That weight was real.

But I had also chosen it in the deeper sense that I could not have done otherwise and remained who I am.

And in that deeper sense, it was not a choice at all.

It was simply the consequence of being without apology or reservation exactly who God had made me.

I was taken from the courtroom back into the body of the prison and the next chapter of my life began.

There is something that happens to time in a long imprisonment.

In the first year, you are still anchored to the outside world by memory and by hope.

You count weeks.

You remember what you would normally be doing on a specific day.

You celebrate your children’s birthdays inside your own head, alone in a cell, picturing what their face might look like, blowing out candles you are not there to see.

The first year is in many ways the hardest uh because you are carrying the full weight of the life you are missing and you have not yet found a way to set that weight down.

By the second year, something shifts.

Not a lessening of the love or the longing.

Those do not decrease, but a kind of adaptation begins.

Your mind and spirit, because they must, find a way to inhabit the present rather than perpetually mourning the past or anxiously projecting into the future.

and you begin to live inside the life you actually have rather than constantly measuring it against the life you have lost.

I am not describing this as some achievement of mine.

I am describing it as something that happened in me over time through the combination of sustained prayer and the absolute necessity of survival and I believe the grace of God working in my psychology in ways that were merciful.

And the daily reality of Evan prison, specifically the years of my imprisonment there, involved a routine that was simultaneously rigid and unpredictable, which is its own particular form of psychological strain.

The structure was fixed, the same meal times, the same lights, the same rotations.

But within that fixed structure, things could change without warning.

A cell transfer, an unexpected period of isolation, privileges granted and then withdrawn, a sudden change in the guard assignment that affected the temperature of daily life in ways that were small but significant.

You could never fully relax into the routine because the routine could be disrupted at any point and the disruption was never explained and rarely predictable.

I was moved from the initial holding situation into a shared cell in the general population of the prison after the trial.

This was in purely human terms a relief.

The shared cell meant other people, a conversation, the small social commerce of daily life that we take entirely for granted until it is removed from us.

Even in a prison, even under the worst conditions, human beings find ways to create small dignities.

A shared meal is still a meal.

A conversation before sleep is still connection.

A joke told quietly in a cell is still laughter.

Thus things matter enormously, and I will not minimize them.

And the men I shared cells with over the years of my imprisonment were a cross-section of the many kinds of people Evan holds.

Political prisoners, journalists, activists, people who had posted something on social media that the authorities found objectionable.

Lawyers who had defended the wrong clients.

economic prisoners, people caught in the complex web of Iran’s various prohibited activities and religious prisoners like myself, Christians, Bahi, Sufi Muslims whose practice the state did not sanction, Sunni Muslims from minority ethnic communities who had run a foul of the religious establishment.

There was a man I will call a rash who was in the cell with me for about 14 months.

He was a journalist who had been arrested for something he had written about economic corruption among officials.

He was secular, sharp, deeply skeptical of all religion, which put him and me in an interesting dynamic.

We had long conversations, many of them over many months.

He challenged me in the way that intelligent, honest skeptics do, which is the most useful kind of challenge.

He did not ask me easy questions.

He asked me, “If your God is good and powerful, what exactly are you doing here?” He asked me whether I had considered the possibility that my conversion experience was a psychological response to a deep need for meaning rather than a genuine encounter with a real being.

Well, he asked me whether the harm done across history in the name of Christianity was something I could honestly account for.

I engaged with every one of those questions, not defensively.

I was beyond that, but with a genuine willingness to think carefully because I believe that a faith that cannot withstand honest questioning is not a faith worth having.

We went on those conversations for months, sitting in our cell, two men with nothing to do but think and talk.

in a rash, never became a Christian while I knew him, and I never pressured him, too.

But something was happening in him over those months.

I could see it, a loosening of the certainty of his dismissal, a growing openness to the possibility that there was more to the universe than his previous framework allowed for.

When he was transferred, he told me privately that the conversations had stayed with him in a way he had not expected.

That was enough for me.

There were other believers I found inside Evan.

Not many, but some.

When you are in a large prison for years, these things happen gradually and carefully.

the establishment of trust, the slow recognition in another person’s eyes that they carry the same thing you carry.

There was a man I will call brother Cameron.

He had been arrested before me, was serving a long sentence for similar activities to mine, and had been inside Evan for several years when I arrived.

He became and in the most genuine sense of the word a brother to me.

We could not always meet freely or regularly.

The conditions of our respective cell blocks and the movements of the guard assignments determined what was possible.

But when we could meet, we met with the intensity of people who understand that time is precious and that connection is survival.

We prayed together.

We recited scripture together quietly from memory on sitting close enough that the words carried between us without needing to travel far.

