his family you could already learn a lot.

I am very grateful to God for the Ananias and Loving Fathers I have met on my life’s journey. Because of them I am a completely different person.

Today my two spiritual Fathers are rejoicing in eternal life with our Lord. They leave us with beautiful memories and are a testimony of how to be a Loving Father to others before we join them there.

It is my prayer that everyone in ICMDA can be an ‘Ananias’ for someone and finds one for themselves. Amen.

Dr Kristina Alikhanyan is the ICMDA Regional Representative for Caucasus, Eurasia

I think back to clinic visits over the years with patients living with Trisomy 21, whose visits I would eagerly anticipate, knowing that I would get a joyful hug and loving greeting as I walked into the exam room which would keep me smiling throughout a busy day. 

But closer to home, I had the tremendous blessing – and I use the word ‘tremendous’ advisedly in its most comprehensive definition, meaning not only ‘greatness or excellence’ but also the broader sense of ‘arousing awe and trembling’ – of having a younger brother who taught and inspired me from my earliest memories, as he overcame great physical challenges. I share part of his story as an example of how God instructs us through the lives of those who overcome.

My younger brother, Stephen Glenn Teusink, died a few days ago in his 66th year, having lived victoriously in the face of mobility challenges from severe cerebral palsy, initially acquired when he was three months old from encephalitis complicating chicken pox. Decades later it was exacerbated by being stabbed in the neck with resulting spinal cord damage during a robbery in his apartment, not long after starting to live independently as a young adult.

Steve’s vibrant Christian faith, fierce independence, enthusiasm, ready smile and laughter and what the French call ‘la joie de vivre’ were a blessing to all who knew him, particularly my sister and myself who grew up with him and assumed our family was typical. Steve was my primary motivation for pursuing a medical career. His way of tackling life head on was an inspiration to all who were privileged to know him, including those of us who knew him best. 

After graduation from secondary school, Steve attended college and worked in data entry for the City of Seattle. He was the first person with his severe degree of spastic quadriplegia and significant speech difficulties (he used a typing pad with voice synthesizer to communicate) to serve on a jury (twice) and he was active in his church. When the sanctuary of the church he attended was renovated, Steve served as a consultant representing church members in wheelchairs. 

He was asked where the wheelchairs should be located during worship: in the back near the entrance doors for ease of access, or in the front indicating a place of honor where everybody could see them? He responded, slowly typing one letter at a time, that they should be right in the middle of the congregation, where they belonged. And that’s where they were placed, in the middle, even though that might impede the smooth flow of other parishioners as they arrived and left. But in that impediment, interaction occurred with those in wheelchairs to the benefit of everyone.

During my infrequent home assignment visits back to the States when I would attend church with him, I would meet his friends. Once, a distinguished Seattle business man, whom I recognised from television commercials, turned around and introduced himself as a friend of Steve’s and wondered who I was, sitting in that place of honour. After services, when we would go out to lunch at his favourite restaurant, the host/hostess and wait staff spoke of their appreciation for Steve as a regular customer.  Just being with him felt like an honour.

When Steve left the love and care of my parents’ nurturing home as a young adult, our parents prayed daily that people would be kind to him in his vulnerability. That prayer was answered in abundance and I again saw poignant evidence of it two years ago on a brief visit home from overseas, when I went to see him in the small group home where he lived after his retirement.  

Steve had just left the residence before I arrived, in his electric wheelchair, taking the backroads and paths for his daily shopping outing at the local supermarket located about a mile away. I drove and arrived just as he was entering the store. As we walked down the aisle together, the store manager came up and with a cautiously protective air, asked if I knew Steve. I replied that I was his big brother and she immediately relaxed, smiled and shared how much they appreciated his daily visits to buy one or two items.  

One of the workers would be assigned to help him get the articles he desired off the shelves and then helped him pay by getting his debit card from his wallet and running it through the card reader. Steve was totally vulnerable and completely dependent on the kindness of strangers but in that dependence exhibited a confidence and strength that was extraordinary and profoundly instructive.  

All of us are only temporarily ‘enabled’ in this broken world and whether our period of disability extends for decades or only briefly before we transition into eternity, it’s helpful to have guides who have walked that path before us.

My brother’s strong Christian faith enabled him to face each day with courage and optimism. He was by far the bravest person I have ever known.

Steve, I look forward to walking and talking with you when next we meet, unencumbered by human frailty and made whole by the God in whose Image we were made. Thank you for being so patient with your big brother when in the midst of my busyness and ‘abilities’, I was actually the ‘disabled’ one.

