Vicky Adam Ubaid Akram had a dream that helped him choose the Catholic faith.
In the dream, he walked in an alley that had many houses of worship including mosques, temples and churches on both sides. But his eyes remained fixated on a Catholic church with a cross on top.
He then fell down and woke up from his sleep. “In that falling position, I looked up again and my eyes were still on the crucifix,” he recalled.
Protestant churches normally do not display a crucifix — a cross with an image of Christ’s body on it — but prefer only a simple cross.
Vicky soon began to read more about Catholicism. “The more I knew, the more interested I became,” he said. Jesus’ teaching about the law of love as “the first and foremost law” was deeply touching, he said. “I really like that part, which for me is the key to being a good human being,” he recalled.
Gradually, Vicky began to visit the Catholic church in Ma-lang. The 24-year-old had grown up in a devout Muslim family in Malang in Indonesia’s East Java, a predominantly Muslim province.
Just like his father, Vicky strictly followed Islamic rituals such as praying five times a day. But three years ago he first felt “a spiritual dryness” and lost interest in his family’s religion.
“In 2018 while I was studying in college, I began to feel that I could not find peace when carrying out Islamic religious rituals such as praying,” he said.
He even began to feel that Islam was ineffective in “communicating with God and finding him peace” and began to search for other religions.
That was when Vicky turned toward Christianity, his mother’s former religion. A Protestant Christian, she had converted to Islam to marry his father and ever since followed Islamic precepts strictly.
Islamic customs and traditions were strong in Vicky’s family, just like most families in the province, where 94 percent of its 39 million people are Muslims.