And Jun said that for a man who knew very well that his life was not together, who had no ladder and no resources to climb one, that God who came down instead of waiting for you to climb up had been simply the only one that felt true.

I sat with that for a long time.

I began reading the Bible in the evenings.

I did this quietly, not telling Fatima at first, not to deceive her, but because I was still trying to understand what I was doing and what it meant, and I did not have the words yet to share the process with anyone.

I started with the Gospel of John because Jun had suggested it when I had asked him somewhat indirectly where I might start.

The opening lines were extraordinary and strange and stopped me before I had finished the first page.

I read slowly.

I had spent my professional life reading quickly, scanning for the key figures, the essential points, the decision relevant information.

The gospels did not respond to this kind of reading.

They required something different.

They required the kind of attention you give to something that you are not just processing but encountering.

I read about the people Jesus spoke to.

The woman at the well who had made a mess of her personal life and who came to the water source alone in the middle of the day because she could not face coming with everyone else in the morning.

Jesus had sat with her not to correct her or condemn her.

He stated what she had done plainly and without drama.

But the statement was not a condemnation.

It was more like a mirror offered with warmth.

He knew her and was not appalled.

And she went back into her town, the woman who had been avoiding people.

and she told everyone she met about the man who had known everything about her and had spoken to her anyway.

I read about the disciples in the boat in the middle of a storm, terrified, convinced they were going to drown and Jesus asleep in the stern, not absent, physically present in the boat with them in the storm, but asleep.

And when they woke him and the fear was all over their faces, he quieted the storm with words.

And then he asked them something.

He asked them where their faith was, not as a rebuke, but this is how it read to me.

as a genuine question, as though what troubled him about the moment was not that they had been afraid, but that they had been afraid while he was in the boat.

He was in the boat.

I read that and I put the Bible down on my desk and I sat very still for a moment because I had spent years praying to a God who felt like he was somewhere else, somewhere very far above and very far removed, monitoring from a great distance, requiring correct
procedure before he could be accessed.

And this this was a God who was in the boat, who came and sat in the boat with you, who was right there in the storm, and whose presence in the storm was the answer to the storm even before the storm was quieted.

I did not pray that night.

I was not ready.

But I sat at my desk in the stillness of the house with the Bible closed in front of me.

And something was happening in me that I could not name and did not yet have the framework for.

And it was the most real thing I had felt in a very long time.

The last conversation I had with John before the night everything changed was on a Friday evening.

He had driven me to a meeting that had gone badly, as many meetings were going badly in those months, and we were sitting in traffic on the way back, and the light was fading, and the city was doing its evening shift into the glittering version of itself that happens after dark.

I asked him something I had been circling for weeks.

I asked him whether he thought Jesus could be for someone like me, a Muslim man, a man who had lived his whole life inside a different tradition, who had said the shahada, who had prayed facing Mecca, who had performed Hajj.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said something that undid something in me.

He said that Jesus himself had said he came for those who knew they were sick, not for those who believed they were well.

And he said that as far as he could tell, I was a man who was beginning to know he was sick and that in his experience that was exactly the condition Jesus was looking for.

He said it gently without drama.

And then the traffic moved and we drove on and neither of us said anything else for the rest of the journey.

But when he dropped me at the villa that evening and I got out and stood for a moment in the warm night air, hearing the faint sound of rayan somewhere inside the house.

I felt the accumulated weight of everything.

The months of searching, the hospital, the waiting room, the business betrayal, the hollow prayers, the 4-hour nights reading about a man who came all the way down.

And I felt it reach its tipping point.

The point at which the weight of what you have been carrying in secret becomes greater than the cost of putting it down.

I was not ready to put it down yet, but I was close.

I was very close.

I want to describe the night as accurately as I can because it is the center of everything, and I owe it that accuracy.

It was not a particularly dramatic evening by any external measure.

There had been no new crisis, no fresh revelation, no final conversation with June that pushed me over an edge.

It was a Tuesday, I think.

Ordinary in every observable way.

A long day, a quiet dinner, Fatima reading in bed, Ryan already asleep.

I had been feeling for several days before this night a particular kind of internal pressure.

Not the business pressure I was accustomed to.

Not the anxiety pressure of financial stress.

Something different.

Something that felt more than anything like the feeling of being about to do something that cannot be undone.

The feeling of standing in front of a door and knowing that when you push it open, you will not be able to pretend you did not see what is on the other side.

I had been reading the Gospel of Mark in the evenings in the hour or so before bed after everything else in the house had settled.

and something about Mark’s directness.

There is a quality to that gospel that is almost urgent.

Very little decoration, just the events one after another pressing forward, had been building in me a clarity that I could not argue with any longer.

The God I had been reading about for months was not the God I had been taught about.

This was the thing I kept coming back to.

The God of my understanding, the God of my formation had been vast and powerful and demanding and ultimately inaccessible.

