Saudi Prince Walked Into a Church to Mock It But Jesus Have Plans

I walked into that church with a camera, a smirk, and a plan to humiliate every person inside it.

And the moment I lifted the crucifix to laugh at it, something stopped me completely cold.

What is it that happens to a man who comes to destroy something holy and finds it looking back at him instead? My name is Zad Al- Rashid and I am 28 years old, born in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, raised in Toronto, Canada.

the grandson of a man who sat in council with princes and the son of a man who brought that same bloodline to a country that did not care about bloodlines at all.

I want to tell you about the day I walked into a church on a deer and came out a different person.

I want to tell you about the crucifix I picked up with a laugh and sat down in silence.

I want to tell you about what looked back at me from a cross on a wall in a small church in East Toronto on a Thursday afternoon in February and what it cost me and what it gave me and why I would not trade it for the name I carried or the money I grew up inside or the 30 years of certainty that came before it.

But first, you need to know who I was when I walked through that door.

You need to understand the particular shape of the man I had built by the time I was 28 years old because the building of it is the whole story.

My father, Prince Majid al-Rashid, was a junior member of the extended Saudi royal family.

Not inner circle, not the men whose names appear on buildings or whose photographs hang in government offices.

He was royalty the way a third cousin is royalty.

blood connection to the center of power, enough status to open doors, not enough to sit at the head of the table.

He came to Canada in the early 90s on a student visa to study economics at the University of Toronto.

And he stayed because he married my mother, a Lebanese Canadian woman named Hannah, whose family had been in Ontario for 20 years.

Her family was Muslim, not devout, the kind of cultural Muslim that eats halal when convenient and attends mosque for weddings and funerals and does not think about the difference between those two categories very hard.

My father was more serious about the faith than my mother’s family, but less serious than he appeared.

He prayed sometimes.

He fasted Ramadan publicly and made up for it privately during business travel.

He gave to Islamic causes because the giving was visible and visibility mattered to a man who had traded a royal title for a suburban house in North York and needed other currencies of respect.

He taught me that Islam was the superior faith with the confidence of a man who had never seriously studied any other faith and considered the question already closed.

We were comfortable in Toronto.

My father ran a small investment firm on Bay Street and we lived in a large house in a good neighborhood and I went to private school in a blazer with a crest on the pocket and I was the kid who told people his grandfather had met the king.

Not boasting exactly, just making sure people understood what kind of family they were dealing with.

The Saudi blood was the most valuable thing I owned in a childhood.

otherwise pretty ordinary by the standards or of wealthy Toronto.

I was smart and I knew it and I used it the way smart people use intelligence when no one has taught them humility as a weapon.

I was the kid in every classroom who corrected the teacher and enjoyed the moment of correction more than the knowledge itself.

But I was the kid who read widely not to understand but to have ammunition.

I accumulated information the way some people accumulate trophies, not for what it meant, but for what it let me do to other people in conversations.

By the time I was in university studying political science at the University of Toronto, I had found my arena debate, not formal debate with judges and rules.

Though I did that, too, and was good at it.

The informal kind.

The kind that happens at campus events and student panels.

and the kind that I sought out specifically in one particular form.

Religion debates, Islam versus everything else.

I was the young Muslim man who showed up at interfaith events, not to learn but to dominate.

I had a practiced set of arguments against Christianity that I could deploy in any order depending on the weakness I identified in whoever was speaking.

I had read enough about Christian theology to know where the pressure points were.

and I applied pressure to them with the focused pleasure of someone who has found the thing they are genuinely good at.

I was not hateful about it.

That is important to understand.

I was not standing on strict corners screaming.

I was polished and articulate and I smiled while I did it.

And the smile was the worst part of it looking back because it meant I was comfortable.

It meant the dismantling of someone else’s faith felt like a recreational activity to me, like a sport I was good at and enjoyed.

My closest friend at university was a man named Hamza, the son of Egyptian immigrants, who was genuinely devout in a way I was not, and who watched my religious debating with a mixture of amusement and unease.

He told me once that the way I talked about Islam sounded like someone describing a team they supported rather than a god they loved.

I laughed at him.

I told him that some people expressed love through defense and that some through devotion and that both were valid.

He looked at me with his patient Egyptian eyes and said, “You are very good at words, Zead.

” But I think sometimes words are how you hide.

I did not think about what he said for 6 years.

