his daughter, his perfect obedient daughter, an apostate, a traitor to Islam, a betrayer of everything he stood for, everything he had fought for.

He said her name once, like a curse.

Then he walked out of the house, and we did not see him for the rest of the day.

The following days were a nightmare that seemed to have no end.

My father came and went stonefaced, refusing to speak about what was happening.

My mother alternated between silent weeping and desperate prayers.

I moved through the house like a zombie, unable to eat, unable to sleep properly, my mind obsessing over Nasin, over where she was, what was happening to her, what they were doing to her.

On the third day, my father called my mother and me into the living room.

He stood before us with a face I did not recognize.

He told us that Nasarine had confessed.

She had admitted to converting to Christianity.

She had admitted to meeting with other converts.

She had admitted to possessing a Bible and reading it.

But she had not done the one thing that might have saved her.

She had not recanted.

They had given her the opportunity to renounce her faith, to return to Islam, to ask for forgiveness.

She had refused.

More than refused, she had proclaimed her faith in Jesus Christ.

She had said she could not deny him.

She had said she would rather die than betray him.

My mother collapsed.

I caught her before she hit the floor.

My father stood there watching his wife crumble and his face remained hard.

I wondered in that moment if he had any softness left, any love, any room for mercy.

He said there was more.

They had found evidence of other crimes, immorality, improper relationships.

They had witnesses who would testify.

I knew even then that these were lies, fabrications meant to justify what they wanted to do anyway.

Apostasy alone was enough to warrant death.

But by adding accusations of sexual immorality, they made it easier.

They made her less sympathetic.

They made her execution more palatable to those who might have had doubts.

My father said all of this in a flat, dead voice.

Then he said something that made my blood turn to ice.

He said that he had a duty to perform.

He was a member of the religious police.

He was a defender of Islam.

He could not show weakness or mercy, especially not to his own family.

If anything, he had to be even more zealous to prove that his loyalty was to God, not to blood.

I understood then what he was saying.

He would not try to save her.

He might even participate in her punishment.

His honor, his reputation, his position.

All of it required that he sacrifice his daughter to prove his righteousness.

I wanted to scream at him.

I wanted to call him a monster.

But I was 14 years old and I was terrified and I had no power.

So I said nothing.

I helped my mother to her room and stayed with her while she wept.

That night, alone in the room I had shared with Nasin, I lay in her empty bed and tried to smell her scent on the pillow.

I reached between the mattresses and pulled out her Bible.

I held it against my chest and cried until I had no tears left.

And then I did something I had never done before.

I prayed to her Jesus, not the tentative, desperate prayer I had prayed months ago when I had asked for her protection.

This was different.

This was angry.

This was a demand.

I told him that if he was real, he had to do something.

He had to save her.

He had to rescue her.

She [snorts] was his follower, his beloved, his child.

He could not let them kill her.

He had to intervene.

He had to perform a miracle.

I prayed this for hours, begging, pleading, demanding.

I prayed until exhaustion overtook me.

And I fell into a restless sleep.

Still clutching the Bible, still believing that surely God would answer.

Surely he would save his faithful servant.

I did not yet understand that sometimes God’s answer is not rescue.

Sometimes his answer is strength to endure.

Sometimes his answer is the cross before the resurrection.

Three weeks passed.

3 weeks of agony, of waiting, of not knowing.

We were not allowed to see Nasarin.

My father went to the facility where she was being held, but he would not tell us what happened there, what he saw, whether he spoke to her.

My mother aged years in those weeks.

I stopped going to school.

I could not concentrate on anything except the gnawing terror in my gut.

I learned later, much later from sources I cannot name some of what happened to Nasin during those weeks.

She was interrogated repeatedly.

She was pressured to recant.

She was shown what would happen to her if she did not.

She was kept in a small cell with other women, some of them also accused of apostasy, some of them convicted of other crimes.

She was given minimal food and water.

She was not allowed to sleep for long stretches.

Standard interrogation techniques designed to break a person’s will, but they did not break her.

Every time they asked her to deny Jesus, she refused.

Every time they offered her a way out, she declined.

She told them that Jesus Christ was Lord, that he had died for her sins and risen from the dead, that she belonged to him, and nothing they did to her could change that.

They told her she would be executed.

She said she was ready.

They told her she would be executed publicly as a warning to others.

She said she prayed her death would bring glory to God.

They told her she would die in shame, condemned by God and man.

She said Jesus was not ashamed of her and that was all that mattered.

One of the interrogators, frustrated by her stubbornness, asked her how she could throw away her life for a foreign god, for a religion of infidels.

She answered that Jesus was not foreign, that he had created all people, that he loved all people, that he had died for all people.

She said that God’s love knew no borders, no nationalities, no boundaries.

