AMAZING STORY
Cynthia Dry: Finding The Truth
By Mia Evans-Saracual
The 700 Club
CBN.com- “The day that I became a Muslim, I was very excited that day because I thought this was the true religion of god. That’s what everybody was telling me. They really convinced me that this was the religion of god and everything that I had been taught as a child was not the truth.” Cindy remembers.
Cindy Dry’s search for truth began when she was a girl in Pasadena, Texas. Every Sunday morning, her parents sent her to church. “I was always looking for a savior. I was really confused in my beliefs, but I was always looking for somebody to save me out of the situation,” she says. Cindy lived in fear most of her childhood. She suffered constant abuse at the hands of a family member.
“There was a lot of abuse, all kinds of abuse: mentally, sexually, and physically.” Cindy recalls. “I was called stupid and ugly and things like that. So it really shattered what I think my personality could have been. So I grew up not really knowing who I was, or where I belonged or where I fit in. I think more than anything else I wanted somebody to love me.”
Marriage couldn’t cure her heartache. After two failed relationships, Cindy felt emotionally paralyzed. “At that time I was still so full of anger, bitterness, jealousy.” Cindy shares. “All those negative traits that you can think of, I had them in my heart. I couldn’t let go of them, because of all the hurt. They were there and they were there stuck. I personally didn’t know how to get rid of it.”
She met a man online who seemed to have the answer. “It was a chat room and this man from Pakistan came online and started telling me about Islam,” Cindy says. “He said he was a Muslim, and I was very interested. I said, ‘What is that? Is that the people that worship the cows?’ He said ‘No, Islam is something different. We worship one god, the one true god.’ When he said ‘the one true god’ I said, ‘Really? Tell me about it,’ because part of me was still searching.”
Cindy began to study Islam at a Muslim community center in Houston, Texas. I was interested in it number one, because of the familiarity that I saw in the Bible, and also because of charity.” Cindy says. “I thought to myself, ‘If they give charity, they have to be good people.’ So once they showed me these things, then I was listening to everything else they had to say.” Within a month she converted to Islam.
“The road to heaven for Muslims is they work their way.” Cindy shares. “Everything they do, every prayer they do, every motion they do is working their way towards heaven. I prayed the five prayers a day, plus if I pray extra, God will be really proud of me. I learned how to read in Arabic so that I could read because Arabic is the chosen language of God in Islam.”
Six months later, Cindy married a Muslim man. The first week I wanted to cry because it was such a culture shock, “ she says. “I saw that he was going to treat me very well as long as I did what he wanted me to do, as long as I was completely covered head to toe, as long as I went only where he wanted me to go. It was a very controlling relationship. If I did anything that he didn’t like, he would abuse me in one form or another. It was a common practice for my husband to bite me or pull my hair or hit me. One time he did throw me in the floor and stomp on my stomach.”
Cindy’s doubts about her new religion grew. In Islam it’s like a controlling atmosphere because your prayers are controlled, when you pray to god, what language you pray to god, what time, what you can and cannot eat, what you can and cannot wear as far as makeup and jewelry,” she says. “If I had known there was this much control over me as a woman in Islam, I probably never would have converted because what this did for me is ultimately made me more angry, more bitter. The more I saw, the more I didn’t like it. They say there’s no compulsion in religion—that’s in the Koran; but what I saw in the Hadiths, which are the sayings and the teachings of Mohammed, he would have people killed or kill them himself if they rejected Islam.
The September 11th attacks solidified her doubts. I felt like I was caught between two worlds at that point because here I was a Muslim and they are saying Muslims did this terrible thing; but yet, I’m an American and this is happening in my country,” Cindy remembers. “So I was totally devastated and it totally wiped me out emotionally. I didn’t know what to think. All I could do was cry and cry for days.
As her beliefs and her marriage crumbled, Cindy fell into a deep depression. At one point, I just became so hopeless that I started begging God for death,” she says. “I was praying to God I knew as a child, that I would pray to when I knew to pray. Then something in my heart said ‘Go back to your childhood. Go back to church.’ Something was drawing me there.” That day Cindy felt the love of Jesus, and longed for more.
The Sunday school teacher emailed me and I started reading the Bible, and she would tell me where to read,” Cindy recalls. “I started praying and asking God, ‘Show me if this is real or if Islam is real. I don’t know what’s real right now, but I want Your truth. I was begging for the truth, that’s all I wanted. I started to believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and that He came to die for my sins. I couldn’t stop praising and worshiping Him.
Cindy renounced Islam, and accepted Jesus Christ. She and her husband eventually divorced. Now through her relationship with Jesus, Cindy says she found truth, love and eternal life. “The love that I feel for Him is just a fraction of what I know He has for me,” she says. “God put such a love in my heart for Muslims. Now I want to teach them about the love of Christ that can change their life like it has mine. We can’t work our way to heaven, it’s by grace that we’re saved through faith. There’s nothing that I could do ever good enough to earn that. Your heart will change, your life will change, the hatred and the bitterness and the hurt goes away. It is replaced with love and joy like you have never known before, like no drug, no man, nothing in this world can satisfy. There’s nothing like it.
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