The consciousness of being observed, of being known to the wrong people, had been present since before Elias was killed, but it had intensified significantly afterward.

I was a widow of a man they had killed for refusing to deny Jesus.

I was continuing to practice my faith.

I was continuing to gather with other believers.

I was making no secret within the community of who I was and what I believed.

None of this was invisible to people who were watching.

I was as careful as I knew how to be.

I was not reckless.

I took precautions.

I varied my roots.

I did not stay in any one location too long.

I was careful about who I spoke to, about what and in what settings.

But I was not willing to stop.

I need to say this plainly.

I was not able to make myself stop.

Not out of stubbornness or a death wish, but because stopping, going quiet, going underground, behaving as though my faith was something I was ashamed of or willing to pretend I did not have would have been a betrayal of alias that I was not capable of.

He had died rather than deny Jesus.

I was not going to hide Jesus while I was still alive.

They came for me on an ordinary morning.

That the way these things always seem to happen on ordinary mornings.

I was not at home.

I was returning from uh visiting an elderly woman from the community, a woman who was ill and alone and whom I had been going to sit with and pray with every few days.

I was walking back through the streets doing the ordinary thing that I had been doing for weeks when a group of armed men stopped me.

The public nature of what they did next was entirely deliberate.

I understood this in the moment and I have thought about it many times since.

They were not interested in dealing with me privately.

Private punishment accomplishes only one thing.

Public punishment accomplishes something much larger.

It sends a message through a whole community.

Every person who witnesses a public punishment is receiving a lesson about what happens to people who behave the way the person being punished has behaved.

Every person who watches becomes a warned person.

This is why they do it publicly.

This is why they chose a street and not a back room.

I was brought to an open area where people could see, but some had gathered or been brought to watch.

I could see faces at windows.

I could see people on the edges of the space who had been doing something else and had stopped, frozen in place by what they were witnessing.

Among those faces, I could see some that I recognized.

women from the community, Christian women who had no power to intervene and who watched with faces that told me they were living through something themselves, their own private agony of witnessing.

A man spoke.

He stated the accusations against me in the formal manner that they used for this kind of public proceeding.

A Christian woman who had continued to practice and promote her faith in defiance of what was required.

A woman who had refused to accept the new order.

A woman who was therefore being given publicly and in front of witnesses while a final opportunity to correct her error.

The offer was what it always was.

Say the shahada.

Declare that there is no god but Allah.

that Muhammad is his prophet.

Renounce Jesus as Lord.

Do it here in public in front of these witnesses and you will be permitted to live.

I want to tell you the truth about what was happening inside me in those moments because I think it matters.

I was not calm.

My body knew what was about to happen and it was responding the way bodies respond to mortal threat.

The trembling in my hands that I could not control.

The weakness in my legs.

The strange heightened clarity that fear sometimes produces where you see everything very sharply and feel time moving differently.

All of that was present.

The fear was completely real.

And at the same time underneath it there was something else.

I keep returning to the image of solid ground beneath a storm because it remains the most accurate description I have.

The storm was real.

The fear was real and there was something underneath that the fear was unable to reach something that held something that was not being generated by my own will or my own strength because my own will and strength were clearly at their limit.

something that was being given to me in that moment from outside myself.

They asked me to deny Jesus.

I said no.

Not dramatically.

My voice was quieter than I wanted it to be because my body was frightened even while the deeper part of me was held.

I said that Jesus is my Lord.

I said I could not say otherwise.

I said it simply because the simple version was the true version and I had no capacity in that moment for anything more elaborate or what followed or that was the flogging.

I will describe it plainly because plain is the only honest way to describe physical pain and I will not dress it up into something it was not.

The instrument was thick and heavy.

The blows landed across my back and my shoulders with a force that was immediately and comprehensively agonizing.

Pain like that does not stay in one location.

It spreads.

It radiates.

It fills the body in a way that becomes its own weather system.

The ground was hard and hot beneath me.

The sun was overhead and direct.

I was aware of the watching faces, aware of the voices around me, aware with a particular sharpness of the faces of the women I knew among the watchers.

The women whose silent agony of watching was written plainly on their faces even from a distance.

Between blows, they asked the question again was, “Would I renounce Jesus? Would I say the words? would I accept the offer that was still even now on the table? I did not say the words each time they asked the question.

I had to find the answer again in that moment and it came from the same place and the same thing was there each time.

I cannot call it strength.

Strength on its own has a limit that can be reached and I was well past any natural limit of strength I might have had.

What was carrying me through each moment was not my own.

I know this sounds like uh the kind of claim that is convenient to make after the fact.

But I can only tell you what was true in my experience.

And what was true was that I should have broken and I did not break.

