Wait, you see that too, right? Tell me I’m not losing my mind.

Something is standing there and I can’t look away.

I translated the lies of the Supreme Leader to the world for over a decade.

And every word I spoke in his name was a weapon aimed at innocent people.

Then Jesus Christ appeared to me in the middle of the night and I have never been the same man since.

What I am about to tell you has never been spoken publicly before.

The people I used to work for would do anything to stop this testimony from reaching your ears.

Watch until the very end because the last thing I say may open a door in your life that you did not know existed.

My name is Navidid Husini and I am originally from Thran, Iran.

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I currently live in Toronto, Canada.

For more than a decade, I was the most trusted English language interpreter inside the inner circle of the Islamic Republic.

My voice carried the words of Carmen himself to the ears of the western world and for years I believed I was doing holy work.

I grew up in a house full of language.

My father Ibrahim Husseini was a professor of linguistics at the University of Thran.

He was a serious and careful man who believed that words were the most precise tools a human being could possess.

He taught me that a man who controlled language controlled reality.

He spent his evenings reading to me in Farsy and then asking me to repeat what he had read back to him in English.

He had learned English himself during the years before the revolution when Iran had strong ties to the west and he passed that language down to me the way some fathers passed down a trade.

My mother Zeba was warm where my father was precise.

She was deeply religious and deeply loving in equal measure.

She cooked elaborate meals and welcomed neighbors into our home and filled every room she entered with a sense that everything was going to be all right.

She prayed constantly and she told me from the time I was very small that God had a specific purpose for every gift he placed in a person.

She believed my gift for language was not an accident.

She believed God had given it to me for a reason.

She was right about that.

She was just wrong about which god she was thinking of.

I was born in Thran and I grew up in the Ilah neighborhood in the northern part of the city.

It was an educated and relatively comfortable area.

Our apartment was modest but full of books.

I had access to good schools and serious teachers.

My father’s position at the university gave our family a degree of protection and the stability that many Iranian families did not have.

I was aware from an early age that I was fortunate though I did not always understand the full weight of what that meant.

I was a gifted student and language came to me the way music comes to certain people effortlessly and completely.

By the time I was 16, I was reading English novels in their original form without a dictionary.

By 18, I was fluent enough to be mistaken for a native speaker on the telephone.

I studied translation at the University of Tehran and then completed a graduate degree in simultaneous interpretation.

My professors told me I had a rare talent, not just for the mechanics of language, but for something harder to teach, the ability to carry tone and intention across the gap between two completely different ways of seeing the world.

After graduating, I worked briefly for a private translation firm in Thran that handled contracts for several government ministries.

My work was noticed by the right people.

In the mid 1990s, I was approached by a senior official from the foreign ministry who told me that my name had been passed along through channels that he declined to specify.

He said that there was a need for a young interpreter with exceptional English skills who could be trusted with sensitive material at the highest levels of government.

He asked whether I was interested.

I was 26 years old and I had grown up in the Islamic Republic believing that serving the state was the natural extension of serving God.

My mother had raised me to see faith and loyalty to the revolution as inseparable things.

When this official sat across from me and suggested that my skill might be useful at the highest levels, I felt the same thing a young man feels when he is told that he has been chosen for something important.

Pride, purpose, the belief that he is exactly where he is supposed to be.

I said yes without hesitation.

The preparation that followed lasted nearly 2 years.

I was given intensive training in diplomatic protocol and political sensitivity.

I was taught how to interpret not just words but entire political frameworks.

How to carry the specific ideological weight of the Islamic Republic’s language into English without losing its intended meaning or its intended effect.

I was given access to classified briefings on foreign policy positions and international relationships so that I could interpret accurately in context that required precise and specific technical knowledge.

I was also vetted thoroughly and repeatedly.

My family background was examined.

My personal relationships were reviewed.

My religious observance was assessed.

My loyalty to the Islamic Republic and to the Supreme Leader was evaluated from multiple angles by multiple people whose job it was to find any reason to doubt me.

