Sometimes I still can’t believe I’m alive.

I’ll be doing something ordinary.

Making breakfast.

playing with Dawood, who is now a bright, active six-year-old, helping Amira with groceries, and suddenly I’ll stop.

I’ll remember standing in that basement.

I’ll remember the gun barrel pointed at my face.

I’ll remember that I should be dead, but I’m not.

I’m here alive, breathing, given more time for reasons I’m still trying to understand.

Life in our new country has been both easier and harder than I expected.

Easier because we’re safe.

We can worship openly.

We can raise our son as a Christian without hiding it.

We can own Bibles, attend church services, pray out loud.

The freedom is intoxicating after a lifetime of secrecy.

But harder too.

Harder because we’re refugees.

foreigners always slightly outside looking in.

Harder because I speak the language imperfectly.

Harder because people here don’t understand what it’s like to live under persecution.

They’re kind, but they can’t fully grasp what we’ve been through.

Harder because part of my heart is still in Yemen with the believers who remain.

The underground network still exists.

We stay in contact when we can, though it’s dangerous and communications must be careful.

Coded infrequent news filters through slowly.

Updates come in pieces, sometimes months apart.

Ahmed was released from prison after 18 months.

18 months of interrogation, pressure, torture.

But he did not break.

He did not recent.

When he finally walked out of that prison, he was thinner, scarred, changed by what he had endured.

But his faith was stronger than ever.

He sent me a message through the network.

Just a few words.

God was with me in the prison just as he was with you in the basement.

Different miracles, same God.

I wept when I received that message.

Wept from relief that he was alive.

Whipped from guilt that I was safe while he suffered.

Wept from pride in this young man who had proven more faithful than I could have imagined.

Ahmed is still in Yemen, still gathering believers in secret, still shephering the flock.

The work I started, he continues.

The torch has been passed and he carries it well.

Hassan died two years ago.

old age and the complications from the beating he received that day.

The underground church gave him a secret burial and believers risked everything to attend.

They told me he died praising God, grateful for every day he had been able to serve.

Fatima is still alive, still worshiping in secret somewhere in Yemen.

She must be nearly noniti now.

Occasionally, word comes through the network that she’s led another person to Christ, that she’s still bold, still fearless, still shining light in darkness despite her age and the danger.

Mariam continues to lead the women’s group.

It has grown, I’m told.

Quietly, carefully, but it has grown.

Seeds scattered sometimes take root and multiply.

The work goes on.

The church in Yemen has not been destroyed, just dispersed.

Like the early church after persecution in Jerusalem, scattering has led to spreading.

There are now underground churches in cities that had none before.

Believers in regions that were once completely unreached.

From my distant vantage point, I watch and pray and sometimes wonder if I should return.

Could I go back? Should I? My face may no longer be remembered.

Five years is a long time.

Wanted posters fade.

Informants forget.

Maybe I could slip back in.

Resume the work.

Serve my people again.

But then I look at Dawood and I know I can’t.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

I have a son who is growing up free who will never have to hide his faith or live in fear the way I did.

How can I take that from him? How can I risk his life to pursue my calling? So I stay.

I serve the believers here, particularly other refugees who have fled persecution.

I tell my story.

I write it down.

I pray for Yemen constantly.

And I trust that God has me exactly where he wants me.

The nightmares have listened over the years.

I used to wake up several times a week in a cold sweat.

Sure, I heard boots on stairs.

Now it’s maybe once a month.

The hyper vigilance has eased.

I can hear a loud noise without immediately thinking gunfire.

I can see a police officer without feeling my heart race.

Trauma fades, though it never fully disappears.

I’ve learned to live with the scars, the invisible ones that mark my mind and soul.

They’re part of my story now, part of the testimony.

I speak at churches, conferences, gatherings of believers, sometimes to hundreds of people, sometimes to small groups.

The audience size doesn’t matter.

What matters is that people hear what God did and are strengthened in their faith.