I think about it constantly now.

The invitation to the church came from a man I barely knew.

His name was Marcus Webb, a Canadian guy from my political science program, White 27.

Not religious himself.

The kind of person who found religious conflict entertaining in the abstract, the way some people find political arguments entertaining without having strong personal stakes in any of it.

He had heard me at a campus panel destroying a young Christian theology students argument about the resurrection.

And afterward he came up to me and said, “You should do that in a real church.

Go in and debate them on their own ground.

” I thought it was funny.

Marcus made it into a plan.

He told me there was a small evangelical church in the Leslieville neighborhood in East Toronto that did open Thursday afternoon sessions, two or 3 hours where anyone could come in and ask questions and talk to the pastor and engage with the
community.

No membership required, no pressure, just open doors.

He said, “Go in with your camera, talk to them, take them apart on film, I’ll post it.

” I said yes because I was 28 years old and had never been told no by a debate and because the camera was an audience and I had never once in my life turned away from an audience.

I want to be precise about my state of mind walking to that church on a Thursday afternoon in February in Toronto.

The sky was white and flat and the temperature was minus 9 and my breath made clouds in the air and I was wearing a good coat and I had my phone in my hand ready to record and I felt the particular comfortable arrogance of a man who has never lost the thing he’s about to go and do.

I had no doubt not one degree of uncertainty.

I was going into that building the way you go into a game you have already won.

just going through the motions because the outcome is not in question.

The church was a narrow building wedged between a dry cleaner and a used bookstore on a street in Leslieville with a small sign over the door that said Cornerstone Community Church in plain letters.

No stable, no grand architecture, just a converted storefront with a wooden door painted dark green.

It looked like nothing.

It looked like exactly the kind of small, struggling local church that I could walk into and out of in an hour and have enough material for three videos.

I pushed the door open and walked inside.

The foyer was small, warm after the cold street, and it smelled like old wood and coffee and something faintly like candle wax.

There was a folding table with a coffee earn on it and a plate of cookies and a handwritten sign that said, “Welcome, come in.

” The floors were worn hardwood, the kind that creeks, and the ceiling was low.

Through an inner doorway, I could hear quiet voices.

I adjusted my phone angle and walked it through to the main room.

It was not large, maybe 40 seats.

Old wooden pews arranged in rows, perhaps a third of them occupied.

Afternoon light came through two tall, narrow windows on the left wall.

Thin February light that made the room look like an old photograph.

At the front of the room was a small raised platform with a wooden lectern and behind the lectern on the wall was a crucifix.

I stopped when I saw the crucifix.

Not because it affected me, because it was my material.

The crucifix, that’s the cross with the body on it was the single most effective argument I had in my arsenal against the Christian faith.

I had an entire monologue about it, theologically source.

It rhetorically airtight about what it meant that a faith built its entire identity around an instrument of execution about the theology of a god who needed to be tortured to forgive his own creation about the image of suffering at the central symbol of a
religion.

I had delivered that monologue at three campus events and it had performed beautifully every time.

I raised my phone and angled it toward the crucifix and I smiled.

The smile I always smiled before I started.

And I said out loud to nobody in particular and to the camera and to the room.

Let’s see what we’ve got here.

A man’s voice behind me said quietly, “Take all the time you need.

” I turned around.

A man in his mid-50s was standing three feet away.

He was wearing regular clothes, not robes, dark trousers, and a brown sweater with a face that was deeply lined and completely calm.

He was looking at me with an expression I was not prepared for.

Not the guarded weariness I usually saw on the faces of people who recognized what I was doing.

Not the performed welcome of someone trying to convert me, just a plain unhurried openness, like I was exactly what he had been expecting, and he was not bothered by any of it.

He said, “I’m Pastor Glenn.

” He held out his hand.

I shook it without thinking.

His hand was warm and his grip was firm, and he did not release my hand immediately, but held it for one extra second in the way of a person who means the handshake.

He said, “Is this your first time here?” I said, “Yes.

” I told him I was here to understand what this place was about.

I did not say I had a camera ready and a monologue loaded and a friend waiting to post the video.

I said I was here to understand, which was technically the most honest thing I had said in a long time, even though it was not what I meant when I said it.

Pastor Glenn said, “Good.

That’s exactly why we’re here.

Come sit down.

” I sat in a pew near the back, close to the aisle in case I needed to move quickly, which I had learned was a useful position at these events.