I passed every evaluation.

Of course, I did.

I believed everything they believed.

I was not performing loyalty.

It was genuine.

By 1998, I had been cleared for the highest level of access and I was formally assigned to the office of the supreme leader as a senior interpreter.

My primary responsibility was simultaneous interpretation for meetings between Cam’s office and Englishspeaking foreign delegations.

I also worked on the preparation of official statements and documents that would be released to the international press.

On occasions when Kamina addressed audiences that included English speakers, my voice was the voice those people heard.

Let me describe what it was actually like to be in those rooms.

The buildings where these meetings took place were immaculate and heavily guarded.

Every visitor was screened multiple times before entering.

The rooms themselves were decorated with the specific aesthetic of the Islamic Republic.

Calligraphy on the walls, Persian carpets of extraordinary quality, no imagery of living things which was considered inappropriate under the interpretation of Islamic law that governed everything in those spaces.

The atmosphere was one of controlled seriousness.

Nobody laughed in those rooms.

Nobody spoke casually.

Everything was deliberate and waited.

Kaman himself was not what most people from outside Iran would expect.

He was not loud or theatrical.

He was quiet and deliberate.

He spoke in a measured and careful way that made it clear he considered every word before releasing it.

He had a long memory and a sharp understanding of how language worked as a political instrument.

When he spoke, the people around him listened with the kind of attention you give to someone who holds your future in his hands, which in a practical sense he did.

My job was to sit slightly behind and to the side of the delegation and render his words into English in real time.

This required not just language skill, but a kind of mental discipline that I had spent years developing.

I had to stay ahead of the speaker by a fraction of a second processing the meaning of what was being said while simultaneously converting it into another language without losing anything in the transfer.

It was technically demanding work and I was very good at it.

What I was also doing though I understood this only gradually over the years was something more than translation.

I was a kind of bridge between two realities.

the reality that Kami and the Islamic Republic wanted the world to see and believe.

Thus, and the reality that actually existed inside Iran for the people who had to live under the system I was representing.

Every time I opened my mouth in those rooms and converted his words into smooth and authoritative English, I was participating in the construction of a version of Iran that bore very little resemblance to the country that ordinary Iranians experienced every day.

I did not see it that way at the time.

I saw myself as a skilled professional performing an essential function.

I saw myself as a faithful servant of the revolution and of the Islamic Republic.

I told myself that the foreign policy positions I was helping to communicate were principled and correct.

I told myself that the international community simply did not understand the Islamic Republic because they were looking at it through a biased western lens.

My job was to help them understand more clearly.

That was how I explained my work to myself for a very long time.

The salary was excellent.

The access was extraordinary.

The status that came with the position was something that opened every door in Thran.

I moved in circles that most Iranians never came near.

I attended private functions and highlevel gatherings and occasionally traveled with official delegations to meetings outside Iran.

I lived in a comfortable apartment in a good neighborhood.

I drove a good car.

My parents were proud of me and told everyone they knew about their son who worked for the Supreme Leader.

I had everything a young man from Thran could reasonably hope for.

And underneath all of it, so quiet that I could barely hear it, a voice was beginning to ask whether any of it was true.

The first time I understood clearly that my work involved something beyond translation, I was 31 years old.

It was the year 2001, and I had been in the position for 3 years.

I was assigned to interpret during a series of private meetings with a European diplomatic delegation that was attempting to open a channel of dialogue on human rights issues inside Iran.

The delegation had been given carefully managed access and was meeting with officials who had been specifically selected and prepared for the encounter.

During one of those meetings, a senior European diplomat asked a direct question about a group of journalists and intellectuals who had disappeared in Iran the previous year.

These were the chain murders, a series of killings and disappearances of writers and intellectuals that had been carried out by elements within the Iranian intelligence services.

The diplomat described the cases by name and asked for an official accounting of what had happened to these individuals.

