23/03/2026
✨ Testimony of Deepak Melwani
I am sixty years old and when I look back, I remember clearly who I was at eighteen.
I had work. I had community. I had religion. But I had no peace.
The people around me prayed on holy days and lived completely differently the rest of the week. I watched this for so long that I stopped questioning it. I simply assumed, this is life — this is how people are. So I buried the restlessness inside me and carried on with life.
But late at night, when everything became quiet, one question kept returning:
Is this really all there is?
I was eighteen when everything changed.
A group called The Gideons International in Jakarta, Indonesia came to me needing suits made. I was a tailor by profession, and I went simply to do my work. But when I walked into that room and saw these men reading the Bible and praying together, something caught my attention.
There was a genuine warmth among them — a unity and care for one another that I had never seen before. There was no pretence, no politics, just real fellowship.
I remember thinking to myself,
“Whatever they have, I don’t have it.”
They invited me to a church meeting, and I went. The pastor preached from John 3:16. He explained that Jesus did not die for the world in some distant or general way. He died for me personally. For my sin, for the emptiness I had been carrying. And He rose again so that I could stop merely existing and actually live.
It had nothing to do with being good enough or religious enough.
That day I repented and gave my life to Jesus. And something shifted inside me that I still cannot fully put into words. A deep peace settled over me that I had never known before. The restlessness that had followed me for years was finally answered.
That was forty-two years ago.
Since then I have walked with God through many seasons — joy and grief, abundance and difficulty, ordinary days and significant ones. Through every season, He has been faithful and present.
In 1999, I received the call to pastor the Prayer & Care Center in Mumbai.In 2004, I was called to serve in New Life Fellowship.
Later, in 2012, the Lord led me to pioneer El Shaddai Ministries — beginning an English service in Juhu and a Hindi service in Kurla.
And today, after all these years, my testimony remains simple:
Jesus Christ is faithful.
The peace I found at eighteen has never left me.
