They come from the actual undecorated interior of people’s lives and they go up with the particular weight of prayers that know they cannot afford to be casual.

I have been since those years in large churches in other countries, beautiful buildings, excellent music, everything organized and presented with great care.

And I am grateful for those churches and I do not say anything against them.

But I want to tell you honestly that I have never been in any of those buildings and felt what I felt in those living rooms.

I think the presence of God is not absent from the comfortable church.

But I think the presence of God has a particular intensity in places where the people present have literally nothing left but him.

When everything that makes faith convenient has been stripped away and what remains is just a small group of human beings and a god they have chosen at genuine cost.

Something happens in that space that I do not have adequate language for.

I know it when I am in it.

I have been in it hundreds of times.

It is the realest thing I know.

The years moved.

The pressure did not let up.

Farhad, the young man who had been sentenced after our 2009 raid, was released after serving his sentence and left Iran.

I received a message from him years later from a country I will not name.

He was well.

He was still following Jesus.

That message meant more to me than I can explain.

The Masa Amini protests in 2022 marked something.

When a 22year-old woman died in the custody of the morality police and they ran streets filled with her name.

When young women stood on cars and cut their hair in public.

When the generation born after the revolution held it up and looked at it and said openly that they did not want it.

I watched all of this with grief for the blood being spilled and with something else underneath the grief.

Something I had not let myself feel in full for a long time.

It felt like a nation coming to the end of something.

Not the end of itself, the end of a lie it had been told about itself.

the end of a version of God it had been given that was never the real God but only a weapon wearing God’s name.

I did not know watching the Amini protests and their violent suppression what was coming next.

I could not have guessed the specific shape of it.

But I had been praying for decades for God to move in Iran.

And something in me was beginning to feel that the ground was changing under everything.

That the soil that had been hard and closed for so long was beginning slowly, painfully, at great cost to break open.

Seeds do not grow in sealed ground.

They grow in broken ground.

And Iran’s ground in those years was breaking.

I was awake when it began.

This is not something I say to make myself sound more present in the moment than I was.

I was awake because I am often awake in the early hours of the morning.

It is one of the habits of 20 years of underground ministry.

The early hours have a quality of quiet that the rest of the day does not have.

and I have come to use them for prayer, for reading, for the kind of thinking that requires silence.

So I was in a small room on the morning of February 28th, 2026 in the early hours before dawn and I was praying.

The first thing I noticed was a sound.

It was distant enough that my mind did not immediately process it correctly.

It registered as something industrial, perhaps the kind of low percussion you sometimes hear from construction or heavy vehicles on a far road.

I noted it and continued praying.

Then it came again, and this time there was something in the quality of it that made my body react before my mind did.

something that old instinct buried from the air raid sirens of my childhood recognized before I consciously understood what I was hearing.

Then my phone began lighting up.

Messages were arriving faster than I could read them from people in Iran.

From contacts in the diaspora who were watching news channels, from pastors in our network who were awake and receiving the same messages I was.

The fragments came in pieces as they always do in those first hours of something large.

A word here, a location there.

Nothing coherent yet, but all of it pointing towards something that the body understands before the mind assembles it into fact.

Tehran, Isvahan, explosions, military targets, Israel, the United States.

I put my phone down and sat very still for a moment.

I cannot tell you that I was calm because I was not.

But neither was I in the kind of panic the situation might logically have called for.

I was in a state that I have been in before at moments of extreme crisis.

A suspended state where the body is alert and the mind is working very fast.

But something underneath all of that is simply waiting, simply watching with a steadiness that does not belong to me personally, but has been given to me and which I have learned over years to lean on rather than fight against.

I prayed, not with words at first, just with presence, just a turning toward God in the dark of that room, in the sounds of what was beginning.

And then I picked up my phone and began to answer the messages.

The hours that followed were the most overwhelming hours I have experienced since the night of the 2009 raid.

And they were overwhelming in a completely different way.

In 2009, the overwhelm was fear and helplessness.

What I felt on the morning of February 28th was harder to categorize.

It was fear.

Yes.

For the people I loved who were inside Iran.

For the new believers who were scattered across the country with no preparation for what was now happening around them.

For the innocent people in the path of strikes that were not designed to care about innocence.

But it was also something else.

something running alongside the fear that I did not know at first what to call.

I was in contact with members of my network throughout that morning.

People were frightened.

Some were in cities where strikes were close enough to feel.

Some had family members in areas that were being hit.

One woman in our network, a young woman barely 20 years old who had come to faith just 8 months before called me from inside Iran and she was not making words, just sounds.

And I stayed on the phone with her for a long time without saying much, just being there, just being a voice that was not afraid in the way she was afraid.

and I prayed over her quietly until the sound she was making gradually became steadier.

