Faith Stories with Naomi Reed

“I grew up in Slemani, Northern Iraq. When Saddam Hussein attacked our city, my family fled with everyone else. There was a mass exodus of two million Kurds. The Iraqi army were shooting at us from their helicopters. I can’t tell you about the things I saw. It was a terrible few weeks. Finally, foreign […]

“My favourite passage in the Bible is in Matthew 25. It’s about the virgins and the oil. I’ve always wondered what the oil represents. I don’t want to be part of the five that don’t get in. So I’ve asked a lot of people what they think. Some people think the oil is the Holy […]

“I only became a Christian in my 40s. We had teenage children, and I wanted to go back to work. So I retrained as a high school teacher. I went to Uni. My husband was the sort of person who criticised everything. He’d had a hard life, and he was negative. He thought Christianity was […]

“I got sick a year ago. I found out I had prostate cancer. At first they said it was low-grade and contained. It was okay. But then I had some more scans … and as soon as he looked at them, you could see it on the doctor’s face. All the blood drained away. They […]

“My entire left side was paralysed, and my right side was partially paralysed, so I stayed in hospital until I was three years old. When I went home, I had two long-leg iron calipers, and a leather corset around my trunk, and four iron bars holding my neck in place. But I didn’t wear the […]

“I was 75 when I came to Australia (from the UK). My daughter was already here and she said, ‘Come to Australia for a bit of an adventure.’ So I did. But when I got here, I thought, ‘What have I done?’ How am I going to manage? My daughter lived down a big hill […]

“My family are Christians [in South India] so we used to go to church every Sunday, and then afterwards, we would eat chicken curry. Every other day of the week, we would eat vegetables, but Sundays we ate chicken. I liked chicken! But before we could eat the chicken, my father made us recite Bible […]

“It all happened in the space of about two years. First, my mum died. Then, my wife’s dad became ill, and he died. Then our son-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, and he needed surgery. Then one of our close friends committed suicide. Throughout that time, our daughter was very unwell and she needed a lot […]

“I spent my childhood on an island in Vanuatu. We used to play on the beach. My local friends and I would make sandcastles and share our canoes and paw paws. But then one day, when I was nine, I was sent away to boarding school in Australia. It was an awful day. I remember […]