She said that she had finally found the God she had been searching for all her life, and she could not let him go.

When I learned these things years later, I wept.

I wept for her courage.

I wept for her faith.

I wept for the beauty of her witness even in the face of death.

But in those three weeks, I knew none of this.

I only knew fear and helplessness and anger at a god who seemed to be doing nothing.

The announcement came in early February.

There would be a public execution in our region.

Several apostates and criminals would be put to death as a warning and a purification of the community.

Nasrin’s name was on the list.

So were five others, three men and two women, all of them accused of converting to Christianity.

My father came home and told us the date and time.

He said it was our duty to attend.

His voice was hard and empty.

My mother began to wail.

I felt something break inside me, something fundamental, some last hope that this could be avoided.

I asked him if there was anything that could be done, any appeal, any mercy, any last chance.

He looked at me with eyes that seemed already dead and said that the decision was final.

Justice would be carried out.

God’s law would be upheld.

I hated him in that moment.

Hated him with a purity of emotion I had never felt before.

This man who claimed to serve God was allowing his daughter to be murdered.

and he called it righteousness.

This man who spoke of honor had no honor left.

This man who called himself my father was no father at all.

But I said none of this.

I was a child and I had no power and I was drowning in my own fear and grief.

The days until the execution were unreal.

Time moved both too slowly and too quickly.

My mother could not stop crying.

She barely ate.

She moved through the house like a living ghost.

My father was gone most of the time.

And when he was home, he spoke to no one.

I existed in a state of numb shock, unable to fully process what was coming, unable to accept it, unable to stop it.

The night before the execution, I could not sleep.

I lay in my bed in Nasin’s bed, which I had been sleeping in since they took her, and I pulled out her Bible again.

I opened it randomly, looking for something, anything that would make sense of this.

My eyes fell on words in the book of Matthew, Jesus speaking.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in heaven.

For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

I read those words over and over.

Blessed are you when people persecute you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad.

Great is your reward in heaven.

How could Nasrin rejoice? How could she be glad? How could she see blessing in this horror? I could not understand it.

But even as I could not understand it, I felt something stirring in me.

Some seed that she had planted.

Some truth that was taking root despite my resistance.

My sister was going to die tomorrow.

But she was not being destroyed.

Something in her was untouchable, unreachable by her persecutors.

Something in her already belonged to another world.

I closed the Bible and held it against my heart.

And I made a promise to my sister even though she could not hear me.

I promised that I would remember.

I promised that I would tell her story.

I promised that her death would not be meaningless.

I did not know yet that her death would also become my life.

I did not know yet that I was standing on the edge of my own transformation.

I only knew that tomorrow I would watch my sister die and nothing would ever be the same again.

The sun rose on the day of execution.

I watched it through our window, watch the light spread across the city, and I thought about how wrong it was that the sun could rise on such a day.

How could the world continue as if nothing was happening? How could the birds still sing? The shopkeepers still open their stores.

The children still play in the streets.

But the world did continue.

It always does.

Even when your world is ending, the rest of the world goes on.

My mother had to be helped to dress.

She could barely stand.

My father was already gone, having left before dawn.

When it was time to leave, a car came for us.

We were driven through the city toward the outskirts, toward the place where executions were carried out.

I watched the familiar streets pass by the window.

I had walked these streets my whole life.

I knew every corner, every shop.

Everything looked the same.

But I was different.

Something in me had already begun to die so that something else could be born.

We were going to watch my sister die for Jesus.

And I did not know it yet, but I was also going to see why Jesus was worth dying for.

The cross was coming.

And after the cross would come, though I could not imagine it then, resurrection.

I need to tell you what I saw that day.

I need to tell you because my sister’s voice was silenced, but mine was not.

I need to tell you because the world needs to know what happens to people who choose Jesus in places where that choice means death.

I need to tell you because even now 22 years later there are sisters and brothers facing the same choice and their stories deserve to be told.

But this is hard.

Even after all this time, even after all the healing God has done in my heart, this is the hardest part to speak about.

When I close my eyes, I am 14 years old again, sitting in that car, watching the city fall away behind us, heading toward the place where my sister would die.

The execution site was on the outskirts of Avas in an area of empty land where the city met the desert.

I had never been there before, but I had heard of it.

Everyone had heard of it.

It was where justice was carried out, where criminals were punished, where the community was purified.

That is what they called it, purification.

As if killing people made anything clean.

There were already crowds when we arrived.

The car drove us through a checkpoint where guards verified identities.

And then we were directed to a specific area where families of the condemned were required to sit.

I understood then what this was.

Not just an execution, but a spectacle, a warning, a display of power and righteousness.

The day was bright and cold.

The sky was that deep winter blue, cloudless, endless.

