Jahan Berns- Overcoming A Father's Death

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Introducing first, from Lithuania, he weighs 123 kilos, the Russian nightmare, Nikita Kolob. Now, the Devil's Nightmare. Welcome back to another episode of It's Time to Man Up. With me today, Jahan Burns. Welcome to the Man Up show. Welcome back to the Man Up show. Welcome back to the Man Up show. Welcome back to the Man Up show. Welcome back to the Man Up show. Welcome back to the Man Up show.

Welcome back to the Man Up show. Okay. Well, thank you, Nikita. Likewise, it was wonderful to meet you that day in North Carolina, and that conference was just off the charts. Just a little bit about me. I was born in Uganda. My dad was in the military and had trained in different countries, including Israel, as a commando. And in the 70s, 80s, you know, Uganda was very much in civil war. We had got independence from England, from Great Britain, but because there were so many tribes coming together to form a country, it was very bumpy from the beginning. So in 1986, when I was about six and a half, my father was part of a unity government that was ruling the country, and he had given up arms to be a part of the peace process, and he ended up being assassinated. So following his death, life was extremely hard. My dad had been Anglican, my mom was Muslim, and so my mom raised a Muslim. And along with that, you know, we became very involved and entrenched into your cult, which really messed up our life. So by the time I was a teenager, I was highly dysfunctional, and I ended up there by really an act of the Lord in a British missionary boarding school.

It was the best girls boarding school at that time in my country, and it was there that I was asked, introduced to Christ, as these plasmids of mine began to pray for me, you know, non-stop. And so through a series of dramatic events, I came to read Psalm 91, and the Bible just became alive to make me feel like it's just the words left off the page, or just slipping off the page. And they gripped me, and I remember just thinking, I have to read this book, I have to read this book, because, you know, for the first time in my life, I had teeth and I was able to sleep all night long. And I didn't have attacks and nightmares and, you know, all demonic stuff that was going on in my life, and so I began to read the Bible, and for three days, I could not put it down. And so when I finished reading it, it wasn't like I had understood everything I read in those three days, but I was sure that the God of the Bible was God. Not any other God I had been taught, but the God of the Bible, and so I went and I knelt down, I didn't know how to give my life to him, but I remember I told him, I said, I have so much darkness, I have so much fear, I have so much confusion and hatred. I said, if you take these things away, I will serve you for the rest of my life. And I just began to cry and weep, and when I was done, I felt so free, I felt clean, and I never felt dirty before, but surprisingly, I felt awesomely clean and free, and I felt this love I'd never felt for myself, for others, and so began this amazing transformational journey.

Yes, I was persecuted for my faith coming from Islam, but Jesus was everything, and he helped me and strengthened me. So fast forward, I went to law school in my country, and then after law school, got married to my husband who was American, and I moved to England, and then I later moved to the US. And so once I came to the US, I went back to law school and began practicing law at a big law firm in Birmingham, Alabama. For 13 years, I was in a law firm working there, litigating, and then eventually, the Lord, I felt a real call to ministry. So after praying about it for about a year, I joined a ministry called JH Israel, and it has a sister organization called the US Israel Education Association, and both of these organizations are involved in Israel. JH Israel runs and supports a national leadership center in Israel where we bring students from Israel, young soldiers, policemen, all Israelis, and we take them through a biblical-based curriculum that teaches them the Bible and how to be leaders based on biblical principles. The US Israel Education Association is an education association that works together with leaders here in Congress and Israeli leaders to cooperate on issues like national security, missile defense, research and development, and health. So I am the chief operating officer and the in-house counsel for both organizations, and the amazing thing about our organizations is that they're really built on a foundation of prayer. We're two Christian educations. Yes, we're educational, but we're also Christian, and so part of what I do is to really travel and talk about the Lord and talk about our work and how the Lord undergirds the work that we're doing for the strengthening of both Israel and the US. So, Nikita, that's a little bit about me.

I'm married to Bob Burns, and we have two children, Charlene Burns and Kendall Burns. Well, you have, I mean, I want to unpack this story just a little bit for our listeners because, I mean, again, I know it fascinated me, and I feel like it's got to fascinate those out there in the listening world and around the world. The show goes presently into over 76 countries that will hear your story, Jahan. And so part of the connection I felt, too, and I may or may not have mentioned this to you, but in my travels, I have made three different trips to Uganda. So I've been to your place of birth, right, Uganda? I have been there. In fact, I did a revival.

