Every corner we turned, I expected to see Taliban fighters waiting for us.

Every checkpoint we approached, I thought, “This is it.

This is where they catch us.

” My heart was racing so fast I thought it would explode.

My hands were sweating despite the cool morning air coming through the car’s windows.

Gulam drove slowly, carefully obeying every traffic rule, drawing no attention to himself or his passengers.

He took side streets when possible, avoiding main roads where there might be more Taliban presence.

We passed people going about their morning routines, shopkeepers opening their stores, children walking to school, women in burkas heading to the market, normal life continuing while we ran for our lives.

It felt surreal, like we existed in a different reality than these other people.

No one in that car spoke.

We were too afraid, too exhausted, too traumatized.

We just sat in silence and prayed internally.

Prayed that we would make it out of the city.

Prayed that the checkpoints would let us pass.

Prayed that God would continue the miracle he had started.

At one point, we did come to a checkpoint.

Taliban fighters standing in the road checking vehicles.

My heart nearly stopped.

This was it.

They would find us.

They would see our injuries despite the scarves covering us.

They would know we were the ones who escaped.

Gulam slowed the car and pulled up to the checkpoint.

A young fighter, maybe 20 years old, leaned down to look in the window.

He had a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and a hard expression on his face.

He asked Gulam where he was going.

Gulam said he was taking his family south to visit relatives in a village near the border.

His voice was calm, casual, like this was the most normal thing in the world.

The fighter looked at us in the car.

His eyes moved from face to face.

I held my breath.

My scarf was pulled up high, covering most of my face.

But could he see my swollen lip? Could he see the fear in my eyes? Time stretched.

Seconds felt like hours.

The fighter’s eyes lingered on me.

I forced myself to look down, to appear modest and submissive like women were expected to be.

Finally, he stepped back and waved us through just like that.

No questions, no search.

He let us pass.

Gulam drove forward slowly, not rushing, not doing anything to make the fighter suspicious.

We continued down the road.

The checkpoint disappeared behind us.

We had made it through.

Sister Paresa started crying quietly in the front seat.

Relief and release of tension.

Sister Leila was praying under her breath, thanking God.

Fared let out a long breath he had been holding.

We drove for maybe another 30 minutes before we reached the edge of Kabul.

The city gave way to more rural areas, smaller villages, open land.

We were leaving the capital behind.

Gulam spoke for the first time since we left the tea shop.

He said he could take us as far as a town about halfway to the border.

From there, we would need to find our own way.

He could not risk driving all the way to Pakistan.

Too many checkpoints near the border.

too much scrutiny, but he could get us closer than we were now.

We thanked him.

Any distance he could take us was more than we could have managed on our own.

The landscape changed as we drove.

Mountains in the distance, their peaks still white with snow.

Fields that would be green in spring, but were brown and dormant now in late November.

Small villages with mudbrick houses clustered together.

Herds of sheep and goats being tended by boys with sticks.

Afghanistan is a beautiful country.

People who have never been there, they think it is only war and destruction.

But it is more than that.

It has beauty, history, culture.

It has people who are kind and generous despite decades of conflict.

It has mountains and rivers and valleys that take your breath away.

I was leaving it maybe forever.

I was fleeing my homeland because I chose to follow Jesus.

And I felt such mixed emotions.

Grief at losing my country, relief at the possibility of safety, fear of the unknown future, gratitude for deliverance.

All of it swirling together inside me until I did not know what I was feeling anymore.

Around midm morning, maybe 10 or 11:00 am, we stopped in a small town.

Gilam said this was as far as he could take us.

From here, we needed to find our own way south.

He gave us some money.

Not much, just what he had in his pocket.

Enough maybe for food and to pay for a ride if we could find one.

He said there were trucks that made runs toward the border carrying goods.

If we could find one, if the driver was sympathetic, maybe we could get further south.

We got out of the car.

Gulam looked at us with such sadness and compassion in his old eyes.

He said, “May God with you.

May you find safety.

May the world become a better place where people are not hunted for their faith.

” Then he drove away, heading back toward Kabul, back to his normal life.

Another stranger who had risked himself to help us.

Another person whose kindness I would remember forever.

