Trinidad Truck Driver Gets Goose Bumps Over God

Before seeking God, the 53-year-old father had often felt alone.

By Andrew McChesney, Adventist Mission

Truck driver Safan Karamath likes goose bumps.

The small bumps form on his arms when he listens to a sermon. They rise during prayer and when he talks about his new-found love for Jesus.

“I really feel God’s presence here,” Karamath said, extending a bare arm during an interview at the University of the Southern Caribbean, a Seventh-day Adventist educational institute on the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, where he was baptized following an evangelistic series in April 2016. Small bumps dotted his brown skin.

“This always happens to me when we speak about God,” he said. “I take it as a sign that I am not alone.”

Karamath said he has felt alone for many of his 53 years.

An only child, his mother died when he was young. He was raised by an alcoholic father in a Muslim community in Trinidad.

“Father was always drunk, so I had to run from him when he came home,” Karamath said. “It was the survival of the fittest. There was no one to help or give guidance. I relied on myself alone.”

Karamath regularly attended services at the neighborhood mosque with the other children. But he left Islam in discouragement over his inability to learn Arabic, a requirement of the mosque clergy. After marriage, he and his wife converted to Hinduism and raised eight children, all of whom were christened in the Roman Catholic Church.

But Karamath still felt alone. He sought comfort in marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol.

Then misfortune struck. He was accosted at gunpoint twice. In one incident, carjackers seized his vehicle and, speeding down a highway, kicked him out of the door. He miraculously survived.

“God brought me back from that,” he said.

Later, robbers held up the van where he was selling beer. They fled with all the cash from the day’s sales.

Then his wife left him.

Karamath wondered whether there was more to life. As he sought a better way, he decided to give up marijuana. Several years later he quit smoking. Sometime later — in January 2016 — he stopped drinking alcohol.

Then the goose bumps started. Karamath started attending evangelistic meetings at the University of the Southern Caribbean after being invited through a children’s Bible class that the university offers to neighborhood children. Karamath’s children attended the weekly class, which is taught by university teachers at a small grocery store.

“The gospel was proclaimed in such a vivid manner, and after 50 years I met the Lord for the first time,” he said. “My family has been drastically transformed.”

Karamath and three of his children, ages 12, 14, and 16, were baptized after the meetings.

Asked Monday whether he would feel like God had left him if the goose bumps stopped, he smiled broadly and exclaimed: “No! Never!”

He said he simply sees the goose bumps as a sign that he has no reason to feel alone anymore.

“I like the reminder that I am not alone,” he said. “God is with me.”

A portion of the the Thirteenth Sabbath Offering in first quarter 2018 will go toward a church for the University of the South Caribbean, which has never owned a church building and presently conducts worship services in an auditorium. Senior church pastor and university spiritual vice president Terry John says the extra space provided by the new church will allow the university to expand outreach programs such as the weekly children’s Bible class that led Safan Karamath and his children to baptism.