And the reason was not me.

At some point during this the situation changed.

A disturbance somewhere, a commotion that I could not see clearly from the ground, but that I could hear.

A rapid change in the quality of attention of the men around me.

Something was happening elsewhere that was urgent.

Communications between the fighters movement.

The focused attention of the men who had been concentrated on me shifted and fractured, pulled by something that required them immediately in another location.

The order to execute me was never given or if it was given at some point earlier, it was never carried out.

In the distraction and the movement that followed, I was simply left on the ground.

The scene dissolved around me.

The men moved.

The watching crowd dispersed in the uncertain way that crowds disperse when the event they were forced to witness has ended without a definitive conclusion.

And nobody is sure what they are allowed to do.

I was on the ground and then there were hands on me, women’s hands, gentle and careful and urgent.

Some of them were women I knew from our community who had watched what happened.

Some of them I did not know.

There was one woman, I didn’t know her name.

I still do not know her name, who I believe from her clothing was Muslim.

She came to me and she covered me with her own outer garment and she wept.

She did not say much that I was in a condition to retain clearly but she wept and she covered me and she was there.

I have thought about her many times.

I do not know what moved her to do that.

It I do not know what was happening inside her as she watched what happened and then came forward when the danger had passed.

I know only what she did and what she did was an act of such basic human solidarity that I have never been able to think about it without being moved.

I was helped to a nearby home.

The injuries from the beating were real and serious.

My back and shoulders badly hurt.

Movement painful and limited.

The kind of damage that takes weeks rather than days to recover from.

There was no real medical care available in our circumstances.

What there was was the community.

The women who came and sat with me, who brought what they had for the pain, who cared for my children while I could not, who maintained a quiet, constant, faithful presence around me.

In those days of recovery and in those days of being forced to be still that my mind went to places it usually moved too quickly to visit.

I was not angry.

I have examined this many times because I think it is the thing that surprises people most when I say it not because anger would have been wrong.

anger would have been completely understandable and nobody who knew what had happened to me could have blamed me for being consumed by it.

But it was not what I found when I looked inside myself during those days.

What I found was something harder to name and I think ultimately more useful.

It was a kind of stripped down clarity as though everything that was not essential had been removed by grief, by pain, by the cumulative weight of everything that had been taken.

And what was left was only what was real.

And what was real was Jesus.

He had been real in my father’s home when I was a child.

I waking up every morning to the sound of prayer.

He had been real in that small church where I had grown up in the singing that was always careful not to be too loud but was always completely genuine.

He had been real in the marriage I had with Elias, in the ministry we had shared.

In the prayers we had prayed together on the floor of our home late at night when the children were sleeping and we were asking God to be enough for whatever came.

He had been real on the day Elias was taken because Elias had stood in a public square and refused to deny him and died with his name on his lips.

He had been real in that locked room with 20 frightened women when an elderly woman began to sing and others joined her.

He had been real on the ground under the blows when I should have broken and did not break.

He had been real in the hands and tears of a woman whose name I would never know who covered me with her own garment.

None of what had been done to me had removed him.

They had taken everything else that could be taken.

They had taken Elias.

They had taken my home.

They had taken my security and my sense of a future I could plan and my confidence that tomorrow would resemble today.

They had beaten my body in public and tried to strip me of my dignity in front of witnesses and the one thing they wanted most.

The one thing all of it was designed to take.

They had not been able to touch.

He was still there.

He had held.

I lay in that borrowed room with my damaged body and my grieving heart and my three children sleeping nearby.

And I felt what the Bible calls the peace that passes understanding.

Not happiness, not the absence of pain, the not denial of the reality of everything that had happened, but a peace that was underneath all of it, deeper than all of it, more solid than any of the circumstances that were pressing against it.

the peace of knowing with a certainty that had now been tested in fire that the thing you built your life on was real.

And I thought about alias.

I thought about his hands, his laugh, the way he prayed with his forehead sometimes against his folded hands.

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

And I thought you showed me my love in the most public and most costly way available to you.

You showed me exactly who you were and who he was.

And I am still here and I am still his and they could not take that and they could not take it from you either.

But by this point the preparations to leave Syria had to begin in earnest.

The flogging had made one thing absolutely clear.

I would not survive another encounter.

The next time they came for me, the distraction that had saved my life would not come again.

I was known.

I was on a list.

Staying was no longer survivable.

But leaving took time and the preparations unfolded over the remaining weeks I was in Syria.

And during that time, I continued to do what I had been doing.

I continued to move among the community.

I healed slowly and I prayed constantly and I began to say the quiet, careful, partial goodbyes that cannot be announced as goodbyes because announcing them is dangerous.

I was not finished.