There was another member of our network, an older man I had known for over a decade whose apartment was near a government facility that was struck in the early hours.

He was uninjured, but the windows of his apartment were broken by the pressure wave.

And he described sitting on his floor in the glass and the cold air coming through the broken windows.

And it was his description of sitting there that broke through my composure for a moment because I knew that man.

I knew what he had endured over his years of faith.

I knew the particular quality of his patience and his quiet courage and the image of him sitting in glass on his floor in the cold in the broken open morning of what Iran was becoming.

That image found a crack in me.

And then the news came through about kmin.

I do not remember exactly which message carried it.

I do not think it was a single message.

It came in pieces the way all large news comes.

A report here, a confirmation there, a statement from a source, another confirmation, and then it was simply a fact that the world contained.

Ali Kame, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the man who had held that position since 1989, who had been the single most powerful figure in the country I was born in for my entire adult life, was dead.

I did not cheer.

I need you to understand this because I think some people expect that an Iranian Christian pastor would respond to this news with something like triumph.

And I want to be honest about what actually happened in me.

I sat down.

I put my phone face down on the surface beside me.

I was very still for a long time.

What came was not celebration.

What came was 37 years.

That is the only way I can describe it.

37 years of everything this man’s regime had done arrived in me simultaneously.

not as thought but as weight.

I thought about Pastor Hussein Sudant hanging from a rope in 1990.

I thought about Mhmedi Debage in solitary confinement for years writing his defense of his faith on whatever paper he could find in a cell he was not supposed to leave.

I thought about Bishop Hake stabbed in a forest.

I thought about Farad, 24 years old, led out of our prayer meeting in handcuffs on a Thursday evening.

I thought about every person in my network who had been taken, questioned, beaten, sentenced, exiled, silenced.

I thought about my father’s voice closing like a door.

I thought about my mother asking me whether Jesus was worth dying for.

I thought about my daughter at 9 years old listening to me tell her what to do if certain people came to the door and then I put my face in my hands and I wept.

I wept for a long time.

Not for Kame.

I want to be completely honest.

I did not weep for him.

But I also did not weep in victory.

I wept in a way I cannot fully explain even now.

a releasing of something that had been held under pressure for so long that I had stopped feeling the pressure.

The way you stop feeling the weight of something you have been carrying for years until the moment it is lifted and you suddenly feel the absence of it in your body.

Something enormous had been lifted.

something that had been pressing down on the country I loved and the people I served for almost four decades.

And the release of it, even in the middle of war, even in the middle of strikes and burning buildings and broken windows and a young woman crying on a phone in a city I could not reach.

The release of it was real and it moved through me like something physical.

I need to say something carefully here and I need anyone listening to hear it carefully.

I do not celebrate bombs.

I do not celebrate war.

I do not celebrate the deaths of human beings including the death of a man who caused enormous suffering because that man was also a person made in the image of God.

and his death is not a thing to celebrate but a thing to mark with the seriousness it deserves.

And more than that, the strikes on February 28th killed people who were not kame.

They killed people who were not IRGC commanders or regime architects.

They killed people who had been living inside the Islamic Republic as victims.

People who had never had a choice about the government above them.

People who were simply in the wrong location when metal fell from the sky.

I know a Christian family in my network who had been underground believers for over 12 years.

People who had endured everything the regime had to give and had held on.

and their neighbor, a man with three children, a man who had no involvement in the regime and no role in its crimes, was killed in the strikes.

Three children without a father.

Three children who had nothing to do with any of this.

That is not collateral.

That is a man.

That is three children.

And if anyone in the church wants to describe what happened on February 28th with only triumph and no grief, I ask them to sit with those three children first.

I say this not to undermine what I believe God is doing in Iran.

I say it because the gospel requires honesty.

The gospel does not ask us to flatten our grief in order to make our hope look cleaner.

It asks us to hold both.

It always asks us to hold both.

That is one of the things about this faith that I have found consistently true across 20 years.

It does not offer easy comfort.

It offers honest comfort which is harder to receive and infinitely more real.

In the days that followed the strikes, reports began reaching me through my network about what was happening inside some of Iran’s prisons.

I want to be careful here because I cannot verify all of these reports with the kind of precision I would prefer, and I will not make claims I cannot stand behind.

What I can tell you is what I received from sources I trust.

In the confusion and the rapid political shifts of those first days, the authority structures inside some detention facilities went through significant disruption.

Some guards abandoned posts.

Some facilities entered a state where the normal functioning of the system broke down.

In this environment, some prisoners were released formally or informally who had been inside for faith related offenses.

I received a phone call 3 days after the strikes from a number I did not recognize.

I almost did not answer it.

When I did, the voice on the other end said my name.

My real name, not Dares.

And I knew immediately who it was.