The sun felt wrong, too cheerful, too indifferent.

I wanted the sky to be dark, to match what was happening.

But nature does not care about human suffering.

The light fell on everything equally, on the righteous and the condemned, on the executioners and the mourers.

My mother could barely walk.

She leaned heavily on me.

This woman who had given birth to Nasserin, who had nursed her and raised her and loved her, [snorts] now she was being forced to watch her daughter die.

What kind of God demanded this? What kind of justice was this? These were the questions screaming in my mind, but I had no answers.

We were seated in a roped off section with other families.

I looked at them.

Other mothers, other sisters, other loved ones of the condemned.

Some were weeping openly.

Some sat in stony silence.

Some looked angry.

One woman was praying loudly, begging Allah for mercy.

I wondered if any of them were families of the other Christians who would die today.

I wondered if they too were being torn apart by this.

The area where the executions would take place was a flat open space of packed earth.

At one end was a raised platform where officials sat.

I could see my father there in his uniform sitting with the other religious police and military officials.

His face was like carved stone.

I stared at him and felt nothing but coldness.

Whatever love I had once felt for him had died in the past three weeks.

He had chosen his position, his honor, his version of God over his own daughter.

He was dead to me.

A crowd had gathered beyond the family section.

Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand or more.

Some had come because they were required to, as we were.

Some had come out of curiosity or bloodlust.

Some, I think now, had come because they were afraid not to come.

Afraid that absence would mark them as sympathizers.

Fear governed everything in our world.

Fear of being different.

Fear of questioning.

Fear of being noticed for the wrong reasons.

There was a sound system set up.

Speakers mounted on poles.

Music played.

Religious chanting verses from the Quran.

The irony was bitter in my mouth.

They were playing words about God’s mercy while preparing to kill six people.

The waiting was torture.

We sat there for perhaps 30 minutes, though it felt like hours.

The sun climbed higher.

The cold morning air began to warm.

My mother’s hand gripped mine so tightly that I lost feeling in my fingers, but I did not pull away.

I was all she had left.

My father had abandoned us both.

Then there was a change in the atmosphere, a stirring in the crowd.

A vehicle appeared in the distance, raising dust as it approached.

My heart began to hammer in my chest.

This was it.

They were bringing the condemned.

The vehicle stopped at the edge of the execution area.

Guards got out first, then began leading people out.

Six people.

I was searching for Nasrin, my eyes desperate, terrified of seeing her and terrified of not seeing her.

And then I saw her.

She was thinner than I remembered.

Her face was bruised.

I could see that even from a distance.

She wore a simple gray dress and her hijab was plain and dark.

Her hands were bound in front of her.

But you was walking with her head up, not proud, but not broken either.

There was something in the way she moved that was different from the others.

Different from what I expected.

The six condemned were lined up facing the crowd.

Three men, three women.

I recognized none of the others, but they all wore similar expressions.

Fear, resignation, grief, all except Nasin.

My sister looked peaceful.

Not happy, not joyful, but deeply, impossibly peaceful, as if she knew something the rest of us did not.

An official with a microphone began to speak.

His voice boomed through the speakers, harsh and metallic.

He read out the charges against each of the condemned.

When he got to Nasarin, I heard our family name spoken aloud, heard her accused of apostasy, of converting to Christianity, of corrupting others, of sexual immorality, of betraying Islam and Iran, the lies mixed with truth.

Yes, she had converted.

Yes, she followed Jesus.

But the rest, the accusations of immorality, of corrupting others, these were fabrications designed to make her death more acceptable.

I wanted to stand up and scream that they were lies, but my voice was frozen in my throat.

The officials spoke about the righteousness of Islamic law, about the necessity of protecting the faith, about the mercy of giving these criminals a chance to recant.

He said that each of them had been offered the opportunity to return to Islam to renounce their apostasy to save themselves.

He said that each of them had refused.

Then he asked them again publicly, giving them one final chance.

Would they renounce their false faith and return to Islam? The first man, a young man who looked to be in his 20ies, was asked.

He spoke, but I could not hear his words.

Whatever he said made the official angry.

The official moved to the second person, one of the women.

She shook her head, weeping, but she did not recant.

Then it was Nasrin’s turn.

The official stood in front of her with a microphone.

He asked her if she would renounce Christianity and return to Islam.

She lifted her head and in a voice that was weak from her ordeal but still clear, she said no.

She said she belonged to Jesus Christ.

She said he was her Lord and Savior.

She said she could not deny him.

The microphone picked up her words and carried them across the crowd.

I heard gasps, murmurss.

My mother made a sound like her heart was breaking, which it was.

I sat frozen, unable to breathe.

The official asked her if she understood that she would be executed.

She said yes, she understood.