They had thought they were finishing me.

They had beaten me in public and left me on the ground and assumed that either the beating would break me or the next encounter would end me.

They were wrong on both counts.

I was still breathing.

I was still his.

And I was going to carry this story out of Syria with me to wherever I was going.

And I was going to speak it for the rest of my life.

Because this story was never only mine.

I did not leave Syria all at once.

That is not how it happens.

You do not simply decide and then go.

Leaving is its own long careful frightening process.

And it happens in stages that are each their own small act of courage or desperation or both.

There is the stage of deciding.

There is the stage of preparing which requires money and information and contacts and time.

All of which are in short supply when you are living in an ISIS controlled area as a recently fgged Christian widow with three children and an elderly mother.

There is the stage of actually moving which is the most dangerous stage and the one that requires you to commit fully because once you begin it you cannot go back and there is the stage after crossing which is its own country entirely.

I want to tell you about all of it, not the specific operational details of how we moved because some of those details involve people who helped us and who are still living in circumstances where those details could endanger them.

But the experience of it, what it was like to leave a country that had held everything you ever were, the money came together slowly from the community.

This is one of the things I want people to understand about what a Christian community does when it is actually functioning as it was designed to.

It pulls what it has for the ones who need it.

There was no wealthy donor who wrote a large check.

There were many people, most of them with very little, who gave what they could give and what arrived from that accumulation was enough to make the journey possible.

Some of these people would never leave Syria.

Some of them were elderly and had no desire to leave and no ability to leave.

They gave what they had to help me take my children to safety.

And I carry that with me in a way I will never be able to fully repay.

The information about roots came through the same networks that the community had always used to share information.

The quiet, careful or person-toperson channels that are the nervous system of any minority community in a hostile environment.

Who knew which routes were currently passable? Which checkpoints were likely to be manageable and which were to be avoided? what the situation was in the areas between us and the border.

These things changed daily in some cases and the information had to be current to be useful.

There were people who tracked this and shared it quietly and at personal risk because they believed that getting families to safety was worth that risk.

My mother.

I have not spoken enough about my mother in this telling, and I want to pause here and give her the space she deserves.

She was an elderly woman by this point, small and slower than she had been, had or with the slightly confused quality that age sometimes brings, where the present moment and the past are not always clearly separated.

She had lost her husband.

She had just lost a son-in-law she loved.

She was living in the middle of a situation that would have broken most people a generation younger than her.

And yet she was my mother.

She was the same woman who had stirred pots and sung hymns quietly in her kitchen for as long as I had known her.

The crisis had not emptied her of herself.

It had, if anything, compressed her down to the essence of herself, and the essence was unbroken.

Getting her out with us was both the most difficult logistical part of the plan, and the part I was least willing to compromise on.

She could not move quickly.

She could not manage terrain that was too difficult.

do.

She needed more care and more patience and more attention than the children in some ways because the children were young enough to be adaptable in the way that children are.

While she was old enough that the disruption of everything familiar was its own kind of damage.

But she was my mother and there was never a version of leaving Syria that did not include her.

The morning we left and it was a morning again because the ordinary mornings of your life keep presenting themselves as the setting for the extraordinary moments within it.

I was up before the first light.

The house was quiet and dark, and I moved through it carefully, not turning on lights, waking the children gently, and in the particular order that their temperaments required.

My oldest woke cleanly, and was immediately alert in the way he always was, the boy who had his father’s quality of complete presence upon waking.

My middle one needed a moment of gentle coaxing.

Her body reluctant to leave sleep.

My youngest I carried, still mostly asleep, her head on my shoulder and her arms around my neck.

We each had a bag small enough to carry without slowing down.

Inside mine was everything practical that we needed and also a small Bible.

Not Elias’s Bible that was still in the home that was no longer our home.

This was a Bible that had been given to me by one of the women of the community in the days after the flogging.

An old copy with a worn cover and some loose pages pressed into my hands by a woman who said simply that I should take it.

I held it against my body throughout the entire journey.

the way you hold something you cannot afford to lose.

My mother walked beside me.

She did not complain.

She did not ask unnecessary questions.

She had understood what was happening and she had made her own internal adjustments to it in the way she always made her adjustments quietly in prayer without making her fear someone else’s problem.

She put her hand in mine at one point during the walk and held it and we walked that way for a while without speaking.

Her hand in mine felt like everything she had ever said to me without words.

The journey took us through multiple kinds of terrain and multiple kinds of danger.

There were stretches by vehicle.

people who were moving in the same direction and who let us join them.

People who had their own reasons for making the journey and who were not interested in our story only in moving.

There were stretches on foot where the road was not safe for vehicles or where the route required us to move through areas that were of any established road.

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