And then he said that he had been spending a lot of time examining his own faith, not doubting it, examining it, asking himself whether it was real enough, whether it was the kind of faith that would hold under the worst pressure or whether it was the kind that looked solid until it was actually tested and then crumbled.

He said he believed it was real enough.

He said he believed that if the moment came, the moment where holding onto Jesus cost him the most expensive thing he had, he would hold.

He said it quietly and without drama.

The way you state a thing you are genuinely certain of rather than a thing you are performing certainty about.

I did not argue with this.

I did not pull back from it the way a frightened wife might pull back saying no that will not happen.

We will be fine.

I did not do that because I understood what he was saying and because I had been asking myself the same questions and because a part of me already knew in the way you know things that your mind has not yet fully permitted itself to acknowledge that a moment was coming.

I lay awake that night beside him after he fell asleep.

I listened to him breathe.

I memorized the sound of it without knowing I was doing it.

I thought about everything.

My father, my mother, the elderly woman in the church with her quiet certainty.

The shop burned because of a cross on a wall.

The friendship that had simply stopped one day when I was 9 years old.

I thought about the accumulation of it, the long slow building of cost and consequence that had been our community’s life for as long as I could remember.

And I prayed, not eloquently, honestly, I prayed that whatever was coming, we would not let go.

I prayed that Jesus would be enough.

I prayed the only prayer that felt real, which was simply hold us.

He was about to be asked to honor that prayer in a way I could not have fully imagined.

And so was I.

I have told this part of the story in several different places to several different groups of people and I have noticed something consistent.

When I get to this part, people stop moving.

They stop shifting in their seats or checking on their children or glancing at their phones.

They go still.

I think the stillness is partly grief and partly something else.

Some recognition that what they are about to hear is one of those things that once you have heard it, you cannot simply put back where it was.

You carry it differently afterward.

So I am going to ask you to be still with me now and let me tell it plainly.

The morning Elias was taken was an ordinary morning.

I need you to hold that because it matters.

Because there is something about the ordinariness of it that is its own particular cruelty.

The worst mornings of your life do not announce themselves.

They begin the way every other morning begins.

The light comes in through the same windows.

The sounds from the street are the same sounds you have heard every morning for years.

The smell of bread and tea and the particular smell of a house that belongs to you is exactly as it always is.

Nothing in the fabric of ordinary morning tells you that this is the last ordinary morning you will have for a very long time, perhaps forever.

I was in the kitchen.

The children were getting ready.

The oldest preparing for school, the middle one eating, the youngest still slow and sleepy and needing to be managed through the morning routine that every small child requires.

Elas had been up before me, as he always was.

He rose early every morning to pray without exception the way his father had and the way he had done for as long as I had known him.

By the time I was in the kitchen, he had finished his morning prayer and was moving through the house in the quiet, purposeful way he moved, getting ready for his day.

He came into the kitchen.

We spoke the way married people speak in the mornings.

The brief, warm, practical words that are not remarkable in themselves, but that are the texture of a shared life.

The small verbal gestures that confirm without ever stating it, I am here.

You are here.

We are in this together.

He ate something.

Yo, he looked tired in the way he had been looking tired for weeks.

The tiredness that is not physical but comes from carrying sustained worry and responsibility.

But he was calm.

He was always calm.

That deeprooted steadiness that had been one of the first things I saw in him.

The sounds from outside changed before anything else.

This is how it begins.

Not with an announcement, with a change in the sounds.

vehicles more than one moving with purpose.

Voices that were louder and more authoritative than the ordinary voices of the street.

A quality of movement and noise that is instantly instinctively recognizable as threat before your conscious mind has processed it into language.

The body knows.

The body knew before I did.

They came into our neighborhood very quickly.

There were many of them armed, all dressed in the manner we had seen in reports and heard described by people who had experienced this in other areas.

The black clothing, the weapons, the manner of men who had decided they were operating under an authority that superseded anything that might push back at them.

They moved through the streets and they went into houses and they took the Christian men when they came to our door.

I was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Elas was in the main room.

The door opened.

I will not reconstruct the mechanics of it because some of those details belong to me and not to anyone else.

And they were there, several of them, inside our home, which was the home where my children’s shoes were lined up by the door and my bread was on the counter, and the ordinary evidence of our ordinary life was everywhere.

They wanted the men.

This became clear immediately.

They were moving through the neighborhood, taking the Christian men, gathering them for something.

IAS was in the room and there was no question about what was going to happen.

I moved toward him and the soldier put his arm across my path, not striking me but stopping me with a force that told me very clearly that this was not a situation I had any power in.

I will not describe in detail the moments of Ilias being taken because those moments are mine in a way that I do not know how to share without losing something I need to keep.

