It was bruised, but there was a pulse, strong, steady, alive.

I sat in the darkness of the van, weeping, not from sorrow, but from an overwhelming realization.

The rope didn’t break because it was old.

The rope didn’t break because of a manufacturing error.

The rope broke because the finger of God touched it.

And if God can break a hangman’s noose, what makes you think he cannot break the chain of addiction holding you? What makes you think he cannot snap the cycle of depression in your family? Before we continue to what happened next because the story didn’t end there.

The real battle was just beginning in the prison.

I want to ask you something.

Have you ever seen the enemy tremble? Have you ever stood your ground long enough to see the fear in the eyes of the thing that was trying to kill you? If this testimony is speaking to your spirit right now, if you feel your faith rising, take a second to subscribe to this channel.

We are building a community of believers who refuse to bow to fear.

Join us because what happened in the prison was even harder than the hanging.

[snorts] And you need to hear how God showed up in the darkness.

Most people think the hardest part of my story was the rope.

They think the climax was the snap.

But they are wrong.

The rope was physical pain.

It was sharp.

It was quick.

It had a beginning and an end.

What happened next? Dot dot.

That was a different kind of torture.

That was a slow poison.

They threw me back into the van.

At this time, there was no shouting.

The guards didn’t insult me.

They didn’t even look at me.

It was as if I had become a ghost in the machine of their system.

A glitch they couldn’t explain.

and therefore couldn’t look at.

We drove for hours.

When the doors opened, I wasn’t at the holding center anymore.

I was at Evan prison.

If you live in the west, you might not know this name.

But in Iran, Evan is a word that stops conversations.

It is a place where people disappear.

It is a black hole.

They walked me down a long corridor.

The air smelled of mold and old fear.

It was cold.

A damp cold that gets into your bones and stays there.

They put me in solitary confinement.

Cell 209.

I want you to picture this space.

It was 2 m by 1 meter.

Three steps forward.

Turn.

Three steps back.

Turn.

The walls were gray concrete, rough to the touch.

There was no window.

Just a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, buzzing constantly.

It never turned off.

Not during the day.

Not during the night.

They wanted to destroy my sense of time.

And then the silence began.

For the first week, I didn’t hear a human voice.

The guards who brought my food a bowl of watery soup and stale bread would slide it through the slot at the bottom of the door.

They wouldn’t speak.

I realized then why they were doing this.

They were afraid.

Remember the executioner on the platform? That fear had spread.

The rumor had gone through the prison guard.

Duen touched the woman with a broken robe.

Her guard fights back.

So instead of beating me, he decided to erase me.

Solitary confinement is a strange thing.

At first you pray.

You sing worship songs.

You feel strong.

You say, “God is with me in this cell.

” But after 3 days, after 7 days, after 10 days of staring at a gray wall under a buzzing light, your mind begins to eat itself.

I started to hallucinate.

I would see spiders crawling on the walls that weren’t there.

I would hear my mother’s voice calling my name, clear as a bow, right next to my ear.

I would jump up and scream, “Mother.

” But there was only the concrete.

The enemy knows that we are created for connection.

God said in Genesis, “It is not good for man to be alone.

When you cut a human being off from all contact, you are attacking the very image of God in them.

” I began to lose track of reality.

Was the rope real? Did I dream the man in the white robe? Maybe I was crazy.

Maybe I had been crazy the whole time.

The silence whispered to me.

God has forgotten you.

The miracle was a mistake.

You are going to rot in this box and no one will ever know.

I lay on the thin blanket on the floor, curling into a ball.

The dampness seeped into my clothes.

I stopped singing.

My prayers became just one word repeated over and over.

Why? Why? Why save me from the rope just to leave me in the box? Why perform a miracle in public just to let me die in private? If you are going through a season of silence right now, I know that question.

You have seen God move in the past.

You have the testimony, but right now the walls are gray, the light is buzzing, and heaven feels like brass.

You feel like God has walked out of the room and locked the door.

But here is what I learned in cell 209.

The teacher is always silent during the test.

God hadn’t left.

He was waiting.

He was stripping away everything I relied on.