I’ve learned to tell the story in a way that glorifies God without glorifying me.

It’s a delicate balance.

People want to make me a hero.

The brave pastor who faced down militants.

But I wasn’t brave.

I was terrified.

I closed my eyes waiting to die.

The heroism was God’s, not mine.

The power was God’s.

The glory belongs to him alone.

After one speaking engagement, a young man approached me.

He was from Syria, another refugee, another survivor of persecution.

He had tears in his eyes as he shook my hand.

He told me that his father had been executed by militants for his faith, shot in front of the family, killed for being a Christian.

I’ve struggled with anger, he said.

Anger at God for not saving my father, for not stopping those bullets the way he stopped yours.

I felt like God played favorites, like he loved you more than my dad.

His pain was raw and real and I understood it.

I had wrestled with the same questions about Ahmed, about Mariam’s husband, about all the martyrs who didn’t receive miraculous deliverance.

I didn’t have easy answers for him.

I couldn’t explain why God intervened for me and not his father.

But I could share what I had learned through my own wrestling.

Your father’s death doesn’t mean God loved him less.

I said it means God trusted him more.

Trusted him to be faithful unto death.

Trusted him to finish his race with courage.

God could have saved him the way he saved me.

But he chose to honor him with martyrdom instead.

Both are gifts.

Both are miracles in their own way.

My miracle was visible.

Everyone could see the guns fail.

Your father’s miracle was invisible but no less real.

The grace to stand firm in the face of death.

The strength to die well.

The faith to trust God even when deliverance didn’t come.

I paused making sure he was hearing me.

I got more years on earth.

Your father got immediate entrance into paradise into the presence of Jesus.

I’m still here struggling with sin and fear and doubt.

He’s there free from all of that, seeing face to face what we can only glimpse.

Which of us got the better miracle? I honestly don’t know.

The young man was crying openly now and so was I.

We held each other.

Two survivors of persecution.

Two men marked by violence.

two believers trying to make sense of God’s mysterious ways.

Tell your father’s story, I urged him, the same way I tell mine.

Tell how he stood firm.

Tell how he chose Jesus over life.

Tell how he was faithful to the end.

That’s a testimony worth sharing.

That’s power worth seeing.

This has become part of my mission.

Not just telling my own story but helping others tell theirs.

Every believer who has survived the persecution has a testimony.

Some survived through miraculous intervention.

Others survived through quiet endurance.

Both are valuable.

Both need to be heard.

I’ve connected with a network of other survivors and refugees.

We meet regularly, share our stories, pray for one another, encourage each other.

Some have testimonies more dramatic than mine.

Others have stories of quiet, faithful persistence through years of pressure and threat.

All of them point to the same truth.

God is with his people in persecution.

Dawood knows my story.

We’ve told him age appropriately about what happened in Yemen about how his father almost died but God protected him about why we had to leave our home and come to this new country.

He’s growing up with a faith forged in reality not sheltered from the cost of following Jesus.

He knows that being a Christian sometimes means danger.

He knows that people die for this faith.

He also knows that God is powerful and present and worth trusting no matter what.

Sometimes he ask questions I can’t answer.

Daddy, why did God save you but not other pastors? I tell him the truth.

I don’t know.

Some questions won’t be answered until we see Jesus face to face.

Amira has blossomed in our new country.

She works with refugee women, particularly those from Muslim backgrounds who have converted to Christianity.

She knows their struggles intimately, the family rejection, the cultural isolation, the fear of violence from their own relatives.

She tells them her story, how she was raised Muslim, how her husband told her about Jesus, how she wrestled with everything she had been taught before finally surrendering to Christ.

How that decision has cost her contact with most of her family, but given her life and purpose and joy.

Together, we’re building something new.

Not the underground church we left behind in Yemen.

That was beautiful, but belongs to another time and place.

Something different.

A community of survivors, refugees, former Muslims, people who have counted the cost and decided Jesus is worth it.

Last month, I baptized three new believers.

All of them former Muslims.