He asked her if her foreign god was worth dying for.

And I will never forget her answer.

Never.

It is burned into my soul.

She said that Jesus was not foreign, that he loved Iranians as much as anyone, that he had died for her sins and risen from the dead, and that yes, he was worth not just dying for, but living for.

She said that she prayed that even through her death, people would come to know his love.

Then she did something that shocked everyone that I did not understand then, but understand now.

She said she forgave everyone who had hurt her.

[snorts] She said she forgave the interrogators, the judges, the executioners.

And then she looked directly at where we were sitting, at where my father sat on his platform, and she said she forgave him, too.

She said she loved him.

She said Jesus loved him.

My father did not move, did not react.

But I saw something flash across his face.

pain maybe or anger or something else I could not name.

The official moved on to the others.

All six refused to recant.

All six maintained their faith even in the face of death.

I learned later that the three men and the other woman were also Christian converts.

Former Muslims who had found Jesus and could not let him go.

They were all going to die for the same reason my sister was dying.

because they love Jesus more than they love their own lives.

What happened next is something I have relived in nightmares for 22 years.

I will not give you all the graphic details.

Some things are too terrible to speak plainly, but I will tell you what I witnessed because it matters.

Because my sister’s death matters.

Because all of their deaths matter.

The method of execution was hanging.

One by one, the condemned were taken to a construction crane that had been positioned for this purpose.

A noose was placed around each neck, and then they were lifted.

I want to tell you that I was brave, that I watched steadily, that I honored my sister with unflinching witness, but that would be a lie.

When they came for Nasarin, when they placed the noose around her neck, I closed my eyes.

I could not watch.

I could not see it happen.

My mother was screaming.

A sound that was not human, was not even animal, was something beyond sound.

I held her and I closed my eyes and I felt my soul tearing in half.

But even with my eyes closed, I could hear the crowd’s reaction.

I could hear the gasps and the shouts.

And I could hear something else.

Someone singing, a female voice, weak but clear, singing something in Farsy, but with words I did not recognize.

A hymn, a song of praise.

My sister was singing to her Jesus.

As they prepared to kill her, the singing stopped.

I knew what that meant.

I kept my eyes closed.

I could not open them.

I could not see my sister’s body hanging there.

I could not bear it.

Time became strange after that.

I do not know how long we sat there.

I do not know when the other executions happened.

I have no memory of them, though they must have occurred.

My mind had gone somewhere else, somewhere dark and hidden where I could not be reached by the horror.

Eventually, hands were pulling us up, leading us away.

The crowd was dispersing.

It was done.

Justice, they called it.

Purification, defense of the faith.

My sister was dead.

Nasarin, who had braided my hair and read me stories and taught me to read and loved me with a love I did not deserve.

Nasarin, who had been kind and gentle and good.

Nasrin, who had found something worth dying for and had died for it without flinching.

She was gone and the sky had not fallen.

The earth had not opened up.

God had not intervened.

He had let them kill her.

[snorts] He had watched his faithful servant die and had done nothing to stop it.

That was what I thought then.

That was the fury and betrayal and grief that filled me as we drove home in silence.

as we entered our empty house, as I went upstairs to our empty room and lay in her empty bed and screamed into her pillow until my voice was gone.

The days after the execution exist in my memory as fragments, sharp pieces of broken glass that cut when I tried to hold them.

My mother was destroyed.

She could not function.

She lay in her bed and stared at the wall and did not speak.

I had to bring her water, try to make her eat.

She was like a body without a soul.

My father came home that night.

I heard him enter the house, heard his footsteps.

I did not go to see him.

I could not bear to look at his face.

He had stood there on that platform and watched his daughter die and had done nothing.

He had chosen his position, his pride, his version of righteousness over her life.

I hated him.

The next morning, I heard him and my mother talking.

Her voice was a whisper, asking him why.

Why had he let this happen? Why had he not saved her? His voice was hard, defensive.

He had done his duty.

He had upheld the law.

Nasarin had made her choice and had paid the price for it.

He said that he had offered her every chance to save herself.

She had refused.

Her death was her own fault.

I listened from the top of the stairs and felt something crystallize inside me.

In that moment, I understood something about the religion I had been raised in, about the system we lived under, about the God my father served.

It was a God of law without love, of justice without mercy, of rules without relationship.

It was a God who demanded obedience even when obedience meant killing your own child.

It was a God I wanted nothing to do with.

But there was another God.

The God my sister had found.

The God she had died for.

The God whose name she had sung as they killed her.

Jesus.

This Jesus had not demanded that his followers kill for him.

He had died for them.

He had taken the punishment himself.

He had laid down his own life rather than anyone else’s.

I did not understand this fully yet.