We stood in that small town, four broken people with nowhere to go and no clear plan.

We found a chai shop and went inside.

We ordered tea and sat in a corner trying to decide what to do next.

Fared, the youngest in our group.

He said he would go ask around about trucks heading south.

He could move more freely than we women could.

He left us in the chai shop and went to explore the town.

While he was gone, we sat in exhausted silence.

The adrenaline that had kept us going was fading.

The full weight of what we had been through was settling on us.

We were so tired, so hurt, so traumatized.

Sister Leila had not spoken much since we left Kabul.

She stared into her teacup like she was seeing something far away.

The night on the railway tracks had broken something in her.

She was physically alive, but not really present anymore.

Sister Paresa and I held hands under the table.

We did not speak.

What was there to say? We both knew we might not survive the next days.

We both knew even if we reached Pakistan, the refugee camps were harsh places.

We both knew our lives as we had known them were over.

But we were alive and we were together and Jesus was still with us.

Even here in this small chai shop in a town whose name I did not know, he was with us.

Fared came back about an hour later.

He had found a truck driver willing to take us further south for the money Gulam had given us.

The driver was leaving in 2 hours.

If we met him at the edge of town, he would hide us in the back of his truck.

It was a risk.

We did not know this driver.

He could be Taliban sympathizer.

He could turn us in for a reward.

But we had no other option.

We waited in the chai shop, drinking tea we could not taste, eating bread we could not feel in our mouths, just waiting, counting down the minutes until we could continue south.

When the time came, we left the chai shop and walked to the edge of town.

The truck was there, old and battered, loaded with bags of grain and other supplies.

The driver was a middle-aged man with a hard face.

He did not smile.

He did not ask questions.

He just pointed to the back of the truck and told us to get in and stay hidden.

We climbed into the truck bed and buried ourselves among the bags of grain.

It was uncomfortable, cramped, difficult to breathe properly, but it hid us from view.

If we were stopped at a checkpoint, unless they thoroughly searched the cargo, they would not find us.

The truck started moving.

We lurched and bounced along rough roads, unable to see where we were going, just trusting this stranger to take us closer to safety.

The journey was long and painful.

Hours of being jostled and thrown around in the back of that truck.

My wrists, my ribs, every injury hurt worse with each bump.

But I bit my lip and endured.

We all did.

Sometime in the afternoon, we stopped.

I heard voices outside.

A checkpoint.

Taliban voices asking the driver where he was going, what he was carrying.

The driver answered calmly.

They seemed satisfied.

The truck started moving again.

More hours passed.

The sun was getting lower in the sky when the truck finally stopped and the driver told us we could come out.

We emerged stiff and sore, blinking in the afternoon light.

We were in another small town much closer to the Pakistan border.

The driver said this was the end of his route.

From here we would have to walk.

The border was maybe 15 kilometers.

If we walked through the night, we could reach it by morning.

15 km.

In our condition, injured and exhausted, it would take all night.

But it was possible.

We could do it.

The driver pointed us in the right direction and left.

We were alone again.

We started walking slowly, painfully, but moving forward, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, exactly like brother Rasheed had said.

Not in our strength, but in God’s strength.

Not because we were strong enough, but because we trusted he was strong enough.

Night fell.

We kept walking.

The pain was intense, overwhelming at times.

Sister Ila especially struggled.

She was older and the night on the tracks had taken a severe toll on her body.

We had to stop frequently to let her rest.

But we kept going.

We had survived being tied to railway tracks.

We had survived the night when trains should have killed us.

We had survived the escape from Kabul.

We would survive this too.

Around 3:00 am we saw lights in the distance.

The border crossing Pakistan safety.

We approached carefully.

We did not go to the official crossing that would require documents we did not have.

Instead, we found a place where locals crossed unofficially a path around the checkpoints that people used to avoid bureaucracy and fees.

As dawn broke on our second day of freedom, we crossed into Pakistan.

We literally walked across an invisible line in the dirt and everything changed.

We were no longer in Afghanistan.

We were no longer under Taliban rule.

We were for the first time in our lives truly free.

We collapsed on the Pakistan side of the border.

Too exhausted to go further.

