He had come to our area for work.

There was a construction or repair project of some kind that had brought him and a small group from his town.

And the way it tends to go in tightlyworked Christian communities, someone who knew his family connected him to our church before he had been in the area a full week.

He first appeared on a Sunday morning sitting toward the back of the church following the service carefully.

I noticed him in the way you notice any unfamiliar face in a small congregation because you know everyone and a new face stands out automatically.

He was not a physically imposing man.

medium height, medium build, dark hair are the kind of face that did not announce itself immediately, but that revealed itself gradually, detail by detail over time.

He sat with his full attention on the service, not glancing around to assess the room the way a newcomer often does.

He was simply present.

That was the first thing I noticed about him, that he was fully present wherever he was.

After the service, the congregation gathered the way it always did, in the yard outside or in the hall attached to the building, eating together, talking, doing the things that Christian communities do when the formal service ends and the real fellowship begins.

My father, who had an instinct for people on the edges of a gathering, went to Elias and drew him in the way my father always did with anyone who seemed to need drawing in.

He introduced him around, including to our family.

We exchanged perhaps 20 words that first Sunday.

He was polite, careful with his speech, asked questions about the community in a way that showed he was genuinely curious rather than just making conversation.

He mentioned his own family with warmth.

He said something brief about his own faith and background.

Not in a way that performed it or displayed it, but in the simple matterof fact way that a man mentions a fact about himself when it is relevant and true.

And then the gathering moved on as gatherings do, and I thought nothing more of it.

He stayed in our area for months, the work having extended beyond its original scope.

And in those months, he became a consistent presence at church and then a growing presence in the broader community and then a regular guest in our home.

My father had taken a genuine liking to him.

Yet they would sit together after meals and talk for long stretches about things that men in that community talked about.

The state of the country, the church, the meaning of things, the way faith operated in practical daily life.

I would be present for some of these conversations and I would listen.

And what I heard over those months built my understanding of Elias more slowly and more thoroughly than any deliberate courtship could have.

He was consistent.

That was the quality that looking back I think I valued most and noticed most clearly.

He was the same person whether he was in the church service or at our kitchen table or helping with some physical task around the property.

the same tone, the same manner, the same underlying orientation toward the people around him.

He did not perform differently for different audiences.

He did not have a public version and a private version of himself that differed significantly.

He was simply steadily himself.

In a world of considerable uncertainty, in a country where the ground was beginning to feel less stable by the year, this quality of steadiness and consistency in a person was more attractive than I can adequately put into words.

I became aware of my feelings for him gradually and without drama.

Somewhere around the sixth or seventh month of knowing him, I had to acknowledge to myself that what I felt when he was present was different from what I felt with anyone else.

It was not something I acted on.

I was not the kind of woman to push at something like this.

I was raised in a community and a culture where these things moved along certain paths and I was content to move along those paths.

I prayed about it.

Yo, I told God what I felt honestly because I had learned from my father that honest prayer was the only kind worth offering and I left it there.

I watched to see what would happen.

What happened was that Elias went to my father.

He approached my father in the way that the tradition of our community called for, the way it had been done for generations, and the way both of them, being the kind of men they were, naturally observed without it needing to be explained.

He told my father that he had developed deep feelings for me, that he had great respect for our family, that he was serious in his intentions and wanted to pursue the possibility of marriage with my father’s blessing and with my full and willing agreement.

My father told him he would pray about it and speak with my mother and with me.

Uh the conversation my father had with me about it was one of the most careful conversations of my life.

He was not a man who would decide something like this for his daughter.

He sat with me and told me what Elias had said, told me what he himself had observed about the man over the months he had known him and then asked me directly and without ceremony what I felt.

I told him the truth.

I told him I had developed strong feelings and that I believed Elias was a genuinely good man.

My father was quiet for a moment after I finished.

The way he was always quiet before he said something that mattered and then he told me he thought so too and that he was prepared to give his blessing.

Our engagement lasted several months, but we were not alone together in the way that couples in other contexts might be.

Our culture and our faith both shaped the structure of how this time unfolded.

And we both honored that structure without experiencing it as a constraint.

We met in family settings, in church settings, in the gathered spaces of our community.

We talked more and more deeply over time.

We prayed together, which was something I had not done with anyone outside my own family.

And the experience of praying with alias told me more about who he was than almost any conversation could have.

The way a person prays tells you what they actually believe about God, not just what they say they believe.

His prayers were direct, honest, and personal in a way that confirmed everything I had already come to see in him.

We were married in our church.

It was not a large wedding.

The times and the finances and our own preferences conspired to keep it intimate.

