Mara's Story: From Reciting to Believing

From the day Mara found out about Reading Circle, she became relentless in her desire to get into the program. God moved my heart at the beginning of the spring of 2026 to become a mentor, especially after finding out she was next up on the waitlist. Having already formed a relationship with her family, I was very excited to be able to share stories about Jesus and God’s plan of redemption with her every week.

Mara’s family is a blend of South Asian identities, with two different languages spoken at home besides English. However, it’s not in any of those three languages that Mara has learned to pray and read religious texts, but in ancient Arabic, a language she does not understand beyond a few common religious phrases. (Even those, she does not know the actual meaning of, but only the situations in which they should be used.) Nonetheless, most days of the week she is expected to report to “Arabic school,” which does not teach Arabic but rather teaches children to recite the sounds found in the Qur’an perfectly, with even the slightest error in pronunciation counted as failure. It was out of this context that Mara entered Reading Circle, and she immediately tried to treat it the same way: as a place where religious performance would be rewarded and anything less than perfection would be punished.

It was immediately apparent that her experience with Islamic school had taught her to see Reading Circle as an extension of the same, where rote memorization and correct pronunciation were the sole priorities above understanding. Add to this a belief that only perfection will be rewarded and mistakes will be shamed, and you have a recipe for anxiety. Seeing Mara gradually relax as she learned, week after week, that not perfection but effort, and not recitation but understanding, where the goals have been the most encouraging part of her progress. She is still learning how to bring her cares to God in prayer, and every week it takes some coaxing for her to use her own voice to pray to God in her own language. My favorite week so far was when we read about the kingdom of God being for little children and for anyone with faith like a child’s. Even as she still tries to guess the “correct” religious answer when we talk about the stories, she is, little by little, being surprised to learn things like Jesus not only healed sick people but made a dead girl alive, and that God is like a kind shepherd who wants to take care of us. Little by little, she is discovering the heart of God, shown especially in the life of Jesus.

I believe she still has a long journey with the Lord as she untangles the bonds of legalism and the feeling that she must earn love, but every week when she completes her memory verse to the praise of Ms. Alysa (even if her pronunciation wasn’t perfect) and finishes her reading and writing practice even when it’s difficult, I see her come a little bit more to life. She is learning that at Reading Circle, she is safe and loved and valuable just for who she is, not for what she does.

I am praying for her whole family to enter God’s kingdom together. Her older sisters also joined the program recently. There is a translation of Scripture in her mom’s heart language, so little by little I am praying for opportunities to share truth with her while walking alongside her family through the daily struggles of being refugees trying to find a sense of stability in a foreign land.

Please pray for this: for miraculous healing by Jesus of Mara’s older sister, so that she and her family would know that Jesus has real power to heal, and for Mara and all her sisters, along with both parents, to experience the goodness of God’s kingdom and choose to enter it themselves through faith in Jesus for their righteousness.

Also pray for the Lord to send more laborers into His harvest, because even while I meet with Mara, I run into other families every week in Vickery Meadow who ask me why their sons or daughters don’t have teachers yet. Many of them also identify as Muslim and, even knowing that their children will hear stories about Jesus, still want them to come because the fruit of the program in helping kids succeed in literacy is so well known. Even more kids want to come, and I believe it’s because they can feel in their spirits that here they will be loved and accepted unconditionally. Indeed, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few!”

Written by: Mary Ashley Mantzel
Edited by: Julianne Elson 

*Name has been changed to protect the privacy of the individual.