We just sat on the ground and cried.

We had made it.

Against all odds, despite everything, we had made it to safety.

We did not know what would come next.

We did not know where we would live or how we would survive.

We did not know what had happened to the others from our group, to brother Rasheed and sister Mina and all the rest.

But we were alive.

We were free.

And the sun was rising on a new day, a new life, a new chapter.

God had delivered us.

He had stopped the trains.

He had sent rescuers.

He had provided helpers along the way.

He had brought us through the darkness into the light.

The miracle was complete.

I am sitting in a small apartment in a country I never imagined I would see.

Outside my window there are no mountains, no mosque minouetses calling people to prayer five times a day.

No women in burkas walking the streets.

No Taliban trucks with fighters carrying Kalashnikovs.

It is quiet here.

Safe.

Strange.

Three years have passed since that night on the railway tracks.

3 years since I lay on cold steel waiting to die.

3 years since God stopped the trains.

Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago.

Sometimes it feels like yesterday.

I look at my wrists every morning.

The scars are still there.

Thin white lines that circle around like bracelets, like permanent reminders of what happened.

The doctors here said I was lucky.

The wire could have cut deeper, could have damaged nerves permanently, but except for the scars and some lingering stiffness, my hands work fine.

My body healed, but some wounds go deeper than skin.

I need to tell you what happened after we crossed the border because this story is not complete without it.

The miracle of survival is only part of the testimony.

What came after, what we learned, what we lost, and what we found, that matters, too.

We spent two weeks in a refugee camp near the border.

It was crowded, chaotic, filled with people fleeing Afghanistan for various reasons.

Some were escaping war.

Some were escaping poverty.

Some, like us, were escaping religious persecution.

The camp was not easy.

Tents packed close together, limited food and water, no privacy, disease spreading quickly in such crowded conditions.

People were desperate, scared, uncertain about their futures.

But we were safe.

That was all that mattered.

We were no longer hunted.

We could breathe without constantly looking over our shoulders.

During those two weeks, we tried to find out what happened to the others from our group.

We asked every Afghan who arrived at the camp if they had seen or heard anything about Christians who had been tied to railway tracks.

We searched for any news, any rumor, any information.

Some of what we learned broke our hearts.

Brother Rashid did not make it.

We learned this from someone who had been in the truck with him.

He died 2 days after we escaped from internal injuries sustained during the beating.

His body could not recover.

He passed away in a safe house somewhere south of Kabul, surrounded by other believers, praying until his last breath.

When I heard this, I wept for hours.

This beautiful man who had taught me so much, who had blessed me before we separated, who had survived the impossible night only to die days later.

It felt cruel, unfair.

But the person who told us about his death, they said something else.

They said brother Rasheed died with joy on his face.

He said he had seen Jesus, that he was ready to go home.

He quoted scripture with his last breaths.

thanked God for a life well-lived and passed peacefully into eternity.

He did not die in fear or regret.

He died in faith and victory and somehow knowing that made the grief a little easier to bear.

Sister Mina and her group made it to Pakistan safely.

We found them in the camp about a week after we arrived.

The reunion was filled with tears and embracing and prayers of thanksgiving.

They had taken a different route, but had also experienced God’s protection along the way.

Others we never found.

Some may have made it to safety, and we just never crossed paths in the chaos of refugees.

Some may have been caught.

Some may have hidden so completely that no one knows where they are.

We do not know.

We may never know.

This is the reality of persecution.

You do not always get clean endings.

You do not always know what happened to people you love.

They just disappear into the fog of fear and secrecy.

And you have to make peace with not knowing.

After 2 weeks, aid organizations helped us relocate to different countries.

Sister Paresa, Sister Leila, Fared, and I, we stayed together.

We requested to be settled in the same place because we were all we had left.

We were family now, bound by shared trauma, survivors of the same nightmare.

They brought us to this western country where I now live.

I cannot tell you which one for security reasons.

There are still people who would like to kill us if they knew where we were.

There are radical groups with long memories and long reaches.

So I keep the location secret.

But I can tell you this place is safe.

There are laws that protect religious freedom.

There are churches everywhere.

Churches with crosses visible from the street.

