I want to start by telling you something that took me many years to fully understand.

The life I am about to describe to you.

The fear, the hiding, the loss, the pain, none of it destroyed my faith.

If anything, everything I went through is the very reason my faith is the only thing I am completely certain of today.

I have lost almost everything a a human being can lose in one lifetime.

I have buried a husband.

I have been beaten in public.

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I have walked away from my country with three children and almost nothing else.

And I am sitting here in a small room in a country that is not mine telling you that Jesus is still Lord.

That is not something I say because it sounds good or because it is what someone in my position is supposed to say.

I say it because I have tested it with my actual life, with my blood, with my grief, and it held.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our sister Sana continues her story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you in your city.

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

My name is Sana.

I was born in Syria and this is my story.

I need you to sit with me for a moment before we get to the hard parts.

Because the hard parts will not mean anything to you if you do not first understand the world I came from.

People hear the word Syria today and they think of destruction.

bombed buildings, displaced families, news footage of suffering, and all of that is true and all of it is real.

But Syria was not always that image.

Before it became what it became, it was a country with history so deep that most of the world does not fully grasp it.

It was a place where civilizations had risen and fallen and left their marks in the stones of cities that are older than most nations on earth.

And it was a place where Christianity had existed quietly and stubbornly for nearly 2,000 years.

I grew up in a small town in the northwestern part of Syria.

It was not a place you would find on any international map.

It was a town of ordinary size, ordinary rhythms, ordinary life.

The kind of place where the same families had lived on the same streets for so many generations that the town itself felt like an extension of family.

Everyone knew everyone.

The baker knew your father.

The woman at the end of the street had known your grandmother.

The children played together in the same lanes that their parents had played in as children.

There was a familiarity to the place that was comforting and sometimes suffocating in equal measure the way it is in any small community anywhere in the world.

I was the third of four children.

My father was a carpenter and furniture maker.

You a tradesman who worked with his hands and was respected in our town by people of all backgrounds because he did his work honestly and did it well.

My mother managed the home with the kind of quiet efficiency that made everything run without ever making a show of running it.

We were not wealthy.

We were not poor either.

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We were a family that had enough and we knew it and we were grateful for it.

What I want you to understand most about my family though is not our economic situation or our social standing.

What I want you to understand is the faith that sat at the center of everything we were.

My father was a Christian man in the deepest most genuine sense of the word.

Not a man who attended church when it was convenient and kept his faith stored away on a shelf for Sundays.

T he was a man for whom Jesus was as real and present as any person in the room.

Every morning in our house began the same way.

Before the breakfast, before school preparations, before anything else, we gathered as a family and we prayed.

My father would lead us and his prayers were not the kind of prayers that feel rehearsed or performative.

They were conversations, real ones.

He talked to God the way you talk to someone you have known for many years and trust completely.

As a young child watching this, I absorbed something that I did not have the language to name yet.

I absorbed the idea that faith was not a religious obligation you performed but a living relationship you maintained.

He taught us his children to understand our position in Syria with both clarity and dignity.

He was careful about this.

He never made us feel that being a Christian minority in a Muslim majority country was something shameful.

But he also never pretended that it came without complications.

He would tell us that we were carrying something precious and that carrying something precious required wisdom about when and how you displayed it.

He drew a clear distinction for us between hiding your faith and being wise about how you lived it.

He said that a man who is wise about his circumstances is not a coward.

He is someone who understands the world he actually lives in, not the world he wishes he lived in.

My father walked that line every day of his life.

And he walked it without bitterness, without resentment, and without ever once suggesting that the price of our faith was too high.

My mother’s faith was expressed differently, but was no less deep.

She was a woman of very few religious words, but constant religious practice.

She prayed while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she moved through the ordinary tasks of her day.

She sang old hymns softly to herself in the kitchen, never loudly enough for the sound to travel beyond our walls, but present always as a kind of background music to our home.

If you had asked her to explain her theology, she probably would have been uncomfortable.

She was not a woman who talked about her faith so much as she inhabited it.

She loved Jesus the way she loved her children completely practically without needing to explain herself about it.

Watching her as I grew up though I learned something that no Sunday sermon ever fully taught me that faith lives most powerfully not in what you say about it but in how you move through each ordinary day because of it.

Our church was a simple building.

If you walked past it without knowing what it was, you might have taken it for any modest structure on that street.

There was no architectural grandeur, no large visible cross above the door, nothing that announced itself dramatically to the neighborhood.

This was not an accident.

It was the practical wisdom of a community that understood its environment.

But inside what happened was anything but modest.

