Paul Calvert spoke with Tass Abu Saada

Paul: Are you from a Christian background or a Moslem background?

Tass: My family is Moslem. I am from a Moslem background. I gave my heart to Jesus in 1993 through a supernatural intervention.

Paul: You went over to America. How did you feel about America at the time?

Tass: After I shot my teacher I was kicked out of school and my father was still concerned about my education so he gave me a choice to go to England or go to Egypt. I didn't want to go to either one; I wanted to go to America. Why did I want to go to America when I hated the Americans just as much as I hated the Jews? It was an amazing thing to me. I was so drawn. When I got to America and I lived there for a few months I realised that the Americans are not really bad people; they are good people, very good hearted people. They welcomed me, they respected me and they accepted me. In Arab countries I am not really accepted. As a Palestinian I am still a refugee and immigrant and always told so. I decided I love America, I love the American people and I wanted to live there, so I made plans to do that.

Paul: What did God do in your life while you were in America?

Tass: Well until 1993 I didn't follow the God that I know today. When I decided to stay in America, I asked my friends what would be the best way to stay there? They said to marry an American girl; so I went hunting for one and found one and got married. My father said, "If you marry an American girl there will be no more money from us, you feed your American wife."

I started working at a French restaurant as a dish washer, washing dishes and cleaning floors and it worked well for me. I really enjoyed what I was doing; I was surprised, as it's not something that I would do from my background of a very wealthy family. The owner of the restaurant was a French man and he and his wife really respected me. They saw that I was a hard worker. So the man decided he wanted to teach me to cook French food and he did. They took good care of me. They moved me to the dining room after a few months and I learned how to serve people. I got to enjoy it tremendously. At the same time I was studying business management and international marketing and when I finished that I started working in the hotel industry. I left that restaurant because the original owners who took care of me sold it to their friends. I wanted to buy it, but they didn't want to sell it to me because I wasn't ready. So I left and started working with hotels. I grew very fast and became very successful in the hotel and restaurant industry. I did my master degree from Quinnell University in hotel management.

I think God was intervening even though I was not following Him. I did not know Him, but He was building that success for the time that we are living today so that I could use all that money and wealth that I made in America to do what I am doing now, that's humanitarian work.

Paul: How did you become a believer in Jesus?

Tass: You know the miracle of all that is how God really is patient with us. I was a wild man and although I married my wife and she's a wonderful woman, really I did not have love for her. I just married her for business, to get my residence, but she was a good woman. I didn't want to divorce her. I wanted her to leave me. I was living a wild life, but she was patient.

When I went to the dining room to be trained that was really the beginning of the process of my salvation. I went to my first customer, an American business man and I reached for his dish and my hand was so nervous, he noticed that my hand was shaking. He stopped talking to the lady with him and looked at me with a beautiful smile and said, "Thank you young man." That gesture of gratitude just captured my heart. You know in the Middle East we don't thank our servers. I know he had to be very wealthy to be eating in that restaurant because it was very expensive, so that really touched my heart. I decided, "I'm gonna take good care of this man," not knowing that God was setting up a relationship between me and this man and that eventually 19 years later he lead me to the Kingdom. He loved me. He treated me as an equal. He's a multi-billionaire, not just a millionaire, but yet he treated me as an equal person. That intrigued me as a person from the Middle East; when you are really that wealthy you don't look at the little people at all, you don't treat them right. This man treated me with the most respect.

After 19 years I went back to that French restaurant to buy it. It was the time for me to get it and that's when God began to move closer on me.

I wanted to move this French restaurant to my own building. It was sitting in a rental property and I wanted to buy my own building in a very nice prestigious area and move the restaurant there. I was looking for a building and Charlie was helping, the friend that I met the first time when I took his dirty dishes away. Charlie knew I was looking, so he was helping me to find a good place. In February of 1993 he came to me to tell me about this particular place; I had gone to see it three days before, it was the same place. The building used to be a funeral home. This is where you see how God works in mysterious ways. It used to be a funeral home and they fixed dead bodies in there and from my Moslem background and teaching, any place that had dead bodies has demons and ghosts in the building, so when I walked in there I was uncomfortable. I ran away, I physically ran out of there. Charlie told me about this building and I told him, "Charlie I was there three days ago and man when I walked in there I felt creeps all over the place." He laughed at me with very bold eyes for the first time. The boldness he had in his eyes, this look was amazing. He said to me, "Tass you know why you feel this way?" "No why?" I replied. He said, "Because you don't have the fear of God in you."

I was shocked. He knew about me, he knew everything about me. I said, "Charlie I'm a Moslem, I fear God. He said, "No you don't, but not to worry I can help you. I can fix it." He then pointed to the sky and said, "I have connections." I just laughed at him and walked away. But you know something, sometimes even as believers we don't realise that God is doing something, we don't realise that sometimes we speak words and these words just stick to us; that God is already in the process, He's setting up the process.