Churches that meet openly without fear.

There are Christians who have never been persecuted.

Who have never had to hide their faith.

who do not understand what it costs in places like Afghanistan.

Sometimes I envy them.

Sometimes their complaints about small things seem trivial to me when I remember what we endured.

But I remind myself that suffering is not a competition.

Their struggles are real to them, even if different from mine.

The first year here was the hardest.

Everything was strange.

the language, the culture, the food, the weather.

I felt lost, disconnected, like I did not belong anywhere anymore.

I was no longer Afghan, but I was not yet part of this new place either.

I existed in a kind of limbo between two worlds.

I had nightmares almost every night.

I would wake up screaming, convinced I was back on those railway tracks, feeling the wire cutting into my wrists, hearing the approach of a train that never came.

Sister Paresa would come to my room and hold me while I cried, and I would do the same for her when she had her nightmares.

We all struggled.

Sister Leila especially.

The trauma had damaged something deep inside her.

She stopped speaking much.

She stopped smiling.

She went through the motions of living, but the light was gone from her eyes.

She died a year ago, quietly in her sleep.

The doctors said it was heart failure.

But I think she died of a broken heart, of wounds that went too deep to heal in this life.

I miss her.

I miss them all.

Brother Rashid, Sister Leila, and all the others from our underground church who I will never see again in this life.

But I also found new life here.

I found a church that welcomed me with open arms.

They helped me learn the language.

They helped me find work.

They helped me begin to heal.

I started studying, something I had always dreamed of but never thought possible.

I am training to be a teacher.

The education is free here.

Something I still cannot fully comprehend.

In Afghanistan, education was a luxury.

Here it is a right.

And I am telling my story.

This is why I am speaking to you now.

This is why I am sharing what happened to us because the world needs to know.

You see, after we arrived here, after we had time to process what happened, we started asking questions.

We wanted to know why no trains came that night.

Was it really a miracle or was there a natural explanation? Some of the aid workers helped us research this.

They contacted railway officials in Afghanistan, asked questions, dug into records, and we learned something that confirmed what we already knew in our hearts.

It was a miracle.

There was a signal malfunction at the main junction station about 20 km from where we were tied to the tracks.

A technical failure that stopped all train traffic on that line starting around 11 p.

m.

that night.

This alone might not seem miraculous.

Equipment fails.

Signals malfunction.

It happens.

But here is what made it impossible to explain naturally.

The failure should have been fixed within two to three hours.

It would not a complicated problem.

Railway engineers worked on it all night, but every time they thought they had fixed it, something else would go wrong.

A backup system failed.

A replacement part did not work.

One thing after another, inexplicable problems that kept the trains from running.

The engineers said they had never seen anything like it.

The problems made no technical sense.

Equipment that should have worked did not work.

Systems that were supposedly fixed broke again immediately.

They worked on it all night, frustrated and confused, unable to solve problems that should have been simple.

And then around 6:00 am, right after we were rescued, everything suddenly started working again.

No explanation.

The systems just started functioning normally, like nothing had ever been wrong.

The railway supervisor we spoke to, he said in 30 years of working for the railways, he had never experienced a failure like that.

He called it strange, inexplicable, impossible.

But we knew what it was.

God had his hand on those systems.

He held back the trains for as long as we needed him to.

And when we were safe, he released them.

Some people when I tell them this story, they try to explain it away.

They say it was coincidence.

They say equipment failures happen and we just got lucky.

They say I am seeing God’s hand in what was really just random chance.

But I was there.

I was the one tied to those tracks.

I was the one who should have died but did not.

And I know with absolute certainty that it was not coincidence.

It was Jesus.

He could have prevented us from being captured in the first place.

He could have made the Taliban raid a different house.

He could have blinded their eyes so they never found our church.

But he did not do that.

He allowed us to be captured, to be beaten, to be tied to those tracks.

He allowed us to face the full horror of that night.

He allowed us to wait for death in darkness and cold and pain.

Why? Because sometimes God’s miracles are not about prevention.

They are about deliverance through the fire, not from it.

The three Hebrew boys in the Bible, Shadrach, Mach, and Abednego, they were thrown into the furnace.