I was still too raw, too angry, too broken, but the questions had been planted.

The seeds had been watered, terribly watered, with my sister’s blood, and they were beginning to grow.

On the third day after the execution, I did something I had been afraid to do.

I took out Nasrin’s Bible from its hiding place.

I held it in my shaking hands and I opened it.

I did not know where to start, so I turned to the place where I had seen words that had affected me before.

The Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’s life.

I started reading in Matthew, the first book.

I read about Jesus’s birth, his childhood, his baptism.

I read about his teachings, strange radical teachings that turned everything I knew upside down.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the persecuted.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Turn the other cheek.

Forgive 70* 7.

These were not the teachings of a warrior prophet.

These were not the teachings of someone building an empire or conquering enemies.

These were the teachings of someone who valued people over power, love over law, mercy over judgment.

I kept reading.

I read about Jesus healing the sick, touching the unclean, eating with sinners, defending the woman caught in adultery.

I read about him challenging the religious leaders, calling them hypocrites and whitewash tombs.

I read about him weeping over Jerusalem, loving even those who rejected him.

And then I read about his death, how he was arrested, falsely accused, beaten, mocked, tortured, how he was sentenced to crucifixion, the most shameful death possible.

How he carried his cross through jeering crowds.

How they nailed him to that cross and left him to die.

I stopped reading.

My hands were shaking.

The parallels were too much.

Jesus, innocent, dying on a cross.

Nasarin, innocent, dying at the end of a rope.

Both of them condemned by religious authorities.

Both of them offered chances to save themselves if they would only deny the truth.

Both of them choosing death over betrayal.

But there was something Jesus said on the cross that broke me.

In the middle of his agony, in the middle of being murdered, he prayed for his killers.

Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.

Forgive them.

He forgave the people who were killing him.

Just like Nashin had forgiven the people killing her.

just like she had forgiven my father.

I closed the book and wept.

Not the angry weeping of before, but something different, something softer, something that felt like grief, but also like revelation.

I was beginning to see something, something that terrified me and drew me at the same time.

Over the following weeks, I read that Bible in secret late at night by flashlight.

I could not stop.

The words were alive.

They spoke to something deep inside me, something I had not known was there, something hungry and thirsty and desperate for truth.

I read all four gospels.

I read about Jesus’s resurrection.

How he had died and been buried and then had risen from the dead on the third day.

How he had appeared to his disciples, proven he was alive, given them hope and purpose and a mission.

How he had conquered death itself.

I read the book of Acts about the early Christians, about how they had been persecuted and killed, about how they had suffered and yet had joy, about how the church had grown even through persecution.

I read about Steven, the first martyr who, like Jesus, had prayed for his killers as they stoned him to death.

I read Paul’s letters about grace and faith and love.

About how we are saved not by our works but by God’s mercy, about how nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

About how to die is gain because to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

Every page seemed to speak directly to me.

Every word seemed chosen for this moment.

I was being pursued by something.

someone and I was running out of places to hide.

I began to understand why Nasarin had been willing to die.

She had found something, someone who loved her, not because she was good enough, but because he was love itself.

She had found forgiveness for all her sins, not earned, but given freely.

She had found peace that made no sense to anyone watching from the outside, but that filled her from the inside out.

She had found life, real life, eternal life, and having found it, she could not let it go, even when letting it go would have saved her earthly life.

Because what profit is there in gaining the whole world, but losing your soul? Jesus had asked that question.

Nasarine had answered it with her life.

She had chosen her soul over her safety.

She had chosen eternity over a few more years on earth.

She had chosen Jesus over everything.

And slowly, painfully, terrifyingly, I was beginning to want to make the same choice.

There was one more thing I needed to understand before I could take that step.

I needed to understand the cross.

Why did Jesus have to die? Why was his death necessary? What did it accomplish? I found my answer in the book of Isaiah in a passage that someone had marked in Nostrin’s Bible, chapter 53.

Words written hundreds of years before Jesus was born, but describing his death with stunning accuracy.

He was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

I read those words over and over, pierced for our transgressions.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

By his wounds, we are healed.

The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Jesus had taken the punishment I deserved.

He had absorbed the wrath of God against sin, my sin, every person’s sin, so that I could be forgiven.

He had died in my place.

He had paid the debt I could never pay.

And then he had risen from the dead, proving that his sacrifice was accepted, that death was defeated, that new life was possible.

This was not a God who demanded his followers die for him.

This was a God who died for his followers.

This was not a system of earning favor through good works.

This was a gift freely given that could only be received by faith.

And faith was what Nasarin had had.

Faith that Jesus had done for her what she could never do for herself.

Faith that his love was real and eternal and unshakable.

Faith that even death could not separate her from him.

Sitting in our room, her room, our room, now just my room, I finally understood.

