Refugee to witness: Ivor’s testimony
Some stories remind us that God is at work long before we recognize His hand. My conversation with Ivor was one of those stories. Today, Ivor serves as a director of communications and digital strategy at a church in Nashville, helping people discover biblical truth, encounter genuine hope, and connect with a church community. But the road that brought him there began amid war, displacement, rejection, and questions that seemed to have no easy answers.
Ivor was born in Bosnia when it was still part of Yugoslavia. His father came from a Croatian Catholic background, while his mother came from a Serbian Orthodox family. When civil war reached their community, Ivor was only about three years old. His family fled first to Croatia and then to Germany, where they lived as refugees for several years before eventually immigrating to Cleveland, Ohio.
Although his parents came from religious traditions, they were not practicing their faith. They wanted their children to decide what they believed when they were older. Still, God began introducing Himself to Ivor through the compassion of Catholic nuns who cared for refugee families in Germany. One of them, Sister Regina, showed him the love of Jesus through practical acts of kindness. She helped provide for his family, welcomed him, and gave him a glimpse of what faith could look like when it was lived out with compassion.
Even as a young child, Ivor wanted to know God. He attended Mass by himself and took religious classes because he genuinely desired a relationship with Him. Unfortunately, when he asked to be baptized and confirmed, a priest refused. Ivor was told that he was too old and that, as a refugee, he did not belong there. To the priest, this may have been an administrative or cultural decision. To a child searching for God, however, it sounded like God Himself was saying no.
That experience changed the direction of Ivor’s life. He withdrew and eventually became cynical about organized religion. The boy who had once pursued God began mocking faith and identifying more closely with atheism. His story is a painful reminder that church hurt is real. When people claim to represent God but respond without love, their actions can distort the way others see Him. Yet it is also important to understand that the rejection Ivor experienced from a religious leader was not rejection from Jesus. Even when Ivor believed God had turned him away, Jesus continued pursuing him.
Ivor’s childhood carried other wounds as well. Refugee life meant separation, uncertainty, language barriers, and trauma that he was too young to understand. His parents tried to protect him from the full horror of the war, but the effects were still present. When he returned to Germany and Bosnia as a teenager, he finally saw the devastation more clearly. He began wrestling with survivor’s guilt and depression. Why had his family escaped when others had not? Why had he been given opportunities that so many others never received? Where was God in all that suffering?
During this season, God brought mentors into Ivor’s life. These men did not pressure him or dismiss his questions. They spent time with him, shared his interests in photography and music, and gave him room to be honest. One of them gave Ivor his first Bible. He began reading it even though he disagreed with much of what he found. He searched for explanations, called his mentor with questions, and slowly began engaging Scripture for himself.
This part of his story stood out to me because honest questions do not frighten God. Ivor did not return to faith by pretending his pain was gone or accepting shallow answers. He read, questioned, sought counseling, and allowed trusted people to walk beside him. Scripture began showing him that his life could have meaning beyond merely surviving. The biblical picture of being a light—a city on a hill—helped him imagine a life devoted to bringing hope to other people.
Then, when Ivor was around eighteen or nineteen, his father suffered multiple strokes and developed double vision. The doctors did not expect his sight to return quickly. In desperation, Ivor prayed. He told God that if He healed his father, he would be ready to believe that God was good, that He heard them, and that hope was possible.
That night, Ivor woke to a bright motion light shining through bare winter branches outside his window. In the pattern of light and shadows, he saw what appeared to him to be the face of Jesus, a crown of thorns, and a cross. His response was simple: “Jesus, that’s You.” The next morning, his father came downstairs and announced that he could see clearly again. For Ivor, there was no going back. Jesus was no longer merely an idea to debate. He had become undeniably personal.
I understood part of what Ivor described because my own journey toward Christ was also gradual. Resources such as Lee Strobel’s work helped address some of my intellectual objections, but God also answered a deeply personal and highly specific prayer in my life. It was something so particular that I could not dismiss it as coincidence. I knew God was real, and once I knew, I could not return to the way I had lived before.
Looking back, Ivor can now recognize God’s fingerprints throughout his story. He sees God’s protection in his family’s escape from Bosnia, despite the odds against them. He sees God in Sister Regina and in the people who cared for his family in Germany. He remembers a time when his mother had only a few dollars a day to provide for them, and someone anonymously left a bag containing exactly the food and toiletries they needed. He sees God in the people who helped his family immigrate to America and in the sponsor family who welcomed them into their home for much longer than originally planned.
Years later, after moving to Nashville, Ivor survived a terrifying accident in which his car became trapped beneath a semi traveling at highway speed. Half the vehicle was destroyed, yet he emerged without an injury. A friend invited him to church, where he found a pastor and community who helped him continue healing and growing. God had remained constant and faithful, even during the years when Ivor could not see Him. Often, that is how God’s work becomes visible to us. We understand it most clearly when we look back.
