what to say to the neighbors, how to explain why you are not at Friday prayers, what to tell your family when they ask questions, and the children had to be taught from a young age before they could fully understand why that there were things you did not say outside the house, that some of what we did and believed was private.

That is a burden to place on a child and I have never been entirely at peace with the necessity of it.

And yet within all of that, within the secrecy and the caution and the daily weight of the double life, there was something extraordinary happening in us and among the people we were connected to.

People were being transformed not in the abstract programmatic sense of a religious program producing behavioral change in the real particular individual sense of actual human lives being turned around.

A man who had been crippled by shame for years finding freedom in the experience of grace.

A marriage being restored when both partners began to pray together.

a young person who had been on the edge of something very dark finding a reason to stay.

These were not statistics.

These were people I knew and watching these transformations happened was fuel for everything.

By 2010, I was leading a small network of house groups across Thrron.

I want to be honest that the growth of this responsibility was not something I sought.

It happened because people needed leadership and I had through the years of study and the depth of my own encounter with God developed the capacity to provide it.

I was teaching, counseling, baptizing.

I was a pastor.

He not by any formal denominational process.

There was no institution here to confer the title, but by the actual functioning definition of the word.

The network numbered perhaps 60 to 70 people at its peak.

Not large by any comparison with a conventional church.

But each person in that number represented a story of real transformation, real cost, real courage.

I knew all of them.

I knew their families, their circumstances, their specific spiritual struggles.

She that knowledge that pastoral intimacy was one of the greatest privileges of my life and also when what came next came one of the greatest sources of grief.

I knew by 2011 that I was being watched.

It was not a single thing but an accumulation of small signals that a person living in a surveillance society learns to read.

I became more cautious.

I talked to Miriam about it and we prayed together about it seriously.

But there were practical conversations about what she would do if I was arrested, who she would contact, where she would go with the children.

These were not panicked conversations.

They were the deliberate, responsible conversations of people who understood their situation.

And there was something else happening in those months before the arrest.

something that I can only describe as a preparation.

Not a preparation I chose or manufactured.

A preparation that was being worked in me.

A deepening of my prayer life that was qualitatively different from what had come before.

a settling in me about the possibility of suffering that did not come from bravado or spiritual performance, but from something that felt like grace being deposited, like God filling a tank before a long journey.

I did not understand it fully at the time.

In retrospect, I understand it completely.

The night I knew I was going to be arrested before it happened.

I was sitting alone in my study after the children had gone to bed.

Miam was reading in the other room.

And I had a very clear, very quiet sense, not a voice, not a vision, just a settled conviction that whatever was coming, I was going to be okay.

Not okay in the sense of comfortable or safe.

Okay sense of held, sustained, not abandoned.

I sat with that sense for a long time.

I held it carefully the way you hold something fragile and then I went to bed.

Two nights later, she know on a cold night in January 2012, the knock came.

It was a Thursday night.

I know it was Thursday because of the significance of that detail in Iranian life.

Thursday evening is the beginning of the weekend in Iran.

A time when families are home, when things are relaxed, when the pace of the week eases.

There was nothing unusual about that evening.

The children were asleep.

Miam was in the kitchen.

I was in my study looking over some notes I had been preparing.

on the apartment was quiet in the particular way it gets quiet when everyone you love is safe inside it and the world outside is holding its noise.

The knock came at around 10 at night.

It was not a polite knock.

It was the kind of knock that does not distinguish itself from a demand.

Loud, flat, immediate.

And I knew in that fraction of a second between hearing the sound and standing up from my chair, I knew, not with fear exactly, with a kind of solemn recognition.

The thing I had been preparing for had arrived.

There were four men at the door, plain clothes, no uniforms.

This is deliberate.

The intelligence agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence almost never appear in the recognizable dress of police or military because the ambiguity is functional.

You do not know exactly who these men are, what authority they carry, what is about to happen.

They identified themselves, showed a document that I was not given time to read carefully.

I had told me I needed to come with them.

They were professional and controlled.

There was no unnecessary drama in how they moved.

They had done this many times before.

They came into the apartment.

They did not wait to be invited.

Miriam came out of the kitchen when she heard the voices, and I watched her see what was happening.

I want to tell you what I saw in her face in that moment.

All because I have carried that image with me through everything that followed and it is central to who she is and what she is.

There was fear.

I will not lie and say there was not because she is a human being and fear was the only rational response.

But there was also something else underneath the fear and not destroyed by it.

A steadiness, a refusal to collapse.

So she looked at me and I looked at her and in that exchange which lasted only a few seconds because the men were moving through the apartment.

Everything that needed to be said between us was said without a single word.

I love you.

I am afraid for you.

I am going to be okay.

Take care of them.

I know.

