According to residents, a group led by Ali Shah, the son of an influential local man, had made a habit of coming to Nasrat Colony every Sunday to harass and follow Christian girls and women as their families walked to church. That morning, Masih, who works making pizzas at a local restaurant, saw the gang harassing a girl and asked them why they kept coming into the neighborhood to trouble women. The men answered him with a slur, "chura," a term used to degrade Christians in Pakistan, and demanded to know how a Christian dared to challenge them.
Shah and his companions left, but they did not forget. Later that day, when Masih was alone, they returned armed and set upon him, beating him while repeating the same religious slurs. Neighbors who heard the commotion alerted Masih's parents, Saleem, a brick-kiln laborer, and Zakriya, a homemaker. By the time they reached their son, he was unconscious. He was rushed first to a local hospital and then referred to the District Headquarters Hospital, where doctors documented severe injuries across multiple parts of his body.
Police have lodged a First Information Report against the attackers. But Masih's family says they fear that Shah's family connections may buy him bail and, in time, quiet dismissal of the case altogether — a pattern that Christian families in Pakistan have learned to dread.
A Boy Who Stood Between the Wolf and the Lamb
There is a kind of courage that does not calculate the cost first. A seventeen-year-old boy from a brick-kiln family, with no rank and no protection, saw a young woman being harassed and put his own body between her and the men doing it. He knew exactly what he was, a Christian in a place where that word can be spat like an insult, and he spoke up anyway. That is not recklessness. That is the oldest kind of manhood there is, the kind that shows up on its own without being taught, because it was placed in the heart by the God who made him.
Scripture does not romanticize what that costs. It tells the truth about it.
"Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12)
Notice the word Paul uses. Not "some." Not "the unlucky." All who will live godly shall suffer for it, in one measure or another, in one country or another. Masih did not suffer for stealing, or brawling, or picking a fight he had no business in. He suffered for standing up for someone weaker than the men attacking her. That is about as close to the character of Christ as a boy can get, and it earned him a hospital bed and a body covered in bruises.
My friend, do not let anyone tell you that goodness is safe. It never has been. The prophets were stoned. The apostles were beaten and jailed and, most of them, killed. The Lord Himself was nailed to a cross for doing nothing but good. If you have decided to follow Him, somewhere down the road you will be asked to pay for it, maybe not with iron rods and pistols, but with something. A friendship. A promotion. A reputation. The question worth asking is not whether it will cost you, but whether you will pay it when the moment comes, the way a seventeen-year-old pizza-maker in Punjab did without stopping to think.
Here is what ought to steady the heart of every believer who reads Masih's story and feels the anger rise. The men who beat him have not settled anything. They have only added their names to a very long list of men who thought violence could silence the gospel and found out, generation after generation, that it cannot.
"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28)
Pray for that boy's healing, and pray for the courts of Sheikhupura to give him and his family the justice the law promises them. But pray, too, that the church in Pakistan, battered as it is, keeps raising sons who will not sit still while the weak are mistreated. The world calls that kind of stand foolish. Heaven calls it faithful.