I want to start by telling you something about where I am right now as I speak these words.

I cannot tell you the city.

I cannot tell you which country I am in.

I cannot tell you the name of the building or the street or the people who are in the next room.

This is not me being dramatic.

This is simply what life looks like when you have spent the last 20 years as a Christian pastor inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Secrecy is not something you choose because you are paranoid.

thumbnail

Secrecy is something you choose because you have watched what happens to people who are not careful.

You have sat across from people who were not careful.

You have visited their families after.

So you learn to be careful and after a while it stops feeling like fear and starts feeling like breathing.

It is just something you do.

I am telling you this at the beginning because I want you to understand the world I am speaking from.

Not the world you see on the news right now with the explosions and the maps and the politicians giving statements.

I mean the world underneath that world.

The world that has been running quietly for decades beneath everything you thought you knew about Iran.

That is the world I live in.

That is the world this testimony comes from.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother from Iran continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

That is the world this testimony comes from.

My name is Dario.

That is not my full name.

It is enough.

I was born in Tran in 1974.

That means I was four years old when the Islamic Revolution happened in 1979 and 5 years old when Ayatollah Kmeni returned from exile in Paris and stepped off that plane and the country I had been born into became a completely different country almost overnight.

I do not have many clear memories of before the revolution.

A few images.

My mother in the kitchen without a headscarf.

Music coming from a neighbor’s window.

My father laughing at something on the television.

Small things.

After 1979, those small things changed.

And the change was so total and so fast that even a child could feel it, even if a child could not name it.

My father was a devout Shia Muslim.

He was not a violent man.

I want to be clear about that because when people in the west hear the words devout Muslim in revolutionary Iran, they sometimes picture a certain kind of man.

And my father was not that kind.

He was a quiet man who prayed five times a day with genuine sincerity, who fasted during Ramadan without complaint, who believed with his whole heart that the revolution was the fulfillment of something God had been preparing for Iran for a long time.

He worked as a mid-level administrator in a government ministry.

He was proud of his work.

He was proud of his country.

image

 

He believed truly believed that Kmeni was a man sent by God to rescue Iran from the corruption of the sha and the influence of foreign powers, especially America.

My mother was softer in her faith.

She prayed and she fasted and she wore her hijab without being told to.

But there was something in her that was quieter than religion.

something that expressed itself more in the way she fed people and cared for people and sat with neighbors when they were grieving.

She was a woman of great warmth.

She still is as far as I know.

We have not spoken in a long time and that is one of the sorrows I carry.

I will come to that.

I grew up in a household where Islam was not a category of life.

It was the whole of life.

It was the air we breathed, the structure of every day, the framework through which every question was answered.

When I was old enough for school, I went to a school where religious instruction was central to everything.

We memorized Quranic verses.

We learned the stories of the prophet and the imams.

We were taught that Iran was the vanguard of God’s revolution on earth.

That we were a special people with a special mission.

And that the enemies of Islam, America, Israel, the West in general were the enemies of God himself.

This was not taught to us as opinion.

It was taught as fact.

The way you teach arithmetic or geography, it simply was.

I was a good student.

I absorbed everything I was given.

I was not a rebel.

I had no reason to be a rebel.

The world I lived in was the only world I knew.

And it made internal sense to me the way any world makes sense to a child who has known nothing else.

God was real.

Islam was the true religion.

Iran was God’s chosen nation.

In these last days, these things were settled.

Then the war began.

I was 6 years old when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.

Saddam Hussein’s forces crossed the border and the war that followed lasted 8 years and killed somewhere between half a million and 1 million people, depending on which count you believe.

I did not understand the politics of it as a child.

What I understood was the air raid sirens at night.

The way my mother would pull me and my younger sister Nasarin under the stairs when the sirens went off.

The particular darkness of Thran during a blackout.

The way the city held its breath.

I understood the funerals, the neighborhood we lived in.

was not wealthy, but it was close-knit.

And when a boy from our street was killed at the front, the whole street felt it.

I remember standing at the edge of one of those funerals as a boy of 9 or 10 and watching a mother receive the news about her son.

And even then, even as a child, something in me registered that grief and something in me filed it away in a place I did not have access to yet.

The regime surrounding that war was unlike anything that had come before it in Iranian history.

Martyrdom was not mourned.

It was celebrated.

Boys who died at the front were called Shahid, martyr, and their photographs were hung on walls and lamposts.

They were told they had gone directly to paradise.

The mosques rang with this message.

The schools rang with it.

We were told that to die for Islam and for the Islamic Republic was the highest possible life a person could live.

I remember being 12 years old and hearing this in school and feeling something that I would only understand much later.

A faint, distant unease that I could not name and did not dare express.