What we had was the people who mattered most.

both families, our closest community members, the pastor who had known me since I was a child.

The ceremony itself was everything I needed it to be.

Scripture was read, vows were spoken.

We took communion together for the first time as husband and wife, which in our tradition is among the most significant things that happen in a marriage ceremony.

the acknowledgment that this union is built on and sustained by something beyond the two people in it.

There was singing.

There was a meal afterward prepared over two days by the women of the church who had arrived with their pots and their love and their unsolicited opinions about quantities of food.

and who turned the preparation itself into a celebration that was as meaningful as the ceremony.

I stood at the front of that small church beside Elas and listened to our pastor talk about the covenant they were witnessing and I felt peace complete inexplicable allencompassing peace.

The kind that tells you not that nothing difficult will ever come, but that you are exactly where you are supposed to be with exactly the person you are supposed to be beside.

Everything in my life had been building toward this moment of standing next to a man who loved Jesus the way I loved Jesus in a community that had cost us all something to belong to.

Making promises before God in a country that did not always make room for people like us.

I was completely fully and deeply happy.

Our early years of marriage were the years I return to most often in my memory now.

Not because they were without difficulty.

Life in Syria by that point was never entirely without a difficulty, but because they contained a quality of ordinary happiness that I understand now was a gift I did not fully appreciate while I was living inside it.

We built a home together, small but ours.

We cooked together in the evenings and talked about the day.

He had a dry, quiet humor that caught you offguard because it appeared so unexpectedly from behind his usual seriousness, and it made me laugh in a way that started deep.

A real laugh, not a polite one.

We read scripture together in the mornings the way my parents had prayed together in the mornings.

We argued about small things and resolved them quickly because neither of us was built for sustained conflict.

We were good together.

We fit.

He had felt even before we married the beginning of what he understood to be a calling.

a calling toward pastoral work, toward leading and shephering a community of believers.

He was careful about it in the way he was careful about everything important.

He did not rush toward it or assume it without examination.

He spent a long time praying about whether what he was feeling was genuinely a call or simply a desire he was projecting onto God’s will for him.

He wanted to know the difference.

That kind of honest self-examination, the willingness to question his own motives and not simply trust them was one of the things I admired most about him.

with he did not want to serve the church out of ambition or the need to feel significant.

He wanted to serve it because he had been called and he wanted to be certain about the difference.

By the time our first child was born a son whose name I will not use here because I will always be protective of my children even in their stories.

Elas had begun to shepherd a small and quiet congregation.

I say quiet because everything about the way the church functioned in our context was by necessity quiet.

It was not a congregation with a building and a listed address and a published schedule of services.

It was a group of believers who rotated among homes, who gathered without announcing themselves, who worshiped with awareness that the wrong ears in the wrong moment could create consequences.

This was the reality of church life for many Christian communities in Syria by this point.

Not all churches operated this way.

Some were established enough and in areas stable enough to function more openly.

But in our area, in our circumstances, this was how we did it.

And the people Aaliyah served were extraordinary.

I use that word carefully because I know it is used loosely, but I mean it precisely.

They were ordinary in every external sense.

trades people, homemakers, elderly people, young people making difficult choices about staying in a country that was becoming increasingly unsafe for them.

But their faith was extraordinary, not performed, actually lived.

Families who had held on to their Christian identity through decades of pressure without it becoming smaller or more defensive.

but if anything more essential and more alive.

Elderly people who had seen and survived things that most of their country would never know about and whose peace was earned rather than assumed.

Young people who could have left but chose to stay because they believed their presence in their community was itself a form of faithfulness.

Elias moved among these people with a humility and a genuiness that I watched and marveled at.

He was not a dramatic preacher.

He did not have the kind of presence that fills a room before he has said a word.

He was quiet and plain and direct.

And when he spoke about Jesus, it was the speech of a man who was talking about someone he knew personally, not a historical figure or a theological proposition.

People responded to this.

They trusted him.

They brought him their real problems and their real doubts and their real fears.

And he met all of it honestly.

He did not give easy answers to hard questions.

He sat in the hard questions with people and trusted that Jesus was present in the sitting, watching him be that man, watching him be in his calling.

The same man I knew at home with the same honesty and the same steadiness and the same quality of genuine presence deepened my love for him in a way that I did not know love could still deepen after years of marriage.

There is a particular kind of love that comes from watching the person you married be exactly who they said they were consistently over time under pressure.

It is different from the love of courtship or the love of early marriage.

It is quieter and heavier and more certain.

I loved Elas with that love.

We had three children.

Each birth was its own complete joy.

Arrow.

Even as the world outside our home was becoming more complicated and more frightening with each year, Syria had fractured badly.

