SEND! magazine Fourth Quarter 2005: From Martial Arts Master to Missionary
From Martial Arts Master to Missionary
One Man's Transformation
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Alone In the World
More than 30 years ago, an emotionally abandoned eight-year-old boy walked into a movie theater and sat down to watch Enter the Dragon, a martial arts action film. The same hurting little child emerged a few hours later, now filled with a vengeful resolve.
"If someone injured me," he explains, "I wanted to attack him back." He believed the film’s hero had obtained what he needed most: the ultimate defense from pain.
Because Nadeek’s small stature and darker-than-average skin were characteristics his culture despised, he was often ignored and neglected by his parents, siblings and classmates. When his father suffered an injury, his mother was forced to shoulder the burden of providing for the family, and Nadeek was on his own even more. The deep hurt he felt turned into a desire to make a mark on the world, to say he was somebody.
The movie Nadeek watched impressed him. It also set the course of his life. That day, a young boy determined to someday become a martial arts master.
By high school, Nadeek had begun to learn karate, and his natural talent was starting to surface. While attending a wrestling tournament one day, he impulsively accepted a challenge to spar with the defending champion. Though Nadeek had no previous experience in the sport, he defeated his opponent and won the tournament.
"From that moment onwards," Nadeek remembers, "I thought there was a strength hidden in me, and I should make the world know it."
Empty Ambition
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Although he grew closer to his lifelong goal as the years passed, Nadeek’s personal life was marked by anger, violence and internal turmoil. An intelligent young man, he earned a degree in martial arts and studied fighting techniques for 18 years. But his education was marred by his habit of breaking desks and chairs and even assaulting students and teachers.
Nadeek became a highly sought-after martial arts instructor with numerous pupils and was even commissioned to train the armed forces, but he still felt alone—that no one cared. He lived in the jungle for several months with Buddhist monks, hoping to learn new fighting techniques by observing wild animals, but he returned without achieving his goals—or finding peace.
Then he met and married Prasha, one of his students and a karate champion in her own right. But he was so focused on his profession that he made very little time for his new wife. Their relationship was filled with tension and arguments that often came to blows between them.
"I was a very bad husband," Nadeek shares. "When I was angry I used to run miles just to calm myself, and I had this habit of hitting trees when I was angry to put down my temper."
Then Prasha became mysteriously ill with migraine head-aches and a poor appetite. Nadeek went to doctors and temple priests, and he even tried practicing witchcraft himself, but nothing helped. Prasha grew thinner and weaker. The couple wasn’t aware of it, but evil spirits were at the root of her physical problems.
For Prasha, her condition was also the last straw in their already tenuous marriage, and she soon left Nadeek and returned to her parents’ home. Nadeek was now faced with the vanity of his own ambitions, a rapidly deteriorating family life, and two angry brothers-in-law who fixed the blame for their sister’s condition squarely on him.
"At this time I was deeply depressed," Nadeek relates. He was weary of the emptiness that surrounded him, and deep in his heart he began to seek for the truth. Then God brought a pastor into Nadeek’s life, who listened to him as he shared his struggles.
"All this will come to an end," the pastor responded, "if you have the salvation and real freedom that God gives."
Nadeek believed him enough to bring his wife for prayer, and he was amazed to witness Prasha’s miraculous deliverance by the power of the living God. Nadeek was also amazed to watch the transformation of his wife, who had become a believer in Jesus, over the days and weeks that followed.
"She was not the old person that I knew," he recalls. "She had completely changed. Her walk with the Lord was so strong, and she had a different attitude toward me."
As Prasha learned from her Bible what it meant to be a godly wife, she returned to live with her husband and humbly asked his forgiveness. She also began praying for Nadeek’s salvation.
Showdown
But Nadeek was not persuaded to follow Jesus. Instead, he grew increasingly irritated with her and the church members who often gathered at their home. One day he angrily took Prasha to the pastor’s house.
"You have a faith that you believe," he challenged the pastor, "and I have a faith that I believe. But there is nothing I cannot do with my fighting techniques, because I am a master."
Then Nadeek called for someone to bring him a fresh coconut and issued this challenge:
"If you can stop me from breaking this coconut with my hand, I will start believing in your God."
Prasha knew this was a simple move. She had seen Nadeek do it hundreds of times and knew her husband was confident he would win the challenge.
But the pastor accepted Nadeek’s test.
"The coconut will not break," the pastor said firmly.
As a gathering crowd looked on, Nadeek paused for a moment, then struck the coconut. But instead of cracking open as he fully expected, the coconut just flexed like a rubber ball. It did not break.