Something in me, something very quiet was asking a question it had no language for yet.

But the world around me was very loud.

And that quiet question got buried under everything else.

What I remember most from those war years more than the sirens or the funerals was the child soldiers.

Iran’s military used children at the front.

Boys as young as 12 and 13 were recruited, some voluntarily, some with pressure applied to their families.

They were given and I am not exaggerating this because it is one of the things about that era that history has documented thoroughly.

They were given small plastic keys to wear around their necks.

The keys to paradise.

The idea was that if you died in battle, the key would open the gates of heaven for you.

I remember seeing those keys.

I remember thinking about them at night.

Even at 12 years old, something about a plastic key made in a factory and handed to a child and told to him that it would open heaven.

Something about that sat wrong in me.

I did not say so to anyone.

I barely said so to myself, but it sat there.

The war ended in 1988 with a ceasefire that neither side could call a victory.

Kmeni died in 1989 and was replaced by Ali Kame who had been the president.

Kame was a different kind of leader.

Kmeni had genuine religious authority.

Even people who hated him acknowledged his standing as a cleric.

Kmin did not have that same standing and everyone in religious circles knew it.

What he had instead was political cunning and a willingness to use the instruments of state power in ways that Kmeni had not needed to because Kmeni’s personal authority was enough.

Under Kame, the enforcement became more organized, more bureaucratic, more pervasive.

the morality police, the intelligence services watching not just political dissident but ordinary citizens.

The sense that the walls had ears which in Iran under Kame they quite literally did.

I grew up into this.

By the time I was in university in the late 1990s studying engineering at a university in Thran, I was a young man who had never known any other world and was only beginning very slowly to develop the capacity to ask questions about it.

The reform period under President Katami gave a lot of young Iranians that capacity.

There was a brief opening in the late 1990s.

Newspapers published things they could not have published before.

Young people discussed politics more openly.

There was a sense in the air that change might be possible.

I remember that period well.

It felt like a window cracking open in a room that had been sealed for 20 years.

I had a close friend at university named Shaham.

He was funny and sharp and more politically engaged than I was.

He went to the student protests in July 1999.

The protests that erupted after the regime shut down a reformist newspaper and students at Tehran University rose up in response.

What happened next was what always happened in Iran.

When people rose up, the regime sent in the plain clothes militia.

They went into the university dormitories at night.

Students were beaten in their beds.

Some were thrown from windows.

Shaham was arrested.

He was held for 6 weeks.

When he came out, he was a different person.

not broken exactly, but quieted in a way that was not natural to him.

The brightness had gone down in him, like someone had turned a dial.

I visited him after his release, and we sat together, and there was not much to say.

I remember looking at him and thinking for the first time with real clarity rather than the vague childhood unease I had always carried.

Something is very wrong with this system.

Something that calls itself the government of God should not do what was done to my friend.

But thinking something is wrong with the system and knowing what to do with that thought are two different things.

I did not become a dissident.

I did not join any movement.

I finished my engineering degree and got a job and lived my life the way most Iranians lived, carefully, quietly, finding whatever small happiness was available within the walls of what was permitted.

I prayed the required prayers.

I fasted in Ramadan.

I went through the motions of a religious life because the motions were the structure of everything around me and stepping outside them would have been like deciding to stop breathing the air.

It was around this time that I got married.

My wife’s name I will not give, not even a change name because she is still in Iran and her safety is not something I will gamble with for the sake of a story.

She was a good woman.

She is a good woman.

What happened to our marriage is complicated and painful and connected to everything else.

I will tell you and I will come to it honestly when the time is right in this telling.

We had two children, a daughter and a son.

My daughter was born in 2003 and my son in 2006.

Becoming a father did something to me that I did not expect.

It made the questions I had been filing away since childhood much louder.

When you hold a child, your child for the first time and you look at that face, something happens to a person that I think is very hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

You feel the weight of what it means to be responsible for another life.

And I remember holding my daughter for the first time and thinking with a clarity that surprised me.

I want to give her something real, something true.

And the next thought which followed the first one like a shadow.

I am not sure I have anything real to give her.

I am not sure I have found anything true yet.

I filed that thought away too.

I was good at filing things away.

My sister Nasrin, who was 3 years younger than me, began to get sick around 2004.

I will not describe her illness in detail because it would identify our family and that is not a risk I am able to take.

What I will tell you is that it was serious and it was slow and it was the kind of illness that does not kill you quickly but sits with you and diminishes you gradually.

And watching someone you love go through that is one of the most helpless experiences a human being can have.

I prayed for her.

I prayed with genuine desperation.

I was not a man who had lost his faith at this point.

I still believed in God.

Or at least I still performed the rituals of believing in God.

