My name is Amamira Bent Abdullah and I want to share with you the story of how Jesus Christ found me in the most unlikely place [music] behind the walls of a royal compound in Riyad, Saudi Arabia.

As I sit here today in this small apartment thousands of miles away from the palace where I grew up, I still sometimes wake up wondering if it was all a dream.

But then I look at my hands.

The same hands that once wore diamond bracelets worth more than most people earn in a lifetime.

Now free and empty.

And I know it was real.

All of it was real.

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I need to take you back to help you understand.

I need you to see the world I came from so you can understand the miracle of where I am now.

I was born into privilege that most people cannot imagine.

My father was a prince, not in the direct line to the throne, but close enough that our family lived in luxury and carried weight in the kingdom.

Our compound in Riyad was like a small city within itself.

High walls surrounded us, walls that I thought were there to keep others out.

I didn’t realize until much later that they were also keeping us in.

Every morning I would wake up in a bedroom larger than most apartments.

The marble floors were always cool beneath my feet, even in the scorching Saudi heat.

My closet held hundreds of abayas, each more expensive than the last.

Designer pieces from Paris and Milan that I would wear over my clothes whenever I left the women’s quarters.

I had everything a young woman could want.

everything except the one thing my soul was desperately searching for.

My days followed a rhythm that never changed.

Private tutors came to teach me and my sisters.

We learned English, French, mathematics, literature.

We were educated, yes, but always within the walls, always supervised, always watched.

My brothers could leave the compound freely, could study abroad, could live.

But for us women, even with our royal blood, the world was small and carefully controlled.

I remember the shopping trips to London and Paris.

Twice a year, my mother and aunts and female cousins would travel together, always with male guardians, always with security.

We would stay in the most expensive hotels, shop on the most exclusive streets.

I would watch other young women my age walking freely, laughing with friends, sitting in cafes without fear.

And something inside me would ache.

But I would push the feeling down and buy another handbag, another pair of shoes, as if enough luxury could fill the emptiness.

The religious duties were part of life like breathing five times a day the call to prayer fasting during Ramadan memorizing verses from the Quran.

I did it all but it was mechanical like going through motions I didn’t understand.

I would kneel on my prayer mat and recite the words in Arabic but I never felt anything.

No connection, no peace, just obligation and the fear of what would happen if I didn’t comply.

What disturbed me more than my own emptiness was the hypocrisy I witnessed growing up.

My uncles and older cousins would be so strict at home, demanding that we women cover [music] completely, that we lower our voices, that we never question.

But I knew what they did when [music] they traveled to Europe.

I had heard the whispered conversations between my aunts.

I had seen the photos accidentally left on phones.

These men who preached piety to us lived completely different lives away from Saudi Arabia.

The rules, it seemed, were different for men.

The rules were different for those with power.

I began to question things in my mind, questions I could never voice aloud.

If God was merciful and loving, why did I feel so afraid all the time? If this was the truth, why did it feel so empty? If paradise was the reward, why did this life feel like a prison? I was 19 when something shifted inside me, though I didn’t understand it at the time.

[snorts] We were in London for one of our shopping trips.

I had slipped away from my cousins for just a moment in Nightsbridge, wanting a few seconds alone.

As I walked past a church, I heard music coming from inside.

It wasn’t like anything I had heard before.

It was beautiful and haunting, and something about it made my heart ache in a way I couldn’t explain.

I stopped walking.

I don’t know how long I stood there just listening to that music flowing out into the London street.

People walked past me and I must have looked strange.

A young Saudi woman in an abaya standing frozen on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t move.

Something was pulling at my heart, pulling so strongly that tears started forming in my eyes.

Then my cousin Noir grabbed my arm.

Her voice was sharp with worry and anger.

She pulled me away quickly, looking around to see if anyone from our family had noticed.

Later, she warned me never to show interest in such places.

The fear in her voice was real.

Even in London, far from home, we were still being watched.

We were still in the cage, just a bigger one.

But I couldn’t forget that moment.

I couldn’t forget that music or the feeling it awakened in me.

It was as if someone had knocked on a door inside my heart that I didn’t know existed.

Back in Riyad, life continued as it always had.

I turned 20, then 21.

My parents began talking about marriage.

Suitable matches were being discussed.

Princes from other families, [music] businessmen with the right connections.

My future was being planned without anyone asking what I wanted.

And the truth was, I didn’t know what I wanted.

I just knew that something was missing.

I would sit by my window in the evenings watching the sun set over Riyad, painting the sky in colors that felt too beautiful for the emptiness I felt inside.

I had my own phone, my own laptop.

I had access to social media, to the internet, though I knew it was monitored.

I could see how other people lived.

I could see their freedom, their joy, their choices.

and I would pray using the only prayers I knew, asking why I felt so alone even when surrounded by family.