Pastor Glenn moved to the front of the room and began speaking to the small group already there.

I looked at the crucifix on the wall behind him.

I raised my phone slightly and the figure on the cross looked back at me.

I want to be careful about how I describe what happened in the next 5 seconds because I know how it sounds and I am not trying to make it sound bigger than it was.

I am trying to make it sound exactly as big as it was.

I raised my phone toward the crucifix on the wall of Cornerstone Community Church in Lesleyville on a Thursday afternoon in February and the figure on the cross looked back at me.

Not with moving eyes, not with a supernatural event, but with the quality of present that a thing can have when you look at it for the first time without the armor of your prepared position already in place.

I had been so focused on arriving with my argument loaded and my camera ready that I had not prepared for the moment before the argument.

The moment when you simply see the thing you are about to dismiss.

What I saw was a man on a cross with his arms out.

That is what a crucifix is.

A man with his arms out.

And for one unguarded second before the monologue started forming in my head, before the theological counterarguments assembled themselves, I saw it the way a person sees something for the first time without knowing yet what it means.

A man, his arms out, open.

I lowered my phone.

It was involuntary.

My arm just went down.

I sat in the wooden pew in the back row of a small church in East Toronto in the thin February light and my phone was in my lap and Pastor Glenn was speaking quietly to the small group at the front and I was looking at a crucifix on a wall and feeling the specific vertigo of a person who has arrived with a map and discovered that the territory is not what the map describes.

I was there for 40 minutes before I said a word.

This had never happened to me at one of these events.

Usually I was talking within the first 5 minutes, finding the opening, inserting the argument, controlling the frame.

But I sat in the back pew and I listened to Pastor Glenn talk.

And I did not insert anything.

He was not preaching.

He was talking the way a person talks when they are just reporting what they know.

He was talking about a passage from the Gospel of John.

The story of a man named Thomas who refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he could put his hand into the wounds.

Thomas said, “I will not believe unless I see and then touch the evidence.

” And then Jesus appeared and said to Thomas, “Put your hand in my side.

Touch the wounds.

Stop doubting and believe.

” Pastor Glenn read that story and then he said something that I did not expect.

He said Jesus did not scold Thomas for needing evidence.

He showed up with the evidence.

He says, “Here I am.

Look, touch, examine.

The proof is the wounds.

” He said, “Thomas was the patron saint of everyone who needs to see it to believe it.

” He looked up from his Bible and his eyes went to the back row and found me.

Not in the dramatic way of a preacher making a point at at the audience, just a natural glance that happened to land on the one person in the room who had come specifically because he needed to examine and disprove.

He held the look for one second and then he moved on.

My argument against the resurrection was sitting ready in my head, loaded, sourced, practiced.

I had used it many times.

I did not say it.

I do not fully understand why I did not say it that afternoon.

I think something about the room would not cooperate with the version of itself I had prepared for.

It was too small and too plain and too warm, and the people in it were too ordinary, and Pastor Glenn was too unhurried, and the crucifix on the wall behind him was too nakedly present to be argued against.

Effectively, with a practiced monologue, you can argue against an institution.

You cannot argue against a man on a cross with his arms out.

Not in the same way the geometry is wrong.

After the session ended, Pastor Glenn came to the back of the room where I was sitting.

He brought two cups of coffee from the folding table in the foyer.

He sat one down on the pew beside me without asking if I wanted it and sat down in the pew across the aisle.

He said, “You had things you wanted to say earlier.

I could see it.

What stopped you?” I looked at him.

He was asking the question like he genuinely wanted to know the answer, not like he was trying to diffuse me or manage me, like he was curious.

I said, “The room is different than I expected.

” He nodded like that made sense.

And he said, “People say that a lot.

What were you expecting?” I said, “Something easier to dismiss.

” He smiled slightly.

He said, “What would have made it easier?” I thought about it.

I said, “If you had been louder, if the place had felt like a performance, I could have pushed against a performance.

This room does not feel like a performance.

” He looked at his coffee.

He said, “That is the most useful thing anyone has said to me about this place in a long time.

” Then he looked at me and then said, “What are you looking for?” Honestly, I opened my mouth to give the answer I always gave, the practiced answer about understanding other belief systems in order to have an informed perspective.

The answer that sounded like intellectual curiosity and was actually reconnaissance.

