I did not understand everything he said, but I understood that whatever he had, whatever was making him speak with that kind of aliveness, I did not have it and I wanted it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely deeply wanted it.

I am going to pause here and say something to anyone listening to this who is not a Christian, who perhaps grew up the way I grew up, who has the same hollow room inside them that I had.

I am not asking you to believe what I believe.

I am not asking you to do anything.

I am only telling you what I experienced as honestly as I can.

A man who was empty found something that filled him.

That is the only claim I am making right now.

Whether you receive that as truth or not is between you and whatever you understand God to be.

But it is what happened.

I found my way to Vartan a few weeks after he left that paper on my desk.

I found a moment when we were alone and I asked him very quietly about the verses.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered.

He was measuring me, I think, measuring whether I was safe.

That measuring look I would learn later after I had been in the underground church for years that every Iranian Christian knows that look.

You give it and you receive it.

It is the look that says, “Can I trust you with my life?” Because that is not a dramatic way of putting it.

That is literally what trust means in that context.

He must have decided I was safe because he began to talk.

What happened over the next several months as Vartan slowly carefully introduced me to more of the Christian faith and then eventually to the small underground community he was connected to.

That is a story I will tell in the next part of this testimony.

But I want to end this first part where the beginning truly was with a man at a desk in Thran in the middle of his hollow life holding a piece of paper.

Not a dramatic beginning, not a vision or a miracle in the conventional sense.

Just words on a page and a stillness that had no explanation.

I did not know sitting at that desk what those words were going to cost me.

I did not know what they were going to require of me.

I did not know that they were going to take me away from everything I had been given.

My community, my family’s approval, my safety, the life I had built inside the permitted walls.

I did not know any of that.

But I also did not know what they were going to give me.

Nasarin was still sick.

The prayers I prayed to the ceiling of hospital corridors were still going unanswered as far as I could tell.

My hollow room was still mostly empty.

The regime was still the regime.

Common was still common.

Tehran was still.

But there was a door in the wall now.

and the light coming from underneath it was the only light in the room.

I did not know it yet sitting at that desk.

But God had already found me.

I was just the last one in the room to find out.

I want to tell you how I came to be baptized because it did not happen quickly and it did not happen easily.

And I think the slowness of it is important to understand.

After those first conversations with Vartan, I spent almost 3 years in what I can only describe as a long, careful, stumbling walk toward faith.

Three years of watching those satellite broadcasts alone at night.

Three years of reading carefully and secretly everything I could get my hands on about Jesus and the Christian faith.

3 years of quiet conversations with Vartan, always in private, always with the lowgrade awareness in the background that this conversation was not a conversation we could be overheard having.

3 years of the question inside me slowly changing shape, moving from is anyone there to who is this Jesus to what do I do with what I am beginning to believe.

I was not raised with patience.

Iranian men of my generation and background were not typically raised to sit with uncertainty.

You knew what you knew and you acted on what you knew.

And the framework of Islamic practice gave you a very clear structure for everything.

There was the permitted and the forbidden.

There was the halal and the haram.

There was a fatwa for every question.

The certainty of that framework was I understand now one of the things that kept me inside it long after the framework had stopped meaning anything to me personally.

Uncertainty is harder to live with than a wrong answer.

A wrong answer at least has the comfort of feeling solid underfoot.

What I was walking into had no solid ground in that sense.

It asked me to trust something I could not fully see or prove.

It asked me to believe not in a set of rules but in a person.

That is a very different thing.

Rules you can examine and debate and apply.

A person you have to choose.

And choosing feels exposed in a way that following rules does not.

But here is what kept pulling me forward through those three years.

It was not arguments.

It was not evidence in the academic sense.

It was the quality of life I saw in the people around this faith.

Vartan was one.

There was a particular steadiness in him.

A kind of peace that was not the peace of someone who had been broken into submission but the peace of someone who had been settled from within.

I had known a lot of religious people in my life.

Iran was full of religious people but this was something different.

This was not the performance of piety.

This was something that came from somewhere deeper than behavior.

When Vartan finally brought me to a house church meeting for the first time, it was a Thursday evening in the spring of 2007.

He drove me there himself, taking a route that involved two unnecessary turns because that is what you do.

You do not drive directly to the place.

You approach it the way you would approach something you are not supposed to approach indirectly checking behind you pausing to make sure.

The apartment was in a quiet part of North Tran.

Seven people were there when we arrived, including the pastor, an older man I will call brother Ysef, though that was not his name.

The apartment looked like an apartment.

There was nothing on the walls that would signal to a visitor what took place there.

No cross, no religious symbols of any kind.

This was deliberate.

If officers came in, the room had to be explainable as an ordinary gathering.

We sat in a circle.

They prayed.

They read from the New Testament.

They talked about what they had read.

And the talking was not like any religious discussion I had ever sat in before.

It was not recitation.