My younger sister Mariam and I were close.

She was 3 years younger than me, still innocent in a way I no longer felt.

She would talk excitedly about the future, about the husband she would marry, about the children she would have.

She believed in everything we had been taught without question.

Sometimes I envied her that certainty.

She slept peacefully at night.

I barely slept at all.

There were moments of happiness I don’t want you to think there weren’t.

Family gatherings could be joyful.

My mother, for all her strictness, loved us in the way she knew how.

My father could be kind when he wasn’t being [music] a prince.

My sisters made me laugh.

But underneath everything was this constant awareness that nothing was truly mine.

Not my body, not my choices, not my thoughts.

Everything belonged to the family, to the honor we had to protect, to the system that controlled every aspect of our lives.

I started noticing things I had ignored before.

The way the servants were treated, especially the foreign workers, the way wealth insulated us from ever having to think about how others struggled.

The way love was rarely spoken of, but duty was mentioned constantly.

The way fear governed everything, even in a palace with marble floors and crystal chandeliers.

One night about six months before everything changed, I did something I had never done before, I went out onto my balcony very late when everyone was asleep and I looked up at the stars over Riad.

I didn’t pray the prayers I had been taught.

Instead, I just spoke from my heart.

I said something like this.

If there is a God who truly loves me, who truly sees me, please show me.

I am so tired of being empty.

I am so tired of pretending.

If there is truth somewhere, please let me find it.

I didn’t know that prayer would be answered.

I didn’t know that the God I was crying out to was already reaching toward me, that he had always been reaching toward me.

[music] I didn’t know that in a matter of months, everything I thought I knew would be shattered and rebuilt into something more beautiful than I could ever imagine.

But I also didn’t know the cost.

I didn’t know that finding truth would mean losing everything.

That finding real love would mean being cut off from the only family I had ever known.

That finding freedom would mean becoming a refugee in a foreign land.

If someone had told me then what was coming, would I have prayed that prayer? Would I have asked God to show himself to me if I knew it would cost me my name, my title, my country, my family? I want to tell you honestly, I don’t know.

I was so broken, so desperate, but I was also comfortable in my cage.

I had never known anything else.

The walls were prison walls, yes, but they were familiar prison walls.

But God knew.

He knew I was ready even when I didn’t know it myself.

He knew that my heart was already turning toward him, already seeking him, even though I didn’t yet know his name.

I would spend my days going through the motions.

Breakfast with my mother and sisters, lessons with tutors, lunch, more lessons or time spent reading or on my phone, dinner with the family, the men separated from the women as always, [music] evening prayers, then the long nights where I couldn’t sleep, where I would stare at the ceiling and wonder if this was all life would ever be.

During the day, I had started looking things up on my phone using VPN software that many of us use to access blocked websites.

I wasn’t looking for anything specific at first.

I was just searching, searching for something that would make sense of the emptiness.

I would read philosophy.

I would read about other religions, though this was dangerous.

I would read poetry.

I was looking for anything that would explain why I felt like a stranger in my own life.

My mother noticed I was different.

She would ask if I was feeling well.

She worried that I was depressed, which I suppose I was.

She suggested I spend more time with my cousins, that I needed to be more social.

She thought it was just the restlessness of a young woman who needed to be married.

She didn’t understand that marriage to a man I didn’t choose.

To live a life I didn’t want would only make the emptiness worse.

My father barely noticed.

He was busy with his own affairs, his businesses, his position in the royal court.

To him, I was just another daughter to be married off appropriately when the time came.

He was not unkind, just distant.

In our world, fathers and daughters did not have close relationships.

That wasn’t how things worked.

I want you to understand what it felt like to be me then.

Imagine having everything and nothing at the same time.

Imagine being surrounded by people but feeling completely alone.

Imagine being told you have a beautiful life while something inside you is dying inch by inch.

That was me.

That was who I was on an ordinary Thursday night in March about 2 years ago now.

I was 22 years old.

I was a princess in a palace.

I had wealth and position and education.

I had a family and a future already planned out.

But I was drowning.

I was drowning in emptiness and silence and questions I couldn’t ask.

I was drowning behind a walls that kept me safe and kept me prisoner at the same time.

I didn’t know that night as I went to sleep in my luxurious bedroom with its silk sheets and its view of the compound gardens that I was about to meet someone who would change everything.

I didn’t know that God himself was about to invade my carefully controlled world in a way that could not be explained away or [music] ignored.

I had everything except the one thing my soul was crying out for.

And then on that ordinary Thursday night in March, he came to me in a dream.

I need to tell you about the dream.

But even now, as I try to find the words, I struggle because what I experienced that night was beyond ordinary dreaming.

It was more real than waking life, more vivid than any memory I have.

and it changed everything.

I had gone to bed that Thursday night the same as always.