What I will tell you is the thing that I have never stopped seeing which is the way he looked at me before they moved him out.

He looked back at me from across our room and I saw everything in that look.

15 years of marriage, every conversation, every prayer, every ordinary morning like this one.

Every difficult night sitting on the floor talking about whether our faith was real enough.

Everything we had been to each other and everything we had built was in that look compressed into a few seconds because there were no seconds left for words.

That look told me everything he needed me to know.

It told me he was not destroyed by what was happening.

It told me he was held and it told me he knew I was held too, even though I did not feel it yet.

And then he was gone.

The women and children of the neighborhood were gathered and taken under guard to one of the larger houses in the area.

The men having been marched in a different direction.

There were perhaps 20 of us, maybe more.

I did not count.

We were compressed into rooms that were not designed to hold that many people.

While with armed guards at the perimeter and no information about what was happening or what was going to happen, children cried.

Some women prayed aloud.

Some were completely silent in a way that was somehow more frightening than any noise.

The waiting that followed was some of the most difficult hours of my life.

When there is action, when there is something to do, when you are moving or fighting or making decisions, the body and the mind have somewhere to put their energy.

When you are locked in a room waiting with no information, the mind has nowhere to go but the worst possibilities, and it goes there methodically and without mercy.

I held my youngest on my lap and tried to keep my face from telling her what I was feeling inside.

My oldest sat close to me with the careful face of a child who is trying very hard to understand a situation beyond his years.

My middle one was quiet in a way that was not natural for her.

pressed against my side with both hands gripping my clothing, I prayed, not with eloquence, with the raw, simple words of a person who is terrified and has nothing to offer but honesty.

I did not ask God to make it not be what it clearly was.

I asked him to be present, to be present in whatever was happening to Elias wherever they had taken him.

to be present in this locked room with 20 frightened women and their children.

To be enough, I kept coming back to that be enough.

I knew what was possible.

I had known for months what was possible.

I was asking not for a miracle that undid the situation, but for the presence of God inside it.

And he was there.

I want to say this clearly and without sentimentality.

In that locked room in the worst hours of my life to that point, God was present in a way I could feel.

It was not comfort in any ordinary sense.

I was not comforted.

I was terrified.

But underneath the terror, there was something holding something that the terror could shake but could not reach the bottom of.

I have tried many times to describe this to people and I always feel that words are insufficient.

The closest I can get is this.

It was like being in a terrible storm.

But knowing that the ground beneath you was solid.

That regardless of how violent the storm became, the ground would hold.

The storm was very real.

The ground was also very real.

There was an older woman in that room.

a woman I had known through the church for years in a woman who had survived things I did not know the full details of before this day who began at some point during those hours to sing very quietly almost below the level of sound one of the old hymns a Syria Christian hymn that is very ancient and that I had grown up hearing in church she started it alone, sitting in her corner with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed and her lips moving.

And it spread through the room the way warmth spreads gradually, quietly, as one woman and then another joined in, each one softly enough that the aggregate was still barely a murmur.

It was not performance.

It was not morale building.

It was a group of frightened women who had been formed by the same faith and who were in the most desperate way doing the only thing they knew to do.

I joined them and my children looked at me and I nodded at them and I sang with my youngest on my lap and my oldest watching me with eyes that were too old for his face.

A guard shouted at us to stop and we stopped, but we had sung.

It was later that afternoon, when the light was changing and the temperature inside the room was dropping slightly, that I received information about what had happened.

A young fighter came into the building for reasons I no longer remember, some administrative matter.

He was young, younger than I expected.

And there was something about him that was not the same as the older men.

Something that could not fully close off whatever was moving in him about what he had witnessed or been part of.

He paused near where I was sitting.

He did not look directly at me.

He said a few words quietly in a way that was clearly intended for me alone.

He told me that the men had been brought to a public area, that they had been given a choice, that they had all refused, that they had died with prayers on their lips.

He said the last part with an expression I could not fully read, not pride, not contempt, something more complicated than either.

as though what he had seen had left a mark he had not anticipated.

He left without waiting for me to respond.

I want to tell you honestly what happened inside me when he said those words.

There was no collapse.

There was no screaming.

What happened was quieter and in some ways more complete than either of those things would have been.

It was a knowing, a confirmation of what I had felt earlier in the most physical part of myself cut at some point during the afternoon that I could not have named precisely.

I had felt Elias leave, not metaphorically.

I had felt it in the actual physical way that people who are deeply connected feel things.

And this young soldier’s words were the confirmation of what I already knew.

The grief did not rush in all at once.

It arrived in layers over time.

What arrived first was something stranger, a profound aching clarity.

Ilas had told me on the floor of our home that his faith was real enough to hold under the worst pressure.