I opened my mouth to say it and different words came out.

I said, “I have been talking about God my whole life and I have never once felt like God was listening.

” The words surprised me as much as they surprised him.

I had not known they were in me.

They came out the way things come out when you are in a room that is too plain and too warm for your armor to work properly.

Through the gap the armor was supposed to cover.

Pastor Glenn did not respond immediately.

He sat with what I had said the way you sit with something heavy that has been handed to you taking the weight of it seriously before deciding what to do with it.

Then he said quietly, “That is a true thing you just told me and I think you have not told it to very many people.

” I said, “I have not told it to anyone.

” He said, “Why today?” I looked at the crucifix on the wall.

The thin February light had shifted slightly.

The afternoon moving on, and the light hit the cross at a different angle than it had an hour before.

I said, “I do not know.

” He said, “I think you do know.

I think something in this room refused to let you perform.

And so you said a true thing instead.

He paused.

He said, “That is not me.

That is not this church.

That is the one this room belongs to.

” I looked at Pastor Glenn for a long time.

He was a 55year-old man in a brown sweater in a small church in Lazleyville that smelled like old wood and coffee.

and he was sitting with completely steady eyes telling me that the God I had been arguing against for 10 years had just opened my mouth and made me tell the truth.

And the most disorienting thing about it was that I could not find a reason he was wrong.

I left the church at 4:30 without posting anything.

I walked out into the minus 9 February Street and I stood on the sidewalk for a moment.

The dry cleaner next door had its lights on and I could see a woman inside moving clothes along a rack and the used bookstore on the other side was still open and a man was standing in the window looking at a book.

The ordinary world was completely intact around me.

Traffic on the street, a street car going past, clouds of breath from pedestrians, everything exactly as it was.

And I was not the same.

not converted, not suddenly believing, but different in a specific way I could not yet name.

The certainty was different.

The comfortable absolute certainty that I had carried for 10 years as my most valuable possession had shifted, not collapsed, just shifted.

The way a building shifts in an earthquake before anyone is sure whether it is going to stand or fall.

I could feel the movement in it, the loosening.

I texted Marcus.

I said I had not gotten the footage.

He asked why.

I said the place was not what I expected.

He sent back a question mark.

I put my phone in my pocket and walked to the street car stop and stood in the cold and thought about a man with his arms out on a wall in a plain church and a pastor who sat with the weight of a true thing before responding to it.

And the question that had come out of my mouth before I knew it was inside me.

I have been talking about God my whole life and I have never once felt like God was listening.

The street car came.

I got on.

I sat by the window and watched Toronto go past in the dark cold February evening and I thought about Thomas, the one who said, “I will not believe unless I touch the wounds and about a god who showed up with the wounds instead of an argument.

” I did not sleep well that night.

I lay in my apartment in the annex neighborhood of Toronto, looking at the ceiling and the certainty kept shifting and I kept feeling the movement of it and being unable to stop it.

Something had gotten under the armor.

Something small and quiet and completely irresistible.

The way cold water gets under a door no matter how tight the seal.

I went back to the church the following Thursday.

I did not tell Marcus I was going back.

I did not tell anyone.

I put my phone in my jacket pocket on airplane mode, something I had not done voluntarily in 4 years, and I walked to Cornerstone Community Church in Leslieville at 2:00 in the afternoon and pushed open the dark green door.

Pastor Glenn was already in the main room, rearranging chairs into a circle instead of rows.

He looked up when I came in and said, “You came back.

” He said it like a simple fact, not surprised, not triumphant, like he had been expecting it, but had also been prepared for the alternative.

I said, “I have questions.

” He said, “Good.

That’s the right reason to come back.

Sit down.

” I sat and he sat and for the next two hours I gave him every argument I had.

I did not perform them.

I asked them as which is different.

The resurrection argument, the reliability of the gospels, the question of why a perfect God would need to be sacrificed to forgive people he created, the history of the church, the violence done in Jesus’s name, the crusades, the colonization, the accumulated weight of centuries of Christian institutions doing terrible things in the name of the
cross on that wall.

I laid it all out not to win, but to find out if it held up under genuine engagement rather than the panic to responses I usually got from young theology students who had not thought through their own position carefully.

Pastor Glenn engaged every question, not perfectly.

He was honest about the ones where the answers were genuinely incomplete.

He said about the violence done by the church.