The Iranian official across the table from her paused for a moment and then delivered a response that I proceeded to translate faithfully into English.

The response denied any state involvement.

It described the cases as matters under ongoing judicial review.

It expressed concern for the well-being of all Iranian citizens and commitment to the rule of law.

It was eloquent and authoritative and completely false.

I knew it was false because I had been in briefings where the actual nature of these cases had been discussed in terms that left no ambiguity.

I sat in my position and I translated those lies into perfect English and I watched the diplomat receive them with the cautious skepticism of someone who suspected she was not being told the truth but had no way to prove it in the room and I felt something move through me that I recognized as discomfort and then immediately suppressed.

I suppressed it because I had been trained to suppress it.

Interpreters are trained to be neutral conduits.

Your personal response to the content is irrelevant.

Your job is accuracy and fidelity, not judgment.

I told myself this and it worked for a while, but it worked less well each time I had to use it.

Over the following years, I translated dozens of official communications and participated in hundreds of meetings where the gap between what was being said and what was actually true was enormous.

I translated statements about Iran’s nuclear program that were strategically misleading.

I translated responses to questions about political prisoners that denied realities I was personally aware of.

I translated official positions on Iran’s support for militant groups across the region that carefully obscured the full extent of that support.

Every time I did this, I was participating in the deception.

Not as a minor player, as an essential one, because the English speakaking world could not hear Kam’s words without my voice.

I was not just a passive instrument.

I was the mechanism by which these lies reached the people they were intended to mislead.

I got married in 2003 to a woman named Shireen.

She was an architect from a good family in Thran.

She was intelligent and warm and she had a quality of directness that I found both attractive and occasionally uncomfortable.

She saw things clearly and said what she saw.

In the early years of our marriage, she accepted my work at face value the way most people in our social circle did.

Working for the Supreme Leader’s Office was prestigious and she was proud of me.

But Shireen was also perceptive.

And as the years went by, she began to notice things that worried her.

She notices that I came home from certain assignments quieter than usual.

She noticed that there were evenings when I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the wall for an hour without speaking.

She noticed that I drank more than I used to and I slept less.

She asked me questions that I deflected with answers that were technically true but not honest.

The more I told her the work was stressful.

I told her that highlevel government work always came with pressures that couldn’t be discussed at home.

She accepted this for a long time because she trusted me.

What I could not tell her, what I could not tell anyone was that the voice inside me that had first spoken in 2001 was getting louder every year and I had run out of ways to make it stop.

In 2007, something happened that pushed the volume of that voice past the point where I could reasonably pretend not to hear it.

I was assigned to a joint project preparing official communications around the case of a dual Iranian American journalist named Roxana Saberi who had been arrested and was being held in Evan prison on espionage charges.

The charges were fabricated.

I knew they were fabricated because I had access to internal documents that made the political motivations behind her arrest entirely clear.

She was being held as a bargaining chip in a broader diplomatic calculation.

My assignment was to help prepare the official English language communications that would be released to the international press regarding her case.

These communications were designed to justify the charges and present her detention as a legitimate legal matter.

I sat at a desk in a government building in Thran and I wrote sentences in English that described the imprisonment of an innocent woman as a necessary application of Iranian law.

And I did it because that was my job and because refusing would have consequences I was not prepared to face.

Saber was eventually released in 2009 after international pressure.

But the experience of writing those documents stayed with me in a way that other things had not because this was not an abstract policy position or a strategic diplomatic statement.

This was a specific woman sitting in a prison cell while I wrote careful English sentences designed to keep her there longer.

I knew her name.

I knew she was innocent.

And I put my skill in service of her continued imprisonment.

I started having trouble sleeping that year.

real trouble.

Not the occasionally restless night I had experienced before.

I would lie awake for hours with sentences running through my head.

Not the sentences I had written for the government.

My own sentences.

Questions that formed themselves in the dark with a precision that my training had given me and that now turned back on me with uncomfortable accuracy.