Said my prayers mechanically, checked my phone one last time, turned off the lights.

I remember feeling particularly empty that evening, like the weight of my life was pressing down on my chest.

I cried quietly into my pillow, not for any specific reason, just from the accumulated sadness of existing without really living.

When I fell asleep, the dream began immediately.

There was no transition, no confusion.

One moment I was in my bed and the next moment I was standing in a garden.

But this was unlike any garden I had ever seen.

The colors were more intense, more alive than anything in the natural world.

The grass beneath my feet was so green it almost glowed.

There were flowers everywhere, types I had never seen before, and their fragrance was overwhelming but not unpleasant.

It was the smell of life itself, if that makes any sense.

The air felt different, lighter, easier to breathe.

There was a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with presents.

I was wearing a simple white dress, not the expensive clothes I usually wore.

I was barefoot and I felt no fear, which was strange because I was alone in an unfamiliar place.

All I felt was a deep sense of peace and an anticipation like something wonderful was about to happen.

Then I saw him.

He was walking toward me through the garden.

And I can’t fully describe him because there was something about him that was beyond description.

He looked like a man, yes, but there was light coming from him.

Or maybe he was made of light.

I don’t know.

His face was kind beyond anything I had ever seen.

His eyes, I will never forget his eyes.

They looked at me with a love so complete, so total that I felt it physically in my chest.

I should have been terrified.

In my culture, strange men don’t approach women.

But I felt no fear, only recognition, though I had never seen him before.

Only belonging, though I didn’t understand why.

He stopped a few feet away from me and smiled.

That smile broke something open inside me.

Then he spoke and his voice was like nothing I had heard before.

It was gentle but powerful like it could shake mountains and comfort children at the same time.

He called me by name.

Amir.

He said it with such tenderness that I started to cry immediately.

But then he added something that made me fall to my knees.

He called me beloved daughter.

No one had ever called me beloved daughter.

Yes, but beloved, that word contained everything I had been searching for my entire life.

In that moment, I felt seen completely, known completely and loved completely.

The emptiness I had carried for so long vanished like it had never existed.

He told me he had called me by name, that I was his, that I had always been his, even when I didn’t know him.

He told me the truth I was seeking was written in a book, a book that had been forbidden to me.

He told me to come to him and I would find rest for my soul.

Then he held out his hands toward me and I saw something that I didn’t understand in the dream, but that would make me weep for days afterward.

There were scars on his hands.

Not fresh wounds, but healed scars, marks that had been there for a long time.

I stared at those scars, confused.

But he just smiled at me again with such love that I couldn’t look away from his face.

The dream lasted only minutes maybe, but it felt like hours.

We didn’t speak much beyond those initial words.

But I felt him communicating with me in ways beyond language.

I felt him pouring love into all the broken, empty places inside me.

I felt him healing wounds I didn’t even know I had.

I felt him claiming me as his own.

Then he began to fade.

Or maybe I began to wake up and I tried to hold on to the dream, tried to stay in that garden.

I reached out for him, crying out, and the last thing I heard was his voice saying that he would never leave me, that he would always be with me, that I would know him by his name.

I woke up gasping, sitting straight up in my bed.

My face was wet with tears.

My hands were shaking.

My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might be having a heart attack.

The room was dark.

The middle of the night.

Everything was quiet and ordinary.

But I was not the same person who had fallen asleep hours before.

The dream stayed with me with a clarity that dreams never have.

Usually dreams fade within minutes of waking, but this one remained vivid, like a memory of something that had actually happened.

I could still smell that garden.

I could still see his face.

I could still feel the weight of his love.

I sat in my bed as the sun began to rise, trembling and confused and more awake than I had ever been in my life.

Something fundamental had shifted inside me.

The emptiness was gone, replaced by a longing so intense it hurt.

I longed to see him again.

I longed to be back in that garden.

I longed to understand what had happened to me.

The next few days were agony.

I went through my regular routines but felt like a stranger in my own life.

Everything seemed flat and colorless compared to what I had experienced in that dream.

I tried to pray it away using the prayers I knew, asking for protection from jin, from evil spirits, from deception.

But the more I tried to forget, the more the dream pressed on my heart.

I couldn’t eat properly.

I couldn’t sleep without hoping I would dream again.

But the dream didn’t return.

My mother asked if I was ill.

I lied and said I thought I had a flu.

My sister Mariam kept looking at me with concern, saying I seemed different, asking what was wrong.

[music] I couldn’t tell her.

How could I explain what I didn’t understand myself.

About a week after the dream, I did something dangerous.

Late at night, when everyone was asleep, I opened my laptop and connected to my VPN.

My hands were shaking as I typed into the search bar.

I typed descriptions of what I had seen.

Man in white, garden dream, scars on hands.

The results that came up made me close my laptop immediately in terror.

They were about Jesus.

