God’s relentless, stubborn, unfailing pursuit of his people through centuries of their unfaithfulness.

The prophets calling out in the wilderness, the exile and the return.

And then Jesus, God himself, stepping into the mess of human history, putting on human skin, walking on human roads, eating human food, weeping human tears, healing, teaching, touching the untouchable, loving the unlovable.

And then the cross, the agony, the darkness, the tearing of the curtain, the tomb, and then on the third day, the stone rolled away, the grave emptied, the impossible made real.

Resurrection.

I saw my own story inside that story.

I had been in Egypt, enslaved.

I had been in exile, far from home.

I had been in a tomb, sealed behind stone.

And God had come for me just as he always comes, just as he has always come throughout all of history, for every lost and broken and forgotten person who cries out to him.

There were certain passages that became so personal to me that I could not read them without weeping.

The story of Hagar, the slave woman used and discarded by Abraham and Sarah, wandering in the desert with her dying child, hopeless, alone.

And God found her.

God saw her.

And Hagar gave God a name that no one else in all of scripture gives him.

She called him the God who sees me.

Elroy, the God who sees.

That is who he is.

He is the god who sees the invisible women.

The ones behind walls.

The ones in locked rooms.

The ones whose names are not spoken.

The ones who are sold and used and forgotten.

He sees them.

He sees us.

The story of Ruth became precious to me too.

Ruth who lost everything.

Her husband, her home, her security.

who chose to leave her own country and her own people and follow her mother-in-law into an uncertain future, who arrived in a foreign land with nothing and gleaned grain from the edges of other people’s fields, living on leftovers and kindness.

And God saw her there in the margins and gave her a home and a husband and a child and a place in the very lineage of Jesus himself.

Uh God took a foreign widow with nothing and made her an ancestor of the savior of the world.

I held that story against my own and marveled.

I too had left everything.

I too had arrived in a strange place with nothing.

I too was gleaning, living on the kindness of believers who owed me nothing and gave me everything.

And I dared to believe that God could take my broken, wasted, stolen years and make something beautiful out of them, too.

I wrestled with hard questions during this time.

Questions that did not have easy answers.

Why did God allow 7 years of suffering before he rescued me? Why not sooner? Why not before the wedding? Why not on my wedding night or the first year or the second? Why seven years of silence and darkness and pain? I will not pretend I have fully answered these questions.

I have not.

There are parts of God’s timing that remain mysterious to me and I have made my peace with the mystery.

But I will tell you what I have come to believe.

I believe that during those seven years, God was not absent.

He was at work.

He was preparing the dream.

He was preparing Miriam, placing her two houses away from me years before I would need her.

He was preparing Leila, bringing her to faith through an online community so that when the moment came, she would understand what was happening and know what to do.

He was preparing the network, the safe house, Mama Grace.

He was preparing me, breaking down the false foundations of everything I had been taught so that when the truth came, I would recognize it.

I do not believe God caused my suffering.

I believe he allowed it and I believe he grieved it and I believe he used it.

Uh he took the worst thing that ever happened to me and turned it into the doorway through which I walked into his arms.

That does not make the suffering good.

It makes God good.

There is a difference.

The day of my baptism was the most important day of my life.

More important than the dream even because the dream was something that happened to me.

The baptism was something I chose.

It did not happen in a church.

There is no church building, no steeple, no pews, no organ, no choir.

It happened in a room, a borrowed room in a borrowed building in a city that was not my own.

There was a large basin filled with water.

There were maybe 12 people present.

All of them believers.

All of them people who could be arrested for being in that room.

The risk was real and present and understood by everyone.

And they came anyway.

They came because a sister was about to be born and they were not going to miss it.

I wore a white dress, simple, inexpensive, nothing special.

But when I put it on and looked down at myself, my breath caught because it was white.

White like the robes in the dream, white like the light in the field.

I had not planned this.

No one had planned this.

But God who attends to details that we overlook had arranged even this before the baptism.

I was asked to share my testimony to tell my story to the people gathered in that room.

I stood before them.

This small collection of brave faithful souls.

And I opened my mouth and the words poured out.

Not polished words, not rehearsed words, broken, stumbling, tearful words.

The story you have been reading, the childhood, the sale, the marriage, the silence, the rooftop, the dream, the man in white, the discovery, the confrontation, the escape.

I told it all and I wept through most of it, and they wept with me.

When I finished, the room was quiet.

the kind of quiet that follows thunder.

And then one of the women, an older woman I had only met that week, began to sing softly at first, then joined by others.

A hymn I did not know the words to yet, but that my heart recognized.

A song about amazing grace, about being lost and found, about being blind and now being able to see.

The pastor asked me what name I wanted to be baptized under.

I did not hesitate.

Sarah, I said in the Bible, God changed Sarai’s name to Sarah, which means princess.

Sarah was old.

The world said she was past her usefulness.

Her body said she was barren, finished, done, but God said otherwise.

God gave her a new name and a new future and a child of promise when every natural circumstance said it was impossible.

I told them this.

I told them that I had been called barren.

That I had been told I was finished.

That the world had written me off as a debt payment, a failed wife, a dead daughter.

But God said I was a princess.

God said he had plans for me.

God said the best was not behind me but ahead of me.

And then I stepped into the water.

The pastor took my hand.

I looked at his hand holding mine and I remembered another hand, a hand in a dream extended toward me in a field of light.

Open warm offering.

I had taken that hand in a vision and it had changed everything.

Now I was taking another hand, a human hand, a hand that represented the body of Christ on earth.

And I was choosing freely for the first time in my life uh to die and be reborn.

He lowered me into the water.

I felt it close over my face, cool and complete.

And for a moment there was silence, the same living silence I had felt at the beginning of the dream.