Questions like, “What exactly do you think you are doing with the gift you were given?” Questions like whose interests are you actually serving? Questions like if the god your mother prays to could see every document you have worked on, every meeting you have interpreted, every lie you have helped to carry across the language barrier.

What would he say to you? I could not answer those questions.

So I worked harder and I drank more.

And I told myself that everyone in every government in the world did work like this and that it was naive to think otherwise.

I told myself that the Islamic Republic was better than the alternatives.

I told myself that my mother’s faith and my country’s faith and my own faith demanded loyalty to the system that had been established in God’s name.

I repeated these things to myself like a man repeating a prayer that no longer quite reaches the place it is aimed at.

By 2012, my marriage was showing the strain of everything I was carrying and refusing to share.

Shireen was patient, but she was not blind.

She knew that the man she had married was becoming a stranger to her, and she did not know why.

We went to counseling twice, and both times I sat across from the counselor and spoke in general terms about work pressure and career stress, while the actual weight of what was happening inside me remained completely hidden.

It was not fair to Shireen.

I knew it was not fair, but I did not know how to do anything differently without pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.

The year 2015 was when the wall finally started to crumble in a way I could not repair.

Iran was in the final stages of negotiations over the nuclear deal, and the diplomatic activity was intense.

I was working longer hours than I ever had before, interpreting in sessions that sometimes ran for eight and 10 hours at a stretch.

The pressure was enormous and the stakes were presented to us internally as existential.

We were told that the future of the Islamic Republic depended on the outcome of these negotiations and that every word mattered.

I was so tired by the end of that period that I was functioning on almost nothing.

And when a person is that depleted, the defenses they have built around the things they don’t want to look at become much harder to maintain.

I sat in a meeting room one afternoon during a break in a negotiating session and I looked around at the men I worked with and I saw something I had never let myself see before.

I saw that not one of them believed what they were saying.

Not fully.

The ideology was a performance, a sophisticated and deeply ingrained performance that they had been running for so long they had almost forgotten it was a performance.

But it was and I was the instrument that carried the performance to the outside world in the language the outside world could understand.

That afternoon I walked out of the building during the break and stood on the street in the autumn air and felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

I had given 17 years to this war.

17 years of carrying other people’s words across a language barrier.

17 years of translating a version of Iran that did not exist for an audience that deserve to know the truth.

And I had done it in the name of a faith that I was no longer sure I actually held.

I went back inside and finished the session.

But something had broken that afternoon that could not be unbroken.

I need to tell you about a night in February 2017.

This is the center of everything.

Everything before it was the life that led me to this night.

Everything after it has been the life that grew from it.

I was in my apartment in Thran.

Shireen had taken our daughter Nida who was 7 years old to visit her parents in Isaham for the week.

I was alone in the apartment and I had been alone for 3 days.

I had not been sleeping.

I had not been eating properly.

I was sitting at my desk surrounded by documents I was supposed to be working on and I had not been able to make myself open them for the past 2 hours.

I was thinking about a conversation I had overheard that week in the office.

Two senior officials discussing a crackdown that was being planned on underground Christian networks in Thran.

They were speaking casually about it the way you speak about administrative matters, logistics, numbers, names on lists.

I had heard conversations like this before and I had trained myself not to absorb them too deeply.

But this time one of the officials mentioned a specific neighborhood where surveillance had identified a house church.

The neighborhood was the same one where my mother lived.

I do not know if the house church he mentioned had anything to do with my mother’s neighbor.

the young man Daresi had told me about years earlier who had lost his job and been beaten for attending underground Christian meetings.

I do not know if it was the same network or a different one, but the combination of hearing my mother’s neighborhood named in that context on top of everything else that was pressing against me from the inside was more than I could absorb calmly.

I sat at my desk and I did something I had not done since I was a child.

I prayed not the formally structured prayer of Islamic practice, not the recited Arabic phrases that I had repeated thousands of times without thinking about the meaning.

I prayed the way a desperate man prays when he has no one else to talk to and nothing left to lose.