He had not been wrong.

He had stood in a public square with armed men around him and been offered his life in exchange for denying Jesus.

And he had refused.

He had died with the name of Jesus on his lips.

The man I had watched for 15 years, the man who prayed before meals and read scripture every morning and sat on the floor late at night examining the honesty of his own faith.

That man had been exactly who he said he was when it cost him everything.

I held my children and I let that truth sit in me.

The grief and the devastating pride and the love were all present simultaneously, not separable from each other.

All of it one compound feeling that had no clean name, but that was as real as anything I have ever felt.

who survived the day.

What I later pieced together through information that came to me over subsequent days from different sources was that there had been some confusion or miscommunication among the ISIS fighters about what was to be done with the women and children.

A commander had given an order.

Yet, that order had not been clearly transmitted or had been countermanded by someone else or had simply been lost in the chaos of a group of men who were simultaneously managing multiple things in multiple locations.

In that confusion, the decision about us was delayed.

And then something elsewhere required their urgent attention, some engagement, some development in another part of the area and they left.

The guards took us out of the building, marched us to the edge of the neighborhood and expelled us.

Told us to go and not return.

I walked out of that neighborhood with my three children.

I had almost nothing.

I had the clothes we were wearing.

I had a small amount of money that I had had in my possession that morning and that they had not taken.

I had my children’s hands.

I had nothing else.

I need you to stay with that image for a moment.

A woman walking out of her neighborhood with three children.

The home she built behind her.

The man she loved already gone.

The street she had walked every day of her life for years, now occupied by men who had ended everything she had known.

The bread still on the counter, the shoes still by the door, all of it behind her, none of it available to her anymore, none of it retrievable.

She walked because walking was what was available.

Because stopping was not an option when you had three children who needed you to keep moving.

Because the road ahead, however unknown and frightening it was, was still a road, and roads can be walked.

I thought about what Elias had said, that a man who has nothing worth dying for has nothing worth living for.

He had proved both sides of that sentence.

He had died for something.

And what he had died for was the same thing that I was now going to have to find a way to keep living for.

Because if it was worth his death, it was worth my life.

I kept walking.

The weeks after Elas was taken were the weeks of simply surviving.

I want to describe them honestly because I think there is a version of this kind of story where the person telling it jumps quickly from the tragedy to the spiritual lessons and the triumphant declarations and I do not think that is honest.

What happened in those weeks was not triumphant.

It was survival in the most basic and unglamorous sense.

getting through each day, finding food for my children, finding somewhere safe to sleep, processing a grief so enormous that I could not face it directly, but had to approach it sideways in small pieces, the way you cannot look directly at the sun.

We were taken in by a family from our extended church network.

People who lived in a part of the area that was not yet as completely under ISIS control as our own neighborhood had been, or people who had a home and were willing to put us in it despite the risk that this carried.

They were a family of remarkable, quiet courage.

They shared what they had without making us feel the weight of what we were costing them.

Their children played with my children.

And this, the ordinary sight of children playing, the sound of it, the way children find their way to games and laughter, even in the middle of adult catastrophe, was sometimes the only thing that kept me functional.

I could not leave Syria immediately.

This is something I want to explain with some care because I know it seems from the outside that the obvious thing to do was to leave as quickly as possible.

But the obvious thing was not the available thing.

We had almost nothing in terms of money or resources.

The journey to any border was not a walk in the park.

It was a long and dangerous route through terrain controlled by multiple factions requiring planning and money and connections that take time to assemble.

My children were small.

My mother, my father, having died sometime before all of this, was elderly and frightened and in no condition to be abandoned.

And there was something else.

There was the community.

What remained of the congregation that Elas had shepherded was scattered and shattered.

Most of the men were gone.

Families had been displaced.

But people were still in the area.

Women, elderly people, families who had nowhere else to go and no resources to get there.

And they were still meeting these remnants still gathering in the quietest possible ways in each other’s homes.

still reading the Bible together in whispers.

I was still praying, still trying to hold some thread of faith alive in conditions that made every meeting a risk.

I could not leave that, not immediately, not until I had done what I could do.

So I moved among them, not as their pastor, I was not that, and I had no title or formal role.

But I had been a pastor’s wife for years and I knew these people and I knew how to be present in the ways that a community in crisis needs presence.

I knew how to sit with someone in their grief without needing to fix it or fill the silence.

I knew how to read a passage of scripture to a room of frightened women and then wait with them in whatever the passage brought up.

I knew how to pray over someone with the kind of prayer that is not a performance but a genuine turning toward God on behalf of another person.

I did these things because Elias had modeled them to me over many years and because the spirit of God I believe fills the gaps that human capacity cannot fill when a person is being used in a place where they are needed.

I knew we were being watched.

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