I was under.

The old life was under.

Aisha was under.

The sold girl, the silent wife, the locked room, the shattered phone, the hand across my face.

The years of emptiness, all of it went under the water.

And then I was lifted up.

I came out of the water gasping, blinking, streaming, and the room erupted.

Not in loud cheers.

They could not be loud.

The danger was too present.

but in fierce whispered joy.

Hands reaching for me, arms pulling me close, voices saying my new name.

Sarah.

Sarah.

Welcome, Sarah.

We love you, Sarah.

Jesus loves you, Sarah.

I stood there dripping, sobbing, laughing, surrounded by people I had known for days or weeks who loved me more than my own blood family ever had.

And I understood in that moment what Jesus meant when he said that everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother for his sake will receive a hundred times as much.

I had left everything and I had received everything.

That was several years ago now.

I will not tell you exactly how many or where I am now or the details of my current life because safety requires vagueness and I have learned to be comfortable with vagueness.

But I will tell you what my life looks like now in broad strokes because I want you to know that the story does not end at the baptism.

The story is still being written.

I work now to help other women.

Women in situations like the one I escaped.

Women trapped in forced marriages.

Women fleeing honor violence.

Women who have left Islam and are in danger.

I am connected to the same kind of networks that saved me.

And I do for others what Miriam and Leila and Mama Grace did for me.

I listen.

I comfort.

I pray.

I help with practical things.

escape plans, safe houses, documents, relocation, and sometimes when the moment is right, I share my story.

I share the dream.

I share the name of Jesus.

I have sat with women on the worst nights of their lives.

Women who have just escaped, who are shaking and bleeding and terrified, who look at me with eyes recognize because I have seen those eyes in my own mirror.

I have held their hands and told them what Ila told me in the backseat of that car.

You are safe.

Jesus has you.

You are safe.

One moment stays with me.

A young woman barely 20 and freshly arrived at a safe house.

She was curled up on a cot, shaking, unable to eat, unable to speak.

After a long time, she looked at me and whispered that nobody was coming for her, that nobody cared, that she was going to disappear and nobody would notice.

I knew those words.

I had spoken those exact words on a rooftop under the stars years ago to a god I was not sure was listening.

I knelt beside her cot.

I knelt the way he had knelt in my dream.

I took her hand the way he had taken mine.

And I told her that someone had already come for her.

That was why she was here.

That someone had moved heaven and earth to get her to this cot in this room on this night.

And he was not done.

He was just getting started.

I do not know if she believed me in that moment.

It does not matter.

The seed was planted.

And the God who makes jasmine bloom in neglected courtyards is the God who makes seeds grow in broken hearts.

I want to speak now to anyone who is listening to this story.

I want to speak to you directly.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, if you are a woman who is trapped in a marriage, in a family, in a system that tells you that you are property, that you are worthless, that you are less than human.

I need you to hear me.

I was you.

I know the walls.

I know the silence.

I know the feeling of being invisible, of being erased, of being a ghost in your own life.

And I need you to know that God sees you.

He knows your name.

Not the name they gave you.

Not the name they used to control you.

Your real name.

The name he has for you.

And he is working right now.

Even if you cannot see it, even if you cannot feel it.

Now, even if the walls are high and the door is locked and the night is long, he is working.

Cry out to him.

He will answer.

He answered me.

If you are someone who is searching, if you are asking questions that your religion or your culture or your family does not want you to ask, if you are feeling the ground shift beneath your feet and you do not know where you will land, do not be afraid.

Follow the truth wherever it leads.

Even if it leads you away from everything you have known, even if it costs you everything, what you will gain is more than you can imagine.

I know this because I have lived it.

If you are someone who has been told that God does not love you, that you are too broken, too sinful, too dirty, too used, too far gone for God to want you, I need you to hear me say this with everything I have.

That is a lie.

It is the oldest lie in the world.

And it is a lie.

God crossed every barrier to reach me.

culture, religion, locked doors, high walls, a husband’s rage, a father’s rejection, and death itself.

He crossed all of it.

He crosses all of it for you right now.

Wherever you are reading this or hearing this, if you are a Christian who sometimes wonders if your faith is real, if the God you worship is really there, if any of it matters, let my story encourage you.

He is real.

He is there.

He is active and moving and rescuing and restoring and making all things new right now, today in places you will never see and among people whose names you will never know.

Your God is not a theory.

He is not a tradition.

He is not a comfortable cultural habit.

Yeah.

He is the living God who walks into dreams and breaks chains and calls the sold and the silenced and the forgotten by name and says, “You are mine.

” My name used to be Aisha.

I was born into a family that loved me in the only way it knew how, which was not enough.

I was sold to a man who treated me as property.

I spent seven years in silence and darkness.

I cried out to God on a rooftop, not even knowing his name.

And he answered.

He answered with a dream and a field of light and a hand extended in love and words that rewrote the story of my life.

He answered with a neighbor named Miriam and a cousin named Leila and a woman named Mama Grace and a network of brave believers who risk their lives for a stranger.

He answered with water and a white dress and a new name.

He answered with himself.

I was a debt payment.

He turned me into a daughter.

I was silenced.

He gave me a voice.

I was sold.

He bought me back not with silver or gold, but with his own blood poured out on a cross 2,000 years ago for every lost and broken and forgotten soul who would ever cry out to him in the dark.

My name is Syra.

It means princess.

And every single day that I wake up free, every day that I breathe without fear, every day that I open my Bible without hiding it, every day that I pray out loud in my own voice to a God who knows me and loves me and calls me his own, I am living proof of one simple, unshakable, eternal truth.

Jesus rescues.

He rescued me and if you let him, he will rescue you too.

My name is Sarah and this is what Jesus did for me.

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