I was more tired than I’d realized.

The kind of tiredness that is not simply physical and that comes from a day of emotional weight that the body carries as much as the mind does.

I want to be careful now about how I describe what happened next because I need you to understand something before I go into it.

I am not a man who has visions.

I have not had supernatural experiences scattered through my Christian life the way some people describe.

I have had a faith that was built day by day in prayer and scripture and community and the ordinary unglamorous discipline of showing up for what God asks of you.

14 years of quiet daily faith, not dramatic, not spectacular.

I had never asked for a vision or an encounter or a sign.

I had not spent the day emotionally overwhelmed and looking for a spiritual experience to make sense of my feelings.

I fell asleep on a couch in Germany like a tired 54year-old man who had had an overwhelming day.

What happened next was not something I sought or produced.

What I know medically is this.

I had developed a heart condition in the years after my escape from Iran.

The journey through the mountains, the weeks of exposure to cold and physical hardship, the years of extreme stress that followed.

All of this had taken a toll on my heart that only became fully visible through a diagnosis I received several years after arriving in Germany.

I had been managing it with medication and with regular monitoring.

My doctor knew about it.

A neighbor of mine, a German man of about 60 who lived in the apartment above mine and who checked on me occasionally because he knew I lived alone and knew something of my medical history because he would become important to what happened next.

Sometime in the night, my heart stopped.

I was asleep on the couch and my heart stopped.

my neighbor, for a reason that had nothing to do with concern for me.

He was trying to reach me about something trivial, a piece of mail that had arrived for me at his address by mistake.

He called my phone around midnight and got no answer.

He tried again.

Still no answer.

Something made him come down.

He knocked and there was no response.

He had a spare key I had given him for emergencies and he used it.

He found me on the couch unresponsive.

He called the emergency services immediately.

The paramedics arrived and assessed me and found no heartbeat.

They worked on me.

They used a defibrillator.

After several minutes, my heart restarted.

I did not know any of this while it was happening.

I I did not feel my heart stop.

I did not feel pain.

I did not feel the struggle of the paramedics or the shock of the defibrillator.

I was not in my apartment anymore.

I was not anywhere I’ve ever been before or since except in the experience I’m about to describe to you.

I want to tell you what the transition felt like.

The moment of moving from where I was to where I went, it was not frightening.

I want to say that clearly because I know that most people’s fear of death is at least partly a fear of what the transition will feel like.

The separation, the losing of everything.

What I experienced was not separation and it was not losing.

It was more like the moment when you step out of a very noisy room into a quiet one and realize only in the quiet how loud the noise was.

The apartment, the day, the grief, the television, the news, all of it was the noisy room.

And then I was somewhere else.

I was more awake than I have ever been.

That is the only way I know how to say it.

Whatever kind of consciousness I had in that place, it was not less than what I have here.

It was more.

Everything was sharper.

Everything was more present.

I was not floating in some vague half-aware state.

I was fully, completely, more than normally conscious.

And I was somewhere real.

What happened next? What I saw and experienced and was told in that place is what I will try to describe in the next part of this testimony.

I am going to try to do this plainly without embellishment, without reaching for dramatic effect because the thing itself is dramatic enough and does not need my help.

I’m going to tell you what happened as clearly as I can, knowing that some of it is beyond my ability to fully put into words.

And knowing that some of it you will struggle to believe and accepting both of those things.

I was shown things.

I was told things and I was sent back.

I am still here because I was sent back.

And I am telling this because that is why I was sent back.

All of this will make sense as I continue.

Please keep reading.

The first thing I want to do before I describe what I saw is tell you what it was not because I think being clear about what it was not will help you understand what it was.

It was not a dream.

I have had thousands of dreams in my life.

I have had vivid dreams and terrifying nightmares.

Particularly in the years after my escape from Iran, when the nights were often as dangerous as the days had been, I know what the inside of a dream feels like.

There is a texture to dreams, even the most vivid ones, that gives them away.

Things don’t quite add up.

The rules shift.

You accept impossibilities as normal.

The logic holds only as long as you don’t examine it.

None of that was present in what I experienced.

Everything in that place was more logical, more consistent, more coherent than anything in the waking world I had left behind.

The internal consistency was not dream consistency.

It was more like the consistency of mathematics or of natural law.

It held because it was true, not because I was too asleep to notice where it didn’t.

It was also not a hallucination produced by a dying or oxygend deprived brain.

I have read the research on what the brain does during crisis situations in the tunnel visions and the feelings of peace and the memory reviews and the surges of neurochemistry that can produce powerful sensory experiences.

None of what I experienced matches those descriptions.

Hallucinations produced by the brain are drawn from the brain’s own contents.

They are rearrangements of what you already know and have already experienced.

What I was shown in that place contained things I had no interior material to generate.

Things that contradicted my expectations.