I said out loud to the ceiling of my apartment, “If there is a God who is actually good and actually real, I need you to show me something true.

I am tired of living inside lies and I do not know who you are or where you are but I am asking you to show me.

Then I sat back in my chair and I waited not because I expected an answer.

I did not expect an answer.

I had spent 17 years working inside a political system that had convinced an entire nation that God was available as a tool of state power and I had watched that claim become more hollow with every passing year.

I did not think God was in the habit [clears throat] of responding to the private prayers of exhausted government interpreters at 2:00 in the morning.

But something happened.

The room did not change physically.

The desk was still in front of me.

The documents were still stacked on it.

The lamp was still on.

But the atmosphere of the room shifted in a way that I noticed with every sense I had simultaneously.

The air became dense with a presence, not threatening.

The opposite of threatening, a warmth that had direction and intention moved into the room and I felt it the way you feel the sun on your face when you step out of a dark building.

Unmistakable and immediate and real.

I looked up from the desk and there was a man standing on the other side of the room.

I want to be careful about how I describe this because I want you to understand that I am a precise person.

Language is my profession.

I do not use words loosely.

I am not telling you I imagined this or dreamed this or experienced a metaphor.

I am telling you that a man was standing in my apartment in Thran at 2:00 in the morning and I had not heard the door open and he had not been there a moment before.

He was dressed simply.

His face was the kind of face that you look at and feel that you are seeing a person who is entirely without pretense or concealment.

No performance, no agenda, just a complete and total presence that ask nothing from you except your attention.

His eyes were looking at me with an expression that I had never seen or any human face in any meeting room or diplomatic session or personal relationship in my entire life.

It was an expression of complete knowledge and complete acceptance at the same time.

He knew everything about me.

Not the public version of me or the professional version of me.

Everything.

All of it.

The documents I had written, the lies I had translated, the evenings I had sat at the kitchen table unable to look at my wife, the prayer I had just spoken into the ceiling of my apartment.

And he was not appalled.

He was not angry.

He was looking at me with a love so specific and so personal that it was more frightening than anger would have been because I had no defense against it.

I knew who this was not through any process of reasoning.

I knew it the way you know your own name.

This was Jesus.

The Jesus who the Islamic Republic had spent decades teaching me to categorize as a misunderstood prophet whose message had been corrupted by Western religion and imperialist agendas.

This was not that Jesus.

This was someone whose presence in the room made every category I had ever been given to contain him feel absurd.

He was not a category.

He was a person.

The most real person I had ever been in a room with.

He spoke my name.

He said Navidid in far with a gentleness that undid me completely.

My name in his mouth sounded like something precious that had been held carefully for a very long time.

Then he said, “You have been carrying words that were never yours to carry.

You have given your voice to things that have cost people more than you know.

I have watched you carry this and I have watched you try to put it down and not be able to.

You do not have to carry it alone anymore.

I want to describe what those words felt like, but I am not sure language is adequate to the task, and I have spent my career believing language is adequate to almost every task.

” It was as if someone had located the exact place in my chest where 17 years of weight had been sitting and addressed that place directly.

Not the surface of me, the specific location of the burden.

He spoke to it precisely and the precision of it broke me open.

I slid off the chair and I was on my knees on the floor of my apartment and I was weeping in a way I had not wept since I was a child.

not the controlled and careful emotional responses that diplomatic life had trained me to produce on appropriate occasions.

This was something biological and complete.

Every wall I had built and maintained and repaired for 17 years collapsed at the same time.

And what came out of me was everything I had been holding behind those walls.

Jesus did not move from where he was standing.

He let me weep.

Ah, he did not rush me or tell me to stop or offer me the kind of anxious comfort that people offer when they are uncomfortable with another person’s pain.

He simply stayed present with a patience that felt infinite, like he had nowhere else to be and nothing more important to do than be in that room with me while I fell apart.