And understanding, I made my choice.

It was late at night, perhaps 2 months after Nasrin’s execution.

I was 15 years old.

I knelt on the floor beside my bed and I prayed to Jesus for the first time with full sincerity, full surrender, full faith.

I told him I was a sinner.

I told him I could not save myself.

I told him I believed he had died for me and risen again.

I told him I wanted the forgiveness he offered, the peace he gave, the life he promised.

I told him I was giving him my life, whatever that meant, whatever it cost.

And I felt it.

Like Nasin had described, a presence, a peace, a sense of being known completely and loved completely, a weight lifting off me that I had not realized I was carrying.

A homecoming to a place I had never been.

I wept, but they were different tears than I had cried before.

These were tears of relief, of joy, of gratitude, of awe.

These were the tears of someone who had been blind and could now see.

Someone who had been dead and was now alive.

My sister had died so that I could live.

She had planted seeds with her words and watered them with her blood.

And now in the darkness of our room, in the quiet of night, those seeds had burst into life.

I was a Christian, a follower of Jesus, born again, saved, a new creation, and I finally understood why it was worth dying for.

Because once you have tasted real life, death loses its power to terrify.

Once you have been loved by perfect love, nothing else matters quite the same way.

Once you have met Jesus, truly met him, you can never be the same.

Nasarin was gone.

But she had not been defeated.

Her death had not been meaningless.

Her witness had not been in vain.

She had led me to Jesus.

And Jesus had given me life.

The sun had risen on the day they killed her.

And now, two months later, in the darkness of my grief, another son was rising.

The son of righteousness with healing in his wings.

Resurrection had come.

I am 35 years old now, sitting in my small apartment in a country where I am free to speak the name of Jesus without fear, free to own a Bible, free to worship, free to tell my story.

The journey from that night when I first gave my life to Christ to this moment of freedom has been long and painful and beautiful and costly.

But I would not trade it for anything.

Let me tell you how I got here.

After my conversion, I lived a double life just as Nasin had.

I was 15 years old, still dependent on my parents, still trapped in a house and a city and a country where my new found faith could get me killed.

I had watched what happened to my sister.

I knew the price of being discovered, so I hid.

I went through the motions.

I wore my hijab.

I performed the Islamic prayers.

Though in my heart I was praying to Jesus.

I attended mosque with my family when required.

I fasted during Ramadan though I used those times to fast and pray in the Christian way seeking God’s face.

I became an actress playing a role just as Nasarin had.

But inside everything had changed.

I devoured Nasarin’s Bible whenever I could do so safely.

I memorized passages, hiding God’s word in my heart where no one could take it from me.

I prayed constantly, silent prayers throughout the day, longer prayers at night when everyone slept.

I talked to Jesus about everything, my fears, my grief, my longing for community, my desperate desire to be baptized, my questions about what would happen to me.

The loneliness was crushing.

I had no one to talk to about my faith.

No other believers, no church, no fellowship.

It was just me and Jesus and the Bible Nashin had left me.

There were times when I wondered if I had imagined it all, if my conversion had been real or just an emotional response to trauma.

But then I would read the word or I would pray and I would feel that presence again, that peace, and I would know it was real.

My mother never recovered from Nasarin’s death.

She became a ghost in our house, barely speaking, barely living.

She had lost weight until she was skeletal.

Her hair turned gray within months.

Sometimes I would find her in Nasarin’s old bed, clutching one of Nasarin’s scarves, weeping silently.

My heart broke for her.

I wanted to tell her about Jesus, about the hope I had found about where Nasarin was now.

But I could not.

She would have told my father, and I would have followed my sister to execution.

My father changed too, but in a different way.

He became harder, more zealous, more involved in religious enforcement.

It was as if he was trying to prove something, to justify what he had done, to convince himself that he had been righteous.

He spent less and less time at home.

When he was there, he barely acknowledged me or my mother.

The house was heavy with silence and grief and unspoken things.

I finished secondary school.

My grades were good.

Studying gave me something to focus on besides my hidden faith and my broken family.

My father suggested I attend university in Avas, not Tehran.

Thrron was where Nasrin had been corrupted.

He said Avas was safer.

I agreed, not because I wanted to obey him, but because staying in Avaz gave me time to plan.

I was planning my escape.

I knew I could not stay in Iran.

The secret was too big to keep forever.

Eventually, I would slip.

Eventually, someone would notice something.

Eventually, I would face the same choice Nasarine had faced.

And while I had faith, I was not sure I had her courage.

I did not want to be a martyr.

I wanted to live.

I wanted to worship Jesus freely.

I wanted to find other believers to be baptized to grow in my faith.

So I began quietly and carefully to research how to leave Iran.

This was dangerous in itself.