I will.

She held herself together in a way that even now when I think about it fills me with a grief and an admiration that are difficult to separate from each other.

She did not scream.

You she did not beg them.

She stood in her own kitchen with the dignity of a woman who understood exactly what was happening and who had decided in that instant that she was not going to give these men the satisfaction of seeing her fall apart.

They took my phone and went through the apartment looking for materials, books, notes, anything that could be used.

They found things, portions of scripture I had written out, notes from teachings I had prepared.

They took what they found into bags.

I I was allowed to pack a small bag of personal items.

I was not allowed to wake the children to say goodbye.

Dra was 8 years old.

Sharon was five.

They were asleep in their room, and I was not allowed to walk in there and hold them one last time before everything changed.

I have thought about that specific denial many times over the years.

The cruelty of small things.

I walked out of my home and into a waiting car.

We drove to Evan Prison in silence.

Evan sits in the north of Thrron, uh, tucked against the foothills in a way that makes it feel geographically separate from the city, even though it is not far.

If you did not know what it was, you might not look twice at the walls and the gates, but every Iranian knows what it is.

It has been the site of some of the darkest chapters of Iranian history under the Sha and then under the Islamic Republic.

different political authorities using the same location for the same essential purpose and which is the confinement and the breaking of people they find inconvenient.

The name Evan carries a specific weight in Iranian consciousness that no other location in the country quite matches.

When you first arrive at Evan, particularly in the intelligence ward, which is often called ward 209, the first thing they do is take from you the things that keep you oriented.

Your clothes are replaced.

Your possessions are cataloged and removed.

You are put in a temporary cell.

And then the most important thing happens.

You lose time.

There is no window.

The lights do not change with the outside world.

You do not know if it is day or night, what hour it is, how long you have been in that room.

This disorientation is deliberate and it is effective.

The human mind depends on temporal reference points in ways we take completely for granted until those reference points are removed.

Without them, anxiety rises and judgment begins to blur.

But I was held in initial processing conditions for what I later estimated was about 3 days, though I could not have told you that at the time.

The first interrogation came when I was already confused about time and had not slept properly and had eaten very little.

This too is deliberate timing.

The interrogations were conducted in a small room with a table between me and the interrogators.

Sometimes one man, sometimes two.

Ye, there was a primary interrogator.

I will call him the interrogator who led most of my sessions, particularly in the early months.

He was not the kind of man you might imagine if you are drawing on film or television depictions of this kind of figure.

He was not loud or physically threatening.

He was measured, educated, articulate.

He spoke in a careful almost academic way about complex subjects in a different context in a university perhaps.

He he might have been someone whose lectures you found interesting but he was very good at what he did and what he did was not primarily information extraction.

The questions about my network, about names and locations and funding sources, those came and I refused to answer them consistently.

And there were consequences for those refusals.

But the deeper project of the interrogations was not information.

It was dismantlement.

Mo He was trying to take apart the framework of my faith and my sense of self in a way that would leave me with nothing to stand on.

He would spend an entire session examining the logic of my conversion, not in a philosophical debate format, but in a way designed to introduce doubt.

Had I been manipulated by foreign interests? Had the people who brought me into the Christian community used me? Was I certain that what I felt in prayer was not simply a psychological phenomenon produced by isolation and group suggestion? Was I willing to destroy my family, my children’s future, my wife’s life for something that might ultimately be nothing more than selfdeception? These questions were not random.

They were targeted at the places where my inner life was most vulnerable.

A man can resist a question that has nothing to do with him.

It is much harder to resist a question that reaches into the real complexity of your actual experience.

Because the truth is that I had asked some of those questions myself, not as evidence of doubt, but as part of honest faith, and he was using my honesty against me.

The physical conditions during this period were an instrument as much as the interrogations were.

The cell was small, the light was constant.

There was never darkness, never the normal signal to the body that rest was available, and the temperature was kept low.

The food was minimal in both quantity and quality.

I was not beaten in those early weeks, though I knew that others elsewhere in the prison were subjected to physical violence.

I heard things through the walls that I will not describe in detail because the people those sounds belong to deserve more than to have their suffering described in a testimony that is primarily about my own experience.

But the cumulative effect of constant light and cold and minimal food and irregular unpredictable sleep disturbance and the relentless pressure of the interrogations.

The effect of all of that together is something that I want people to understand is a form of torture.

It does not leave visible marks.

It leaves something else.

There came a point approximately 6 weeks into my detention, I believe, where I reached a place of interior collapse that I have not fully spoken about publicly before.

I I was in my cell alone late in what I assumed was night based on some internal sense that was no longer reliable.

And I experienced something that I can only describe as a complete internal darkness, not just fear, not just exhaustion, something that felt like the total absence of God.

