a message from my father that was short and that I will not quote directly because some things are private but that communicated clearly that he did not understand what I had done and that he was in pain.

A message from my mother that was longer and more complicated full of love and grief at the same time which in some ways was harder to read than the anger.

There were messages from Muslims who said they were removing the podcast from their library and advising their friends to do the same.

There were messages from community leaders in Dearbornne saying that I had damaged the reputation of young American Islam.

Brother Samir put out a statement saying that he was saddened by my apostasy and that the Muslim community should pray for my return to the straight path.

I read all of it.

I did not respond with argument.

I had nothing to defend and nothing to prove.

And then there were the other messages.

They came from everywhere from Dearbornne and Detroit and Chicago and Houston and New Jersey and London and Toronto.

From young Muslims, mostly around my age, who wrote things that sounded like variations of the same letter.

They said they had been having dreams they couldn’t explain.

They said they had been feeling empty for years, but were afraid to say so out loud.

They said they had been reading the Bible in secret on their phones at night.

They said they had been praying to Jesus in silence alone in their rooms, terrified that even a whispered prayer was a betrayal.

They said my episode was the first time they had heard someone name what they were experiencing without shame.

One message came from a young woman named Dena, 26 years old, raised Muslim in New Jersey, who said she had been a secret believer for 2 years.

She had given her life to Jesus after watching a video online about Christian converts from Islam.

She had told no one.

She had been going to the mosque with her family on Fridays and going to a church alone on Sunday mornings and living in the gap between two worlds with no community in either one.

She said listening to my episode made her feel for the first time like she was not completely alone.

Another message came from a man in his late 20s in Toronto who said he was a graduate student in Islamic studies who had been asking questions he was not allowed to ask in his department.

He said my episode had given him the courage to have a conversation he had been putting off for 2 years.

Another came from a college student in Houston who said she was the daughter of an imam and had encountered Jesus in a dream 6 months earlier and had been carrying the weight of it alone ever since.

She said the dream had been almost identical to what I described.

A room, a presence, the feeling of being known all the way down.

She said when I described those four words, she had broken down and called her roommate who was a Christian and told her everything for the first time.

These messages numbered in the hundreds in the first week alone.

I am not going to tell you that everything that came next was easy.

It was not.

My relationship with my parents went through a period that was genuinely painful, especially with my father.

There were months of distance and difficult conversations and silences that felt permanent.

My community in Dearbornne largely closed around me the way communities do when one of their own does something they cannot understand.

I lost friendship I had thought were solid.

I lost speaking invitations.

The podcast audience dropped sharply.

I also gained something I had never had before and did not have words for until it was mine.

I had never had real community.

I had had audience.

I had had followers.

I had had people who respected my platform.

But in the church in Epsilante, in Wednesday night Bible study with Marcus and his friends, in the conversations I started having with other former Muslims who were finding Jesus across North America, I found something different.

People who knew me as I actually was, not as I performed and who stayed anyway.

Not because I was useful to them or because I represented something they wanted to be associated with, just because we were connected by something that had nothing to do with performance.

Marcus threw his arm around me the Sunday after I published the episode and he said, “Welcome to the other side of the performance.

” And he was grinning in a way that made me laugh for the first time in weeks.

My mother came to visit me 2 months after the episode.

We sat at my kitchen table.

the same table where I had sat alone at 2 in the morning during Ramadan asking myself when I had last felt God.

She did not come to argue.

She came to see me.

She brought food, the soup she always made.

And she sat across from me and she said Zed, are you happy? Not are you right? Not do you know what you have done.

Are you happy? I told her the truth.

I said for the first time in years, yes.

Not because everything is easy.

because I’m not performing anymore.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Your father will come around.

Give him time.

” And she reached across the table and put her hand on mine and kept it there.

I want to end by speaking directly to you.

Because if you have read this far, there is probably a reason.

If you are a young Muslim who has been doing everything right and feeling empty at the end of every day, I am not going to tell you that Islam is wrong or that your family is wrong or that your tradition is worthless.

I am going to tell you what I know from the inside of my own chest.

There is a difference between performing faith and being found by God.

I performed faith for 27 years.

I was very good at it and I was hollow.

And then someone showed up who already knew that.

And instead of condemning me for the performance or demanding I clean myself up before he would deal with me, he just said four words that cut through everything I had built and landed on the truth underneath.

You know I’m real.

If something in you is nodding right now, that is not me convincing you of anything.

I cannot convince you of what I cannot manufacture.

That recognition you feel is between you and him.

I am just telling you that I know what it is and I know you do not have to keep running from it.

His name is Jesus.

He is not a product.

He is not a fantasy for people who cannot handle discipline.

He is the most real thing I have ever encountered.

And I called him a product in front of 10,000 people.

And he showed up that same night and did not bring the accusation with him.

He just brought himself.

And what he brought was enough.

If this story reached something in you, write in the comments, “He found me, too.

” Let it be a declaration.

Let it be the beginning of an honest conversation between you and the most real presence you have ever felt, but may have been afraid to name.

He is not waiting for you to be good enough.

He is not waiting for your performance to be perfect.

He showed up for me in the middle of Ramadan after I spent an afternoon telling people he was not real.

He will show up for you,

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