All of them risking family rejection and possibly violence for their decision.

We held the baptism service in a church building.

No basement, no hiding, no whispered prayers.

We sang loudly.

We proclaimed their faith openly.

We celebrated without fear.

As I lowered each one into the water and raised them again, I thought about baptizing people in a basin.

and that basement in Yemen, about how we had to whisper the words, about how we lived in constant fear of discovery.

And uh I wept with gratitude that these three could make their declaration publicly, freely, safely, that they could start their journey of faith without the burden of secrecy that I carried for so many years.

But I also prayed for the believers still in Yemen who don’t have this freedom, who are still hiding, who are still whispering their prayers, who are still risking everything.

Every time they gather, I carry them with me always.

In every sermon I preach, every story I tell, every person I baptize, I remember them.

I am here partly so I can speak for those who can’t speak openly.

I am free partly so I can advocate for those still in bondage.

I’ve met with government officials, human rights organizations, anyone who will listen.

I tell them about the persecution of Christians in Yemen and across the Middle East.

I provide names when I can, stories, evidence.

I plead for intervention, for protection, for religious freedom.

Sometimes they listen, sometimes they care, often they don’t.

The world is full of injustice and persecuted Christians are just one of many groups suffering.

But I keep speaking anyway.

Keep advocating.

Keep hoping that one voice joining other voices might eventually be loud enough to make a difference.

5 years later, I’m still processing what happened in that basement, still understanding new layers of it, still seeing how God is using it.

Recently, I spoke at a conference and afterward, a man approached me.

He was Yemen and from the way he carried himself.

I suspected he might be from a militant background.

He waited until everyone else had left, then came close and spoke quietly.

I was there that day, he said.

My heart stopped.

I looked at him carefully, trying to place his face, but I couldn’t.

I had been so focused on the leader, on the guns, that I hadn’t memorized the faces of the other men.

I was one of the five who tried to shoot you, he continued.

His voice was shaking.

I was so certain we were doing God’s work.

so certain you were an apostate who deserved death.

But when my gun wouldn’t fire, he stopped, overcome with emotion.

When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.

It broke something in me, the certainty.

I couldn’t explain it.

We all tried to rationalize it later.

Bad ammunition, mechanical failure, something.

But I knew deep down I knew something supernatural had happened.

That we had been wrong.

That maybe you had been right.

Tears were streaming down his face.

Now it took me 3 years.

Three years of wrestling with what I saw.

Three years of secretly reading a Bible I stole.

Three years of questioning everything I had been taught.

But 6 months ago, I surrendered to Jesus.

I gave him my life.

The Jesus who protected you from my bullets became my Lord.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t process what I was hearing.

One of the men who tried to kill me had become a believer because of what happened that day.

He continued, I had to find you.

I had to tell you.

I had to ask, can you forgive me? Can I forgive the man who pointed a gun at my face? Who pulled the trigger intending to end my life? Who would have killed me if God hadn’t intervened? In my own strength, I’m not sure I could have.

The trauma is still real.

The nightmares still come.

Part of me still fears men who look like him, sound like him.

But forgiveness isn’t about my strength.

It’s about God’s grace working through me.

The same grace that saved me in that basement.

The same grace that saved this man from darkness into light.

I embraced him.

This former enemy, this new brother.

We wept together.

Him asking forgiveness, me offering it.

Both of us marveling at a god who can turn militant persecutors into passionate disciples.

You don’t need my forgiveness.

I finally said Jesus already gave you his.

That’s all that matters.

But yes, I forgive you completely.

And I’m honored to call you brother.

We’ve stayed in contact since then.

He’s now helping other former militants who are questioning their faith, who are haunted by violence they committed, who are searching for truth.

He knows their world, speaks their language, understands their mindset.

He’s perfectly positioned to reach them.

God is using him in ways I never could.

Another example of how God takes the worst moments and redeems them for his purposes.

This is what I’ve learned in these five years.

The miracle didn’t end when the guns failed to fire.