God did not prevent them from being thrown in, but he walked through the fire with them and they emerged without even the smell of smoke on their clothes.

That is what happened to us.

We went through the fire.

We were not spared the suffering, but God walked through it with us and we emerged alive on the other side.

And now I have a testimony.

Now I have a story that cannot be explained away or dismissed.

Now I can stand in front of people and say I should be dead, but I am alive and God did it.

If he had prevented our capture, I would not have this story.

If he had made the Taliban leave us alone, I would still be hiding in Afghanistan, afraid, never knowing what he could do.

But because he allowed us to go through the fire, because he stopped the trains in such an impossible way, now the whole world can see his power.

Now skeptics have to wrestle with evidence they cannot easily dismiss.

Now Muslims and Christians and people of no faith have to confront the reality that something miraculous happened.

This is why I am sharing this story with you.

This is why I am telling you what happened to me and my church family on that cold November night in Afghanistan.

I want Muslims who are watching this to know something.

I love you.

I respect your sincerity.

I know most of you do not condone what the Taliban did to us.

I know many of you like Hamid and Fatima and Gulam and the men who freed us.

You have goodness and compassion in your hearts.

But I also need to tell you that Jesus is real.

He is not just a prophet.

He is the son of God.

He died for your sins and mine.

He rose from the dead.

And he is still working miracles today.

Still delivering people, still calling people to follow him.

I know this is hard to hear.

I know it contradicts what you have been taught since childhood.

I know accepting it would cost you everything just like it cost me everything.

But he is worth it.

Jesus is worth losing your family, your country, your safety, your life because he is not just a religion or a set of rules.

He is life itself.

He is truth itself.

He is love itself.

I am not asking you to become western.

I am not asking you to abandon your culture or your identity.

I am asking you to meet Jesus, to read the gospels with an open heart, to pray and ask God to show you the truth even if the truth is costly.

Because life following Jesus even with persecution is more real and more full than any life without him.

I know this from experience.

I lived both lives and I would choose the life with Jesus every time, even knowing the cost.

To Christians who are watching, especially those of you living in free countries, I want to say this.

Please do not take your freedom for granted.

You can go to church openly.

You can carry a Bible in public.

You can talk about Jesus without fear.

You can raise your children as Christians without hiding it.

These are not small things.

These are enormous blessings that millions of believers around the world do not have.

Do not waste this freedom.

Do not be lukewarm or casual about your faith just because it costs you nothing to follow Jesus.

In Afghanistan, people risk their lives to gather for worship.

They memorize scripture because having a physical Bible is too dangerous.

They pray in whispers.

They cannot tell their own families about their faith.

They live every day knowing they could be killed for believing in Jesus.

And they still believe.

They still worship.

They still say Jesus is worth it.

If they can be faithful when it costs them everything, surely you can be faithful when it costs you nothing.

Pray for the persecuted church.

Most of you do not know what is happening to Christians in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and so many others.

We are being arrested, tortured, killed.

Our churches are being raided.

Our families are being torn apart.

Pray for us.

Do not forget us.

We are your brothers and sisters, and we need you to remember us in your prayers.

and be bold with your faith.

Do not hide it.

Do not be ashamed of it.

Do not let the fear of being mocked or rejected keep you silent about Jesus.

You have freedom.

Use it.

Speak up.

Share the gospel.

Tell people about Jesus while you still can, while it is still legal and safe to do so.

To skeptics and atheists who might be watching, I know you have doubts about God, about miracles, about whether any of this is real.

I cannot prove to you that God exists.

I cannot force you to believe, but I can tell you what happened to me.

I was tied to railway tracks by the Taliban because I am a Christian.

I should have been killed by a train around 1:00 am Then another train around 4:00 am Both trains that should have come that always came at those times did not come that night.

A signal malfunction at a junction station 20 km away stopped all train traffic for the exact hours we needed it to stop.

Railway engineers could not fix the problem no matter what they tried.

And then right after we were rescued, everything suddenly worked again.

You can call it coincidence if you want.

You can say it was just mechanical failure and good timing.

You can explain it away however you need to in order to preserve your worldview.

But I know what I experienced.

I know what I felt lying on those tracks.