Those are the hands of the church and the hands of the church have done terrible things.

But the hands of the church are not the hands of Christ.

The church is made of people and people are capable of corruption especially when they have power.

This is exactly what Jesus said would happen.

He said his kingdom was not of this world.

He said the greatest in his kingdom would be the servant of all.

Every atrocity done in the name of the church was done against those teachings.

Not because of them.

I pushed back.

I asked then why follow the institution? Why the church at all? If the institution is corruptible, he said, I do not follow the institution.

I follow the person.

The institution is an imperfect vehicle for something that is not imperfect.

You do not judge the thing by the vehicle.

You judge the thing by what the thing actually is.

I said, how do you know what the thing actually is? He said, the same way Thomas knew.

You put your hand in the wounds.

You look at the evidence directly instead of at other people’s descriptions of it.

I said, “And what is the evidence?” He said, “Start with the person, not the doctrine, not the institution, not the arguments for or against the resurrection as a historical event.

Start with the person.

Read the Gospels not as a theological document, but as the record of a person moving through the world.

Watch where he goes.

Watch who he sits with.

Watch what he says to the people that nobody else will speak to.

Let the person be the evidence before you.

Let the argument be the argument.

I went home that afternoon and I did what he said.

I pulled up the Gospel of John on my laptop and I read it the way I had never read anything before.

Not hunting for weakness, not loading the arguments, just reading, just watching a person move through the world.

I got to chapter 4, The Woman at the Well.

a Samaritan woman, which meant a person his own society had decided was worth less than the people around her.

An outsider, I a person whose water you did not accept and whose conversation you did not have.

And Jesus sat at the well and said to her, “Give me a drink.

” And then he talking to her.

He talked to her about her life.

Everything about her life, the parts she would have wanted to keep hidden.

And he talked it to her without judgment, just with a cleareyed knowing that did not look away from what it knew.

The woman said to Jesus, “How do you know all this about me?” And then Jesus told her.

And she left her water jar and ran back to her village.

And she said to everyone she met, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.

Is this not the one?” I sat at my laptop in my apartment in the annex and I read those words and I thought about what I had said to Pastor Glenn a week ago in a wooden pew in the back row of a smaller church.

I have been talking about God my whole life and I have never once felt like God was listening.

The words that came out of my mouth before I knew they were in me.

The things I had never said to anyone.

The parts I would have wanted to keep hidden.

Someone had been at the well when I walked in.

That thought arrived in my chest with a weight I was not ready for.

Not a metaphor, not a theological formulation, a specific concrete thought.

Someone was already there when you arrived.

Someone knew the argument you had prepared and also knew the thing underneath the argument that you had never prepared anyone for.

Someone knew why you built the argument in the first place.

the glass wall, the performing, the 10 years of talking about God without ever feeling like God heard a word.

I closed the laptop and sat in my apartment in the dark for a long time.

My mother called me that evening.

She called most evenings, a habit from my childhood when she would call to check if I was eating properly.

And that habit had never fully stopped even now that I was 28 and living alone.

She asked how I was.

I said, “Fine.

” She said, “You sound different.

” I said, “I am thinking about some things.

” She said, “What things?” I said, “Religious things.

” There was a pause and then she said, “Are you all right?” I said, “Yes.

” I said, “I am actually more all right than usual.

” She said, “That is a strange way to put it.

” I said, “I know.

” After the call, I went to my desk and I wrote down the question that had been building since the Thursday afternoon with the crucifix.

I wrote it in plain English so I could not dress it up or make it sound better than it was.

I wrote, “Is Jesus real?” Not is Christianity true as a theological system.

Not is the resurrection historically defensible.

Is Jesus real? Is the person in those pages a real person who can be encountered and not just studied? I looked at the question.

Then I wrote underneath it.

If you are real, I need you to be real to me, not to the argument.

to me.

I put the paper in my desk drawer and went to bed.

3 days later, I had a dream.

I want to tell you about it without overstating it.

It was not theatrical.

There was no blinding light.

There was no voice from the clouds.

I was in a long corridor, the kind of corridor you find in large old buildings with high ceilings and doors on either side and a floor that went on further than you could see.

All the doors were closed.

And at the far end of the corridor, there was a figure indistinct, not close enough to see clearly, just present, just there.

And the feeling in the dream was not fear and not all.

It was recognition.