As Ivor continued following Jesus, he began recognizing a calling rooted in hospitality and accessibility. His refugee childhood had trained him to enter a room and immediately determine whether it was safe and whether he belonged. God transformed that survival instinct into an ability to notice people who feel excluded or overlooked. Ivor came to value the power of a shared meal and the way hospitality can break down barriers between people.
He was especially drawn to the story in Luke 14 about the great banquet. When the original guests declined the invitation, the host welcomed the poor, the marginalized, and those who were normally excluded. It is a beautiful picture of God’s desire to bring people home. This calling now shapes Ivor’s work in church communications. He wants biblical truth to be understandable and accessible to people who may feel intimidated by church or uncertain that they belong there.
Healing from church hurt was not immediate for Ivor. He began reading the Bible at fifteen, but he did not enter a church again until he was twenty-two. His restoration was a process. I believe that is worth remembering. We sometimes expect people to move quickly from pain into trust, but rebuilding trust takes time. Even after Paul encountered Jesus, he went through a season of preparation, and other believers were initially afraid of him because of his past. God is patient with us as He restores what has been broken.
Eventually, Ivor sensed God calling him back to Bosnia. At twenty-six or twenty-seven, he sold his belongings, left his job in Nashville, and bought a one-way ticket. His mother warned him not to talk about God, religion, or politics because the country was in a divisive season. Ivor’s answer was essentially that this was the very reason he needed to go. He wanted his people to know what Jesus had done in his life.
In Bosnia, God connected him with a distant cousin who had become a pastor after encountering Christ during the war through American missionaries. Through this connection, Ivor met believers from backgrounds that had once been violently divided. He saw Roma believers, former Orthodox Christians, former Catholics, Pentecostals, and Baptists worshiping Jesus together. For a man whose childhood had been shaped by ethnic and religious conflict, it was a glimpse of heaven.
Ivor preached from Hebrews in his native language about the heavenly city where death, violence, and division will finally end. Reading and teaching Scripture in Bosnian helped him discover nuances he had missed in English. He also gathered New Testaments, children’s Bibles, and other translations to distribute throughout the community. Inside each one, he wrote the recipient’s name and part of his testimony. He personally delivered them to family members and neighbors, explaining that he had sold everything and returned because they needed to know Jesus. He encouraged them to open the Bible when life became difficult and trust that God would speak.
His conversations were not limited to people who already agreed with him. He spent hours discussing the gospel with a devoted Muslim neighbor. He also shared Christ with Serbian veterans and even with people connected to those who had harmed or threatened his family. In a place still scarred by war, he chose to cross lines of hostility and offer the message of reconciliation.
That did not mean he handled every situation perfectly. During a conflict involving neighbors taking pears from his family’s property, Ivor reacted combatively. One man told him that his grandfather would have been ashamed of the way he was behaving. Ivor immediately realized that his response had failed to represent Jesus. After talking with his wife, Carolina, he returned with coffee and cookies, apologized, and asked if they could begin again.
I love that part of the story because following Jesus is not about never making mistakes. It is about being willing to repent, repair what we have damaged, and return with humility. Ivor’s apology opened the door to a relationship. Instead of remaining enemies, they began sharing conversations and serving one another. Sometimes the clearest picture of Jesus is not our perfection but our willingness to admit when we were wrong.
Ivor also met an Orthodox widow who was grieving the loss of her brother. He prayed with her and learned that some veterans in the community mocked her and her daughter for their faith. When he gave Bibles to the woman, her daughter, and her granddaughter, she began to cry. She explained that she otherwise would have needed to drive for hours to find those Scriptures.
Later, Ivor overheard some of the skeptical veterans wondering whether God might actually be real. He may never know the complete impact of the Bibles he distributed, the conversations he shared, or the acts of love he offered. That is often the nature of kingdom work. We plant seeds, but God produces the growth.
Ivor’s journey shows us that Jesus is present in the darkest chapters of our stories. He was present in a refugee camp, in the kindness of a nun, in a bag of desperately needed supplies, in honest conversations with patient mentors, and in a young man’s desperate prayer for his father. He was present in the process of healing from rejection, in the return to a war-torn homeland, and in the humility of an apology offered over coffee and cookies.
We may not always recognize what God is doing in the moment. Darkness can make us believe that we have been forgotten, rejected, or abandoned. But God is faithful. He continues pursuing us, placing people in our path and transforming our deepest wounds into opportunities to bring hope to others.
My prayer is that the seeds Ivor planted in Bosnia will continue multiplying. I pray that the Bibles he delivered will be opened at precisely the right moments, that his words will be remembered, and that his acts of love will continue pointing people toward Jesus. Most of all, I pray that his story reminds us of a simple but powerful truth: even when we cannot see God, He has never stopped seeing us.