Something to be appeased and obeyed and submitted to from a distance.

And the one I kept meeting in these pages was something entirely different.

He was enormous, yes, in ways that were genuinely frightening to encounter, in a way that was more real than frightening.

But he was not distant.

He was the opposite of distant.

He was relentlessly, almost intrusively near.

He came to where people were.

He sat at tables they were ashamed to be seen at.

He touched people that the religious establishment had declared untouchable.

He wept.

He got angry.

He cooked breakfast on a beach for his friends.

He was entirely beyond categorization and yet more specific, more personal, more particular than anything I had ever been told about God.

And then there was the cross.

I had spent a long time with the crucifixion accounts.

I had read them with the same careful attention I had brought to everything else.

And what I had found was not what I expected.

I had expected something that felt like mythology, elevated, symbolic, distant.

What I found was something that felt almost violently human.

the physical details, the social ones, the specific people present, the conversations, the particular kind of humiliation involved.

This was not a story that felt constructed or theatrical.

It felt, and I am aware this is a strange word to apply, like a record, like something that had actually happened and that the people recording it were unable to dress up or simplify because they had been there and they knew that simplifying it would be dishonest.

And what had happened was that God had allowed himself to be broken by the world.

Not because he had no choice.

The accounts were clear on this.

He had the choice.

Repeatedly offered n and repeatedly declined.

He had come for this.

He had set his face toward it.

And the reason the theology of why which I had been reading about alongside the accounts themselves, the reason was that the distance between a holy God and a human being stained by everything human beings are stained by was too great to be crossed from the human side.

And so it was crossed from the other side.

Not because humanity deserved it, not because of any earned merit, but because of love.

A love so total and so committed that no distance, not even the distance between infinite holiness and comprehensive human failure was acceptable to it.

This was not the God I had been taught about.

This was not a God who required the correct procedure from the correct distance.

This was a god who had crossed every possible distance on at the greatest possible personal cost to be near.

I lay in bed that night beside my sleeping wife and I stared at the ceiling and I knew what I was about to do.

I had known it for some time.

I think the nights of reading, the conversations with Jun, the waiting room, the months of questions, and the answers that kept pointing in the same direction.

All of it had been building toward this.

There are decisions in life that feel genuinely chosen and decisions that feel more like acknowledging what has already been decided by something in you that is deeper than the thinking mind.

This was the second kind.

I got up quietly.

I went to my study.

I closed the door.

I stood in the middle of the room for a moment.

The house was absolutely silent.

The city outside was doing what cities do at 1:00 in the morning.

Still going, but distantly a low hum of lights and movement that barely reached through the window.

In the study, in the silence, it was just me.

I need to be honest about what I was feeling.

I was afraid, not the fear of consequences, though those were real.

I was not naive about what a conversion meant in the context I lived in, what it could cost me, what it would mean for my family, my business relationships, my community.

I was aware of all of that and it was not small.

But the fear I felt in that moment was not the practical fear of consequences.

It was something bigger.

The fear of being known.

The fear of bringing the actual contents of your actual self before something real and letting it see you clearly without management, without presentation.

The fear of the honest prayer.

I had not prayed an honest prayer in my life.

I had prayed correct prayers.

I had prayed the words I had been taught to say in the order I had been taught to say them with the posture I had been taught to maintain.

I had never prayed a prayer that was simply nakedly me.

My real state, my real confusion, my real failures, my real need offered as it actually was without dressing.

I knelt on the floor of my study.

I am a large man and the floor is hard and kneeling is not a dignified position for a man in his 40s who has spent 20 years in boardrooms and none of this mattered at all.

I spoke out loud.

I did not shout.

I spoke quietly because the house was sleeping.

But I spoke.

Not a recitation, not a ritual, a conversation.

my first honest conversation with God.

I told him everything.

I told him about the emptiness.

I told him about the performance, the years of performance, the exhaustion of it.

I told him about the hollow prayers, about the scotch bottle in the desk drawer, about the son I had kept telling to come back later, about the wife I had been too busy to truly see.

I told him about the betrayal and the fear and the business falling apart and the specific quality of loneliness that lives inside a successful life.

I told him all of it plainly in the same simple English I am using now because by that point I did not have the energy for any other language.

And then I told him about Jun.

I told him about watching this man carry peace like something he owned rather than performed.

And about the hospital and the prayer and the feverb breaking and about the months of reading and the questions and the thing I kept encountering in every page.

The God who came.

The God who was in the boat.

the God who sat with the woman at the well and knew everything about her and was not appalled.

I told him I did not fully understand.

I told him my understanding was incomplete and probably always would be.

I told him I had not been trained for this and that my whole formation had pointed in a different direction and that some part of me was terrified of what I was doing.

And then I said, “I believe you are real.

I believe Jesus is who he claimed to be.

I believe what happened on the cross was for people like me.

