Atheist Kindergarten Teacher Turns to Jesus Christ After Struggle With Depression, Suicide (Interview)
Menon's trust in the Browns continued to grow and when her marriage with her ex-husband began falling apart, it was the Browns who she turned to for help and guidance on how she can help save her marriage. Even though the Browns helped Menon deal with the tough times during the end of her marriage, she still was not able to commit to going to church or even asking the Browns her spiritual questions.
"The love that exuded from the Browns, it didn't make sense to me. All of the mission teams coming up and all of the love they continued to show to me and taking time away from their own lives and own families to come up and show love to me and the community, I was scared because I had built a close relationship with the Browns," Menon told CP. "I was really scared to go to church because I didn't want them to get their feelings hurt or to get excited about something."
But when Menon's mother suffered a heart attack and doctors felt the needed to undergo heart surgery with a fragile body over a year-and-a-half ago, Menon uncharacteristically turned to the Browns and asked them to pray for her mother.
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"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Brown said of Menon's prayer request during a recent interview with Baptist Press.
Brown recalled boldly telling Menon that "God will heal her mom." As soon as the words left his mouth, Brown kind of freaked out because he wondered how Menon would react if God did not heal her mother.
"Here is this atheist who now a pastor says what God is going to do," Menon told CP. "He was like, 'I am not supposed to do that. A person can't say what God is going to do.' All I remember was that was the first time that I completely opened up to him and saw Andy as more than just a friend."
Not only did the Browns pray, they did just about everything they could to make sure others in their church were praying for Menon's mother as well.
"When I get [to the hospital], the doctors are saying that she is in tons of pain and she feels like there is an elephant on her chest. They are saying the enzymes have all come back positive for a heart attack. They said they had to wait another 24 hours to do another test because all the medications they were giving her were not working either," Menon explained. "She started in the emergency room and was moved to several different rooms, every doctor said that it was a heart attack. They scheduled a procedure to put a balloon in her artery to open up the blockage. They are scheduling this and they go inside her and the doctor was shocked."
"He is like 'Why are we in here?' When he came out, he said that it doesn't make sense and that was the healthiest heart he has worked on in his recent recollection. He said it was perfect and that there were no signs of any heart attack," Menon continued. "I was advocating for my mom the whole time. I was not going to let her leave until the doctors could tell me what was going on so that we can stop whatever happened from happening again. They said, 'Well, she is fine now so we have to let her go.' No one could tell us what it was."
After doctors were left clueless, Menon called a parent of one of her students who is an atheist cardiac nurse, who also happened to have a problem with missionaries serving at the school. Menon recalled that all the parent could tell her was that "sometimes there are situations where technology is not advanced enough to know the answers to these things."
"I listened to that and that didn't make sense to me," Menon said.
Menon also talked with the Browns, who came down and took Menon to lunch and also prayed with her mother, who is a Christian. The Browns asked Menon what she thought was behind her mother's sudden turn for the better.
"At that time, I was still questioning," Menon said, saying that she wasn't quite ready to concede that it was God.
Menon told CP that it was about two months after her mother's health episode that she really opened her heart to the Lord and prayed.
Menon explained in her video testimony that she was driving home from the grocery store with her kids when she heard three Christian gospel songs that really "spoke to her heart."
"I turned on the Christian music channel and the words that were in these songs, I just felt them in my heart and just felt overwhelmed. I started crying as I [was] driving with my girls in the car. I started praying," she explained. "I just felt like God was there with me, telling me that He loved me."
"I just knew that I was no longer an unbeliever," she added.
Menon was baptized in March 2015 at The Landing Church in front of several of her unsaved friends. She is now a part-time children's minister at The Landing Church.
Menon told CP that it wasn't the miraculous healing of her mother that caused her to convert, she explained that it had more to do with the love poured into her by the Browns and other missionaries who worked at the school for the last few years, which helped plant the seeds for her to come to a relationship with the Lord.
Menon's coming to faith has not only impacted her but also her 4-year-old daughter, who she says is now asking to pray for people and thanking God when she falls and doesn't get hurt.