Like every experience I had ever had in prayer, every encounter, every moment of that warmth and presence that had sustained my faith for years, all of it had been some kind of extended selfdeception.

And now, just stripped of everything external.

The truth was becoming visible.

There was nothing there.

There was a cell and a wall and a light that never went out and a man who was completely alone.

I lay on the floor of that cell.

I do not know for how long.

And I prayed, though calling it prayer almost sounds too dignified for what it was.

It was more like a desperate reaching in a direction where I was no longer sure anything existed to be reached.

I said, and I do not remember the exact words and would not pretend to.

something that amounted to if you are there I need you to be real right now not later now because I have nothing left.

What happened next I will try to describe as accurately as I can and without embellishment because embellishment would dishonor it.

The darkness did not lift dramatically.

There was no sudden vision, no audible voice, no light show.

But into the room where I was lying on that floor, there came something that I can only call a presence.

Quiet, unmistakable, and entirely external to me.

Meaning, I know the difference between something I generated from my own psychological resources and something that arrived from outside them.

And this was the second thing.

This presence settled into that room the way warmth settles into a cold space when a heat source is brought into it.

And with it came a verse that I had memorized, but that arrived in that moment not as a recollection but as a communication.

From Isaiah 43.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overflow you.

When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you.

I am not going to try to make that moment sound more dramatic than it was.

I am going to tell you that after that night and something in me was settled that was never fully unsettled again during those 8 years.

The particular fear, the fear of abandonment, the fear that my faith had been nothing and that I was alone in the universe, lost its power over me.

Not all fear disappeared.

The fear for Miam and the children never left.

The physical and psychological difficulty of what I was enduring did not change.

But the deepest terror, the existential terror was addressed in that cold cell on that floor.

I by something that was not me.

My trial took place after several months of pre-trial detention.

I want to describe the charges clearly because I think it is important for people outside Iran to understand exactly what the Iranian state criminalizes.

I was charged with apostasy, leaving Islam.

I was charged with leading an illegal church, which in Iran means any gathering of Christians that is not part of the small number of officially recognized pre-revolution historic churches, and that includes converts from Islam.

I was charged with evangelizing Muslims, which means sharing my faith with people who were not Christians.

Bandai was charged with acting against national security through what was described as connection with foreign anti-revolutionary organizations.

A charge that was applied to almost every house church leader because the state categorizes the entire network of international Christian organizations that support Iranian believers as hostile foreign actors.

These charges together in Iran’s legal framework can carry a death sentence.

Our my lawyer who had been assigned rather than chosen and who was navigating a system with very little room for genuine defense told me plainly that the apostasy charge alone could result in execution.

He urged me in the careful language of a man who could not be too direct to consider the benefit of demonstrating cooperation with the court.

I understood what he was saying and I told him as clearly and respectfully as I could that I was not going to recant my faith, that I was not going to provide information about other believers, that I would speak honestly in court about who I was and what I believed.

He absorbed this information with the expression of a man who was not surprised, but who had been obligated to try.

The court session itself was not long.

In Iran’s system for cases of this nature, the proceeding does not resemble what most people in democratic countries understand as a trial.

The judge in my case was also a cleric.

The outcome based on what had been gathered during my detention was not genuinely open.

I was allowed to make a statement.

I used that opportunity to say clearly that I believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

That I had come to this faith through my own genuine conviction and not through foreign manipulation.

That I had led a community of believers whose only activity was worship and the study of scripture and that I did not consider this a crime against my country or my people.

I I said that I loved Iran.

I said that the God I served was not the enemy of Iran.

I said that I was prepared to accept whatever judgment the court gave, but that I could not deny what I had encountered and what I believed.

The sentence was life imprisonment.

The words landed in my chest like something physical.

Not because I had not known they were coming.

I had, but knowing and hearing are different.

Life imprisonment.

I was 35 years old.

I had a wife and two children.

And a man in a court in Thran had just told me that I would die inside Evan prison.

I looked at my lawyer.

He looked down at the table.

I looked at the judge who was already moving on.

I looked at the wall and I felt under the weight of those words something that I want to be honest about because I think dishonesty here would damage the authenticity of everything else I have told you.

I felt for a period of days after that sentencing.

A grief so profound that it was almost physical not for myself.

I had made my peace with whatever came for me.

The grief was for Miam, for Dar and Sharan, for the life they were going to have to live without me in it.

For Darra’s growing up, for Sharan’s childhood, for all the ordinary things, birthday meals, homework, the first day of a new school year, the conversations you have with your children late at night when they cannot sleep and they come to find you.

All of that now taken from them.

And I had chosen this.

Oh, in the sense that I had the option to prevent it and had refused to take that option.

Continue reading….
« Prev Next »