The civil war that began in 2011 had opened up layers of conflict that went far deeper than the original dispute, revealing fractures and resentments and power struggles that had been present for a long time.

beneath a surface stability that turned out to be more fragile than anyone had understood.

Different factions were fighting different battles simultaneously.

The government, the opposition, foreign interests, regional militias, all of it layered and intersecting in a violence that consumed ordinary people who wanted none of it.

And into that chaos came the group the world would come to call ISIS.

The first time I heard the name clearly enough to understand its significance.

I was in our kitchen and Alias was at the other room talking with one of the men from the congregation.

They were speaking in the lowered voices that men use when they are discussing something serious and do not want to alarm the household.

I listened without making myself known.

I heard enough to understand that what was being discussed was not another faction in an already complex civil conflict.

What was being discussed was something categorically different in its intentions and its methods.

a group that was not simply fighting for political control, but was actively and violently enforcing a particular religious order on every territory it took.

And that for Christians, this group had a very specific and very clear agenda.

That evening, after the visitor had gone, I asked Elas directly about what I had heard.

Thus, he did not try to minimize it or spare me from it.

He told me what he knew at that point, which was still incomplete, but was already disturbing.

He told me that the reports from areas where this group had taken control, were unlike anything else that had happened in the conflict so far.

He told me that Christians in those areas had been given choices.

convert, pay a punishing tax and submit to secondass status, or face the third option.

He told me that many had been killed, that churches had been destroyed, that communities that had existed for centuries had been driven out within days.

And then he told me that he did not think we should leave.

He said it carefully.

He said it as a man who had thought and prayed about it, not as a man making a reckless or unexamined decision.

Yet he said that the people in the congregation had nowhere to go and no one else.

He said that if he left, he was not sure what would hold that community together.

He said he felt as clearly as he had ever felt anything from God that his place was there.

He asked me what I thought.

He genuinely asked he was not presenting a decision already made and seeking my agreement.

He was asking his partner, the woman he had made his life with, what she thought.

I held that question a long time in silence.

I was a mother of small children.

I was a daughter with an aging mother.

I was a woman with every practical reason to want safety.

And I was also a woman who had chosen her faith knowingly and had watched what faith looked like when it was backed by actual conviction.

I looked at my husband across the room and I saw a man who was not asking me to be reckless with our lives.

I saw a man who had counted the cost and made a decision before God.

And I knew that whatever happened, I was beside him in it.

We were one.

We had promised that.

I told him I was with him.

We stayed.

The months that followed were some of the most difficult we had lived through.

The news from surrounding areas was consistently terrible.

Every week brought reports that were harder to process than the week before.

Whole Christian communities gone.

Churches turned to rubble or repurposed under the black flag.

Names of people we knew or knew of reported dead or missing.

The circle of safety was shrinking steadily and visibly, and we were watching it shrink from inside it.

And yet the congregation held more than held.

It went deeper.

There is something that happens to a community when it faces genuine threat together.

The superficial things fall away.

The petty conflicts and the small rivalries and the issues that take up space in a community that has never been seriously tested simply dissolve.

What is left is what was real all along.

And what was real in our congregation was a love for God and for each other that I had never seen more clearly than in those frightened and faithful months.

People prayed with a desperation and an honesty that I have never since seen equaled in any comfortable setting.

They wept openly and without embarrassment.

They held each other.

They shared what they had.

They showed up for each other with a consistency and a willingness that required no organization or instruction.

They simply did it because that is what you do when you are really the church and not just attending it.

Ilas preached during those months from the parts of scripture that speak to suffering and perseverance.

He preached from the Psalms those ancient cries of people who were terrified and faithful simultaneously.

He preached from Hebrews that long sustained argument for holding on when everything inside you wants to let go.

He preached from the letters of Paul written by a man who knew exactly what it cost to carry Jesus into a world that did not want him.

And the people received those sermons not as theological instruction but as bread as the specific thing they needed to keep moving.

There was a night close to the end of our life as we knew it.

And when the children were asleep and the house was quiet and Elias and I sat together on the floor of the main room.

We did this sometimes.

sat on the floor with our backs against the wall because there was something about the groundedness of it that felt more real than furniture.

When we needed to talk about real things, we talked about the children, about what we hoped for them and what we feared for them and what we were trying to build in them that would hold regardless of what came.

We talked about faith, about what it meant to trust God not as a comfort but as an actual conviction.

To trust him when the circumstances made trust feel irrational.

To believe that he was present and that he was enough when the evidence visible to the human eye was pointing in a different direction.

And at some point in that conversation, Galas went quiet for a moment.

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