Things that corrected assumptions I had been carrying for years.

A hallucination does not correct your assumptions.

It reflects them back at you in distorted form.

What I experienced did the opposite.

What it was is what I was told it was.

And what every cell in my body has continued to confirm in the months since I came back.

It was real to more real than this.

More real than the chair I am sitting in as I tell you this story.

More real than the paper this is written on.

More real than anything I have ever touched or seen or heard in 54 years of physical life.

The physical world is real and I do not want to minimize it cuz God made it and it matters.

But what I experienced on the other side of my brief death was not less real than this world.

It was more.

I came back to a world that feels by comparison like a place where the lights are turned slightly down.

I became aware of movement.

I am not sure the word movement is exactly right because it implies traveling through physical space and I do not know whether what was happening was physical in any sense.

I was being drawn towards something.

The drawing was gentle and without force the way a current in water moves you when you stop swimming against it.

The direction was not a compass direction.

The closest word I have is upward, but upward is a physical word.

And what I mean is something more like toward, toward more, toward fullness, toward a place where the things that are absent from ordinary life, the things you have always felt faintly missing without being able to name them were present.

And then there was light.

I want to spend a moment here because the light is important.

When people describe near-death experiences in books and documentaries, they often talk about a bright light.

And I understand why because there was something that could be called light.

But what I want to tell you is that this light was not primarily a visual phenomenon.

Light in this world is a thing you see.

What I encountered was a thing you were inside of.

It was not shining on anything.

It was the medium I was moving through.

And it had qualities that light in the physical world does not have.

It had warmth, but not physical warmth.

something closer to the warmth you feel when you are deeply known and deeply loved by someone who has no agenda, no need for anything from you, no conditions, the warmth of being fully received.

It had peace, but not the absence of conflict peace we usually mean by that word.

The peace was active and full.

It was not quiet because nothing was happening.

It was the deep settledness of a place where everything is exactly and permanently as it should be.

And it had goodness, the most complete and present goodness I have ever encountered.

Not the goodness of a kind act or a moral choice, but goodness as a quality of being, as a fundamental property of the reality I had entered.

I was not alone.

Before I could orient myself, before I had properly adjusted to where I was, I became aware of a presence.

I used that word carefully, knowing it can sound vague.

It was not vague.

It was the most specific and particular thing I have ever encountered.

It was enormous and it was personal at the same time.

It was everywhere and it was directed at me.

If you have ever been in a very large public place and suddenly become aware that a single specific pair of eyes in all that space are looking at you.

And when you find them, they are looking at you with complete recognition.

That experience scaled up infinitely is the closest I can come to describing the quality of this presence.

And then I saw him or he became visible to me.

Though I am not certain the word saw is exactly right either.

It was Jesus.

I am not going to try to describe his appearance in the detailed way that some people do.

Partly because I think description of that kind can become its own kind of obstacle.

giving people an image to accept or reject based on whether it matches their prior picture.

What I will tell you is the thing that mattered most about what I saw.

He was exactly himself.

He was not a concept or a symbol or a theological position.

He was a person, present, specific, real, and unmistakably himself.

and I knew him the way you know your own name, not as a conclusion reached through a process of thought, but as an immediate and complete recognition that was already finished before it began.

I am a man who spent more than 30 years in a tradition that honored Jesus as a prophet and firmly rejected that he was anything more than that.

I had made this argument many times with confidence and with considerable theological sophistication.

And I am telling you that in that moment, in that presence, every argument I had ever made or heard about who Jesus was dissolved.

Not because someone defeated the arguments logically, because the reality in front of me was so plainly and completely itself that the arguments about it became irrelevant.

You do not argue about whether the ocean is real when you are standing in it.

What was communicated to me in that presence? Nan, I want to be honest that I am giving you the substance of what I understood rather than a verbatim account because what happened was not primarily verbal and I would not trust a verbatim rendering even if I had one.

The first thing I received was simply this.

I was completely known.

Everything in my life was present and visible.

Not selected highlights.

Everything.

Every thought I had managed and hidden and never expressed.

Every action I was ashamed of.

Every moment of cowardice when truth required courage and I chose safety instead.

Every person I had dismissed or failed or hurt in small ways and large ones.

Every good thing I had done and every bad thing I had done and everything in between.

All of it was visible and there was nowhere to put it or manage it or explain it.

I was simply open.

And what I encountered in that complete openness was not what I had always feared complete openness would produce.

All of my life at some level I had been afraid of being fully known.

Afraid that total exposure would result in total rejection.

that if anyone ever saw all of it, they would turn away.

What I found in that place was the exact opposite.

I was completely seen and completely held at the same time.

Not held despite what was seen.

Held with what was seen, the whole of it.

The beautiful and the broken and the shameful and the brave.

All of it gathered and held in a love that was not performing love.