After a long time, the weeping slowed and I sat on the floor of my apartment and I looked at him and he was still there and still looking at me with those eyes that knew everything and accepted everything.

He said, “I am the truth you have been looking for behind every language you have ever translated.

I am the word that does not require interpretation.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

and I am offering you a completely new beginning right now in this room.

He spoke then about forgiveness in a way that I was not prepared for.

Not forgiveness as an abstract theological principle, forgiveness as a specific and personal transaction.

He told me that the cross was not a historical event with symbolic significance.

He told me it was the moment when the full weight of everything I had done and everything every human being had ever done was taken onto a single person voluntarily so that the debt would be paid and the path would be clear.

He said that this include every document I had written that kept a innocent person in prison longer.

Every meeting where I had carried lies in my voice across a language barrier.

every year I had spent making the Islamic Republic sound more legitimate than it was to an audience that deserved the truth.

All of it paid for, forgiven, if I would receive it.

I told him I I did not understand why he would offer this to someone like me.

He said that was precisely the kind of person the offer was made for.

He said there was no version of me so damaged or so complicit that his love could not reach it.

He said that the same hands that had been nailed to a cross would hold everything I had been carrying if I would let them.

I told him I was afraid.

He said he knew.

He said, “Follow me anyway.

” I said yes.

Sitting on the floor of my apartment in Thran at 2:00 in the morning, I said yes to Jesus with everything I had and everything I would and everything I was ashamed of.

And the warmth that had been in the room when he appeared moved into me and through me.

And I felt something leave that had been residing in my chest for 17 years.

The weight did not disappear, but it moved.

It transferred into hands that were strong enough to hold it.

When I looked up, he was gone.

The room was the same room it had always been.

The lamp was on.

The documents were on the desk.

The apartment was quiet.

But I was not the same person who had been sitting at that desk 2 hours earlier.

I was something new.

And I knew it.

And there was not a single part of me that doubted it.

I did not go back to work the next day.

I called in sick and I stayed in the apartment and I sat with what had happened.

I am an interpreter.

I am trained to process information quickly and render it accurately in another language.

I could not process this quickly.

I did not try to.

I sat with it slowly and let it be as large as it actually was.

The first thing I needed was a Bible.

In Iran, this is not a simple matter.

Christian materials are banned and possessing a Bible, especially in far can result in serious legal consequences.

For most Iranians, this represents a nearly insurmountable barrier.

For me, a man with 17 years of experience navigating the most classified systems in the Iranian estate.

It was difficult, but not impossible.

I found a contact through a chain of personal connections that I had built over years of working across different levels of Iranian society.

A man who I will call Ardashir had been known to me for some time as someone who moved in circles that I had monitored professionally without ever having to act against him directly.

I reached out through a mutual contact with a message that I kept deliberately vague.

I said only that I had had an experience that I needed to understand and that I thought he might be able to help me find the materials I was looking for.

Argasher was cautious more than cautious.

He was a man who had been careful for years because the cost of carelessness in his community was arrest and imprisonment and violence.

A message from someone connected to the Supreme Leader’s office asking for Christian materials.

was the kind of message that could be a death sentence.

Dressed in curiosity, he told our mutual contact that he needed time to consider.

3 weeks passed, then he agreed to meet.

We met in a small tea house in the south of the city, far from the areas where I was likely to be recognized.

He arrived before me and sat in the back corner with a clear view of the door.

When I sat down across from him, he studied my face for a long moment without speaking.

Then he said, “Tell me what happened.

” I told him about the night in the apartment.

I told him about the figure in the room and the words that had been spoken and the thing that had broken open in my chest.

I told him because I had learned in 17 years of interpreting that there is a quality to the truth that distinguished it from everything else you might say.

And Ardeshir was a man who had spent years living close to the truth in a country that punished people for it.

he would know.

When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, “This is how he comes.

This is exactly how he comes.

” He said it the way you say something you have heard described many times and have been waiting to hear described again.

He gave me a Bible.

He did not hand it to me in the tea house.