It was a pastor I had known for over 15 years.

A man who had been inside Evan prison for three years on charges of acting against national security.

A man I had prayed for by name out loud every single day for three years every day.

not as a ritual, as an act of faith that was sometimes difficult to sustain because three years is a long time and silence is a hard thing to keep praying into.

He said my name and I could not speak.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out for almost a full minute and he waited on the other end of the line and then he said my name again gently to let me know he was still there.

I will not reproduce the conversation that followed.

It was private and it was sacred.

But I will tell you that when I finally found words, the first thing I said was, “I prayed for you every day.

And his response was something I will carry for the rest of my life.

He said he knew.

He had not known in any rational sense.

He had been in a cell without access to communication, but he said he knew he had felt it.

I sat with that phone call for a long time after it ended.

I thought about what prayer actually is.

I thought about all the years I had prayed into things I could not see.

All the prayers that had seemed to go up and dissolve into silence.

All the mornings I had prayed in the dark of a room and had to choose in the absence of evidence to believe that the prayers were landing somewhere real.

And I thought about that voice on the phone saying, “I knew.

I felt it.

I want to talk about something else that happened in those days because it may be the thing that surprised me most of everything that February 28th unleashed.

My phone and the phones of other house church leaders across my network began receiving calls and messages from Muslims.

Not hostile calls, not threatening calls, questions.

I need you to understand what this means in context.

For decades, the dynamic between the underground church and the surrounding Muslim community had been one of extreme caution on both sides.

We did not approach Muslims.

We did not evangelize openly.

We did not make ourselves known.

The risk of doing so was too great.

And beyond the personal risk, the risk to the person being approached was real.

A Muslim who showed interest in Christianity could face serious consequences.

The separation was enforced not by preference but by survival.

And now, without anything being initiated from our side, messages were arriving.

A man who said he had known for years that a neighbor was a Christian and had never said anything, but now wanted to talk.

a young woman who had been watching Christian satellite broadcasts in secret for months but had not known how to reach anyone and had now through a chain of connections found a number to contact a man who identified himself as a former member of the bas’s paramilitary volunteer force who said he had spent 15 years enforcing a system he had believed believed was God’s will.

And now he did not know what he believed about anything.

And he had been given a number and he was calling it.

That last call lasted 4 hours.

I am not going to describe everything that was said in it.

I will tell you that by the end of it, the man on the other end of the phone was not the same man who had called at the beginning.

I do not mean he converted in that phone call.

I mean something had opened in him, something that had been sealed for a long time.

When we finished talking, he said he wanted to talk again and I said yes and we have talked since.

I do not know where his journey will end.

I know where it is going.

This is what I want the world to understand about what is happening in Iran right now.

Underneath the news cycle, underneath the military strategy, underneath the political analysis, the Islamic Republic used religion as a weapon for 47 years.

They took the name of God and they put it in front of every act of oppression, every execution, every arrested pastor, every plastic key around a child’s neck.

And when the system built on that weaponized version of God began to collapse, something predictable and also somehow astonishing happened.

The people living inside that system began to ask whether the god they had been given was the real god or whether there was something else.

There was always something else.

The underground church knew this because the underground church had been meeting that something else in living rooms every Thursday for 30 years.

But the invitation to find it had never been this open before.

The doors that were being blown off their hinges by the events of February 28th were not only political doors.

They were spiritual doors.

And on the other side of them, hungry, disoriented, searching, were millions of Iranians who had been told for their entire lives what God was like and were now in the rubble of that telling, willing to ask the question again from the beginning.

There is a verse in the book of Isaiah that I have returned to throughout my life at critical moments.

It says, “I am doing a new thing.

Do you not perceive it?” I have leaned on that verse in dark times when the new thing was not visible, and I was asking God to remind me it was coming.

I went back to that verse on the days after February 28th.

I sat with it for a long time, and for the first time in all the years I had read it, I was reading it, not as a promise still waiting to be fulfilled, but as a description of something I could see with my own eyes in real time, happening in the country I had been born in and loved and served and suffered for.

I am 51 years old.

I have been a pastor in the underground church for 15 years.

I have sat in interrogation rooms and bathtubs and hospital corridors and prison waiting rooms and living rooms with closed curtains.

I have prayed into silence for decades.

I have held people who were breaking and tried to be steady for them.

I have been afraid more times than I can count and have chosen to continue more times than I can count.

And I am standing.

I cannot say standing literally.

I am in a room somewhere in the world that I cannot name.

But I am standing at the edge of something I do not have words for yet.

Something I have prayed toward for 20 years without knowing if I would live to see it.

The ground of Iran is broken open and something is growing in it.

The war is still happening.

People are still dying.

The future is not settled.

I do not pretend otherwise.

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