I know the terror and the hopelessness and then the impossible dawn when we were still alive.

And I know Jesus met me in that darkness, not with words or visions, but with presence, with peace that made no sense, with strength I did not have on my own, with deliverance that cannot be explained by natural causes.

I am not asking you to believe without thinking.

I am asking you to honestly consider the evidence to look at what happened and ask yourself if it can really be explained away as coincidence.

And if you are willing, if you are open, pray.

Just pray and ask God if he is real to show you.

Ask him to reveal himself to you.

See what happens.

The worst that can happen is nothing changes and you still do not believe.

But what if he answers? What if he is real and he has been waiting for you to ask? I sit here in my small apartment 3 years after the worst night of my life and I am filled with such complicated emotions.

I grieve for what I lost.

My country, my family who does not know where I am, my friends who died or disappeared, the life I might have had if I had never become a Christian.

If I had stayed safe and quiet and not rocked the boat, I carry guilt.

Survivors guilt, the counselors here call it.

Why did I survive when brother Rasheed died? Why am I safe in the West while millions of believers still suffer in Afghanistan and other countries? What makes me special that I got to escape? I have nightmares.

I struggle with trust.

I find it hard to feel safe even here, even in this free country.

Part of me is always waiting for the door to crash open, for the Taliban to come for me.

But I also have joy, deep, unshakable joy that comes from knowing I am alive when I should be dead.

From knowing Jesus saved me, literally saved me in such a powerful and undeniable way.

I have purpose.

I know why I am still alive.

I am here to tell this story, to testify to what God did, to tell people that Jesus is real, that miracles still happen, that faith is worth the cost.

I have hope.

Hope that my testimony will reach people who need to hear it.

Hope that Muslims who watch this might reconsider Jesus.

Hope that lukewarm Christians might be awakened to the value of what they have.

hope that skeptics might encounter evidence that shakes their unbelief.

Every day I wake up is a gift.

Every breath I take is a miracle.

I should not be here, but I am.

And I will not waste this gift.

I am Amina.

That is not my real name, but it is the name I carry now to protect those I left behind.

I am 24 years old.

I am from Afghanistan and I am a Christian.

I was tied to railway tracks by the Taliban and left to die.

But Jesus stopped the trains.

He held them back all night.

He sent rescuers at dawn.

He provided helpers along the escape route.

He brought me to safety.

The scars on my wrists are real.

The trauma is real.

The cost of following Jesus was real.

But so is the miracle.

So is his deliverance.

So is his faithfulness.

And I am here to tell you Jesus is real.

He is worth everything.

He is worth your comfort, your safety, your family’s approval, your social status, your very life because he gave his life for you.

He was beaten and tortured and nailed to a cross.

He died in your place, taking the punishment you deserve for your sins.

And he rose from the dead three days later, defeating death itself, proving he is who he said he is.

And he offers you the same thing he offered me.

Forgiveness, new life, hope, purpose, salvation.

All you have to do is believe, trust in him, follow him, count the cost, and decide he is worth it.

I counted the cost.

I lost everything.

And I gained something far greater.

I gained him.

And that was enough.

That is always enough.

This is my testimony.

This is my story.

This is what Jesus did for me and my church family on a cold November night in Afghanistan when we should have died but lived instead.

I pray it reaches the hearts that need to hear it.

I pray it changes lives.

I pray it brings glory to Jesus who deserves all glory and honor and praise.

May you know him.

May you experience his love.

May you discover as I did that he is faithful even in the darkest valley.

Even when you walk through the shadow of death.

Even when you are tied to railway tracks waiting for trains that never come.

He is there.

He is with you.

And he is enough.

Let me end with the verse brother Rashid quoted to us that last night before we were captured from Romans 8.

These words sustained me through that terrible night, they sustain me still.

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can separate us from his love.

Not the Taliban, not persecution, not suffering, not even death.

We are held by love that will not let us go.

By hands that stopped trains.

By a god who walks through fire with his children and brings them out alive on the other side.

I am Amina.

I survived.

And I am here to tell you Jesus is real and he is worth everything.

Thank you for listening.

May God bless you and open your eyes to see him.

 

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