He arranged for it to reach me through a method that I will not describe in detail.

But within a week of our meeting, I was sitting in my apartment with a Pharisee Bible in my hands and I was reading it for the first time in my life as something other than a foreign religious text.

What I found in that Bible was the person I had met in my apartment, the same voice, the same quality of complete honesty and complete love existing without any contradiction in the same space.

Jesus speaking in the Gospels sounded exactly like Jesus speaking in my apartment.

The consistency of it was overwhelming to me in a way that I had not expected.

I had spent my career in rooms where words were used strategically and where the meaning behind the words was often completely different from the words themselves.

The gospels were nothing like that.

They were the most direct and unmanaged communication I had ever read.

I met with Ardashir several more times over the following months.

He introduced me gradually and carefully to a small group of believers who gathered in a private home.

I attended their meetings with the same security awareness I had learned in my professional life, never taking the same route twice, never arriving, and leaving at the same time as other members of the group.

The people in that room were teachers and engineers and a young woman who was a medical student and a retired military officer who had converted a decade earlier.

They welcomed me with a warmth that was completely disproportionate to what I deserved given who I was and what I did for a living.

I had not told Shireen any of this.

She had returned from Isvahan with Neda and our life had resumed its surface patterns.

I was deeply aware that I was carrying a secret again the way I had carried secrets for 17 years.

But this secret was entirely different in nature.

This was not a secret I was keeping to protect myself or to maintain a position of power.

This was a secret I was keeping because I did not yet know how to speak it in a way that would not blow up my marriage and potentially endanger my wife and daughter.

I spent 3 months praying about how to tell Shireen.

I asked Jesus every day to prepare her heart and to give me the right words and the right moment.

Shireen was a Muslim, but she was not an ideological Muslim.

She was a private and personally spiritual woman who had grown increasingly skeptical of the politicized version of Islam that governed Iranian public life.

She had questions she had been living with for years.

I knew this because in our best moments, she had shared some of those questions with me.

I told her on a Saturday evening in the spring of 2018.

I sat her down in the living room and I told her everything.

The night in the apartment, the figure in the room, the words, the Bible, the house, church.

I spoke for almost 2 hours and she listened without interrupting once.

When I finished, there was a long silence.

Then she said, “How long have you been going to this group?” I told her 6 months.

She nodded slowly.

Then she said, “I want to come with you.

” I want to pause on that moment for a second because it was not the response I had prepared myself for.

I had prepared myself for fear and anger and the possibility of her leaving.

I had not prepared myself for that.

She told me later that she had been having her own private questions about Jesus for years, that she had read things and heard things that had been working on her without her knowing what to call it.

My story did not surprise her the way I expected it to.

It landed in a place that had been quietly prepared.

Shireen came to the house church the following week.

Within 2 months, she had given her life to Jesus in a prayer that she told me afterward was the most honest conversation she had ever had.

My daughter Neda was too young to fully understand everything.

But she grew up in a home where faith was no longer a political obligation.

It was a living relationship.

The difference was visible in everything.

I resigned from my position in the Supreme Leader’s office in late 2018.

I gave a health reason that was not entirely false.

The years of carrying that work had taken a genuine physical toll.

My resignation was accepted with less drama than I had anticipated.

I had been careful enough in my professional relationships that I did not have obvious enemies who would question my departure too aggressively.

I spent 6 months in Thran after my resignation managing the transition out of my professional role and quietly preparing for what came next.

We left Iran in the summer of 2019.

Shireen and Nida and I crossed into Turkey by land and from Turkey we applied for immigration to Canada on grounds of religious persecution.

The process took 18 months and we spent that time in Ankara living carefully and waiting.

The Iranian government knew we had left.

They did not know where we were.

We kept it that way.

We arrived in Toronto in January 2021 in the middle of a Canadian winter.

Nida had never seen a snow.

She stood outside the airport with her face turned up to the falling flakes and she laughed with the joy that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

We had left behind everything we owned except what fit in four suitcases.