My family, my reputation, my freedom, even my sanity until I had nothing left but him.

It is a terrifying place to be, but it is also the most holy ground you will ever stand on.

One night, or maybe it was day, I heard a sound, a tapping, tap, tap.

It was coming from the other side of the wall.

I froze.

I crawled to the wall and put my ear against the cold concrete.

Tap tap.

I tapped back.

For the next hour, we tapped back and forth.

No words, no code, just the signal.

I am here.

You are here.

We are not dead.

That tiny sound broke the siege.

Tears [snorts] stream down my face.

I realize that the enemy can build walls.

He can lock doors.

He can silence voices, but he cannot stop the spirit from connecting us.

Even through 2 ft of reinforced concrete, I was not alone.

3 weeks later, the door opened.

I shielded my eyes against the hallway light.

A guard stood there.

Interrogation, he granted.

It was the first human word I had heard in 21 days.

They took me to a different room.

This wasn’t the rough interrogation room with the blood stains.

This was an office.

There was a Persian rug, a mahogany desk, a pot of tea steaming on a tray.

Behind a desk sat a man I had never seen before.

He was dressed in a sharp suit, not a uniform.

He looked kind.

He smiled when I entered.

“Please sit down,” he said, gesturing to a comfortable chair.

“Would you like some tea?” “This, my friends, is the most dangerous form of the enemy.

The devil doesn’t always come with horns and a pitchfork.

Sometimes he comes with a suit and a cup of tea.

He comes with logic.

He comes with common sense.

” I sat down.

My hands were shaking.

I wanted that tea so badly.

Look, he said softly.

We have a problem.

You see the incident at the square.

It has caused some confusion.

People are superstitious.

They think something magical happened.

He leaned forward.

But you and I know better, don’t we? It was a faulty rope.

It happens.

Industrial accidents happen.

He pushed a piece of paper across the desk.

It was a single page.

I don’t want to kill you.

He said, “You are young.

You are beautiful.

You have your whole life ahead of you.

Your family misses you.

Your mother is sick with worry.

Do you want to kill your mother with grief? The mention of my mother hit me like a punch to the stomach.

All you have to do is sign this.

He tapped the paper.

It just says that the rope broke due to a defect.

And it says that you renounce your association with a Zionist cult of Christianity.

You don’t even have to mean it.

Just sign it for the paperwork.

Go home.

Be a Muslim on the outside.

Believe whatever you want in your heart.

God knows your huck, right? He smiled again.

It’s just paper.

I stared at the pin.

The battle I fought in that office was a thousand times harder than the battle on the gallows.

On the gallows, I had no choice.

I was a victim.

Here, I had a choice.

And the temptation was overwhelming.

My mind started to rationalize.

You know that voice, don’t you? Sign it.

The voice said, “God already saved you from the rope.

He proved his point.

He doesn’t want you to die in prison.

He wants you to go home and witness to your family.

How can you witness if you’re dead? Think about Peter,” the voice whispered.

“Peter denied Jesus three times to save his own skin.

And Jesus forgave him.

Jesus made him the rock of the church.

If Peter can deny him, why can’t you? Just a little signature.

Just a little lie to save a life.

It made so much sense.

It was logical.

It was pragmatic.

It was survival.

I picked up the pen.

The man smiled.

He poured the tea.

The steam rose up, smelling of cardamom and sugar.

It smelled like freedom.

I brought the pen to the paper.

I looked at the line where I was supposed to sign my name.

And then I saw it.

In my mind’s eye, I saw the platform again.

I saw the crowd.

I saw the fear in the executioner’s eyes.

I realized something in that split second.

The miracle wasn’t just for me.

The miracle was a testimony to them.

God had broken the rope to show his power to the nations.

If I signed this paper, if I said it was just a faulty rope, I would be stealing God’s glory.

I would be turning a miracle into an accident.

I would be telling the world that the God who saved me was small, weak, unexplainable.

I would be buying my life with the currency of betrayal.

Yes, Peter denied Jesus.

And yes, Jesus forgave him, but Peter denied Jesus before the resurrection.

Peter denied him in fear.