The feeling you have when you see someone you know from a long distance and you recognize them from the way they stand before you can see their face.

I knew this person.

I had always known this person.

I had been in every argument against this person for 10 years.

And underneath every argument, I had always known this person was real.

I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and sat in the dark of my apartment.

And the recognition from the dream was still completely present, not fading the way dreams fade, staying the way true things stay.

I got up and went to my desk and opened the drawer and took out the paper with the question on it.

Is Jesus real? I read it and then I read the second line.

If you are real, I need you to be real to me.

And I sat with the paper in my hands in the 5:00 dark and I knew with the specific quality of knowing that cannot be argued away because it is not an argument.

It is a recognition that something had answered.

Not the question, not the argument.

Me something had answered me.

I went back to Cornerstone on the Thursday after the dream.

It was the third Thursday in a row.

The consistency of it surprised me more than anything else that had happened that I, who had never willingly returned to anything that made me feel less than in control, had come back to this plain warm room in East Toronto three weeks in a row.

Pastor Glenn was there.

He looked up when I came in, and this time he did not say anything.

He just nodded.

The nod of a person who recognizes a season when they see one.

I sat down in the circle of chairs, not the back pew this time, the circle, and I told Pastor Glenn about the dream.

I told him plainly the way I had learning to tell true things in this room, the corridor, the figure at the end, the recognition, the feeling of knowing someone you had been arguing against for 10 years and finding that underneath every argument, you had always known
they were real.

Pastor Glenn listened without interrupting.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “What do you want to do with that?” I said, “I want to stop running.

” He nodded slowly.

He said, “What does stopping look like?” I said, “I think it looks like saying out loud what I have been knowing quietly for 3 weeks.

” I said, “I think Jesus is real.

” I think I have always known he was real.

and I built 10 years of argument on top of the knowing because knowing and doing something about the knowing are very different things.

And the second one is much more frightening.

Pastor Glenn said, “You are right.

It is frightening.

” He said, “What makes it frightening for you specifically?” I thought about it.

I said, “My family, my father’s name, the thing I am in my family story, the Saudi blood, the grandfather who met the king.

” If I say I believe in Jesus Christ, I am not just changing my religion.

I am stepping outside the entire identity my family built across generations.

I am becoming the person who broke the line.

Pastor Glenn sat with that.

Then he said, “Can I tell you what I see when I look at you?” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “I see a man who has been arguing for an identity he was assigned rather than one he chose.

I see a man who has been very good at defending a position he’s not sure he occupies.

And I see a man who walked into this room three weeks ago with a phone ready to film and a monologue ready to deliver and instead sat in the back row and said the truest thing he had ever said to another person.

He paused.

He said, “The identity you are afraid to lose is the armor you put on because you did not yet know who you were without it.

I looked at the crucifix on the wall behind the lectern.

the man with his arms out open.

I had looked at it three times now and each time it looked back with the same expression which was not an expression at all in any describable sense just a presence just the quality of a thing that is completely real and knows you are looking at it.

I said I want to believe.

I think I already believe.

I think the dream was the last piece and I am still standing here because I am afraid of what happens next.

Pastor Glenn said, “What do you think happens next?” I said, “I lose things.

” He said, “Yes, probably.

” He said it simply, without minimizing it, which was the thing I needed him to do.

He said, “But I want to ask you something.

How much of what you lose is actually something you have and how much of it is something you have been performing?” I sat with that question for a long time.

The Saudi blood, the grandfather’s name, the certainty, the monologue, the camera, the 12,000 followers watching me dismantle other people’s faith, the comfortable arrogance of the man who has never lost the thing he is about to go and do.

How much of it was mine? How much of it had ever been mine? I got down on my knees on the worn hardwood floor of Cornerstone Community Church in Lesleyville, Toronto.

Not because someone asked me to, not because it was part of a program or a process, because it was the only honest position available to me in that moment.

And I had been learning for 3 weeks that honesty in this room was the one thing I could not avoid.

I said, I believe you are real.

I said it to the crucifix and to the room and to the presence that had been at the well when I walked in and in the corridor of the dream and in the answer that arrived in the 5:00 dark 3 days ago.

I said, “I believe you died and rose again.

And I believe the man on that cross had his arms out because that is the posture of someone who is not turning away.

I believe you have not turned away from me once in 28 years.

Even while I was building arguments against you, I believe that 10 years of debate was me running from something I already knew and I am done running.

