The following is a Bible Gateway exclusive Sneak Peek and First Listen of My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles: The Amazing True Story of OneBoys Journey from Refugee to Chess Champion (W Publishing, 2020) by Tanitoluwa Adewumi. Order the book and unabridged audiobook on CD in the Bible Gateway Store.

By Tanitoluwa Adewumi

[Before escaping to America] Ever since they abducted 276 girls from a high school in northeast Nigeria in 2014, the whole world has known the name Boko Haram. They are the nigerian Taliban, the West African cousin of ISIS, and their aim is to establish an Islamic state or caliphate in my homeland. They are ruthless and wicked, the type of people who post videos online of men they have captured being decapitated. The kind of animals who do not just abduct schoolgirls but use many of them as suicide bombers….

[After escaping to America] ….Every evening, after we had eaten dinner and before I left for work, we would all gather in either the boys’ room or ours to talk, read the Bible, encourage each other, and pray. It was a ritual that Oluwatoyin and I had been practicing ever since we had married, but the threat from Boko Haram had certainly made us pray longer and louder. So had the struggles in Dallas and the new start in New York.

One night Oluwatoyin was telling us about how she had been talking with one of the women who worked as a security guard for the main hotel downstairs.

“I told her about the words of Isaiah 60, ‘arise, for the light has come.’ She has been looking so down lately, and I want her to know that there is hope, even in the darkness. I wanted to encourage her to keep believing in God, to know that God can do many things for her and that no matter how great the obstacle we face, God can rescue us.”

She paused. We all did. A few seconds stretched toward a minute. We all needed to hear her words and take them as our own.

Soon we started singing and clapping, then moved to close the way we always did, with every one of us getting ready to say amen. But first Oluwatoyin reminded us of the important truth, proclaiming loudly, “No matter how great the obstacle we face, God can rescue us.”

“A-MEN,” we called. “A-MEN! A-MEN!”

The doors at the shelter were not thick. From outside we heard the sound of someone calling out, “A-men!”

My cleaning job was tough. I knew I could not last long at it. Eventually I would have to find something else, something that did not leave me in agony at the end of every day. But all that would happen in good time. There was something more important for me to do. I had to choose not to fear. I had to choose not to look at my twisted hands or the way the walls in our room were so close together.

The above is a Bible Gateway exclusive Sneak Peek and First Listen of My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles: The Amazing True Story of One Boy’s Journey from Refugee to Chess Champion (W Publishing, 2020) by Tanitoluwa Adewumi. Order the book and unabridged audiobook on CD in the Bible Gateway Store.

My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway.

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