I had seen the resurrection.

I had felt the rope snap.

I had seen the impossible.

To deny him now wouldn’t be weakness.

It would be treason.

I put the pen down.

The man’s smile vanished instantly.

The air in the room turned ice cold.

I cannot sign this, I whispered.

Why? He hissed.

Do you want to die? I looked him in the eye.

I was dirty.

I smelled of prison.

I was weak from hunger.

He was powerful, rich, and clean.

But in that moment, I was the one with authority.

Because I said the rope did not break by accident and I will not trade the truth of God for a cup of tea.

He stood up and slammed his fist on the desk.

Get her out of here.

He screamed.

Take her back to the hole.

Let her rot.

The guards dragged me out.

I didn’t get the tea.

I didn’t get to go home.

I went back to the darkness.

Back to the spiders.

Back to the silence.

But as the heavy metal door slammed shut on cell 209, leaving me in total darkness again, I felt a piece that I cannot explain.

It was a piece heavier than the concrete walls.

I was hungry, but my soul was full.

I was trapped, but I was free.

I want to pause here and ask you a hard question.

Have you ever picked up the pen? Maybe nobody’s asking you to sign a death warrant, but maybe the enemy is offering you a deal.

Just compromise a little bit on your taxes.

Nobody will know.

Just stay quiet about your faith at work so you get their promotion.

Just date that person who doesn’t believe you can change them later.

It makes sense.

It’s logical.

It’s safe.

But every time we choose safety over truth, we are signing that paper.

We are telling the world that our comfort is more valuable than our Christ.

If you are standing in that office right now, looking at the pen, looking at the easy way out, dot dot dot dot, put it down.

The tea is poisoned.

The freedom is a lie.

The only thing that matters is keeping your testimony crystal clear.

This brings me to the final part of my journey.

Because after I refused to sign, things changed.

I wasn’t just a prisoner anymore.

I became something else, something they couldn’t break.

So they tried to bury and that is where I learned the lesson of the crystal.

[snorts] If you’ve ever felt the pressure to compromise your values just to survive, you need to hear how this ends because God didn’t leave me in that cell forever.

But he didn’t take me out the way I expected.

Click that subscribe button if you are with me because we are heading into the final revelation that changed my life.

They eventually let me go not because they were kind and not because they believed me.

They let me go because they did not know what else to do with me.

I was a problem without a solution.

Killing me had failed.

Keeping me was inspiring the other prisoners.

So they opened the gate and pushed me out into the street.

I remember standing on the pavement outside Eving Prison.

The air was filled with the smog of Terron, but to me it tasted sweet.

I touched the scar on my neck.

It was still tender, a raised purple line that would mark me for the rest of my life.

I felt the hardest part was over.

I thought that surviving the rope and surviving the solitary confinement made that I had passed the test.

I thought I would go home and be welcomed like a hero.

I imagined my community would look at me and see the power of God.

I imagined they would say, “Teach us how to have this faith.

” I was so naive.

I walked back to my neighborhood.

It was a long walk, but I needed it to clear my head.

When I finally turned the corner onto my street, my heart leaped.

I saw the familiar shops.

I saw the bakery where I used to buy bread.

I saw the neighbors I had known since I was a child.

I saw a woman I knew well, a neighbor whose children I had played with.

I smiled and waved, ready to run to her and hug her.

She looked up.

She saw me.

And then her face went pale.

She didn’t smile.

She didn’t wave back.

She grabbed her child’s hand, pulled him close, and turned around, walking quickly in the opposite direction.

I stopped.

My hand froze in the air.

Maybe she didn’t recognize me.

I told myself, “I have lost weight.

I looked tired.

” I kept walking.

I saw the grosser standing outside his shop.

He was a kind man who always gave me extra candy when I was little.

I walked toward him.

“Uncle,” I said.

He looked at me with eyes full of panic.

He stepped back into his shop and slammed the metal shutter down.

I heard the lock click.

It was then that the cold reality hit me.

They weren’t afraid of me.

They were afraid of what I represented.

To them, I was not a miracle.

I was a danger.

I was a walking target.

