Sarah Marikh grew up in a Muslim family and faced bullying, loneliness, and abuse from a young age. When her sister gave her life to Jesus, Sarah saw the change and wanted that too. Step by step, and through the deep valley of a battle with cancer, she came to know the profound love of Jesus. In a video by Jubilee, she shares her remarkable testimony.
Sarah: “I was raised by my mother. My parents separated when I was four years old. I used to be a really happy, cheerful child—but that disappeared early on because I started getting bullied at school.
I was also abused at a young age and felt completely alone. That joy was gone. I was Muslim, but not really. I joined in fasting, but after a while, I let it all go. Officially I was still Muslim, but I didn’t feel like one.”
A Dream
“My sister and I didn’t have a good relationship. She had her own struggles. Until one day, she had a dream from God. She didn’t know it was from Him at the time, but later she realized it was.
After that dream, she completely changed. I saw how she turned from a not-so-pleasant person into a really lovely person. She talked differently, acted differently, thought differently—and I thought, I want to know what’s happening here!
My sister was genuinely searching for who God is, and after some time He showed her: It’s Me. And I thought, okay great, I want this too.
A few months after my sister was baptized, I got baptized as well. I didn’t really know what I was doing; I just thought: whatever she has, I want it too. I hadn’t done any research and didn’t understand much. Maybe it was naïve, but I thought: now that I’m baptized, everything will go well—because that’s what you always hear: you get baptized, life becomes good, hallelujah!
But that wasn’t my case. I hadn’t truly repented, I hadn’t changed anything. I still had the same friends and did what I always did. Yet I kept feeling unhappy. It even started to feel like I no longer belonged with my friends.”
Illness
“One time I looked at them and clearly heard in my head: You don’t belong here anymore. That’s how I started hearing God more and more often. He would say, Do this, don’t do that, go there… Every time I disobeyed, I became more unhappy.
Eventually I had enough. I thought: I’m done with everything. Whatever God wants me to do, I’ll just do it—I don’t care, even if I end up completely alone. So I let everything go—or so I thought. Things began to improve, and I started to feel in a good flow again.
But after just a few months—when I was 27—I went to a doctor and heard: You’re sick. You have cancer.”
Prayer and Faith
“I thought: what is this? Things were finally going well, and now this happens. Still, I wanted to go through this with God, even though the doctors said, ‘You have to start treatment now or you won’t live to see 28.’
I didn’t want the treatment, so I did everything that’s written in God’s Word. I prayed, went to other Christians for prayer. I truly had faith. I thought: I know God doesn’t want me to be sick; I know He wants to help me—so I’ll stand firm in that.
But the illness didn’t go away. I got worse, and the doctors told me, ‘It’s growing, you really have to do something now, because once it spreads, there’s nothing more we can do. You’re still so young.’
I wondered, God, why aren’t You helping me? Eventually I thought: I’ve prayed and stood in faith, but it hasn’t worked, so I’ll start the treatments—I don’t want to die.”
Anger
“I went through every treatment they prescribed. I lost my hair, one of my kidneys stopped working… I am healed now—praise the Lord!—but I didn’t like that I still had to go through all that. I was angry with God for months. I kept asking why He had allowed it, but I heard nothing from Him.
After half a year, I started picking up my life again and went back to work. Then, suddenly, God answered the number-one question I’d had: Your Word says You heal—why didn’t You heal me?
His answer was: Sarah, I also wanted you to be healed. My will is for you to be healthy. But sin was in the way.
That’s when I realized: I hadn’t stopped the sins I was living in before my baptism. Those sins were literally blocking the way. I had still been living a double life. At that moment, I decided: I need to truly repent from everything.”
Restoration
“I texted my sister and said, ‘I’m coming over right now, and I’m going to tell you everything I’ve ever done—and everything that’s ever been done to me.’ I told her everything I’d kept secret all that time. I said, ‘This needs to come into the light, otherwise it can’t be healed.’
Only then was I able to let everything go—and I’ve never gone back. I let go of it all, and that changed everything. I wasn’t angry anymore. Everything was restored in a single moment, with one sentence that I heard from God.”
God’s Love
“It was so beautiful. I realized: it doesn’t matter to God—you can fall a hundred times, and you can come back to Him a hundred times. That touched me deeply, because in Islam it isn’t like that. There, you have to do things right; God feels distant—you don’t really feel Him. So this was so special to me.
The love of God was truly a wow moment for me. The person I used to be is completely gone. Everything is clean and new. That’s the beauty of my story: you can fall so many times, but you can always come back to God.”