When I say that our church was the center of our community’s life, I do not mean that as a figure of speech.

It was literally the center.

It was the place where people brought their grief and their gratitude.

where marriages were blessed and children were dedicated and the dead were mourned.

Where the rhythms of the Christian year gave shape and meaning to the passage of time.

The Sunday service was long, 2 hours at minimum, often closer to three.

As a young child, I was frequently bored during the longer stretches.

I will not pretend otherwise.

I would count the tiles on the floor or watch dust moving in the light that came through the windows or fidget until my mother put her hand on my knee without looking at me, which was her signal to be still.

But even as a child who did not always understand what was being said or sung, I was aware that something real happened in that room.

There was a quality to the air in that church during worship that was different from anywhere else I went.

A presence that I could feel but could not explain.

I did not have words for it at age seven or 8.

I only knew it was real and that it was the same every week and that it had nothing to do with the building itself and everything to do with the people inside it and what they brought with them.

Easter was the highest point of our year.

In Syria, Easter for Christians carries a weight that is difficult to explain to people who have only ever celebrated it in places where Christianity is the majority.

When you are a minority, the resurrection of Jesus is not just a theological event you commemorate.

It is your own story.

The story of something that should have been finished by its enemies, but was not.

the story of a power that could not be contained by death.

You sing those resurrection hymns differently when your community has lived something of that same experience across many generations.

You sing them as people who have personal and historical reasons to believe that endings are not always what they appear to be.

The friction of being a Christian minority in Syria was something I became aware of gradually.

The way children become aware of complex realities piece by piece, incident by incident until the full picture assembles itself.

The first piece I remember clearly was a friendship that ended when I was 9 or 10 years old.

There was a girl I had played with since we were small children.

We had been in and out of each other’s homes.

We had shared food and games and the particular closeness that forms between girls who grow up side by side.

And then one day without explanation ah she stopped.

She was still polite when we passed each other at school, but the friendship was gone, switched off as completely as a light.

I eventually understood through the things children overhear and piece together, that her older sister had told her that good Muslim girls did not form close friendships with Christian children.

She was not a bad child.

She was a child who had been told something by someone she trusted and she obeyed it.

I did not hate her for it.

But I carried the loss of that friendship for a long time and I carried the lesson it came with.

That in our world, the faith you were born into could reach into your most ordinary relationships and change them in ways you had no power over.

There was a teacher I had around the age of 11 who made certain things very clear without ever being openly hostile.

Yet he was a devout man, visibly religious and in his classroom the casual assumption was that his world view was simply the correct one and all others were deficient variations.

He never singled me out directly.

He did not need to.

The remarks he made in general class discussions were sufficient comments that placed people of other faiths in a category that was clearly lesser, clearly tolerated at best, clearly in need of correction at worst.

He said these things pleasantly, the way you state facts that no reasonable person would dispute.

And in a classroom of children who were almost entirely Muslim, there was nobody to push back.

I would sit with something burning in my chest and say nothing.

Not because I had no thoughts, but because I was 11 years old and had already understood in the instinctive way children understand survival.

But that this was not a battle that would go well for me if I picked it.

I told my father about one of those classroom incidents.

I remember the evening clearly, sitting at the kitchen table after supper, everyone else having moved on, just my father and me.

I told him what the teacher had said and how it had made me feel.

He listened all the way through without interrupting, which was characteristic of him.

He had the patience to hear a thing completely before he responded to it.

And when I finished, he sat quietly for a moment and then he said something I never lost.

He told me that people would say many things about Jesus throughout my life.

Things that were wrong and sometimes things that were cruel, and that none of those things would change who Jesus actually was.

He said, “My job was not to outar argue everyone who had a wrong opinion, but to live so honestly and so well that my life itself became an argument that was harder to dismiss than any words.

” He said, “The most powerful thing I could offer as a testimony was the quality of person my faith made me.

I was 11 and I absorbed it more than I understood it.

But I never forgot it and I have come back to it hundreds of times in the years since.

As I grew into my teenage years and then into early adulthood, I watched Syria itself begin to change in ways that were subtle at first and then less subtle.

There was a period roughly in my late teenage years when the political atmosphere began to carry a different charge.

Conversations that had once happened openly began to shift to private settings.

What news traveled through networks of trusted people rather than through official channels.

Families with members in other parts of the country were receiving reports that were alarming.

accounts of tensions escalating in ways that had not been seen before, of incidents between communities that were more violent than what anyone had previously experienced.

Our own town was not at the center of any of this in those years, but the ripples reached us.

