Horrified Sunitha Ramakrishna watched as her mother burst into flames before her eyes, while cooking breakfast at their home in Bangalore.

"It was a real nightmare" says Sunitha, then 12, now 26. "But I'd learned at school that 'Jesus is the healer', so I prayed for Jesus to heal her."

Jesus's answer came in an unexpected way.

The example of a Christian's love for her mother at this time affected Sunitha deeply: "There were five unhealed wounds on her leg, and every time she'd walk she'd bleed" explains Sunitha. "This friend would cry for my mum, serve her, pray for her; her other friends wouldn't."

Sunitha found faith in Jesus, and her mum followed. A year later she was healed. "All the top doctors in Bangalore gave up hope; mum's only hope was Jesus - He spoke to her in a vision" says Sunitha.

It was Jesus's sacrificial love that won Sunitha: "God loved me enough to die for me -that just blew my mind. I didn't find that in the Indian gods."

But for Sunitha and her mum, becoming Christians was a huge and difficult decision. Their religious family had 10 gods in the house, gave food to idols, even gave idols to the temple. So, their baptism had to be secret.

Young Sunitha had always cherished two dreams: to have a cause to fight for and to have a big family. "I wanted to be a warrior princess" she says. "While I was at college, I was a Lance Corporal in the National Cadet Corps, I was trained in the forest and mountain to fight and my secret desire was to fight and win battles."

God was to use her fighting spirit to lead her to her second dream.

When Sunitha was secretly baptised as a Christian in 2002, she remembers saying to her mum "You know why we have such a big house? 'Cause one day we're going to live in a massive house with lots of Christians!"

The next eight years were years of searching for just such a house. As a student in the UK she looked for a church that could fulfil her deepest desire. When the church hunt turned out to be in vain, she returned to India.

"Go back to the UK - I'll give you a people" she felt God saying. So she did. And a couple of months later, in January 2007, she read a verse in the Bible: "Get up, I've heard your cry, I'm going to give you a people."

Two days later, as she was running to catch a bus on Oxford Street, she met someone who asked "Do you love Jesus?" and invited her to visit the nearby Jesus Army house.

The moment Sunitha came through the door, she knew she had come home. Here were the brothers and sisters she'd longed for, for years.

But the battle was far from over. Two visa refusals and trouble back home lay in the way of fulfilling her dream.

Her friends in London prayed for her return, and, in 2009, against all the odds, she got the papers she needed.

No longer is Sunitha lonely. She shares her life with a big, loving family.

Now she wants to express her love in caring for others, showing them the purity she's found in Jesus and adding to the "forever family" she's found as a Christian.

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