Jesus Christ, the Christian prophet, the one we were taught had been a good man, but nothing more.

the one Christians claimed was God’s son, which we were taught was blasphemy.

I sat there in the dark, my heart racing.

This couldn’t be right.

This couldn’t be what it meant.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about those scars on his hands.

I opened the laptop again, my hands trembling so badly I could barely type.

I searched for images, and there he was.

In painting after painting, icon after icon, I saw the face from my dream.

It was him.

The man from the garden was Jesus.

I was sure of it with a certainty I had never felt about anything in my life.

Terror washed over me.

This was the ultimate betrayal in my culture, the unforgivable sin.

To be interested in Christianity, to even study it was dangerous.

to actually believe it meant death, social death at minimum, and in some cases, physical death.

Apostasy was not tolerated.

Conversion from Islam was the worst thing a person could do, worse than murder, worse than anything.

I should have stopped there.

I should have closed the laptop and never looked again.

I should have convinced myself it was just a dream, nothing more.

But I couldn’t.

The love I had felt in that garden was real.

The man I had seen was real, and I needed to understand.

Over the next few weeks, I began searching late at night.

I was so careful, using multiple VPN services, clearing my history obsessively, making sure no one could see what I was looking at.

I watched YouTube videos, finding channels of people sharing about Jesus.

I listened to testimonies of other Muslims who had converted to Christianity.

Though these videos were risky because they could get me in serious trouble if anyone found out.

What struck me most was how these Christians talked about God.

They called him father.

[snorts] They talked about relationship, about knowing him personally, about his love.

This was so different from what I had known.

In Islam, God felt distant, unknowable, someone to fear and obey, but never to truly know.

But these Christians spoke of intimacy with God, of being his children, of grace and forgiveness and love that had no conditions.

I discovered Bible reading apps and downloaded one, disguising the icon as a calculator app.

Late at night, I would read starting with the Gospel of John because someone in a video had said to start there.

And as I read, I felt like I was drinking water after a lifetime of thirst.

The word spoke to my heart in ways nothing ever had before.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.

That last verse broke me.

Come to me rest.

That was what he had promised in the dream.

I wept as I read, curled up in my bathroom with the door locked so no one would hear me, reading the words of Jesus on my phone and feeling like he was speaking directly to me across the centuries.

But with the joy came terrible fear.

What was I doing? If anyone found out, I would be destroyed.

My family would disown me.

I could be imprisoned.

I could be killed.

The Mukabarat, the religious police did not tolerate this kind of thing.

I had heard stories of Saudi Christians, though we were told they didn’t exist.

I had heard whispered rumors of people who had converted and disappeared.

I tried to stop several times.

I would delete the apps, promise myself I would forget, try to be a good Muslim daughter, but I couldn’t stay away.

Jesus kept calling me back.

The love I had felt in that dream kept pulling me back.

The truth in those Bible verses kept echoing in my mind.

About 2 months after the dream, I remembered Sophia.

She had been a friend from my time at an international school when I was younger.

[music] Her family was Filipino and she was Christian, though she had been careful never to talk about her faith around me.

We had kept in touch occasionally over social media and I knew she had returned to Riyad to work as a nurse at one of the hospitals.

It took me 3 days to gather the courage to message her.

I kept my message carefully vague, asking if we could meet for coffee.

She responded enthusiastically and we set a time to meet at a westernstyle cafe in one of the compounds where expats lived.

I was terrified the whole drive there.

My driver dropped me off and I told him to return in 2 hours.

[music] I wore my abaya and covered my face as was required.

But underneath I was shaking.

What if Sophia had told someone? What if this was a trap? But I was desperate enough to take the risk.

When I saw her in the cafe, her warm smile steadied me slightly.

We exchanged the usual greetings, ordered coffee, made small talk about our lives.

But then I couldn’t wait anymore.

I needed answers.

I needed to understand what was happening to me.

I told her I had questions about Christianity.

I watched her face [music] change, saw the caution enter her eyes.

She glanced around to make sure no one was listening to us.

Then she leaned forward and spoke very quietly.

She asked what kind of questions.

I told her about the dream, leaving out some details, but giving her enough to understand.

[music] I told her I had been reading the Bible in secret.

I told her I felt drawn to Jesus in a way I couldn’t explain or resist.

Sophia’s eyes filled with tears.

She reached across the table and took my hand, which was bold in our culture, but I needed that human touch.

She told me that what I was experiencing was God calling me to himself.

She told me that Jesus loved me and had died for me.

She explained the cross, the sacrifice, the resurrection in ways I was beginning to understand from my reading.

Then she did something incredibly dangerous and incredibly kind.

She reached into her bag and pulled out a small book.

It was a New Testament in Arabic.

She told me to hide it carefully, but that I needed to read it.

She told me to be very cautious about who I talked to, but that there were other believers in Riyad if I needed support.

[music] I hid that small book in my purse like it was made of gold and explosives at the same time, because in some ways it was both.

That book became my most precious possession and my most dangerous secret.

I read it constantly over the next months.

Every free moment locked in my bathroom or hidden in my closet.

I read the words of Jesus.

And the more I read, the more I fell in love with him.

[snorts] He was everything the man in my dream had been and more.

He was gentle and fierce.

He was loving and holy.

He welcomed sinners and challenged the self-righteous.

He healed the broken and confronted the powerful.

And he promised that anyone who came to him would not be cast out.

Anyone, even a Saudi princess who had been taught her whole life that Christianity was false, even me.

But I was living a double life now.

And the strain was enormous.

During the day, I wore my abaya and went to the mosque with my family and recited prayers in Arabic that I no longer believed.

At night, I prayed to Jesus in secret, calling him Lord in whispered Arabic, asking him to help me, to guide me, to give me courage.

I knew I couldn’t hide forever.

I knew eventually I would have to make a choice.

stay in the safety of my family and deny what I knew to be true or acknowledge Jesus publicly and lose everything.

I wasn’t ready yet.

I was too afraid.

But Jesus was patient with my fear.

He kept revealing himself to me through his word, through dreams that were less vivid than that first one, but still powerful.

Through the small acts of courage Sophia showed in helping me.

About 4 months after that first dream, Sophia carefully introduced me to something that both terrified and amazed me.

She told me there was a house church in Riad, a secret gathering of Christians, mostly expats, but some Saudis like me, who met to worship Jesus together.

The idea of walking into a room full of Christians felt like stepping off a cliff.

But I was so hungry for community, for people who understood what I was experiencing that I agreed to go.

That first meeting changed my life almost as much as the dream had.

I will never forget walking into that small apartment, [music] my whole body trembling with fear and hearing them singing worship songs softly.

The music was similar to what I had heard in London that day and it went straight to my heart.

There were about 20 people there, Filipino nurses and construction workers, Indian technicians, Ethiopian domestic workers, and three Saudi women, all wearing ordinary clothes, their faces uncovered, their eyes shining with something I recognized, freedom and joy and peace.

One of these women approached me after the meeting.

Her name was Ila, and she had been a Christian for 5 years.

She hugged me, which made me stiffen at first because I wasn’t used to such open affection.

But then I relaxed into it.

She whispered that she understood that she had walked this same terrifying path, that I wasn’t alone.

For the first time since that dream, I felt like I could breathe fully.

I wasn’t alone.

There were others like me, others who had found Jesus and were willing to risk everything to follow him.

But Ila also warned me.

She told me to be extremely careful.

She told me stories of Saudi converts who had been discovered and imprisoned.

She told me that following Jesus here meant living in constant danger.

She told me I had to be wise, patient, careful.

I tried to be all those things.

For six more months, I lived my double life.

I met with a house church every Friday, which was our day off, telling my family I was going to the mall or visiting cousins.

I studied the Bible constantly.

[music] I grew in my understanding of who Jesus was and what he had done for me.

But the burden of pretending was crushing me.

Every time I put in the hijab, I felt like I was denying him.

Every time I went to the mosque, I felt like I was betraying him.

Every prayer I recited that wasn’t to Jesus felt like a lie I was living.

I had found the truth, but I was still trapped in a cage of my family’s expectations and my cultures demands.

I was free inside, but imprisoned outside.

and I didn’t know how much longer I could bear it.

Then I had another dream.

This one was shorter, but just as powerful.

Jesus appeared to me again, and his message was clear.

He reminded me that he had given up everything for me.

His glory, his comfort, his life.

And he asked me a question that burned itself into my heart.

He asked if I would give up everything for him.

I woke up knowing what I had to do.

I couldn’t hide anymore.

I couldn’t keep denying him in public while loving him in private.

Jesus had been so public about his love for me, dying on a cross for the whole world to see.

How could I keep my love for him hidden? I decided I would tell someone first, test the waters.

I thought if I could make one person understand, maybe there was hope that eventually my whole family could accept it.

I was naive.

I was foolish.

But I was also desperate to stop living a lie.

I chose my sister Miam.

She was closest to me in age and in friendship.

[music] We had shared secrets our whole lives.

I thought if anyone would listen, if anyone would try to understand, it would be her.

I could not have been more wrong.

The six months I spent living between two worlds were the most intense of my life.

On one side was everything I had ever known.

My family, my culture, my identity as Amira bent Abdullah.

On the other side was this new life in Christ that was growing inside me like a secret garden, beautiful and forbidden and absolutely real.

Every day felt like walking a tight rope.

One misstep, one careless word, one moment of letting my guard down and everything would collapse.

The house church became my lifeline.

Every Friday afternoon, I would tell my mother I was going shopping or visiting my cousin Hanan at her compound across the city.

My driver would drop me off at a mall and I would slip out through a side entrance where Sophia or another believer would be waiting to take me to wherever we were meeting that week.

We never met in the same place twice in a row.

Security was everything.

The first time I walked into that gathering and heard them worshiping Jesus without fear or hiding, I broke down weeping.

They were singing in different languages.

Tagalog, Arabic, Amaric, English.

But somehow it all blended together into something beautiful.

There was no expensive sound system, no professional musicians, just people with hearts full of love for Jesus, singing to him in a cramped apartment with the windows closed so the sound wouldn’t carry.

I couldn’t sing at first.

I just stood there with tears streaming down my face, overwhelmed by the reality of what I was experiencing.

These people had so much less than me in material terms.

The Filipino nurses worked 12-hour shifts and sent most of their money home to their families.

The construction workers lived in labor camps with conditions I couldn’t imagine.

The domestic workers were often treated poorly by their Saudi employers.

But they had something I had never seen in all the palaces and luxury of my life.

They had joy.

Real joy.

They had freedom inside.

Even though they were foreign workers in a country that didn’t always treat them well, [music] they had Jesus.

And somehow that made them richer than any Saudi royale.

Ila took me under her wing those early months.

She was 28, 5 years older than me, and she had been through what I was going through.

She had been married to a Saudi man, had two young children, and then Jesus had found her.

When she converted, her husband divorced her immediately and took the children.

She hadn’t seen them in 3 years.

I asked her once how she survived that kind of pain, how she kept believing when it cost her so much.

She looked at me with eyes that had known deep suffering but also deep peace.

And she told me something I will never forget.

She said, “Jesus never promised us it would be easy.

He promised us it would be worth it.

She taught me how to be careful, how to cover my tracks online, how to hide the Bible app on my phone, how to pray silently during the day when others thought I was praying Muslim prayers, how to live in hostile territory without compromising my faith.

But she also warned me about the cost of following Jesus in Saudi Arabia.

She told me stories of Saudi converts who had been imprisoned, tortured, killed.

She told me about families who had disowned their children for converting.

She told me that if I continued on this path, I would lose everything.

I thought I understood what she meant.

I thought I was prepared for the cost.

But you can never really be prepared for losing everything until it happens.

During those months, I devoured the Bible.

I had finished the New Testament and moved into the Old Testament, seeing how everything pointed [music] toward Jesus.

The Psalms especially spoke to me.

David’s honest prayers, his struggles with fear and doubt, his absolute trust in God.

Even when everything seemed dark, I related to all of it.

I memorized verses that I could repeat to myself during the day when I couldn’t read.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Come to me all who are weary and burdened.

God so loved the world.

These words became my oxygen.

The Christian concepts that had seemed so strange at first were beginning to make sense.

The Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was still mysterious, but I was starting to understand it not as three gods, but as one God in three persons.

The idea that God could be my father, that I could have an intimate relationship with the creator of the universe still amazed me every time I thought about it.

The cross was the hardest thing to understand.

In Islam, we were taught that a real prophet would never allow himself to [music] be killed in such a humiliating way.

That God would never permit his messenger to suffer like that.

But as I studied, I began to see the beauty and power in the cross.

Jesus chose to suffer.

He chose to die.

Not because he was weak, but because that was the only way to pay for my sins.

For the sins of the whole world and the resurrection that changed everything.

Jesus didn’t stay dead.

He conquered death itself.

He proved that he was who he claimed to be.

And he promised that everyone who believed in him would also have eternal life.

This wasn’t just a philosophy or a set of rules like what I had known before.

This was a relationship with a living God who loved me personally, who knew my name, who had died for me specifically.

The God of the universe knew Amamira Bint Abdullah and loved her enough to suffer for her.

This truth overwhelmed me every time I really let myself think about it.

I started seeing people differently, too.

The servants in our compound whom I had barely noticed before.

I started really seeing them.

The driver who took me places, the housekeepers who cleaned our rooms, the gardeners who maintained the grounds.

Many of them were Christians.

I learned Filipino and Indian believers who were serving in Saudi Arabia to support their families back home.

I began treating them differently, speaking to them with respect, asking about their lives.

My mother noticed and told me I was being too familiar with the help.

But I couldn’t go back to not seeing them as real people, as my brothers and sisters in Christ, as people Jesus loved just as much as he loved me.

My relationship with my family became complicated in ways that broke my heart.

I still loved them.

That never changed.

I loved my mother with her strict ways and her concern for family honor.

I loved my father despite his distance.

I loved my siblings, especially Mariam.

But I was carrying this enormous secret that was changing me from the inside out.

And they could sense something was different, even if they didn’t know what.

My mother worried constantly about me.

She thought I was depressed or sick.