Too many searches about leaving the country could flag you as a flight risk.

Too many questions could draw attention.

I had to be smart.

I learned about the refugee process.

I learned about the countries where Iranian Christians had successfully claimed asylum.

I learned about the routes people took through Turkey mostly then trying to reach Greece or other European countries.

I learned about the smugglers who helped people cross borders illegally.

I learned about the costs, the dangers, the risks.

I needed money.

I began tutoring younger students in English and math, saving every tooman I earned.

I told my parents the money was for university expenses.

I hid the cash in the same place I hid my Bible between my mattress and bedframe.

I needed documents.

I already had a passport.

My father had gotten one for me years ago, thinking I might travel for educational purposes.

But I needed copies of everything hidden away in case of emergency.

Most importantly, I needed courage.

And that came only through prayer, through reading the Bible, through trusting that if God wanted me free, he would make a way.

It took 3 years.

Three years of living two lives, of saving money in secret, of making plans and discarding them and making new ones.

Three years of praying and waiting and watching for the right opportunity.

Three years of grief for my sister, of slow healing, of growing stronger in faith even while isolated.

During those years, I found ways to connect with other believers, though these connections were brief and dangerous.

Once I met a woman in the market who noticed I was reading a book of Persian poetry that was known to be popular among Christians.

She approached me carefully, tested me with careful words, and then invited me to a gathering.

I went once, met with perhaps eight other Iranian believers in a basement, worshiped Jesus openly for the first time, and wept through the entire meeting.

It was beautiful and terrifying.

I did not go back.

It was too risky to establish a pattern.

But that one taste of fellowship sustained me for months.

Another time, I made contact with an underground network that helped Christian converts escape Iran.

They could not help me immediately.

I was too young, had no resources, was too closely watched by my father.

But they gave me information, contacts, advice.

They told me to be patient, to prepare, to wait for the right moment.

The right moment came in 2006.

I was 18 years old, had just started my second year at university.

My father had become less vigilant over time, perhaps assuming that I was the obedient daughter Nashin had pretended to be.

My mother was still lost in her grief, barely aware of what I did.

I had saved enough money for the first leg of the journey, and I had received word through my contacts that a group was leaving soon, heading for Turkey, and there was space for one more.

I made my decision.

I would go.

I left on a Friday night in November.

I told my mother I was going to stay with a friend from university to work on a project.

This was plausible.

I had done this before.

She barely registered what I said, just nodded, and turned back to staring out the window.

My father was not home.

I do not know where he was.

I am glad I did not have to lie to his face.

I packed a small bag with a few clothes, my identification documents, my money, and Nasin’s Bible.

That Bible was the most dangerous thing I carried and the most precious.

If I were caught with it, I would be arrested immediately, but I could not leave it behind.

It was my sister’s gift to me.

It was God’s word.

It was my lifeline.

I walked out of my house for the last time.

I did not look back.

If I had looked back, I might have lost my courage.

I took a taxi to a meeting point across the city.

There I met the smuggler and three other people making the journey.

A young couple who had converted to Christianity and an older man who was Bahigh also fleeing religious persecution.

We did not exchange names.

It was safer not to know.

We traveled in the back of a truck hidden under cargo for the first leg of the journey.

Eight hours of cramped darkness, barely able to breathe.

Every bump in the road sending jolts of pain through my body.

But I prayed through all of it.

I prayed for safety, for strength, for my mother back home who would wake up tomorrow and realize I was gone.

We crossed into Turkey illegally, hiking through mountains at night, guided by smugglers who knew the routes.

It was freezing.

My thin jacket was inadequate.

My feet blistered in my cheap shoes.

I was terrified of being caught, of being sent back, of ending up like Nasarine.

But I kept moving, one foot in front of the other, one step closer to freedom.

It took us three nights to reach a city in eastern Turkey where we could find temporary shelter.

The smugglers left us there with the address of a contact who might be able to help.

We were on our own.

The next two years are a blur of waiting, fear, and bureaucracy.

I claimed asylum in Turkey, identifying myself as a Christian convert fleeing persecution.

The process was slow, uncertain, filled with interviews and paperwork and waiting and more waiting.

I lived in a cramped apartment with other refugees, sharing one room with five other women.

We had little money.

surviving on aid from refugee organizations and churches.

I could not work legally.

I could not go home.

I could not move forward.

I was stuck in limbo.

Neither here nor there, belonging nowhere.

But for the first time in my life, I could worship openly.

I found a church, an underground church made up mostly of other Iranian and Afghan refugees.

We met in secret still because there was always danger.

But it was nothing like the danger back home.

And in that church, I found family.

I was baptized in 2007 in a bathroom in a tub full of cold water by a former Muslim who had himself fled Iran 10 years before.