The martial arts master was embarrassed and mystified. In his 18 years of experience, this had never happened. He quickly covered his shame and told the crowd that a mistake had somehow happened. He would try again.
"So I used double the amount of strength that I needed to break the coconut," Nadeek remembers. "If someone who knows martial arts would have seen that, it would have been a joke, because the coconut should have broken into pieces on the second attempt."
"But what happened was the exact thing that happened the first time."
Nadeek started to sweat. He had never failed before. Now, in front of the pastor, this crowd and his wife—who had never once seen him falter—he had been humiliated twice. As he made a feeble attempt toward a third try, the pastor stopped him.
"Nadeek, that’s enough," he said. "Even if you hit the coconut with a hammer, it will not break, because by the name of the Lord I have bound the demons that are controlling you."
Witness to a Transformation
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| While returing home via motor bike from a church service, Nadeek and Prasha stop to share the Gospel with two Gospel. |
That failure marked a turning point in Nadeek’s life. He began to understand the nature of Jesus Christ and His power, and the day came when he finally surrendered his heart to the Lord. Just like Prasha, he also experienced deliverance from evil spirits. For the first time in his life, Nadeek was at rest.
"I felt the peace I had been searching for," he expresses. It wasn’t long after this experience that the Lord called Nadeek to be His witness on a full-time basis. Nadeek initially struggled with giving up his lucrative martial arts career, but he chose to obey.
Incredibly, the first place where God told him to go was his childhood home—the roots of his rejection and neglect and the birthplace of his lifetime ambition. Nadeek and Prasha went, committed to laying a foundation of prayer before anything else.
At first they experienced the same scorn and disregard that Nadeek had known as a boy. But within weeks, villagers noticed the transformation that had taken place in this man who had once been so violent and proud. Soon, they began to approach him with their needs, asking him to pray for the sick and the demon-possessed among them. And God worked His wonders.
"The Lord was helping us in all ways," Nadeek recalls, "and my wife and I decided to continue there."
Nadeek and Prasha learned to trust in the Lord’s leading during those first years of ministry. They also grew to love one another deeply, something their marriage had lacked before. As the couple began to work as a team with increasing effectiveness, their pastor sent them to a GFA Bible college for further training.
Today Nadeek can testify to the Lord’s mighty power working through a man who has surrendered his own strength. His life is an example of the servant who was faithful in small things, now given charge over large things.
Nadeek’s responsibilities are many and varied: He pastors two Believers Church congregations of about 100 members each, he is a regional GFA leader who oversees 32 pastors and meets with them on a regular basis, he supervises the women’s and children’s ministry for his area, and he directs 15 home fellowships that will most likely become churches someday. And because his region of ministry is located in the tsunami-affected area of Sri Lanka, he also gives leadership to ongoing relief work among the survivors.
Despite his full load of pastoral and leadership responsibilities, Nadeek has not neglected outreach and evangelism. He has a special burden for young people, and he frequently organizes sports festivals and cultural shows as a means to share the Gospel. In addition, he has founded a youth club where boys and girls are trained in sports and physical discipline while earning of the love of Jesus.
"This is My Passion"
Although Nadeek now looks back on his life before Christ and sees how futile his ambitions for power were, he also recognizes God’s miraculous use of what could have been wasted years. Nadeek has discovered that his past actually lends credibility to his testimony.
Nadeek says that those who knew him before his salvation have been greatly impacted by the transformation they’ve seen in his life.
"When people who knew me 25 years ago look at me now, they see a different person," he says. "I was a martial arts master, and now I am a missionary. My life was an utter mess, but now the Lord has done things in me that nobody could have ever imagined. They see the real change in me."
When Nadeek travels to villages and towns for outreach, he doesn’t hesitate to use his skills, which he believes are gifts from God. People are initially skeptical when he tells them about his abilities and his previous reputation as a martial arts expert—that is, until they see proof. Then the question comes: If you had such fame and money, why did you leave all that to follow Jesus?Then Nadeek has a perfect opportunity to share how the Lord has transformed his life.
"When I see people emotionally down like I used to be, I get into their shoes and understand their situation. I share my personal testimony, and out of my own experiences I help them. They can visibly see all that He has done for me out of His love."
And that transformation is what spurs on the nearly 41-year-old native missionary in his calling today. He says that if the Lord has changed him so completely, He can change anyone.
"The real passion I have comes from my own life," he says, "what I went through, what the Lord did for me, and now who I am after my conversion. I want to make this message clear to people who are lost like I was. This is my main passion."
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