I remember the incident that first made me understand in a visceral and not just intellectual way what we were living in.

A man from our church community, an older man who had run a small shop for decades, well known and generally respected across all communities in our town, had a small wooden cross hanging on the wall inside his shop.

not displayed aggressively, though not positioned to make a statement to anyone.

It was simply there the way a grandfather’s photograph might be there because it was part of who he was.

One night, someone set fire to his shop.

The damage was significant, but not total.

The fire was contained before it took the whole building.

But the shop was badly hurt and the man who had built it over a lifetime was left standing in the street looking at what remained of it.

There was no serious investigation.

No one was charged.

The community understood quietly and without needing to say it directly what had happened and why.

The cross on the wall had been the reason.

I was 12 years old.

My father did not shield us from this event.

He sat the family down and explained it plainly.

He was not dramatic about it.

He was a man who believed that the truth delivered with steadiness.

It was more useful than either panic or false reassurance.

He told us what had happened, why he believed it had happened, and what it told us about the world we lived in.

He told us that this was not what God wanted for any community, that it was wrong and nothing could make it right, but that it was real and we had to know it was real.

He told us that we could not let fear become the governing principle of our lives.

He told us that fear was natural, but that it could not be allowed to make our decisions for us.

I looked at my father’s hands on the table as he spoke.

They were the hands of a man who had spent his life working with wood, strong, calloused, marked by years of honest labor.

And those hands were completely still and steady on the table as he talked about our situation.

That stillness was not the stillness of someone who was not frightened.

I think it was the stillness of someone who had already made his peace with what his faith cost and had decided that the cost did not change the decision.

Over the following years, there were other incidents, smaller and larger.

They accumulated the way things accumulate in environments like ours, not as dramatic single events, but as a steady, low-level pressure that you learned to carry as a permanent feature of your life.

A Christian family’s vehicle vandalized because of a small fish symbol on it.

Young men from the church harassed on the street with slurs.

A pastor from a town nearby briefly detained and questioned about the content of his preaching, then released, but different afterward in a way everyone could see.

Yay.

None of these things made any kind of news beyond our community.

None of them were remarkable enough by the world’s indifferent standards to merit attention.

They were simply what life looked like for people like us.

And through all of it, our church held.

It held in a way that I think only communities that share a cost can hold.

The shared experience of pressure did not fracture us.

It solared us together more completely than comfort ever could have.

There was an elderly woman in our congregation, a widow who had lost her husband to illness years before and who had outlived him with tremendous dignity, who had a habit at the close of every Sunday service of saying quietly, almost to herself, but loud enough that people around her could hear, that they had not stopped us yet, and that they would not stop us.

She did not say it with aggression or bravado.

She said it with the absolute calm certainty of someone who has been tested over a long time and knows where she stands.

Every time she said it, the people around her would smile.

And there was in that smile a resilience and a tenderness that I carry to this day.

By the time I reached my early 20s, I had grown into a faith that was fully my own.

Not inherited on autopilot from my parents, though their example had shaped everything in me, but genuinely claimed, genuinely chosen.

I had looked at what being a Christian in Syria cost.

the friction, the exclusions, the incidents, the constant background awareness of being a minority in an environment that did not always regard you well.

And I had said clearly and consciously inside myself, yes, this is mine.

I choose this though not because it is easy, because it is true.

Because the presence I had felt in that church since I was a small child was real.

Because the man my father was, the peace my mother carried, the resilience of that elderly woman and all the others like her, all of it pointed to something that was actually there, that was actually holding them, that I wanted to be held by too.

This is the thing I most need you to understand before we go further.

Everything that I survived in the years that followed was survived by a woman who had chosen her faith with full knowledge of its cost.

I was not naive.

I was not someone who had never seen what the price looked like.

I had been watching the price being paid around me since I was a child.

I chose it anyway because the thing it purchased was worth more than anything giving it up could have preserved.

That is the ground I was standing on when everything came.

And then I met IAS.

But that comes next.

I did not meet Elias through any remarkable circumstance.

There was no dramatic moment, no single instant that I can point to and say everything changed at exactly that second.

Real life, in my experience, rarely delivers the moments that stories promise.

What it delivers instead is a slow, quiet accumulation.

Small interactions that seem unremarkable in themselves, but that together add up to something that changes everything.

That is how I came to know Ilas slowly, honestly, in the ordinary way that things that last are usually built.

He came from a town not far from ours.

His family had been Christian for as many generations as anyone had bothered to count.

The same deep roots that my own family had are the same kind of faith that had survived long enough in that part of the world to stop being something you debated and become something you simply were.

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