It was not performance.

It was people speaking about Jesus the way you speak about someone who is present in the room.

There was a woman there who talked about something she had been struggling with that week.

and the way she connected it to a passage she had been reading and the honesty of it, the plain undefended honesty of saying here is my weakness and here is where I am finding something to hold on to.

That honesty undid something in me.

I sat in that circle and I did not say very much.

I was not ready to say much.

But by the time I left that evening, I knew with a certainty I had not felt about anything in years that I wanted to come back.

I came back and I kept coming back.

Months passed.

The circle became familiar.

The faces became known to me.

The faith became through all those Thursday evenings and all those secret readings and all those quiet prayers.

I was learning to pray in my own words rather than in the formulas I had been given.

Something that I could no longer honestly call someone else’s faith.

It was becoming mine.

Not because I had reasoned my way into it.

because something had been happening in me slowly and genuinely that I did not have any other explanation for.

The hollow room was not hollow anymore.

That is the simplest way I know to say it.

When I was baptized in the spring of 2008, it was in the bathtub of an apartment belonging to a woman in our group whose husband was away on work.

Brother Yseph performed the baptism.

There were four of us present.

The window was closed.

The bathroom door was closed.

There was no music.

Brother Ysef put his hand on my head and said the words and lowered me into that water and I came back up.

And I am not going to pretend I have the words to fully describe what happened in me in that moment.

I sat on the edge of that bathtub and I wept for a long time.

Not for one reason, but for many reasons at once.

For all the years I had lived in the hollow room and not known there was a door.

For Nasarin, still sick, still in and out of hospitals.

for my children who I was determined now to raise with something true inside them, even if I could not yet see how that would be possible.

For the 30 years of plastic keys and empty ceilings and prayers that bounced off the sky, and also, and this was the strange part, the part I did not expect, for joy, a joy that made no logical sense given the circumstances I was sitting in.

I was wet in a stranger’s bathroom in Thran, having just committed what my country’s laws considered apostasy, a crime that could theoretically be punished by death.

And I was experiencing something that I can only call joy.

Real solid interior joy.

The kind that has nothing to do with what is happening around you and everything.

to do with something that has shifted permanently inside you.

I have thought about that bathtub many times in the years since.

I think about it especially on the days when everything is hard and the cost of this life presses down on you and you wonder whether you have made a catastrophic mistake.

On those days, I go back to that bathtub and the weight of that water and the feeling of coming up from under it and I remember that is the anchor.

That moment is the anchor.

What I stepped into after that baptism was the full reality of what it means to follow Jesus in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I had understood it in my mind before.

But there is a difference between understanding something in your mind and living it in your body every day.

The underground church is not a romantic thing.

It is a practical daily often exhausting exercise in loving people and serving God under conditions specifically designed to make both of those things as difficult as possible.

The rotation of meeting places was constant.

We never met in the same location more than a few weeks in a row.

Phones were left in a bag outside the door of wherever we were meeting because the regime had the capability to activate phone microphones remotely and we knew it.

Bibles were wrapped in newspaper or plain cloth covers or disguised as other books.

The Bibles themselves were scarce and precious.

A single Bible would pass through many hands, be written in and underlined and worn to pieces by the time it finished its journey through a church community.

New converts were introduced to the group slowly over multiple weeks of individual vetting because the IRGC’s intelligence wing V AJA was known to place informants inside house churches, not a paranoid fear, a documented reality.

It had happened to people we knew.

You learned to read a room.

You learn to listen for something slightly off in a new person.

A question that felt designed to prompt a specific answer, an eagerness that was slightly too targeted, an interest in names and locations that went a little beyond natural curiosity.

Most of the time, your instincts were wrong, and the new person was simply a genuinely hungry soul who needed what you had.

But you could not afford to assume the cost of being wrong was not hurt feelings.

The cost of being wrong was Evan prison.

Let me tell you about Evan prison because I think people outside Iran do not fully understand what those two words mean to an Iranian Christian or to any Iranian dissident or minority believer.

Evan prison sits in the mountains at the northern edge of Tehran and it is not a place where people are sent to serve sentences in the straightforward sense that a prison sentence is understood elsewhere.

Evan is a place where people go and what happens to them while they are there is largely invisible to anyone on the outside.

Torture has been documented extensively by human rights organizations.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN special reporter on Iran, not as an accusation, but as a established fact documented by the testimonies of hundreds of survivors over decades.

Sleep deprivation, isolation, beatings, psychological pressure applied with professional precision.

People came out of Evan changed.

Some came out of Evan not at all.

Iranian Christians had been going to Evan for decades before I was baptized.

Let me tell you about some of them because their stories need to be said out loud and need to be remembered.

Pastor Hussein Sudman was executed in 1990.

He was a convert from Islam which under the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Sharia made him an apostate, a crime punishable by death.

He had pastored a church in Mashad in northeastern Iran.