She wanted me to see doctors.

She suggested I needed to get married soon, that having a husband and purpose would fix whatever was wrong with me.

She didn’t understand that I had found my purpose, that I had found the one my soul loved, and that he wasn’t a Saudi prince or businessman.

He was the prince of peace, the king of kings.

There were so many close calls during those months, times when I was sure I would be discovered.

Once my brother Abdullah tried to use my laptop without asking.

I had just closed the Bible app seconds before he walked into my room, but my heart pounded for hours afterward, thinking about what could have happened if he had seen what I was reading.

Another time, my cousin saw me watching something on my phone during a family gathering.

She tried to see what it was, and I quickly locked the screen, but she kept asking questions.

I told her it was just a cooking video, but she looked suspicious.

For days, I worried she would mention it to someone.

The worst close call was with my driver.

He had been with our family for 10 years.

A quiet Pakistani man who rarely spoke.

But he started asking questions about my Friday outings.

Why did I spend so long at the mall? Why did I sometimes come back from different locations than where he had dropped me? I realized [snorts] he was getting suspicious, maybe even reporting back to my father.

I had to stop going to the house church for 3 weeks until things calmed down.

Those three weeks were torture.

I needed that fellowship.

Needed to worship freely.

Needed to be around people who understood what I was going through.

When I finally was able to go back, I cried through the entire meeting, just grateful to be there.

The house church was small, but it became my true family.

There was Pastor John, a Filipino man who worked as an accountant but shepherded us spiritually with such gentle wisdom.

There was Ruth, an Ethiopian domestic worker with a voice like an angel who led worship.

There was Samuel, an Indian engineer who had memorized huge portions of scripture and taught us with such passion.

And there was Ila and the other Saudi women who understood my specific struggles in ways no one else could.

We celebrated communion together, taking bread and grape juice and remembering what Jesus had done for us.

The first time I took communion, I shook so hard I could barely hold the cup.

This simple act was illegal in my country.

If we were caught, we could all be imprisoned or worse.

But as I took that bread and juice, symbolizing Jesus’s body and blood given for me, I felt his presence so powerfully that all fear disappeared for a moment.

They prayed for me constantly.

They prayed for my protection, for my family’s hearts to be opened, for my faith to remain strong.

They prayed that somehow I would be able to stay in Saudi Arabia and be a light for Jesus.

They had no idea that God’s plan was very different.

I wanted to be baptized.

I had read about baptism in the Bible and understood it as a public declaration of faith in Jesus.

But there was nowhere to do it safely in Saudi Arabia.

No rivers or lakes where we could go without being seen.

No baptismal pools in secret places.

Ila had been baptized in a bathtub in someone’s apartment, and she offered to arrange the same for me, but something in me wanted to wait.

I don’t know why.

Maybe I sensed that my time in Saudi Arabia was limited.

Maybe I knew that when I was baptized, I wanted to do it in freedom, in the open, without fear.

I told Ila I would wait, and she understood.

[music] During this time, my prayer life deepened in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

I learned to pray constantly throughout the day, silent conversations with Jesus about everything.

I talked to him like he was right there with me because I believed he was.

I told him my fears, my joys, my doubts, my hopes.

And I felt him answering, not usually in words, but in peace, in small confirmations, in perfectly timed verses that spoke exactly to what I needed to hear.

I started reading Christian books that Sophia would smuggle to me, books about other Muslims who had found Christ, books about faith and suffering, books about what it means to follow Jesus when it costs you everything.

These books prepared me for what was coming, though I didn’t know it at the time.

One book in particular impacted me deeply.

It was about Christians in China who had suffered terribly for their faith during persecution, but their faith had only grown stronger.

They talked about joy in suffering, about counting it all worth it to know Christ.

I read their stories and wondered if I would be that strong if I was tested.

I prayed that I would be.

The happiest moments of those six months were in worship.

When we would sing to Jesus, even quietly, even in fear, something happened that I can only describe as heaven touching earth.

The presence of God would fill that room and we would all feel it.

Tears would flow, hands would raise, hearts would overflow with love for Jesus.

I learned all the worship songs in Arabic.

I learned songs in English, too.

Even though my English wasn’t perfect, the words didn’t matter as much as the heart behind them.

Jesus, I love you.

Jesus, I surrender all to you.

How great is our God.

What a beautiful name.

These simple songs became my anthems.

But with every passing week, the burden of living a double life grew heavier.

Every time I put on my abaya and nikab, I felt like I was hiding who I really was.

Every time I bowed in the mosque, going through motions of prayers I no longer believed.

I felt like I was betraying Jesus.

Every time I stayed silent when my family spoke against Christians or mocked Jesus, I felt like Peter denying Christ.

The guilt was crushing me.

I knew Jesus understood.

I knew he was patient with my weakness.