One of my fondest memories of Uganda is I did a revival in the capital city of Kampala, right? Yes. Yep, and one of the most interesting memories is we were doing a Sunday night service, and they forewarned me that the power can go off at any time, right, with no warning. It's something you're probably very familiar with, right?

Yes. And I'll just try to condense this down, but I'm in the middle of my sermon, and we're in this church, and of course, it's a building. It's got dirt floors. It's got walls.

There's no windows yet installed, and they're in the process of trying to complete this building project. And I'm preaching my heart out, and it goes black. And when the electricity goes out, it's like pitch black, right? It's dark, yes.

I know you know what I'm talking about. I mean, I can't see my hand in front of my face. I'm like, Lord, what am I supposed to do?

The place is packed out. And I heard the Lord just say, keep preaching. And I had an interpreter too, right? I can't even see him.

I can't even see him. And Jahan, it was the most amazing experience because... So I just kept preaching.

He kept interpreting. No microphones at this point, but the Lord is just projecting our voice. And I heard all this shuffling, and I thought, man, I guess everybody's leaving. Nobody can see, right? And then after, I don't know, a few minutes or whatever, just continue to preach my heart out, this elderly woman comes in from very far back with one little single lit candle. And that little candle lit the entire...

I mean, it wasn't neon lights, but it lit the entire inside of that. And she comes all the way down the aisle and comes up on the stage, pours a little wax on the pulpit for me and plants that single candle on the pulpit where I can now see my Bible. And all the shuffling was people coming flooding the altars, flooding the altars. And God just moved that night in such a marvelous way. It's the only time I ever preached in the dark, Jahan. Yeah, but it was an amazing memory. But yeah, so I've been three trips to Uganda, and so there's definitely a connection there. Let me ask you, let me go back just for a moment.

Your dad, if they didn't pick up on that, I mean, he was like... I guess what we would phrase in America, a special forces guy, right? And both for the Ugandan government, but I think you said trained in Israel, right? He was trained in Israel? In Israel and Russia and Iraq, but yeah.

Okay, so he was trained all over. And so you're six or seven years old when there's essentially... Was it kind of a type of a coup? Is that why he was assassinated?

Right. We don't know who did it, but you know, in 1985, there were all these fighting factions, and hundreds and thousands of people had died. So Kenya, the government of Kenya, held a peace process for the Ugandan fighting factions and brought them together to form a unity government to say, let's try peace. And my dad... You know, Uganda, as you know, is just about 50 tribes which all speak different languages.

And Kampala falls within the kingdom of Buganda, from which Uganda gets its name. So it was the largest tribe, and my dad came from that tribe, and he found, well, he never really set out to have an army when times got so bad and his people were being killed so much. He, being highly trained, ended up commanding a special elite force that became an army to protect Kampala and all the other areas that his tribe lived in. So you had the current president of Uganda right now, Moshe Rennie, in the west where his tribe lived, and you had rebel factions from the north. So all these factions were brought together, about five factions that were brought together in this unity government, you know, except one I think that refused to join. And so they cobbled together this government to try and, you know, bring a lasting peace. So that was 1985 when they signed that agreement, and my dad came out of guerrilla warfare, and it was the first time in Kita that I had normal home life.

And I was living with my dad at home, you know, lots of soldiers, lots of bodyguards, lots of fighting, but a sense of normalcy for me to live with my parents. But that unity government fell apart in 1986 because there were just selfish entities there that everyone wanted power. Right. And so they just kept on assassinating people that they thought were obstacles to. Right. People were standing in their way, right, of gaining power. Now, if I remember the story, right, Jahanla, when you guys got word that your dad had been assassinated, like, was it like a, you didn't know, like you didn't know where he was. It was like a couple weeks or something, if I remember right.

And it wasn't like maybe your uncle that found him. Is that correct? You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. Nikita Koloff here, and I am excited. Did you hear the huge announcement, the big announcement?

Well, maybe it's a minor announcement. Anyway, Facebook, go look up my new fan page, Nikita Koloff Fans, and like it and follow today. If you would like to support Koloff for Christ Ministries for a gift of $25, Nikita will send you his two CDs, Adoration and Declaration for a gift of $50. Nikita will include his book, Wrestling with Success, and for a gift of $100 or more, Nikita will include a signed copy of his newly updated life story, A Tale of the Ring and Redemption.