We talked about God with a directness and an intimacy that I think is only really possible when you are in a situation where everything else has been stripped away.

There is no performance in those conversations.

There is no theological point scoring.

There is just two people reduced to their essentials talking honestly about the thing that is sustaining them in an unsustainable situation.

Brother Cameron had a quality of faith that I have not often encountered.

It was very quiet and very deep.

He did not speak much about his experiences or his feelings.

He was a contained man.

But when he prayed, there was something in his prayers that was unlike most prayer I had heard.

A directness, an intimacy with God that sounded like a man talking to someone he had known for a long time and trusted completely.

He had been in that prison for years at that point, and his faith had not shrunk under the pressure.

It had deepened.

Watching that in him was a confirmation to me in the early years especially that what I was trying to hold on to was holdable.

Every year with the regularity of a ritual that was designed to erode rather than honor, officials came to me with the recantation document.

The wording changed slightly from year to year, but the substance never did.

It was a statement that I had been misled in my conversion, that I renounced Christianity, that I returned to the practice of Islam, and that I acknowledge the authority of the Islamic Republic’s religious framework.

Signing it would lead to review of my sentence, possible reduction, possible release.

Every year, I refused.

I want to describe what that refusal cost because I do not want it to sound like a triumphant or effortless thing.

The first few times it was met with extended periods in isolation.

Solitary confinement in heaven is a specific kind of suffering.

The cell is small and the time in it is absolute.

no meaningful interaction with other human beings for days or weeks at a stretch.

In isolation, the mind has no choice but to turn inward.

And for a person who is carrying real grief and real fear, that inward turning can become very dark.

I struggled in isolation more than I have often admitted.

And the thoughts that came in those periods were not good thoughts.

They were the thoughts of a man who was questioning every decision that had brought him to where he was, who was measuring the cost against the return in a way that did not produce comfortable conclusions.

But here is what I also found in isolation.

And I say this not to dress it up in false spiritual heroism, but because it is true.

The presence of God was more tangible in those isolated periods than at almost any other time.

I think it is because in isolation there is nothing else, nothing to distract, nothing to lean on, nothing to fill the space except what is actually there.

And what was actually there, what I found in the absolute silence of those periods was not emptiness.

It was presence.

The same presence I had first encountered in a dream before I understood who it belonged to.

the same presence that had come into my cell on the floor in those early terrible weeks.

It was consistent.

It was faithful and it was enough.

In my fourth year of imprisonment, the dreams began.

I have spoken about these dreams in select settings and I will speak about them here fully because they are a central part of this testimony.

I want to be careful and precise about how I present this because I have seen prophetic claims used irresponsibly and I have seen people build entire narratives on uncertain foundations.

So let me tell you exactly what the dreams were and exactly what I understood about them at the time without adding the interpretation that came later.

The first dream came on an ordinary night.

I was asleep in my cell.

In the dream there was a structure large imposing carrying the sense of great authority.

I understood this structure in the dream to represent the highest level of power in Iran.

Not the building itself, not a specific location, but the authority and the symbolic representation of the system of control that was embodied in the Supreme Leader’s office.

Around this structure, there were layers like concentric rings of reinforcement.

It felt impregnable.

It felt like something that had been built to last indefinitely.

And then something came from above.

Not from a human direction, not from a military direction, not from a political direction.

From above.

And in the dream, this was unmistakably a direction that carried spiritual significance.

Above meant something different from the horizontal directions that human power operates in.

And what came struck the structure at its center.

There was a rupture, a breaking, and then, and this is the part that stayed with me most, a stillness settled over what had broken.

Not the stillness of death, not the silence of a place destroyed and emptied, more like the stillness of a thing that had been very tightly sealed, a jar or a container that had been opened.

And in that stillness there was the sense of something entering or something being able to enter for the first time.

I woke from this dream with the same quality of impression that I associate with the dreams I have learned to take seriously.

A clarity that does not fade with waking.

a sense of having been shown something rather than simply having experienced the random firing of a sleeping mind.

I lay in my cell for a long time thinking about it.

I did not know what to make of it with confidence.

I had ideas, but I was careful with my ideas.

Over the following months, the dream recurred, each time with the same essential structure and the same essential feeling, though with variations in the peripheral details, a rupture from above, a stillness, an opening.

I began keeping notes in the margins of the Quran that I had been given as a prisonisssued item in a notation system that I developed specifically to record these things in a form that was not immediately legible to anyone who might search my belongings.

The notes documented what I had seen and the approximate dates and any specific details that differed from previous occurrences.

The one thing I will say about what I believed at the time, and I held this belief carefully, I without broadcasting it, without making pronouncements, was that I felt God was showing me something about Iran’s future.