I went under the water, symbolizing death to my old life, and came up gasping, symbolizing resurrection to new life in Christ.

I wept through the whole thing.

I wished Nazin could have been there to see it.

The church loved me, taught me, discipled me.

I learned theology.

I learned how to pray.

Really pray, not just desperate please, but conversation with God.

I learned about grace.

amazing, undeserved, abundant grace.

I learned that I was not alone, that I was part of a global family of believers, that Christians around the world were praying for people like me.

I also began to process my trauma.

The nightmares about Nasarin’s execution came frequently.

I would wake up screaming, reliving that day, seeing her face, hearing the crowd.

I jumped at loud noises.

I was afraid of authority figures.

I struggled to trust people.

The church connected me with a counselor, another Iranian refugee who had been a psychologist back home.

She helped me understand that what I was experiencing was normal, that trauma did this to people, that healing was possible but would take time.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to heal.

The nightmares became less frequent.

The panic attacks subsided.

I learned to talk about Nasarin without falling apart.

I learned to remember her with joy instead of only with pain.

I learned that grief and hope could coexist, that I could carry both her memory and my faith forward.

And I waited, waited for my asylum claim to be processed, for a country to accept me for resettlement, for permission to begin a new life somewhere safe.

The call came in late 2008, a western country, I will not say which one, for there are still people I love back in Iran who could be endangered if the specifics are known, had approved my resettlement application.

I was going to be free.

truly legally permanently free.

I arrived in my new country in early 2009.

I was 21 years old.

I had left Iran at 18.

In those 3 years, I had aged a lifetime.

Everything was strange.

The language, the culture, the food, the weather, the way people dressed and acted and thought.

I was given a small apartment, some basic furniture, assistance from a refugee resettlement agency.

I enrolled in language classes, learned to navigate the bus system, learned to shop in grocery stores that had more choices in one aisle than my entire neighborhood market in Avaz.

The freedom was overwhelming.

I could wear what I wanted, say what I wanted, believe what I wanted, worship where I wanted.

No one was watching, no one was enforcing, no one was punishing.

It felt too good to be true.

For months, I kept waiting for it to be taken away.

I kept expecting a knock on the door, an arrest, a deportation.

I struggled with anxiety, with feeling that I did not deserve this freedom.

when Nasarin had died for wanting the same thing.

But the church, I had found a church within weeks of arriving, a church with other Iranian believers and Americans who welcomed refugees.

The church kept telling me that this was grace, that I did not have to earn it, that God had brought me here, had kept me safe, had given me this gift of freedom, that the right response was not guilt, but gratitude, not fear, but faith.

I learned to live in that freedom.

I got my driver’s license.

I enrolled in community college.

I got a part-time job.

I made friends, real friends who knew my story and loved me anyway.

I dated cautiously and eventually met the man who would become my husband.

A fellow believer from a different background who understood my trauma and loved me patiently.

I learned to laugh again, to enjoy small things, to wake up without fear, to go to sleep without nightmares, to worship Jesus without looking over my shoulder.

And I learned to tell my story.

It started small.

Someone at church asked me to share my testimony at a women’s meeting.

I was terrified, but I did it.

I told them about Nasarin, about her courage, about her death, about how her witness had led me to Jesus.

I wept through most of it.

So did many of the women listening.

After I finished, women came up to me.

They hugged me.

They thanked me.

They said my story had strengthened their faith, had reminded them of the cost of the gospel, had made them grateful for their freedom.

One woman said she had been taking her faith for granted.

But hearing my story had rekindled something in her heart.

That was when I understood.

My story, our story, mine and Nasrin’s was not just for me.

It was for others.

It was a testimony to the power of Jesus, to the reality of his love, to the truth that he is worth everything.

[snorts] I began accepting more invitations to speak, church services, conferences, small group meetings.

Each time I told the story of my sister who loved Jesus more than life, and of how her death became my life.

Each time I watched people respond, Christians weeping and renewing their commitment to Christ, non-Christians asking questions about this Jesus who inspired such devotion.

Muslims hearing perhaps for the first time that leaving Islam did not mean leaving God, but rather finding him truly.

The more I shared, the more I healed.

Speaking about Nasrin kept her memory alive.

Telling others about her courage honored her sacrifice.

Sharing how her witness led me to Jesus gave meaning to the suffering.

In 2012, I received news about my family.

It came through indirect channels through people who knew people who knew people.

The news was hard to hear but not surprising.

My mother had died.

She had never recovered from Nasrin’s execution.

She had withered away slowly, dying of what some might call a broken heart, but what I knew was grief and loss and the destruction of hope.

I wept when I heard this news.

I wept for the mother who had loved her daughters but had not been strong enough to save them.

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