And in Iran, the two things can become so intertwined, you stop noticing the difference.

I prayed the prayers I had been taught.

I asked Allah for her healing.

I asked with everything I had.

What I got back was silence.

I want to be honest about that silence because I think it is important.

It was not a silence I felt once and then moved on from.

It was a silence that accumulated over months and then over years.

Each prayer that went up and came back with nothing attached to it.

Each night I drove to the hospital and sat in a corridor while the doctors did what doctors do and I looked at the ceiling of that corridor and I spoke in my heart to a god I was no longer sure was listening and I asked the same question.

I think every human being eventually asks when they are in enough pain is anyone there? I was 30 years old.

I had a wife, two young children, a good job, a life that looked from the outside like a life that was working.

And inside I was completely hollow.

I do not mean sad.

I mean empty in a way that is deeper than sadness.

Like a room that has had all its furniture removed and the walls stripped bare and the windows sealed.

Just space and silence and nothing to fill it with.

I am telling you all of this because I want you to understand that when God found me, he did not find a man who was ready.

He did not find a man who had been searching.

He found a man who had stopped looking.

A man who had convinced himself there was nothing to find.

He found me in the hollow place.

That is where he tends to find people.

I had a colleague at my engineering firm named Vartan.

He was Armenian.

His family had lived in Iran for generations.

There is a significant Armenian Christian community in Iran, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and they exist within the Islamic Republic in a particular kind of fragile tolerance.

They could practice their faith but quietly and within limits and always with the awareness that the tolerance could be withdrawn at any time.

Vatan was a quiet man.

He was not someone who talked about his faith.

I had worked alongside him for 3 years and we had never once discussed religion.

One afternoon, Vatan left something on my desk before he went home.

Not a book, not a Bible, a small piece of paper folded twice with several verses typed out in Farsy.

That was all.

He left it and he left for the day.

And I sat at my desk for a long time, looking at that folded paper before I picked it up.

I will not pretend that what happened next was dramatic.

It was not.

I read the words on that paper and they were words from the Gospel of John.

I had never read the Gospel of John.

I had been taught that the Christian scriptures were corrupted.

That the original gospel that Jesus received had been altered by his followers into something unrecognizable.

That what Christians had was not the true word of God.

I believed this the way I believed everything else I had been taught without examining it because there had never been any need to examine it.

But here were these words and they were in my hands and I was alone in an office in Thran at the end of a day and I read them.

I am not going to try to manufacture emotion in the retelling of this moment.

I am going to tell you what actually happened.

I read the words.

I read them again.

And the third time I read them, I felt something that I do not have an adequate word for in any language.

Not lightning, not a vision, nothing that would make a compelling scene in a film.

Just a stillness, a sudden, deep, inexplicable stillness.

The way sometimes in the middle of a loud city, everything will briefly go quiet between one moment and the next.

That stillness settled over me, sitting at my desk with that piece of paper in my hands.

And in that stillness, something in me that had been asking a question for 30 years felt for the first time like the question had been heard.

That is the only way I know how to describe it.

The verses were from the Gospel of John.

One of them said that the truth will set you free.

Another said that Jesus came so that people could have life.

Not a reduced version of life.

Not a managed, controlled, permitted version of life, but life in fullness.

I sat with those two sentences for a long time.

I thought about what I had been given by the system I was born into.

The fear, the silence, the performance of faith that had nothing living in it anymore.

The hollow room I was living inside.

And I thought about those two sentences, truth, life, freedom.

I folded the paper back up and put it in the inner pocket of my jacket and I went home.

I did not tell my wife.

I did not tell anyone.

I put the paper inside an engineering textbook on my shelf at home and I went about my life.

But every night after everyone was asleep, I would take that paper out and read those verses again.

And every night the stillness came back.

It was like discovering a door in a wall you had walked past a thousand times without noticing.

I had not opened the door yet.

I was not even sure I was going to.

But I knew the door was there now and I could not unknow it.

Over the weeks that followed, I started finding my way to more.

There was a satellite channel, I will not name it, though many Iranians know the channels.

I mean, that broadcast Christian programming into Iran at night.

Christian satellite television had become by the mid 2000s one of the most significant tools for the gospel reaching Iranians precisely because it was invisible.

No missionary had to enter the country.

No pamphlet had to be smuggled across a border.

The signal simply came from the sky into homes across the Islamic Republic.

And people watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched a man explain who Jesus was.

Not a Western man in a suit trying to sell me something.

An Iranian man speaking in Farsy talking about Jesus the way someone talks about a person they have actually met.

Not a historical figure behind glass in a museum.

A living person.

Someone this man on the screen had encountered and had not recovered from in the best possible way.

I watched this man speak and something in me could not look away.

Continue reading….
Next »