People who cannot close the gap from their side.

And I am asking you, I am asking you, Jesus, to do what you came to do.

I am asking you to come to where I am.

What happened next? I will try to describe but I want to be honest with you about the limitations of language here.

Language is a container and what I am trying to put in it is larger than the container but I will try.

Something entered the room.

I know how that sounds.

I am aware of how it sounds.

But I am a rational man and I was fully awake and sober and I am telling you what happened.

Something entered the room.

Not a noise, not a light, not anything dramatic in the visual or auditory sense.

Something else, a presence.

The way the air changes in a room when a person you love enters it, even before you have seen them, before you have heard them, something registers, some change in the quality of the space.

It was like that, but more, much more.

And simultaneously with that, something lifted.

There is no other word for it.

something that had been present in me for I think looking back for all of my adult life, perhaps longer, simply lifted a weight that I had been so accustomed to carrying that I had stopped noticing it was there.

The way you stop noticing a sound that has been continuous for a very long time.

It lifted and in the place where it had been was something I do not have a word for in any language I have spoken.

Clean is the word that comes closest.

But it is not quite right.

Unbburdened.

Held.

I wept.

I have not wept since I was a very young child.

Since before the programming of manhood had fully installed its rules about what men did and did not do.

I wept on the floor of my study in the middle of the night.

And it was not sad weeping.

It was not the weeping of grief or fear or despair.

It was the weeping of release.

The weeping of a man who has been holding something very heavy for a very long time and has finally been told that he can put it down and has put it down and is standing in the strange disorienting lightness of no longer carrying it.

I do not know how long I was there.

Sometime when I finally got up, the room was the same room.

The desk, the laptop, the photo of Rayan, everything the same.

But I was not the same, and I knew it with a certainty that surprised me with its solidity, not an emotional certainty.

I was not in the grip of any ecstasy or transport.

A quiet certainty, the kind that does not shout, the kind that simply is.

I went back to bed.

I lay down beside Fatima.

She was still asleep.

The house was still quiet.

Outside, the city still made its low continuous sound.

I lay on my back and I stared at the ceiling and I thought, “So this is what it is.

This is what Jun has.

” Not the absence of difficulty or the solution to every problem.

Just this.

The certainty that someone is in the boat.

The knowledge that the weight is not yours alone to carry.

The understanding that the distance has been crossed from the other side.

I did not sleep much that night.

But for the first time in as long as I could remember, the wakefulness was not anxious.

It was more like the wakefulness of a man who has just arrived somewhere after a very long journey and is lying in the unfamiliar quiet of the destination.

Just breathing, just being where he finally is.

The changes that came after were real and they were not simple.

Real first.

The most immediate thing I noticed, and this began the very next morning and never fully left, was a different relationship with fear.

Fear had been the engine of my life for as long as I could remember, though I had dressed it in other names: ambition, drive, standards, and excellence.

Underneath all those names was the fundamental unexamined terror of a man who believed that if he stopped performing everything would collapse.

That morning the fear was quieter, not gone.

I do not want to paint a picture of supernatural serenity that is more dramatic than true, but quieter.

And the quietness was not the quiet of suppression, but the quiet of something that had been addressed.

I was more present.

This is the thing that Fatima noticed first before I told her anything.

She said it later that in the weeks after the night in the study, I was different in a way she could not immediately name.

I came to breakfast and I was actually at breakfast, not elsewhere with my phone and my thoughts.

I knocked on Rayon’s door in the evenings and I went in and stayed.

I asked Fatima one evening shortly after about a book she had mentioned weeks earlier that I had not registered at the time.

And she looked at me with a faintly surprised expression and said she had not expected me to remember that.

I told her everything about 3 weeks after it happened.

I had been thinking about how to do it.

There was no good script for this conversation.

I was a Muslim man from a prominent Emirati family with a wife from a similarly placed family with parents, brothers, extended family, social circles, business relationships, community ties, all of which were built on a shared understanding of who and what we were.

an understanding that included our faith as a foundational brick.

Removing that brick did not just affect the structure of my own interior life.

It had implications that radiated outward in every direction.

I told Fatima on a quiet evening when Rayan was asleep and there was no particular time pressure.

I told her as simply and as honestly as I could, not with the language of theology, but with the language of personal experience, the only language I had for it.

I told her about the months of reading and questions and the night in the study.

I told her what had happened in the room as best I could.

I told her what had lifted and what had come in its place.

She was quiet for a long time afterward.

I did not feel the silence.

I let it stand.

What she felt in that silence was complex.

And it would take months to fully unfold.

There was fear, real practical fear about what this meant and what it would cost us.

There was confusion because the man sitting in front of her was clearly the same man she had married and also clearly in some essential way different.

There was something else, something she would only name for me much later when her own journey had brought her to a different place.

She said that what she felt underneath the fear and the confusion was a recognition.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »