The way you choose anything that runs counter to what your instincts are telling you and some days the choice is easy and some days it is very hard and both of those things are true without one cancelelling out the other.

What helps me in this practice of ongoing forgiveness is thinking about who those guards were before they were guards.

They are Afghan men.

Some of them are probably not old young men who grew up in a country of war who were shaped by violence and ideology from childhood who may have known nothing else.

This does not excuse what they did.

I am very clear that what they did was wrong and that deliberately starving a human being because of his faith is a serious moral evil that cannot be explained away.

But understanding the formation of a person is different from excusing their actions and understanding it makes the practice of forgiveness more possible.

Not by minimizing the wrong but by restoring the humanity of the person who did it.

I pray for them.

I pray for Afghanistan every day.

I love my country.

I want to say this clearly because I think people expect that I would hate it.

That what happened to me would have turned me against the land and the culture and the people.

It has not.

Afghanistan is in my blood.

The language is in my dreams.

The mountains, the specific quality of light.

The people, ordinary people, not soldiers or ideologues, but the ordinary Afghans I grew up alongside.

I love them and I miss them and I pray for them.

What was done to me was done by a regime, not by a people.

This is a distinction I hold on to.

There are things I want to say to different groups of people.

I say this at the end of my public testimony and I want to say it here too to Afghan Christians still inside the country and there are some.

I know there are some more than the world might imagine.

I want you to know that you are not forgotten.

The global church knows you exist.

People are praying for you specifically.

Your faith is not invisible to heaven.

I know how alone it feels.

I know how complete the isolation can seem.

I was in a cell by myself for 54 days and I was not alone.

I need you to believe me when I say this, not because I am trying to make you feel better with a nice phrase, but because it is the truest thing I know from direct experience to Christians in places where faith costs nothing.

where you can put a church sign on a building and drive to it on a Sunday morning and sit in a hated room and sing at full volume and walk back to your car and go get lunch.

I want to say something that I hope you receive in the spirit in which I offer it, which is love and not condemnation.

What you have is precious.

It is more precious than I think many of you know I because you have never had it taken from you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty.

Guilt is not useful.

I am saying it to invite you to treasure it, to take it seriously, to let the fact that your faith costs you very little in terms of safety make you ask whether it is costing you enough in terms of depth.

I say this not from superiority.

I did not choose to be tested the way I was tested.

I would not have chosen it.

I would not recommend it.

But I have something now, a quality of certainty about what I believe, a directness in my relationship with God, an understanding of what matters and what does not.

That I did not have before the cell.

And I know that this thing I have, this particular quality was given to me through suffering.

And I wish there were another way to get it.

And I do not know if there is.

And to Muslims listening to this story, Alis, and I hope some are, I hope you would hear me out.

I want to say this with every bit of respect and genuine regard that I have for you which is substantial.

I am an Afghan man.

I grew up inside Islam.

I know what it is to love that tradition, to have been formed by it, to have prayed toward Mecca since I was a small child.

I am not your enemy.

I am not trying to take something from you or tell you that everything you believe is worthless.

What I want to say to you is simply this.

I found something in the darkest place I have ever been.

I found a presence that held me when I had nothing left to hold onto myself.

I am not asking you to take my word for it.

I am asking you to consider that the question of who Jesus actually is deserves serious attention on not the Jesus of western culture or political Christianity.

The Jesus of the gospels, the one who stopped for the people everyone else had stopped noticing.

I was one of those people in that cell and he stopped.

The last thing I want to tell you is what I pray for every night.

Not for great things, not for my own safety or comfort.

Not even primarily for Afghanistan, though I always pray for Afghanistan.

What I pray for every night is this, that I would remain the man who came out of that cell and not slowly become again the man who went in.

The man who went in had faith.

I do not want to dismiss that.

He had real faith and he loved God in the way he was capable of loving him at that time.

But the man who came out knows something.

The man who went in did not know.

How the man who came out knows exactly what he believes and exactly why and exactly what it costs.

And he is not confused about what is essential and what is decoration.

And he is not able to be satisfied with a faith that lives only on the surface of things.

I do not want to lose that man.

I am afraid in the ordinary comfortable days of exile life, the days with grocery stores and reliable heating and safe streets.

I am afraid of slowly forgetting of the urgency fading of the clarity going soft around the edges.

This is a real fear.

The comfortable life is in its own quiet way a danger.

So I pray every night to remain awake, to remain clear, to keep the essential thing essential and to not let the peripheral things take more space than they deserve.

And then I go to sleep and sometimes I dream of the cell.

F I wake up and I am in a room with a ceiling that is not concrete and the wife who is breathing next to me and two daughters in the next room and outside the window.

If I pull back the curtain.

The sky.

The sky enormous, full of stars if the night is clear or gray and overcast and ordinary if it is not.

It does not matter.

It is the sky.

It is outside.

It is the world big and open and full of the presence of a god who found me in a cell and decided I was worth staying with and who has not in all the days since let go of my hand.

I am Yu Rahimi.

I am a pastor.

I am an Afghan.

I am a man who was starved for 54 days and did not die.

And I’m here to tell you, he is real.

He is present.

He is worth everything it costs to know him.

That is all I have to say.

 

 

 

Ex-Muslim Hamas Commander from Gaza Dies and Returns With a SHOCKING Message for all Muslims

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My name is Abdel.

For 12 years, I made weapons designed to kill people.

I mixed chemicals that would tear bodies apart.

I assembled devices that would end lives in seconds.

I did this with my own hands and I believed I was doing the right thing.

I believed I was serving God.

Today, I sit in a small room in a place I cannot tell you about.

My life depends on staying hidden.

But I am alive to tell you what I saw when I died.

And I am alive to warn you about what is waiting for many people when their last breath comes.

This is my story.

Every word of it is true.

I need you to understand something before I begin.

I was not an evil man who enjoyed hurting people.

I was not a monster.

I was a man who loved his family.

I prayed five times every day.

I memorized long passages from the Quran.

I fasted during Ramadan.

I gave to the poor.

I believed with all my heart that I was on the right path.

That is what makes my story so important.

Cuz if I could be so wrong about something so serious, then maybe you need to examine what you believe too.

Let me take you back to the beginning.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before Abdul continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

I grew up in Gaza City in a neighborhood called Alimal.

Our apartment building was old with cracks in the walls that grew wider every year.

My father sold vegetables from a cart.

My mother stayed home with us children.

We were not rich, but we had enough.

Gaza is not like other places.

War is part of normal life there.

You grow up with the sound of explosions in the distance.

You learn to recognize the different sounds.

The whistle of a rocket going out.

The boom of an Israeli air strike coming in.

The rattle of gunfire that could be close or far away.

When I was 7 years old, I was playing soccer with my friends in the street.

We used a ball made of rolled up plastic bags tied with string because we could not afford a real one.

We were laughing and shouting the way children do everywhere.

Then we heard the sound.

It was different from the usual background noise of war.

It was closer, louder, coming toward us.

My friend Mahmud looked up at the sky.

I remember his face.

His eyes went wide.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Then there was a flash of light and a noise so loud it felt like my head would split open.

When I could see again, Mahmud was on the ground.

There was blood everywhere.

Too much blood.

Other children were screaming and running.

Adults came rushing out of buildings.

Someone picked me up and carried me away.

But I kept looking back at Mahmud lying there in the street.

He died before they could get him to a hospital.

He was 8 years old.

That was my first real memory of death.

It would not be my last.

By the time I was 12, I had been to 17 funerals.

Most of them were for people younger than 30.

Some were for children.

You learn to recognize the sound of women wailing.

You learn to watch men cry quietly with their faces turned away.

You learn that death can come at any moment for any reason without warning.

You also learn to be angry.

I was angry at Israel.

I was angry at America for supporting Israel.

I was angry at the world for not caring about us.

I was angry at God.

Sometimes though I felt guilty for those thoughts and would pray extra to make up for them.

The anger grew inside me like a living thing.

It fed on every new death, every new destroyed building, every new family left homeless.

And there was always something new to feed it.

When I was 16, our building was hit.

We had warning.

Someone ran through shouting that we needed to evacuate.

Israeli jets had fired warning shots at the roof.

We had minutes to get out.

We ran down the stairs, my father carrying my youngest sister, my mother grabbing what she could.

We made it to the street just before the real missiles came.

I watched our home collapse into rubble and dust.

Everything we owned was inside.

my clothes, my school books, the photo albums with pictures of my grandparents, all of it gone in seconds.

We stayed with seconds relatives after that.

12 people crammed into three rooms.

My father tried to to start over, but his cart and all his vegetables had been in the storage room of our destroyed building.

He had nothing.

We had nothing.

That is when the men came to talk to me.

They were from Hamas.

They came to the mosque where I prayed.

They were always respectful.

They never pushed.

They just talked to me about dignity and resistance and faith.

They told me that Allah honored those who fought against oppression.

They told me that I could make a difference, that I could protect my people, that I could be more than just another victim.

I listened and slowly over months I began to believe them.

They started by giving me small tasks, delivering messages, standing watch, nothing dangerous at first.

They paid me a little money which I gave to my father.

They made me feel important like I mattered, like I was part of something bigger than myself.

By the time I was 18, I was fully committed.

I had been trained.

I had been taught and I had been given my specialty.

I was good with my hands.

I had always been good at taking things apart and putting them back together.

As a child, I used to fix broken radios and clocks for neighbors.

This skill, the men told me, could be used for the cause.

They taught me chemistry.

They taught me electronics.

They taught me how to build devices that would explode.

I became a bomb maker.

Looking back now, I can see how carefully they shaped my thinking, how they took my anger and my pain and my desire to matter and turned it into something they could use.

But at the time, I could not see it.

I thought I was choosing this path.

I thought I was serving God.

My workshop was beneath a residential building in the Shajaya neighborhood.

You reached it through a hidden entrance in a basement storage room.