He was arrested, tried, convicted of apostasy, and hanged.

His son Ramin was told his father would be released if Hussein recanted his faith.

Hussein Sudman refused to recant.

He was 55 years old when they killed him.

His name is recorded in the history of the persecuted church.

His name should be known everywhere that people talk about religious freedom and the price of faith.

Pastor Medie Debbage was arrested in 1983 and imprisoned for 9 years, a significant portion of it in solitary confinement on the charge of apostasy.

While he was in prison, he wrote a defense of his faith that was eventually read into the public record at his trial, a document of extraordinary clarity and courage in which he said plainly that he had chosen Jesus and would not unchoose him regardless of what the court decided.

International pressure eventually secured his release in 1994.

Two weeks after he was released, his colleague, Bishop Hike Hovepian Mayor, the man who had campaigned most loudly for Debb’s freedom, was found stabbed to death.

6 months later, Mehi Debbage himself was found murdered in a forest.

The killings were never officially solved.

Everyone in the Iranian Christian community understood who was responsible.

These names were known to us in the underground church, not as distant historical figures, but as recent predecessors, as people whose choices and whose deaths define the soil we were standing on.

We were not naive about what we had stepped into.

We were not innocent of the knowledge of what the regime had done and was capable of doing.

We chose to be in that circle anyway.

That is what I want people to understand.

The choice was made with open eyes.

By 2009, I had been part of the house church for 2 years and brother Yseph had begun to speak to me about growing in leadership.

I was not yet a pastor.

That would come later.

But I was someone the group was beginning to look to.

Someone who people came to with questions, someone who seemed to have a gift for sitting with people in the hard places and not flinching.

I do not say this with pride.

I say it because it is relevant to what happened next.

The year 2009 was already electric in Iran before our church was raided.

The presidential election in June of that year in which Mahmud Ahmad Nad was declared the winner over the reformist Mir Hussein Mosavi in a result that millions of Iranians believed was fraudulent had triggered the largest street protests the country had seen since 1979.

The green movement.

Millions of people in the streets dressed in green, chanting for their votes to be counted.

The regime’s response was what the regime’s response always was.

Violence, arrests, disappearances, a brutal grinding down of the resistance until the streets went quiet again.

But something had cracked in the relationship between the Iranian people and their government that year.

Something that would not fully heal.

It was in this atmosphere in the late summer of 2009 that our house church gathered on a Thursday evening in an apartment in the Narmmak district of Tehran.

12 of us were present.

We had been meeting in that particular location for about five weeks, which was longer than we usually stayed anywhere.

There had been difficulty finding alternative spaces, and we had allowed ourselves to stay in one place, perhaps one or two weeks longer than was wise.

I have replayed that evening many times in my mind over the years.

The meeting had been going for about an hour.

We were in the middle of prayer.

The lights in the apartment were at their normal evening level.

Someone was praying out loud.

I no longer remember who.

And the room had that quality of gathered quiet that I described earlier, that particular fullness that comes when people are genuinely present with God together.

Then the door came in.

It did not knock.

It did not ring.

The door came in.

Four men in plain clothes, which was how the intelligence agents always operated.

They did not wear uniforms because the absence of uniforms created a particular kind of terror, a confusion about who exactly these people were and by what exact authority they were entering your space.

They were followed by two more men.

The room erupted into movement and noise for about 30 seconds and then went very still as everyone understood simultaneously that there was nothing productive that movement could accomplish.

I am not going to describe the physical details of what happened in that apartment at length because some of the people who were in that room are still in Iran and the specific details of that night could still be dangerous to them.

What I will tell you is that everyone present was taken.

We were transported separately.

I did not know for the first several days where any of the others were or what was happening to them.

I was taken to a facility I believe was connected to Evan Prison’s intelligence ward, though I was blindfolded during transport and cannot be certain of the location.

I was placed in a small room.

The interrogations began the following morning and continued over a period of 11 days.

The man who conducted most of my interrogations was calm.

I remembered the calmness more than anything else about him.

He was not cruel in an obvious way.

He did not shout.

He spoke to me in a measured, reasonable tone, as though we were colleagues working through a professional problem together.

And that reasonleness was more disturbing than rage would have been.

He wanted names.

He wanted locations.

He wanted me to describe the network of house churches I was connected to and the people who led them.

I told him I did not know what he was talking about.

He smiled at this very slightly and said he understood and we would continue to talk until I remembered.

There was a piece of paper placed in front of me at one of the sessions.

A printed document.

I was told to read it and then sign it.

It stated that I had been deceived by foreign missionaries working on behalf of Zionist and Western powers to destabilize Iran, that I renounced any association with Christian organizations, and that I affirmed my return to Islam.

I read it carefully.

I pushed it back across the table.

The man on the other side looked at me for a long moment and then folded the document and put it away.

He told me that my family would be approached.

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