Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

It was at 11.44am that time stood still at All Saints' Church.

The clock on the wall is frozen at the very minute seven-year-old Shyam Emmanuel lost his parents. In that same moment, seven children were sent to their deaths along with 78 adults who had congregated outside the gleaming white walls of Peshawar's main Christian place of worship.

The carnage inflicted here was dealt by two young men, dressed in security uniforms, who, under instruction from the Taliban, detonated suicide vests and turned a warm community celebration into the biggest massacre of Christians in Pakistan's history.

Six days after the devastating bombing in this North Western city of three and a half million people, the paediatric ward of Peshawar's Lady Reading hospital is still full.

Shyam is one of more than a dozen bandaged, maimed and burnt children being treated all of whom had lost parents, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.

^{Shyam in his hospital bed. (DIEGO IBARRA SANCHEZ FOR THE TELEGRAPH)}

Looking forlorn in thick spectacles, with a bandaged nose and arm, he said he could not remember much of the blast.

What he does know is that he was one of about 50 children singing The Good Shepherd in the Sunday school opposite the colonial church when their teacher told them to run out and get rice and sweets being offered in memory of a popular parishioner who had died.

As he rushed down the steps with his two brothers and friends into the common courtyard, the two uniformed bombers in their mid twenties struck and the clock on the wall of All Saints' stopped.

Arif Latif, a male nurse at a local clinic, heard the blast, saw the destruction and immediately thought that his 12-year-old son Norman was dead.

He and his wife had been inside the church.

"We were confused. We have two children. I went looking for them," recalls Mr Latif. "He was under a dead body, unconscious. I thought he was dead. I picked him up and he shouted about his leg. It was broken, he was crying in pain, but I was happy because my child was alive."

Although Norman and his sister survived, burns on one side of the young boy's face have turned his skin white, the ball bearings from the suicide vests had punctured his chest and some of the shrapnel remains stuck inside. His arm is seriously burnt and there is a tube in his chest to ease his breathing. Doctors are worried about his liver.

Like the rest of his fearful minority community, Mr Latif believes Christians face a bleak future.