I am yours.

Whatever that costs me, I am yours.

I stayed on my knees for a while.

Pastor Glenn did not touch me or speak.

He just let the silences be what it was, which was not empty.

When I stood up, I felt lighter than I had felt since I was a small boy in Toronto before I learned that the Saudi blood was a currency and the certainty was armor.

And the arguments were the price of belonging to the identity I had been assigned.

Lighter in the specific way of someone who has put down a thing they have been carrying for a very long time without ever admitting it was heavy.

The things I lost in the months that followed were real and I will not minimize them.

I told my father by phone from my apartment on a Sunday morning in Marsh.

I told him plainly the way I had learned to tell true things without softening the edges.

He was silent for longer than he had ever been silent in a conversation with me.

Then he said words is Arabic that I will not repeat here because they were said in pain and I do not want to use his pain as material.

He hung up.

We did not speak for 11 weeks.

My mother called me 3 days after my father and she cried and she asked me what had happened.

And I told her about the church and the crucifix and the dream and the 5:00 dark and she listened to all of it.

And at the end she said, “Zead, I do not understand this, but I hear something in your voice I have not heard since you were a little boy.

” She said, “You sound like yourself.

” I said, “I am.

For the first time in 10 years, I am.

I called Marcus and told him there would be no video.

He said he thought something had happened in that church.

He said I had looked strange coming out.

I said strange was a fair description.

He said, “Are you all right?” I said, “Better than all right.

” He said, “That is a strange answer.

” I said, “I know.

I began attending Cornerstone regularly, not as a project or an investigation, as a person who belonged there.

I sat in the circle on Thursdays and in the pews on Sundays and I read the gospels again.

All four of them not hunting and not defending, just reading about a person moving through the world toward the people everyone else was moving away from.

I thought often about the woman at the well, the one who left her water jar and ran back to her village, saying, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.

” I understood the running now.

Not running away, running toward the urgent need to tell someone, anyone or about the thing you have found that you had not known you were looking for.

My father and I spoke again 11 weeks after the Sunday morning call.

He called me on a Tuesday evening and he said, “I do not understand what you have done.

” [clears throat] He said, “But you are my son and I am not finished with you.

” I said, “I am not finished with you either, Baba.

” We talked for 2 hours not about religion about other things about Toronto and his work and my childhood and the house in North York and the grandfather whose name I had been carrying.

At the end of the call he said Zad are you at peace? I said yes Baba for the first time I am at peace.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said then I will have to learn to be glad about that even though I do not understand it.

I said that is enough.

That is more than enough.

I want to speak to two groups of people before I finish.

To every young Muslim man who has ever used debate as religion, who has ever built a wall of argument because the space behind the wall was too frightening to look at directly, who has ever been very good at talking about God and secretly terrified that God was not listening.

I want to say the wall is not the faith.

The argument is not the devotion.

The certainty is not the relationship.

I spent 10 years being the smartest person in every religion debate and I was empty for all 10 of them.

And the emptiness was the evidence that I was building on sand.

No matter how solid the argument sounded from the outside, the question underneath all the questions is not whether you can win the debate.

It is whether the God you are debating about is real and whether he hears you.

I have the answer to that question now.

It cost me everything I thought I was and gave me back everything I actually am.

The trade is not close to anyone who has been building an identity on top of a question they are afraid to ask.

I want to say the room you are afraid to sit in quietly is the room where the answer is waiting.

Not the debate room, not the online forum, not the video with the argument that performs well and fills the silence with approval from strangers.

the plain warm room with the warm floors and the cold coffee and the cross on on the wall with the figure whose arms are open.

Go and sit in it without your armor.

Say the true thing.

Find out what happens when you stop performing and start asking.

He was at the well when I walked in.

He has been at the well the whole time.

He is there right now waiting for you to put down the water jar, waiting for you to run back to wherever you came from and say, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.

” Is this not the one? He is the one I know because I spent 10 years building walls against him.

and he was on the other side of every single one of them, arms out, not turning away, waiting for the Thursday afternoon in February when a 28-year-old man from Toronto walked in with a phone and a smirk and a prepared monologue and set the phone down without knowing why and said the truest thing he had ever said in his life.

He was already there.

He heard every word.

He had been hearing every word for 28 years and he is hearing yours right now.

The arms are still out.

They were never closed.

Walk toward them.