Not a specific event with a specific date, but a direction, a trajectory, that the power structure that had held Iran in its grip was not permanent.

that something was coming from above, from God that was going to break something open and that on the other side of that breaking there would be an unprecedented opportunity for the gospel in Iran.

I held that.

I wrote it down and I continued living inside the years.

The visits from Miam were the lifeline they were both emotionally and practically.

We developed over time and out of necessity a way of communicating real information within the constraints of monitored visiting conditions.

It was not elaborate code.

It was more the intimacy of people who know each other deeply enough to understand what is being meant by what is being said.

She updated me on the children in ways that told me everything I needed to know about their emotional state as well as their physical well-being.

She told me about the community carefully without names or specifics that could endanger anyone in ways that told me whether the work was continuing.

It was through everything it was continuing.

Watching Darra grow up through a pane of glass is something that I carry with a specific kind of grief that has not fully healed even now.

She at 8, he was still young enough to sit close to the glass and press his small hand against it in a way that broke something open in my chest every time.

At 10, he was asking questions in a way that told me his mind was working on the reality of what was happening to our family.

At 12, he had gone quieter, an introversion that I recognized as the young person’s way of processing more than they know how to say.

At 14, there was something in his eyes when he looked at me that was complicated in a way I could not fully read from the other side of that glass, and that I spent long hours in my cell trying to understand.

At 16, when I was finally released, he was taller than me, and he stood back slightly when I first came in, and we had to find our way back to each other slowly, carefully, like two people who had drifted, and had to learn the distance they had traveled apart.

Sharon was different.

She was younger and more instinctively physical, and less guarded in showing what she felt.

She would put her hand flat against the glass and say things that were simple and true in the way that a child’s observations can be.

She told me during one visit when she was perhaps seven or eight that she prayed for me every night that she told God that I was in prison because I love Jesus and she asked God to make the people in charge be fair.

I wept after that visit and not in front of her.

I held myself together for the duration of the visit.

But alone in my cell afterward, I wept for a long time because the faith of that child formed in secret in a small apartment in Thran by a mother who was doing everything alone was more real and more pure than most of what I had encountered in years of ministry.

The executions that happened during my years inside Evan are something I will address only in general terms.

I knew men who were executed.

So not strangers, men I had talked with, prayed with, shared food with in the common areas during the periods when we had that access.

Men who had faced their deaths with a courage that I will not dress up in any language because the plain description of it is enough.

They faced death for the things they believed and for the way they had lived and they did so with a dignity that the state that killed them did not deserve to witness.

I will say nothing more specific than that and except that the grief of those losses was one of the heaviest things I carried in those years and that those men are not forgotten.

By year six, my situation had become the subject of significant international attention.

Through Miam and through my lawyer and through the fragmented information that reached me inside the prison, I became aware that my name was being spoken in places and contexts I had never expected.

Advocacy organizations, government statements are reports by human rights bodies.

This information arrived in pieces, often months after the events it described.

But its cumulative effect was to tell me that I had not been forgotten.

And that knowledge was in the practical reality of long imprisonment more important than I can easily describe.

Being forgotten is its own kind of death.

Being remembered is its own kind of lifeline.

In year seven, conditions inside the prison began to shift slightly.

Not dramatically and not in any way that made the fundamental reality different.

But the temperature of daily life changed in small ways that were perceptible to those of us living inside it.

more access to common areas, slightly improved conditions in some of the cell blocks, a reduction in some of the more arbitrary withdrawal of privileges.

Iran’s relationship with the outside world always complicated.

You was going through a particular phase of pressure that was producing certain adjustments in how the prison administration managed international scrutiny.

I do not know all the factors.

I only know what I experienced and what changed.

And then in what I later understood to be my last year, word began to come through the channels available to me, indirect, fragmentaryary, carefully communicated that something was moving in my case, negotiations of some kind or international pressure producing some response.

My lawyer, who had stayed with my case through all those years with a faithfulness that I can only attribute to conscience, communicated to Miam that there was activity happening around my situation that he was cautiously hopeful about.

I received this information across the glass during one of Mariam’s visits.

We could not speak plainly, but she communicated it in the way we had learned to communicate, in the texture of what she said and what she chose not to say, and in the steadiness of her eyes when she said it.

And that night, alone in my cell, I prayed.

I prayed the most honest prayer I think I had prayed in years, which was this.

That if this door was opening by God’s hand, I received it with gratitude.

And that if it was not yet time, I would continue to trust him in that place.

Because he had been trustworthy in that place for 7 years, and I had no reason to stop believing he would remain so.

I meant both parts of that prayer completely.

That is not something I could have said in year one.

It is something that can only be true after years of being held.

The door opened.

The release did not come in a single moment.

This is the reality of how the Iranian system processes these things.

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