Go to www.koloff.net and donate today. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. It is correct. So what happened was he got a call. He came to pick me up from school that day. He dropped me off and came pick me up an hour later, and there was fighting in the city. We were driving our convoy back home and they were shooting at us.

We get home and my dad just kept on getting phone call after phone call. So in the early afternoon, he gets this call and they're telling him to come to a hotel at the time it was called Nile Mansions, a famous hotel in Uganda now called Serena. That's where they would hold the peace talks. So they tell him that they were trying to come together again to stop the fighting and would he come for the peace talks.

And so he said yes, you know, against the wishes of some of my relatives that were there, my uncle especially, saying, I don't think you should go. Well, he did. He got into a Range Rover and took three other Range Rovers, four packed soldiers. Well, when they walked into the hotel, it was an ambush, and they beheaded the other soldiers, and they took my dad to a suburb of Kampala on a lonely road called Silver Springs. And they shot him, and they dropped his body in a ditch. And then they tipped the media. And that's how Nikita was first heard about it on the news. And it was, oh my goodness, art of confusion and mayhem. And it was terrible. So we ran to the village.

We had a village home. You know, we ran there for safety while they sent out such parties to look for him. And now you know how general with him can be very sensational. And there were reports filtering through that he had been hacked to pieces. And in fact, the first body they brought to us was very mutilated and, you know, just in a highly state of decomposition. And imagine that trauma of having to really look at different corpses to say, no, that's not him, that's not him, that's not him. But eventually, yeah, my uncle was driving up and down this road just praying and just, you know, desperate, saying, God, it's been two weeks. And then he saw an arm, he just saw an arm and something made him stop. He'd been looking at corpses all these days. But he went and he looked at that arm. And thankfully, my dad had a bracelet, a big bracelet that has his name and army number. And that's how he identified him.

Yeah, miraculously found him after a two-week search, which is amazing. So you're six or seven, obviously, I mean, traumatic for a six or seven-year-old. And as you said earlier in our interview, so your mom, you're now being raised by a single mom who's Muslim, and you got involved in the occult and all of that. And it's just amazing that you really sent off to this boarding school and there as a teenager, as you were sharing earlier, you were introduced to Psalm 91, and that really opened your eyes for the first time, right, to the God of the universe who, in a sense, rescues you and brings you into the family of God, right?

Right, right. And so you eventually make your way, and just kind of recap in what you were sharing, you make your way eventually over to England and attend law school. Your story reminds me, the word that comes to mind is overcomer. I mean, if there was anyone that had a story that's an overcomer, Jehan, oh my goodness, your story is one of those.

And you mentioned a couple of words that really stuck out to me in your story. When you accepted Christ, you felt free for the first time and clean. You said, not that I felt dirty, but it just, you remind me of a dear friend of mine and one of my best friends, Lex Luger, who, when he gave his life to the Lord, he said he felt like he was power washed from the inside out, from the soles of his feet up to the crown of his head, right? But from the inside out, right?

For you listening out there and listening, as you're listening to Jehan's story and what she has overcome and where she's at in life today, only Jesus could be a part of this story to help her be an overcomer and power wash you from the inside. Transformation takes place from the inside out. You can't work for it. You can't earn salvation.

It's from the inside out and it's making that decision. And so you go off to law school at the UK, you eventually make it to America. And so where did you meet your husband?

Just real quick, tell us where you met him. Yeah. Okay, Nikita.

I just want to clarify that I went back to law school here in America. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Gotcha. So my husband's kind of a funny story. We met on a Christian dating site back in 2003 and it was my first stint in law school and I'd really been praying and fasting and just saying, God, I made so many mistakes. And I'd come to that point where I was really pursuing what you would call radical obedience to the word of God, because I got to a point and I thought, you know, God's much smarter than I am. You know, and so I began to pray and wait on God.

And then, you know, I had a dream one day and that as I was praying for a husband that I saw God and his hand was holding the universe, you know, looked like a ball in his hand and he turned it around and he pointed to the US and he said, your husband is going to be from this country. And then I saw a picture and I saw myself standing next to you in Uganda, we call them white people, white persons, you know, and there was this man, you know, that was white and I'd never dated anyone white, never thought about it. I wasn't racist.

I just, it just, I didn't grow up that way. Right. Just didn't connect the dots there. Right. So.

Right. So I woke up and I was a little bit shocked and I was like, God, are you trying to speak to me? So I pondered about it, prayed about it. And then after a while, I just felt that urge to go on a Christian dating site and boy, did my friends laugh. They were like, that stuff is for people without social skills. Right.

