Vani Marshall grew up in a Hindu home in Malaysia. A few years back, she shared a story about how her Hindu mother ended up going to a church in Malaysia to encourage people to keep praying for their family members.
She recalled the day she received a phone call from her cousin about how Vani’s mother had recently taken a bouquet of flowers to church.
Knowing that her mother was a committed Hindu, Vani said that obviously, her cousin meant to say that her mother had taken the flowers to a Hindu Temple.
The cousin said, no, her mother had taken it to a church.
Vani, who still couldn’t believe what she had heard, called her mother to find out more.
“Mom, Jenny said that you went to church with some flowers. Is that true? Was it a temple you went to?,” Vani asked her mother.
Her mother replied that in fact she had gone to a church with the bouquet of flowers but didn’t want to tell Vani about it.
Vani immediately asked why she had done it.
Her mother said that a bit earlier, Vani had prayed for the healing of her mother’s leg, and when the pain lifted later that day, Vani’s mother believed that Jesus had healed her.
Because of this healing, she went to church with a bouquet of flowers to thank Him.
“I didn’t know how to thank this Jesus. Didn’t know what I could do for Him. So, I went out and got flowers“, Vani’s mother said. “And I didn’t know what church to go to. You know there are so many in the Yellow Pages, so I just went to a random church that had a cross. And thought, maybe He lived there, Maybe He would receive my flowers.”
Vani assured her mother, that Jesus saw her thankful heart.
It was evidence that a remarkable transformation was taking place in her mother because years earlier, she had actually banned Vani from the family home after she became a Christian.
Vani herself became a believer because of a miraculous healing encounter with Jesus as a young woman in Malaysia.
She grew up in a Hindu home, where family members had served as Brahmin chief priests for three generations.
As a baby, her parents had dedicated Vani to a Hindu god, and for years she devoted her life to Hinduism and learned the names of over 2,000 Hindu gods. She also trained and worked as a dancer at the Hindu temple.
But things took a turn in her teenage years when she became quite ill. Doctors were unable to diagnose what was wrong with her and prescribed pain medication to help her cope.
During this time, she prayed to Hindu gods for healing and when she was 18, her family even took Vani on a pilgrimage to India hoping for a cure.
While there, they visited a Hindu temple, and she mistakenly pulled back a curtain and entered a room with a multi-armed Hindu god and touched the idol hoping for healing.
When a Hindu priest saw her, he angrily cursed and condemned Vani because people were absolutely forbidden to touch the idol and as a woman, she was not even allowed to enter the idol’s sanctuary.
At that point, Vani believed her chances of getting healed were done.
When she returned to Malaysia, Vani was lying in bed one night. Feeling hopeless about her situation, she decided to try Jesus, whom she had heard about through a Christian tract that people had left at her home.
She prayed and actually told Jesus she was a Hindu and “I worship many gods.”
As she continued praying, a light entered her room and a voice said “I am Jesus, I am God.” As soon as those words were said, the pain instantly left.
The next morning, her mother knocked on Vani’s door to take her to the Hindu temple to pray. However, Vani refused to go and told her mother about the miraculous encounter with Jesus.
Her mother angrily said they would talk about this later and after the temple prayers, her mother brought several relatives, including those who were temple priests, to convince Vani to leave Jesus.
When Vani refused, her mother banned Vani from the family home, drove her to the house of a Christian family, and left her.
Vani added that Christian families in Malaysia often take in children who have been abandoned by their families after believing in Jesus.
For the next year, whenever Vani tried to phone home, her mother would hang up on her.
But the first crack in the family occurred when Vani’s father who was experiencing financial problems in his business showed up at the church Vani was attending.
As soon as he entered the church, her father felt this burden to pray. When an older woman told her dad to say “hallelujah” the words weren’t even out of his mouth when the Holy Spirit fell upon him.
He was shaking and filled with the Holy Spirit and told Vani he understood why she had left Hinduism.
Vani and her husband live in the US. She leads worship at her church, and she and her husband perform in the Malaysian entertainment industry.
READ: Vani Marshall shared how Jesus moved in the life of her mother who believed in Hinduism AND Hindu woman found miraculous healing in Jesus AND Hindu worshiper tormented by evil, encounters Jesus right before taking her own life
