10 Thursday, March 31, 2011
www.northshoreoutlook.com
Leap of
faith
North Vancouver’s Afshin Javid shares the story of his spiritual transformation from a teen soldier in Hezbollah to pastor of a Christian fellowship.
GREG HOEKSTRA S TA F F R E P O RT E R
A
s the muted sunlight of an overcast day spills into the kitchen of his North Vancouver home, Afshin Javid quietly flips through a weathered manila notebook. Scrawled on its yellowed pages are journal entries, written what seems like a lifetime ago in a dank concrete prison cell in the tropical city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The journal, says Javid, tells the story of more than just his incarceration in the infamous Pudu Jail after he was caught with 30 illegal passports on his way to North America two decades ago. It recounts the story, he says, of his dramatic transformation of faith. The story of a young devout Muslim and Hezbollah soldier whose world was turned upside down when he came face-to-face with a life force he believes was Jesus Christ.
Raised in a revolution Born in southwestern Iran in 1972, Afshin Javid grew up during a period of intense civil unrest. His first memories, he says, begin around the age of five or six, when citizens of his country began lashing out at the Iranian monarchy and its leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The revolution, he says, was a move to overthrow the ruling “puppet regime” and install a hardline Islamic theocracy, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Javid says he remembers ordinary people, including members of his family, being arrested and beaten in the late 1970s by the government’s secret service. The army imposed curfews, but families defiantly broke them each night, gathering with their children in streets and roundabouts as a form of protest. One evening, Javid remembers a soldier from the Shah’s army pointing a gun in his father’s face, demanding he take his family back inside. “Go ahead,” his father said. “Shoot me, in the cause of Allah.” That, says Javid in hindsight, was a turning point in his young life. “It’s one of those things... you mess with my father, and it becomes war,” he says. “That’s when I really started getting deeper and deeper into Islam.”
An allegiance to Allah About five years later, around the age of 12, Javid began volunteering with the militant group known as Hezbollah. Iran’s Islamic Revolution had been successful in ousting the Shah and his regime, but a year later the country was thrust into full-on war when the
Pastor Afshin Javid prepares a meal in his North Vancouver home. Top right, one of the few photos of Javid as a teenager in Iran. Peter Taylor portrait / submitted photo
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