It continues.

It ripples outward in ways I’m still discovering.

Every person whose faith is strengthened by hearing the story.

Every doubter who reconsiders God’s power.

Every former Muslim who sees evidence that Jesus is is who he claimed to be.

The miracle keeps multiplying.

I still don’t know why God saved me that day.

But I’m beginning to see the fruit of that salvation.

Not just in my continued life, but in the lives touched by the testimony, in believers encouraged, in skeptics challenged, in former enemies transformed.

Sometimes people ask me if I would go through it again, if I would choose to face that trauma again, knowing the outcome.

It’s a hard question.

The trauma is real.

The nightmares are real.

The scars are real.

There are days when the weight of it feels crushing.

But yes, yes, I would because the testimony is real, too.

The transformed lives are real.

The glory given to God is real.

The hope offered to suffering believers is real.

If five minutes of terror in a basement could result in decades of testimony and countless people encouraged in former militants coming to Christ, then yes, it was worth it.

I don’t say that lightly.

I’m not minimizing the cost, but I’m seeing the fruit and the fruit is worth the price.

As I write this, sitting in my small apartment in a country far from Yemen, I can hear Dwood playing in the next room, Amira is cooking dinner.

Normal sounds of a normal evening in a normal family.

Except we’re not normal.

We’re refugees who survived persecution.

We’re carriers of testimony.

We’re living proof that God still does miracles.

And we’re called to live lives worthy of that miracle.

To tell the story, to encourage the suffering, to give hope to the hopeless, to point everyone who will listen to the God who can stop bullets.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds.

Maybe one day I’ll return to Yemen.

Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life here serving refugees and telling my story.

Maybe God has plans I can’t yet imagine.

But I know this.

I am alive for a purpose.

God didn’t save me from those bullets randomly.

He saved me to be a witness, to testify to his power, to encourage his church, to show the world that he is not distant or weak, but present and powerful.

So I will keep telling the story as long as I have breath.

I will keep pointing to his glory.

I will keep encouraging believers to stand firm even in persecution.

I will keep praying for those still in danger, still hiding, still risking everything for Jesus.

And I will keep living in wonder that I’m still here at all.

That five guns failed when they should have worked.

That I walked out of that basement alive.

that God chose to display his power in such an undeniable way.

I’m standing here today as a living miracle.

Walking proof that God is real and active and capable of anything.

My life, every breath, every heartbeat, every moment is testimony to his power and grace.

To anyone reading this who is facing persecution, who is afraid, who wonders if God will protect them, I can promise he’ll stop bullets for you the way he did for me.

He may have a different plan.

He may call you to martyrdom like he called Ahmed’s time in prison or Mariam’s husband’s death.

But I can promise this.

He will be with you.

Whether he delivers you from the fire or walks with you through it, he will not abandon you.

Whether your miracle is visible like mine or invisible like the grace to endure, he is faithful.

To anyone reading this who doubts God’s power, who thinks miracles are ancient history, who believes God doesn’t intervene in our natural world, I am here to tell you that you are wrong.

I’ve seen his power firsthand.

I’ve watched the impossible happen.

I’ve experienced intervention that cannot be explained by science or reason.

God is real.

His power is real.

Miracles are real.

And to anyone reading this who knows Jesus, who loves him, who has given their life to him, count the cost.

Yes, but also count the reward.

Jesus is worth everything we give up for him.

Everything we risk, everything we suffer.

I should be dead.

Five guns pointed at me at point blank range.

Five triggers pulled.

I should be gone.

But God said no.

And here I am.

5 years later, still marveling at his grace.

I don’t know how many years I have left.

The militants might find me one day.

The persecution might catch up with me.

I might die of old age in peace.

Or I might die as a martyr like so many before me.

But however many days I have, I will use them to point to Jesus, to tell what he did, to give glory to his name.

to encourage his church to fulfill the purpose for which he saved my life.

This is my testimony.

This is my calling.

This is why I’m still breathing.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »