A recognition of the change she had already been observing in me for weeks without having the explanation for it.

And a recognition that whatever had caused the change was real.

Because she had lived alongside me for nearly 10 years and she knew what real looked like and what performed looked like.

And this was real.

She did not convert that night.

She was not ready.

But she did not shut the door.

The months that followed were the most complicated of my life.

I need to say this plainly because I do not want to tell a story that sounds neater than it was.

And conversion does not arrive with a bow on it.

It arrives with consequences.

My faith was secret at first, of necessity.

I was still in Dubai.

My family and business community were around me.

I was navigating a legal situation with the fraud case that required me to maintain relationships with people who would not have taken kindly to knowing what was happening in my private life.

I had a son in school, a wife whose family I was deeply respectful of, parents who loved me.

The stakes of exposure were real and they were significant.

This created a particular kind of internal pressure that I had not anticipated.

I had been a performer for most of my life, yes, but I had at least been performing a version of myself that I had been formed to inhabit.

Now I was performing a version that was specifically different from who I had become.

And the gap between the performance and the reality was a constant friction.

I would sit at family gatherings and participate in conversations about faith that I was no longer having the same internal relationship with.

And the dual reality of it was exhausting in a way that was different from the exhaustion of the old performance.

But at the same time, underneath the complication and the pressure and the fear of exposure, there was that new thing, the settled thing.

The thing I had been watching in June for a year and had not understood and now understood from the inside.

Not a solution to the difficulty, a presence in the difficulty, someone in the boat.

I began praying differently.

Not the formal prayers of my old practice, though I was still performing those publicly for the sake of the people around me.

privately in my study on in the car in the early morning before the house woke.

I talked to Jesus the way Jun talked to him simply directly without the elaborate procedural architecture of a religious performance.

I told him what I was afraid of.

I asked him for what I needed.

I thanked him for what I had been given.

And there was a responsiveness to it.

Not always in the form of specific answers to specific requests, but in the form of that presence, that companionship, that sense of not being alone in the thing I was facing that was entirely unlike anything I had experienced in the years of formal prayer.

Jun noticed the change in me, I think, before I told him.

He would not have mentioned it unless asked.

That was his way.

But there was a different quality to the silence between us in the car.

A different kind of ease when two people who now shared something even unspoken.

When I finally told him, it was on a morning in January, months after the night in the study.

I got in the car and I sat down and I said simply that something had changed.

I told him about the night.

I told him what had happened.

He did not say much.

He listened with that full unhurried attention he gave to everything.

And when I was done, he was quiet for a moment.

Then he said something that stays with me that I return to when things are hard.

He said that God had been working long before either of us was aware of it.

He said that the prayer he prayed in the hospital waiting room for our family.

The prayer asking Jesus to show himself to us through what happened to Rayan.

He had kept praying it every night for months afterward.

He had not told me this.

He had just prayed.

I thought about that.

The man sleeping in the car park.

The man who declined bribes and returned extra cash and hummed worship songs in the driver’s seat at midnight.

The man who had never pushed, never preached, never made me feel cornered or targeted.

He had simply lived what he believed with a consistency and a completeness that could not be faked and had prayed for us in the dark when we did not know and had trusted that the one he was praying to would do the rest.

I could not speak for a moment.

Then I said with complete honesty that I did not think I would be where I was without him.

He shook his head.

He said he had only done the small part.

The rest was not him.

Fatima came to faith about 4 months after I did.

She had been reading.

She had borrowed quietly without announcing it the books I had been keeping in my study.

She had been in her own private process parallel to mine, and I had respected it by not trying to manage it or accelerate it, which was, I am fairly sure, one of the few good instincts I had in that period.

She came to it in her own way, in her own time.

And the night she told me, we sat together for a long time in the quiet of the villa, and it was the closest I had felt to her in years.

Since those early years, before the business took over, and the distance set in, Ryan was nine by then.

Children have a relationship with the sacred that adults have mostly lost.

They come to it without the filters of formation and social consequence.

He had been listening in the way children listen to the things happening around him.

He had questions that were simpler and more direct than anything an adult would ask and more devastating in their accuracy.

He asked one evening whether Jesus was the one who had made him better in the hospital.

I told him that I believed so.

He thought about this for a moment with the seriousness a 9-year-old brings to important matters and then he nodded as though this confirmed something he had already suspected and went back to what he was doing.

The pressure from the extended family had been building for months.

Something was different with us and people in close communities noticed differences.

My behavior had changed in ways that were hard to explain within the frame of who I was supposed to be.

I was less available for certain social and business interactions that were tied to shared religious identity.

I was making decisions about some professional relationships that seemed from the outside inexplicable.

My brothers had begun asking questions carefully at first.

then with less care.

My father had looked at me across a table one evening with an expression that told me he knew something had shifted, even if he had not yet named what.

I knew this could not continue indefinitely.

I knew the reckoning was coming and the question was not whether I was willing to face it.

I had decided that but how to face it in a way that protected my family while it was still being protected.

The business opportunity came from an unexpected direction as the best ones sometimes do.

a partner I had been in early conversations with for over a year, a property development group based in Europe and with portfolio interests that were moving significantly into the Gulf region from the other direction had been making increasingly serious overtures about a joint venture that would require a local partner with exactly the kind of regional expertise and relationships I had spent 15 years building.

The structure they were proposing would involve establishing a regional headquarters and the people they wanted to run it would need to be in their phrasing internationally positioned.

There was talk of primary base of operations of where the family would be best placed given the nature of the travel and the time zones involved.

I had been listening to these conversations with professional interest for months.

In the normal course of things, I might have structured an arrangement that allowed me to stay based in Dubai while managing the international dimensions of the relationship from there.

I had done this before.

I knew how.

But things were not as they had been in the normal course.

And when the conversations reached the point where I was being directly invited to consider relocating with my family as the cleanest operational solution, I sat with it differently than I would have a year earlier.

I sat with it and I prayed with it.

And the praying produced something I can only describe as clarity.

Not a dramatic sign, not a voice or a vision, but the same quiet, solid sense of direction that I had learned to recognize in the months since the night in the study.

I discussed it with Fatima.

We talked about it honestly, a without the evasions that had characterized too many of our earlier conversations.

We talked about what staying meant.

We talked about what leaving meant.

We talked about Rayon and what kind of environment we wanted for him as he grew and what kind of faith life we wanted to be able to live openly rather than in private.

We talked about my family and the real grief of distance and the reality that the relationship with my family was already fractured and would fracture further regardless of geography once the truth was fully known.

We talked for a long time and we decided together clearly and without regret to go.

I want to tell you about the leaving because it was not clean and I think honesty requires me to say that.

The day I told my father I had asked to see him alone which he had granted with the weariness of a man who knows that a private meeting of this kind brings a specific category of news was one of the hardest days of my life.

Not because he was violent or because the scene was dramatic.

My father is not a dramatic man.

It was hard because of what I saw on his face.

Not anger, though there was anger.

Not shame, though there was that too.

The particular shame of a father who does not understand how the son he formed became the man sitting across from him.

What I saw underneath the anger and the shame was something that I recognized and that cost me more than either of the others.

Grief.

The grief of a man looking at his child and feeling that the child has moved to a place he cannot follow.

I told him the truth.

All of it.

Not with the calm I had imagined I would have, but with the shaking voice of a man who loves his father and is doing something that will hurt him and knows it and is doing it anyway because to do otherwise would be a lie, and I had committed to living without lies.

He was quiet for a long time after I finished.

Then he said some things that were painful and that I will not repeat here because they came from a place of pain rather than truth and because he is my father and I love him and the things he said do not represent the final word of our relationship.

We have spoken since.

The relationship is complex and wounded.

And it is also still there, still continuing, still open in the way the relationships between parents and children stay open even when they have been damaged because love is more durable than agreement.

I have not lost my family, but I have felt the cost of the distance in both directions.

I carry this with me.

I do not pretend it away.

I think it is important for anyone who is where I was to understand that the cost is real and that the realness of the cost does not mean the decision was wrong.

These two things can both be true at the same time.

The best decisions of my life have cost the most.

We settled in the new country in the spring.

I am not going to specify the location for reasons that will be obvious, but I will tell you that it is a place with laws that protect the freedom of belief and with a community of faith that received us with a warmth and a normaly that after years of secrecy felt almost disorienting in its simplicity.

We attended a church gathering for the first time as a family a few weeks after arriving.

It was small and informal and nothing like what I had expected church to be.

Nothing of the grandeur or ceremony or formal architecture I had associated with western religion from the outside.

Just people in a room singing and praying and listening and talking to each other.

Ryan was at ease immediately in the way children are at ease when the environment around them is genuine.

Fatima cried quietly during a song she did not know the words to.

She told me afterward that she had cried because she felt for the first time that she was allowed to be where she actually was.

That she did not have to manage the distance between her exterior presentation and her interior reality.

That she could simply be present.

I understood exactly what she meant.

I had been present in that same way since the night in the study.

The freedom of no longer performing a self that is not yourself is a freedom that is difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced the imprisonment of performing a self that is not yourself.

But those of you who know, and I think many of you watching this know, you do not need me to describe it.

You already know what I mean.

Jun went back to the Philippines before we left Dubai.

His contract with us ended when the circumstances changed.

I paid him generously, inadequately generously, if I am being honest, because no salary I could have given him would have properly accounted for what his presence in our lives had meant.

And we said goodbye in the car park of the villa on his last day.

And it was one of those goodbyes that carries the weight of everything that has passed between people that cannot be adequately expressed in the format of a goodbye.

I told him that I did not think I had the words for what he had given us.

He said he had given us nothing, that all he had done was be faithful where he was planted, and that the rest was God’s work.

He said he was just glad he had been allowed to be part of it.

He said it the way he said everything quietly without performance as though this were simply a true thing being stated.

We embraced two men from entirely different worlds, one of whom had walked into the other’s life as an employee and had become without either of us planning it or managing it.

something that I can only accurately describe as a brother.

I speak to him still.

We video call, usually on the Sunday mornings, his time, late Saturday nights, mine.

He is back in his province with his wife and his children doing the work he was always going to do.

Being faithful where he is planted, serving the people around him with the same unhurried thorowness he brought to driving a car for a businessman who did not deserve it.

He has started mentoring young men from his community who are preparing to work abroad, helping them hold on to their faith in environments that are not designed to support it.

He has not changed.

He is exactly who he always was.

And I say this with the full understanding of what it means.

That the peace I watched from the backseat of my car for over a year.

The peace I could not explain and could not stop thinking about is not the peace of a man who has an easy life or a comfortable one.

It is the peace of a man who has settled the one question that all other questions ultimately rest on.

the question of whether God is present or absent, near or far, watching from a distance or sitting in the boat with you.

June answered that question not by arguing it but by living it every day in a car park, in a hospital corridor, in a worker’s accommodation far from his family.

in the small hidden corners where he thought no one could see him, but where God could and where I unexpectedly could too.

I am speaking to you now from a place I could not have imagined standing in 10 years ago.

A place of genuine, ordinary, imperfect, ongoing peace.

I still have problems.

I want to be clear about this because I have no interest in selling you a version of faith that is a passport to an easy life.

Uh because that version is not true and the people selling it are not helping you.

The business has had its difficulties since we moved and there have been seasons of real financial pressure and I’ve had to rebuild professional relationships in a new context which is not simple.

The relationship with my family in Dubai is a wound that has begun to scar but has not fully healed and may never fully heal in the way I would wish it to.

There are mornings when the fears come back.

When the old anxious engine in me starts revving.

When I have to do the work of bringing myself back to what I know instead of what I feel.

But here is the difference.

Here is the thing that is different from everything before.

I am not alone in it.

That is the entire thing.

That is the whole revolution.

And it is so simple that I am sometimes embarrassed by how long it took me to find it.

And then I am not embarrassed at all because I think God’s timing in the story of any life is not an accident.

The timing of Jun’s arrival in mine, the timing of Ryan’s illness, the timing of the business betrayal, the timing of the night in the study, all of it was precisely sequenced in a way that a man who no longer believes in coincidence cannot look at and not see the shape of.

I was found.

That is the testimony.

Not that I searched and found, though I did search and the searching mattered.

But underneath the searching was a truth that I was the last to understand.

I was being looked for.

Long before I opened a laptop at 3:00 in the morning to type a question about who Jesus was, someone was already working in the question.

Long before I knelt on my study floor.

The floor had been prepared for that kneeling long before Jun Santos walked into a 20inut job interview and answered my questions plainly and was hired because I was tired and had other things to do before any of this.

Something that I now know was love was already arranging the pieces.

I want to speak directly now for a moment to whoever needs to hear this.

If you are a Muslim watching this, I want you to know that I say what I am saying with the deepest respect for you and for the faith that formed me.

I know what it means to hear a man from a Muslim background say what I am saying.

I know the categories it will be placed in the dismissals that will be easy to reach for.

I am asking you not to agree with me, not to immediately change anything, simply to do what I did, to sit unhonestly with the questions.

To look without predetermined conclusions at who Jesus actually claimed to be and what the evidence around those claims actually says.

to consider whether the God you pray to feels like a presence or a concept and whether the answer to that question means something.

If you are not a religious person, if you have no faith and have never felt drawn to any, I want to tell you about the particular loneliness of a man who has everything the world promises will make him happy and finds that it does not.

I know you may have a different explanation for that loneliness, a psychological one or a philosophical one.

And I am not dismissing your explanation.

I am simply sharing mine.

I spent 20 years trying to fill a space that was shaped for something my money and my achievements and my status could not provide.

And the thing that filled it was not a doctrine or an institution or a system.

It was a person.

It was an encounter.

Real and specific and unlike anything I had managed or produced with the God who came.

Continue reading….
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