That was not deciding to love despite difficulty, but that simply was love the way the sun simply is light.

It cannot do anything else.

It does not choose to shine.

It shines because it is the sun.

I am still not over this.

In months later, sitting here trying to put it into words, I am still undone by it.

The years I spent hiding and performing and managing what people saw of me.

The years of the double life in Iran, the years after of rebuilding myself from almost nothing.

All of that had been marked by a deep private fear of exposure.

And in one moment complete exposure happened and it was not destruction.

It was the most specific love I have ever known.

Then things changed.

I became aware that I was being taken somewhere different.

Not away from that presence.

I want to be clear about this.

The presence did not leave.

It was more like being walked through a place by someone who is with you throughout.

But the terrain you are moving through changes.

The fullness and warmth and peace did not disappear.

But they began to thin.

The way light thins at the edges of a day when the sun is still up, but you can feel the evening coming.

The further we moved in this direction, the more I became aware of what was absent.

And the absence of goodness, I need you to understand this, is not a neutral experience.

The absence of goodness is its own weight, its own reality.

It presses on you.

It has a texture of wrongness that becomes more concentrated the further you go into it.

Then there was heat.

Real heat oppressing from every direction.

And then sound.

I will not try to reconstruct the sounds for you in detail, not to spare you drama, but because I do not think the details of the description serve anything.

What I want to tell you about the sound is its quality, which was permanence.

The sounds were not the sounds of something happening.

They were the sounds of something that had happened, was established, was fixed.

That quality of settlement, of irrevocability, was the most disturbing thing about them.

I saw people in that place.

I want to be careful here.

I know the weight of claiming to have seen specific individuals in hell.

I know that such claims can be used to score points, to settle grudges, to make theological arguments in ways that become more about human anger than about truth.

I am not making claims about where every person I saw there had come from or what their complete story was.

What I am telling you is what I saw because I was shown it.

And I believe I was shown it for a reason that was not about my personal grievances.

I saw people whose faces I recognized, religious scholars whose funerals I had watched on state television and whose portraits had hung in the mosques and seminaries I had lived in.

Men whose books were studied as foundational texts in comm.

Men who had been presented as the closest thing to saints.

the modern Islamic world had produced.

I will not name them.

Naming them is not the point and would only distract from the point.

The point is that the certainty with which their righteousness had been declared in life had no bearing on where they were.

And then I saw Kam.

He had died only days before in the world I had come from.

In this place, that temporal gap seemed to mean nothing.

He was there.

I recognized him without any doubt.

He was not the composed authoritative figure from the photographs and the official portraits.

The authority was entirely gone, not suppressed, not contained, gone.

What remained was a man in a state of absolute clarity.

That is the most accurate description I have.

He was not confused about where he was or why.

He understood it perfectly.

And that perfect understanding was itself the primary experience he was having.

Because understanding exactly what you have done and why it has led you here.

And being unable to change any of it and knowing that you cannot change any of it is a particular kind of unbearable knowing.

He became aware of me and this is the part that I have sat with most in the month since.

Out of all the people in that vast and populated place, he became aware of me specifically.

He looked at me and there was recognition.

He knew who I was.

And what came across his face in that recognition was something I had never seen on that face in any footage or photograph from his living years.

Genuine and unprotected anguish.

He was a man who had been defined over decades by certainty and control and authority.

He had moved through the world as someone who knew exactly what God wanted and had the mandate to impose it.

That version of him was completely absent.

What I saw was a man stripped of everything he had used to construct himself in life, stripped of every layer of authority and justification and religious framing.

And what was underneath all of that construction was not the saint he had presented himself as.

It was a man, a human being who had chosen repeatedly at every turn where a different choice was available to him and who now existed in the permanent company of those choices.

He communicated to me not in a long speech, not in the kind of formal address he had given 10,000 times in life.

What came from him was the communication of a man who had no pride left to protect and no audience to perform for.

He knew I had been one of the converts.

He knew I had been someone the system he controlled had hunted.

He knew what had been done to people like me under his authority.

He saw it all completely and clearly without the justifications that had made it feel right to him in life.

He was asking me to go back.

He was asking me to find the Christians who had been persecuted under his authority and to carry to them a plea for forgiveness.

He was not asking because their forgiveness would change his situation.

He seemed to know it would not.

He was asking because the asking was the only truthful thing left to him.

He had spent his life refusing certain truths.

The only thing left was to acknowledge them.

And he wanted the people he had wronged to know that he was acknowledging them.

He also asked me to carry something back to Iran to the Iranian people to tell them that Jesus is real.

That he Kam had known this at some level deeper than he had ever been willing to admit.

that the encounters with Christians, the testimonies of converts, the evidence that had reached him across decades of running a state that persecuted the church, that none of it had left him fully without knowledge.

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