Everyone knew the story of the woman with the broken rope.

And everyone knew that the regime does not forgive embarrassment.

They knew that anyone seen talking to me, anyone seen helping me would be the next one in the black van.

I was like a leper in the ancient times.

I carried the mark of God, but to the world.

It looked like a plague.

When I finally reached my family’s house, the door was unlocked.

I walked in.

My mother was there.

She looked at me and burst into tears.

that they were not tears of pure joy.

They were tears of overwhelming fear.

“Why did you come back?” she whispered.

“Those words hurt more than the executioner’s knot.

I have nowhere else to go,” I said.

“My father sat in the corner.

He didn’t look at me.

” He looked at the floor.

“You have brought shame on us,” he said quietly.

“And now you bring danger.

Every breath you take in this house puts a target on your sister’s backs.

” I went to my room, the same room where I had hidden the Bible, the same room where I had the dream.

But it didn’t feel like my roof anymore.

I sat on the bed and realized a terrible truth.

The rope in the square had failed to kill me.

The prison had failed to break me.

But this, this rejection by my own people, this was the weapon that could finally destroy my soul.

Loneliness is a powerful weapon in the enemy’s hand.

When you are persecuted by the government, you feel like a martyr.

You feel strong because you are suffering for a cause.

But when you are rejected by your loved ones, you don’t feel like a martyr.

You feel like a mistake.

I spent days in that house like a ghost.

Nobody spoke to me.

If I entered the kitchen, my sisters would leave.

If I sat in the living room, the television would be turned up to drown out my presence.

I began to question God again.

Lord, I prayed.

You saved me from the dead, but you left me among the living dead.

Why did you bring me back to this ice? Why didn’t you just take me home to heaven when the trap door opened? It is easy to have faith when you are fighting a clear enemy.

It is much harder to have faith when the enemy is the silence of your friends.

But God in his mercy does not leave us in the cold forever.

He allows the winter so that we can learn the value of the fire.

I want to speak to someone watching this right now.

Maybe you have taken a stand for your faith and instead of applause, you got silence.

Maybe you started living right.

You stopped partying.

You stopped lying.

And suddenly your friends don’t invite you out anymore.

They call you judgmental.

They call you too religious.

You feel the cold wind of rejection.

And you are tempted to go back.

You are tempted to compromise just to be invited back to the table.

Do not do it.

What I learned in those lonely days is the human approval is a drug.

It feels good, but it makes you weak.

God had to strip away every single layer of human support from my life.

He took away the support of the law.

He took away the support of my family.

He [snorts] took away the support of my community.

He cleared the stage completely.

Why? So that when I stood, I would be standing on nothing but him.

He was teaching me that if I have Jesus and the whole world is against me, I am the majority.

But if I have the whole world and I do not have Jesus, I am utterly alone.

This season of coldness was not a punishment.

It was a preparation.

It was the pressure chamber.

And just like coal needs massive pressure to become something valuable, I was being squeezed.

I didn’t know it then, but I was about to undergo the final transformation.

If you are feeling the pressure right now, if you are feeling the crush of loneliness, do not run away.

[snorts] You are not being destroyed.

You are being formed.

Stay with me because what happened next is the most important part of the revelation.

It is the reason I can sit here today and smile at the memory of the gallows.

There is a concept in science that I love.

It is the difference between glass and crystal.

To the naked eye, they might look the same.

They [snorts] are both clear.

They both let light through.

But their internal structure is completely different.

Glass is made quickly.

It is fragile.

If you hit it, it shatters into dangerous shards.

But a crystal, a diamond, it is formed over thousands of years, under intense heat and crushing weight.

Its internal structure is organized, aligned, and incredibly strong.

One afternoon I was sitting in the garden looking at a small piece of quartz.

I had found in the dirt.

I was turning it over in my hand, watching how it caught the sunlight.

And the Holy Spirit spoke to me, not in an audible voice like in the prison, but as a deep knowing in my spirit.

He said, “My daughter, you wanted to be glass.

You wanted to be normal.

You wanted to be invisible and safe.

But I have called you to be a crystal.

Continue reading….
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