Right. But I felt like that's where God was leading me. And you know, the interesting thing was that's where God was leading him to.

He had gone through a time of rebellion and doing drugs. And then he came to Christ and his grandmother actually told him, you know, instead of just dating college kids that are not as mature as you are, why don't you try this Christian dating thing? So that's how we met. And we both just knew.

I knew first. I mean, I'd really been in such a time of just waiting on God and just saying, God, I want what you want. I lay myself down and I said, I lay my desires down.

I just want what you want. And so he wrote to me and we began corresponding and there were so many things that seemed like coincidence, but really were not. And so we agreed to meet in London. And I just have this thing, you know, he says it drives me mad, but just some would say it's a strong intuition.

I say it's one of the gifts of the Lord that he gives us, you know, that I'll know something. I just knew that he was going to propose, you know, on the phone. And he called me and he proposed. This is like two months after just talking. And I felt in my heart that God had told me to say yes.

So I said yes. And I had never met him. You know, we're just talking on the phone. And I came and told my mom, I said, Mom, I am going to marry this man. And she's like, what? And she's like, where is this from? I said, America. And she said, Americans are crazy.

You should never marry an American. And she proceeded to tell me all this crazy stuff. And I said, Mom, why did you learn that? She said, on Jerry Springer. Oh, goodness, of all things.

Right. I said, Mom, yeah, like American and not like what you see on Jerry Springer. Like, this is a wonderful Christian man. Anyway, he came home and met my family and they really fell in love with him. And so we've been married for almost 20 years now. That's awesome.

You have a beautiful family. And you bring up another interesting point here. We're almost out of time. But I want to bring this point home for our listeners. Lord, I just lay my life down. I lay my desires down. I lay my life down. And when you did that, God brought this man into your life.

And now you have a beautiful family. Jahan, let me ask you before we run out of time. I know you don't have a website. But how could people like if a church or a pastor conference wants to bring you in to share your story and for you to speak? I know you minister not just to women, but men and those, anyone who will listen. What's your email address for our listeners if there's a pastor out there listening or a ministry that wants to bring you in?

Yeah. Oh, thank you, Nikita, for that. Actually, I'll give two words. I remember that I mentioned that I work for an organization called JH Israel.com. If you go to that website, JH Israel.com and look under team, you will see my name and my contact there. OK. That's one way.

Second way, which is what I'm mostly commonly used for ministry purposes, is just send me an email at four number four or so 91 at gmail dot com. Awesome. And I think what's cool, too, is how God's kind of brought this full circle. Your dad was part of the Israel, you know, trained as a commando for, you know, through the Israel Israeli Army. And now here you're connected full circle back with Israel. So JH Israel dot com. That's the website, correct? JH Israel dot com, correct?

Yes. OK. And well, I hope you were as intrigued with Jahan story today as I was. And there's just so much more to the story. I would encourage you if you are a pastor, pastor out there to consider bringing Jahan in and minister to the men, to the women, to your church or to your conference, because you will be blown away by there's so much more to her story. We're going to kind of leave it like an old wrestling show, Jahan.

We used to leave them hanging at the end of the show so they'd have to tune in next week. So they're going to have to go to your website or email you to get the rest of the story. But thank you so much for being a part of this. So what a what an overcoming story. And I just want to thank you for being a part of the man up show today. Thank you, Nikita. God bless you for what you're doing for that kingdom. May he continue to use you and speak to people through you in Jesus name.

Well, and I received that and I anticipate God's going to continue to use you mightily in the future as well. Jahan Burns here on the man up show. And, you know, each and every week, all of you are so faithful to to dial in to tune in to help spread the word, help help us spread the word.

Go spread the word on the man up show. Go to the Truth Radio app or go to the Truth Radio podcast platform or just your your own podcast platform. And help us spread the word and get more stories like Jahan's out there to the world to inspire people who need the inspiration of Jesus. God bless you. Thanks for tuning in again today. This podcast is made possible by the grace of God and your faithful prayers, support and generous gifts. May God bless you for your continual contributions. Go to Koloff.net and donate today.

I, Nikita Koloff. Be sure to check out the man up show now available on television, broadcast and podcast. Go to MorningStarTV.com or the Truth Radio Network. Check out your local listings or better yet, download the Truth Network app today. If you are enjoying the man up show, would you help us spread the word? Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your neighbors to download, subscribe and leave a comment. Nikita Koloff here.

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