We had left behind our apartment and our car and our social world and the professional identity I had spent 20 years building.

We arrived in Canada with almost nothing.

And we were freer than we had ever been.

We found an Iranian Christian community in Toronto that welcomed us with the same warmth I had first experienced in that house church in Thran.

We connected with a pastor named David who had himself come from Iran 15 years earlier and who understood exactly what we carried and what we needed.

He became our mentor and our friend and he helped us build a life in Canada that was built on something real for the first time.

I work now as a translation consultant for organizations that serve Iranian diaspora communities in North America.

I help people navigate language barriers that are also cultural and legal barriers.

I use the skill that my father gave me and that God gave me and that I spent so many years using in the wrong direction.

I use it now in the right direction and the difference is something I feel every [clears throat] single day.

I am coming forward publicly with this testimony because I believe it is time.

I have been living quietly in Toronto for several years, building a new life, growing in my faith, raising my daughter in a home where truth is the organizing principle.

But the call to speak publicly has been growing in me for the past year.

And I have prayed about it enough to be certain that this is what Jesus is asking me to do with this story.

The Islamic Republic is still using the name of God to control and silence millions of people.

Kam’s office is still preparing statements in smooth English that carry the same lies I used to translate.

Now in someone else’s voice, underground Christians in Iran are still gathering in secret and still being arrested and they’re still being beaten and they still walking with limps as my mother’s neighbor once walked.

Nothing about that system has changed.

But what can change is a single person’s heart.

I know this because mine changed in the most unexpected location at the most unexpected hour in the presence of the most unexpected visitor.

A man who stood in my apartment at 2:00 in the morning and said my name and offered me something I had not earned and could not buy and did not deserve.

That offer is not exclusive to government interpreters from Thrron.

It is the same offer being made right now to every person watching this testimony.

If you are inside Iran, I want to speak to you directly.

The version of God that your government has been presenting to you for 40 years is not the real God.

I know this because I was on the inside of that presentation.

I help it construct it in English for an international audience for 17 years.

It is a performance.

It is a carefully managed political instrument wearing the clothes of religion.

The real god, the one who is actually there, does not require your silence or your fear or your submission to a political system.

He requires only your honesty.

Tell him the truth about what you are carrying and what you are afraid of and what you have been hoping for.

He already knows it.

He is waiting for you to say it.

If you are someone who works within the Iranian government, I want to tell you that I understand your position in a very specific way.

I was that position for a very long time.

I know what it feels like to be embedded in a system that has an answer for every question and a justification for every action and a framework that makes everything feel both inevitable and righteous.

I know how complete that framework feels from the inside.

I also know that it has cracks in it.

I know that the questions come at night when the official answers are not available to suppress them.

I know because I lived that for 17 years.

The cracks are where the light gets in.

Do not fill them.

Let them grow.

Let the questions speak.

Because on the other side of those questions, I promise you there is someone waiting to answer them honestly.

I want to tell you something about the night Jesus appeared to me that I have not said yet.

when he stood in my apartment and looked at me with those eyes that knew everything.

There was one moment that I have returned to more times than any other.

It was after I had been weeping for a long time and I had finally gone quiet and I was sitting on the floor looking up at him.

He looked at me with that expression of complete knowledge and complete acceptance and he said one thing that I want to close with today.

He said, “Navid, you have spent your whole career finding the exact right word in two different languages.

I want you to spend the rest of your life telling people about the word that needs no translation.

I am doing that now.

This testimony is me doing that and I will keep doing it for whatever years I have left because the man who stood in my apartment at 2:00 in the morning and said my name is worth every risk it takes to speak about him publicly.

My name is Navided Husini.

I was Kam’s English interpreter and I am standing here today because Jesus Christ appeared to me in Thran and refused to let me go.

If this story has touched something real in you today, write in the comments right now, the word found me.

Let it be your declaration.

Let it be the first honest sentence of the rest of your