‘Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’
(Hamlet, Act V Scene ii)

Tim Teusink MD MA (Bioethics) is an American physician based in France with SIM in France but his primary work involves teaching Bioethics around the African Continent to medical students and resident physicians. In normal times he travels a lot and also teaches at the CMDA-CMDE Conferences in Thailand and Greece.

Jany Haddad (born Teheran, Iran, 13 March 1954, died Aleppo, Syria, 14 August 2020)

‘Doctor, we plead with you, please do not leave Aleppo, you are the salt of this land. You are the light of this city.’

So spoke Dr Jany Haddad’s Muslim patients during the dark days in Syria when hundreds of thousands were escaping the country to seek refuge in Europe and beyond.

Dr Jany stayed, while the bombs fell and the bullets flew, through ten years of the Syrian civil war operating on the wounded, caring for the sick and ministering to the broken.

Jany was a monumental figure and a leader among leaders, deeply loved by many. His achievements were breath-taking, and he will be very greatly missed.

As the founder and president of both the Armenian Christian Medical Association (ACMA) and ‘Living Hope for Family Ministries’ he touched the lives of thousands and he inspired many others to join him and share in the work to which God had called him.

Jany Haddad was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1954. He graduated from Damascus medical university in Syria then specialised in general surgery. He trained and worked in Kuwait, later gaining FRCS in Glasgow, Scotland. He later gained training in 13 surgical subspecialties including oncology, endocrine, microsurgery and laparoscopy.

He married Sonig Arabian in 1982 and God blessed them with three children: Fouad (engineer), Manana (dietician) and Pethia (plastic surgeon).

In 1985, he and Sonig started family ministry together in Kuwait, interrupted by the Iraqi invasion.

When the Armenian earthquake struck in 1988, killing 50,000 and injuring 130,000, he felt God calling him to help this nation and chartered two shipments of medical supplies.

In 1990, Jany moved to Syria, where he started the family ministry once again in 1992, in Aleppo, with annual family conferences.

In 1996, God guided him to found ‘Living Hope for Family Ministries’, registered initially in Lebanon. The ministry expanded quickly and Jany wrote, translated, and published many books on Christian family principles and discipleship

In 2002, he had a vision of starting a Baptist church in Aleppo, and in 2003, when others joined him, the Baptist Evangelical Church of Aleppo was born. This was to become a seed which led to the planting of other new Syrian churches.

In 2003, during the Iraqi war, Jany began ministering among the Iraqi refugees, with medical care, food and supplies.

During this time, he visited Armenia twice a year from 2000, running charitable surgical clinics for the poor in rural villages and towns. This led to him founding the Armenian Christian Medical Association (ACMA) in 2006, which ran annual leadership conferences and weekly mobile medical and dental clinics.

When the pastor of the Evangelical Baptist Church in Aleppo migrated with his family in 2013, Jany took over as pastor, and expanded ‘Living Hope’ between 2013 and 2020 to embrace a huge range of charitable and relief work during the Syrian war which had started in 2011.

This included support for internally displaced Syrians, digging 41 wells for drinking water (Isaac Project), spiritual and practical care for war widows and orphans (Ladies of Living Hope), University student ministry and the St Luke and Healing Grace medical charity centres.

The ‘Building Restoration Department’ helped families restore and renovate their homes which had been damaged or destroyed during the war. An elderly people’s ministry cared for the medical, social and spiritual needs of those who had been left behind after their families left the country.

Other initiatives included a mini-enterprises ministry providing food, a post-war trauma care centre, a psychological support centre, and training in sewing and other skills.

Jany died from complications of COVID on 14 August, 2020. It may be hard to understand why God should preserve Jany through the war only to take him in this way at a time when he seemingly had so much more to give and was still, even at 66, effectively in his prime.

The mystery remains, but the Lord is sovereign. His ways are always perfect and he always in all things works for the good of those who love him.

Jany is now in the presence of the Saviour he loved and served and has finished the race. He joins that great cloud of witnesses cheering the rest of us on.

He leaves behind friends and colleagues from all over the world who he encouraged and inspired and who are thanking God for his faithfulness to Christ and his wonderful service to God’s church and the Syrian and Armenian people as a surgeon, pastor, leader, teacher and mentor.

The words posted by his daughter Pethia this week, on behalf of his children and their families, are a lovely tribute:

‘Our beloved father, you are now with your Saviour… You planted in us the love of God and the spirit of service since our childhood, have nurtured in us our abilities and talents and were the motivation to reach successes we didn’t dream about. You were the perfect husband, the caring father, the honest shepherd and the healing doctor who healed thousands of souls and bodies with his smile, words and blessed touch…. We trust God’s appointments and know with all certainty that your mission has not yet come to an end. We will continue it.’

Peter Saunders is CEO of ICMDA