But I also knew this couldn’t continue forever.

I couldn’t keep pretending.

The truth inside me was too big to keep hidden.

I talked to Leila about it many times.

She counseledled patience and wisdom.

She reminded me that in Muslim countries, many Christians have to live carefully, that there was no shame in protecting yourself.

She told me that proclaiming my faith publicly would mean losing everything, and I needed to be absolutely sure I was ready for that before I did it.

[snorts] up my cross and following him, about losing my life to find it.

These words burned in my heart.

They challenged me.

They called me to courage I didn’t think I had.

I prayed and prayed about what to do.

Part of me wanted to stay hidden forever, to have Jesus secretly while keeping my family and comfortable life.

But I knew that wasn’t real faith.

Real faith required confession.

Real faith required sacrifice.

Real faith required me to love Jesus more than I loved my family, my country, my own life.

About 8 months after that first dream, I had another encounter with Jesus.

This dream was shorter but just as powerful as the first one.

He appeared to me again in that same garden and he reminded me of what he had done for me.

He showed me the cross, showed me his suffering, showed me his love poured out without reservation.

Then he asked me a question that I knew was coming but still shook me to my core.

He asked if I would give up everything for him the way he had given up everything for me.

He asked if I loved him enough to lose it all.

He asked if I was ready to follow him all the way no matter the cost.

I woke up with tears streaming down my face and I knew the answer.

Yes.

Yes, I would give up everything.

[music] Yes, I loved him enough.

Yes, I was ready.

I didn’t know how it would happen or when, but I knew my time of hiding was coming to an end.

I knew I would have to confess Jesus publicly, and I knew what that would cost me.

But Jesus was worth it.

He was worth everything.

[music] I decided I would tell someone first, test the waters, see if there was any possibility that my family could accept this.

I chose Mariam because she was my closest friend, my confidant, my sister in every way that mattered.

We had shared secrets our whole lives.

I thought if anyone would try to understand, if anyone would listen with love, it would be her.

I planned it carefully.

I waited for a day when our parents were out.

When it was just the two of us in the family section of the compound, I asked her to come to my room because I needed to talk to her about something important.

She came willingly, sitting on my bed with concern in her eyes, asking if I was okay.

My hands were shaking.

My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest.

I had practiced what I would say a hundred times.

But now that the moment was here, all my careful words disappeared.

I told her I had something to tell her that would be hard to hear.

I told her I loved her and our family.

I told her I had been on a spiritual journey for the past months.

[music] And then with my voice breaking, I told her the truth.

I told her about the dream.

I told her about Jesus appearing to me.

I told her I had been studying Christianity.

I told her I believed Jesus was the son of God, that he had died for my sins, that he was alive, and that I had given my life to him.

The silence that followed was the loudest sound I had ever heard.

Mariam stared at me like I had become a stranger.

Her face went through so many expressions.

Confusion, disbelief, shock, horror, fear.

Then she started to cry.

not sad crying, angry, terrified crying.

She stood up from my bed like it had burned her.

She started backing away from me like I was diseased.

[music] She asked me if I knew what I was saying, if I understood what I had just confessed to, if I realized I had become an apostate, a mertad, the worst thing a Muslim could be.

I tried to explain.

I tried to tell her about the love of Jesus, about the peace I had found, about the truth in the Bible.

But she wasn’t listening.

She was panicking.

She kept saying this couldn’t be real, that I must be possessed by jin, that I needed help.

I reached for her hand, but she pulled away from me like my touch would contaminate her.

She told me I had to take it back, had to repent, [music] had to return to Islam immediately.

She said, “If I didn’t, if anyone found out, I would be killed.

Our family would be shamed forever.

” I told her I couldn’t deny Jesus.

I told her he was real and alive and that he loved her, too.

This only made things worse.

Then she said the words that broke my heart into pieces.

She said she had to tell our father.

She said this was too big for her to keep secret.

She said she loved me, but she loved Allah and the family more.

She said she had no choice.

I begged her not to.

I dropped to my knees and begged her to please keep this between [music] us, to give me time to figure out what to do.

But she was already at the door, already leaving my room.

Her face wet with tears and twisted with a combination of love and duty that left no room for mercy.

She left me there on my knees and I knew my life as I had known it was over.

I had maybe hours before my father found out, maybe less.

Everything I had feared, everything Leila had warned me about was about to become real.

I should have felt terror.

And I did feel terror.

But underneath the terror was something else.

Something I didn’t expect.

It was peace.

The same peace from the garden in my dream.

The peace that Jesus had promised.

The peace that made no logical sense but was absolutely real.

I was about to lose everything.

But I had Jesus.

And somehow impossibly that was enough.

I don’t remember exactly how long I stayed on my knees after Mariam left my room.

Time seemed to stop.

I could hear my heart pounding in my ears.

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