The room below was small, maybe 4 m by 5 m.

It had a workbench, shelves with materials, and a ventilation system that brought in air from outside through hidden pipes.

I spent hours there, sometimes entire days.

The work required complete focus.

One wrong measurement, one careless moment, and I could blow myself up.

I lost two friends that way in the early years.

They made mistakes.

They died instantly.

I was careful.

I was precise.

I took my time and um I became known for my skill.

The devices I made were used in many operations.

I did not usually know the details.

Someone would give me specifications.

I would build what they asked for.

They would take it away.

Later I might hear about an explosion on the news, an Israeli checkpoint, a settlement, a military vehicle.

I would know that my work had been used.

I told myself that I was only targeting soldiers and settlers, combatants, people who had chosen to be part of the occupation.

I told myself this made it different, made it justified.

But I knew deep in a place I did not like to look that sometimes civilians died too.

Children sometimes I would feel a twinge of something uncomfortable when I heard about those deaths.

But I would push it away.

I would remind myself of Mahmud dying in the street, of my home being destroyed, of all the Palestinian children who had died.

I would tell myself that our cost was just and in war terrible things happen.

This is how you live with yourself.

When you do terrible things, you build walls in your mind.

You create justifications.

You stop thinking too deeply about certain questions.

I prayed five times a day.

I never missed a prayer.

Before I began work each day, I would pray and ask Allah to guide my hands.

I would recite verses from the Quran.

I believed completely that I was doing holy work.

On Fridays, I went to the mosque.

I listened to the sermons about jihad and paradise, about the rewards waiting for martyrs, about the evil of our enemies.

These sermons reinforced everything I believed.

They made me feel righteous.

I had respect in the community.

People knew I was involved in the resistance.

Though they did not know exactly what I did.

Men would nod to me in the street.

Older women would smile at me and call me a good Muslim boy.

Young men looked up to me.

I had purpose.

I had identity.

I had a place in the world.

When I was 23, I married Aliyah.

She was 19, beautiful with dark eyes and a gentle spirit.

She knew I was involved in the resistance.

Her brother was a fighter.

Her father had been killed in an is an an Israeli raid years before.

She understood the life.

We had a small wedding.

Everyone was happy despite the circumstances we lived under.

For one night, we forgot about the war and just celebrated.

Aliyah moved into the apartment I shared with my parents and siblings.

It was crowded, but we made it work.

A year later, our first child was born, a son.

We named him Tariq.

Then came our daughter, Leila, and then another son, Omar.

Those children were everything to me.

When I held my newborn son for the first time, I cried.

I promised him I would make the world better for him.

I promised I would fight so he could grow up free.

I loved being a father.

At home, I was not a fighter or a bumbo maker.

I was just Abu Tarik, the father who played with his children and made them laugh.

Tariq loved it when I would chase him around the apartment pretending to be a monster.

Ila would braid my short beard and giggle.

Little Omar would fall asleep on my chest while I read the Quran.

Aliyah was a good wife.

She made our crammed space feel like home.

She cooked good food with whatever we could afford.

She kept the children clean and well behaved.

She prayed constantly for my safety.

She worried about my work.

She knew it was dangerous.

Sometimes I would come home with burns on my hands from chemicals.

Once I was caught near an explosion when an Israeli strike hit nearby.

I came home covered in dust and blood that was not mine.

She cried and begged me to find other work.

But I would tell her this was my duty.

This was how I protected her and the children.

This was what Allah wanted from me.

She would nod and accept it.

But I could see the fear in her eyes every time I left.

I lived two lives.

At home, I was gentle and loving.

At work, I built machines of death.

I kept these two worlds completely separate in my mind.

I had to otherwise I do not think I could have continued.

The morning of the explosion started like any other morning.

I woke before dawn for fajar prayer.

The apartment was quiet except for Omar’s soft breathing.

He was sleeping between me and Aliyah.

I carefully moved him aside and got up.

I performed my ablutions in the small bathroom, washing my hands, face, arms, and feet.

The water was cold.

We rarely had hot water.

I did not mind.

I was used to it.

I prayed in the corner of the main room facing toward Mecca.

I recited the familiar words in Arabic, words I had said thousands of times before.

I asked Allah to protect my family, to give me strength, to accept my efforts, to grant me paradise.

After prayer, I sat and read from the Quran until the others began to wake.

Aliyah made breakfast, bread with olive oil and zatar, tea with too much sugar, the way I liked it.

The children ate quickly, excited about something that had happened at school a day before.

I was not really listening to their chatter.

I was thinking about the work ahead.

We had received materials for a new type of rocket.

It would fly farther and carry a larger payload than the ones we usually made.

The design was complex.

I had been studying the plans for days.

Today we would begin assembly.

Ila tugged on my sleeve.

She wanted me to look at a drawing she had made.

It was of our family, all stick figures holding hands.

She had drawn a big sun in the corner with a smiling face.

I told her it was beautiful.

I kissed her forehead.

She smelled like the cheap shampoo Aliyah used for the children’s hair.

Continue reading….
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