My name is Pastor Vincent Sahayanathan. I was born on a small island called Sri Lanka. Born and raised there, I had a good childhood which turned sour because of a civil war that had broken out in the country. Because of this, I had to leave my family, my land, everything that I had ever known and flee as a refugee to Germany.
In Germany, a country where I knew no one and nothing, I started to miss home and felt down about my life and these feelings eventually led to depression. Soon I started to have suicidal thoughts and made the decision to end my life.
One night, I left my room with the intention of jumping on to the highway and this ending this suffering I was in. But, of course, God had another plan for me. I hid in the bushes on the side of the road waiting for a moment to jump when a white van pulled up and slowed down to a stop right where I was hiding. I got up and out of the van came a man dressed in white.
The man in white approached me handed me a small book and said that it was in Tamil. With that, the man in white got back into his van and drove off and at that moment, any suicidal thought that I had vanished and I went back into my room.
I opened the Bible and the first verse my eyes fell upon was John 14:1: “Do not let your hearts be troubled”. This verse truly touched my life and I knew that there had to be someone somewhere watching over me. This realization led to me attending a church service in which I became saved and committed my life to God.
From that day on, my life did a full 180 turn and I became very involved in my church, got an amazing job at a Christian bookstore and my life was starting to look up again by the grace of God.
A couple of years later, after marrying my wife Salini, and establishing a small church amongst the Sri Lankan Tamil population in Germany, God called me to move to Canada. This was a very difficult thing to do considering we were settled in Germany and expecting a child but, since God had asked, we packed up our things again and migrated to Canada in February of 1994.
When we first got to Canada, we went about our lives, with the intention of continuing to worship and serve God. But God had a different plan. God blessed me with two girls Evelyn and Angeline. He helped us to establish a church, Toronto Harvest Missionary Church, a church for the large Sri Lankan Tamil population of Toronto.