There were hours of waiting in locations that felt exposed, waiting for something or someone that had been arranged and that we could only trust would materialize.

The checkpoints were the worst of it, not because they were always the most physically difficult sections, but because they were the sections of most concentrated fear.

When you approach a checkpoint with three children and an elderly mother and documents that may or may not be sufficient and a soldier whose mood and whose instructions you cannot know in advance, the space between you and that checkpoint is the longest space in the world.

I prayed at everyone, not elaborate prayers.

The simplest possible request, let us through.

Let my children through.

We got through everyone.

I do not say this lightly or without weight.

I know what getting through every checkpoint meant.

I know people who did not get through.

I know stories from the same roads we traveled of families who were turned back or worse.

I have no explanation for why we made it through.

That does not involve the direct intervention of a god who was present in that journey.

I do not offer that as an argument for you to accept or reject.

I offer it as the most honest account I can give of my own experience.

My youngest fell asleep on my back during the longest walking stretch carried in a way that distributed her weight across my still healing injuries.

The pain was significant but manageable.

You manage it because the child needs to be carried and you are the one who has to carry her.

The body finds capacity that you did not know you had when the alternative to finding it is not acceptable.

There was a moment somewhere in the journey that I cannot place precisely on any map.

When we when we came over a rise in the terrain and I could see the border crossing in the distance.

It was still far.

There was still ground to cover, but it was visible.

And something happened in me that I can only describe as the first exhale of a breath I had been holding for longer than I could calculate.

Not relief.

It was too early for relief, but permission.

Permission from my own body to acknowledge that this was real, that we were moving, that the ground was changing beneath our feet.

When we crossed, when we were through and the ground under us was no longer Syrian ground, I stood still for a long moment.

My children were around me.

My mother was beside me.

The road stretched ahead of us into a country we had never lived in and knew almost nothing about.

The sun was at a particular angle in the sky.

I stood there and I cried in a way I had not cried since the very earliest days after Elias was taken.

Not the controlled careful grief of a woman who could not afford to be disabled by her emotions in front of her children, but the full unmanaged uncontrolled weeping of a person who has survived something that should not have been survivable.

My children gathered around me.

My oldest held my hand.

My youngest pressed her face against my stomach.

My mother put her hand on my back, but on the exact spot that still hurt from the flogging and she did not say anything.

She just kept her hand there.

We stayed like that for a while and then we moved on because moving on was what was next.

The country we arrived in was not a paradise.

I want to be clear about this because I think there is sometimes an expectation in stories of people escaping terrible places that the escape itself resolves everything.

It does not.

It ends one category of danger and begins another category of difficulty.

We were refugees now, which meant we existed in a legal liinal space, present in a country that was not ours, dependent on processes and institutions and decisions that were being made about us rather than by us, uncertain about our status and our future in a way that was its own particular anxiety.

What the practical dimensions of being a refugee are things that people who have never experienced it cannot fully imagine.

There is the registration presenting yourself to authorities and being documented as a displaced person which involves surrendering a certain kind of agency over your own story to an institutional process.

There is the waiting which is a permanent feature of refugee life.

Waiting for decisions, waiting for approvals, waiting for clarity about what you are allowed to do and where you are allowed to go.

There is the condensed living, small spaces, limited resources, proximity to many other people who are also in difficult circumstances and who carry their own grief and trauma and need.

There is the disorientation of a new place, new sounds, new routines, a city that has its own rhythms that you are not part of.

uh people who move through their ordinary lives around you while you are trying to figure out how to have a life at all.

My children struggled.

I will say this plainly because they were real children in a real situation and their struggle was real and it mattered.

My oldest became more inward and vigilant than a child of his age should need to be.

Waking at small sounds, always tracking exits and entrances, carrying in his small body the learned alertness of a child who has lived in a place where the wrong kind of attention could mean the wrong kind of outcome.

My middle one became attached to me in a way that was different from ordinary childhood attachment, needing to know where I was at all times.

distressed by any distance between us.

Added the insecurity showing up in her sleep and in her eating and in the way she clung when I tried to move, even a few steps away.

My youngest, still small enough that much of what had happened lived in her as atmosphere rather than memory, was more resilient in some ways.

Still capable of being delighted by small things, still able to find her way to play.

Still someone who could laugh with her whole body in the way that small children do when nothing has yet taught them to hold back.

Watching her laugh in the middle of everything.

Watching the complete uncomplicated joy of my youngest child finding something funny in our difficult and uncertain circumstances was one of the things that most held me together in those months.

Not because it took the pain away, but because it reminded me that life, actual living, odd continued even in the middle of catastrophe.

That laughter was still possible.

That small joys were still real.

That the world was not entirely consumed by what had consumed us.

I found the church through connections, Christian network, finding Christian network in the way that these communities have always found each other across borders and distances.

Word traveling through people who knew people, the same mechanism that had always been the nervous system of the persecuted church.

A name, a location, a Sunday morning.

I walked into that church for the first time on a Sunday and I was not prepared for what it would do to me.

It was a modest building and a modest congregation.

There was nothing extraordinary about it by any external measure, but the door was open.

Not open in a technical sense only.

Open in the full sense of a place that was not hiding what it was.

That didn’t require you to approach it carefully and quietly and with awareness of who might be watching.

It was simply open and inside people were singing.

They were singing at a normal volume, not at the carefully moderated level that I had absorbed into my very body over years of worshiping in a context where singing too loudly could bring the wrong attention.

They were singing the way people sing when they are allowed to with their actual voices at the level that music requires to be fully music.

And those voices, that sound, the sheer open normality of a group of people singing to God at normal human volume inside a building with an open door, it undid me completely.

I stood at the back of that church and I could not stop crying.

The pastor, an older man, who had clearly seen people arrive at his door in various states over the years, and who had developed the wisdom to know when presence is more useful than words, simply let me stand there and weep.

He came and stood near me after a while, not touching me, not speaking, just present.

That was the right thing.

That quiet company, that presence without demand.

It was the right thing.

The congregation received us with a warmth that I still find difficult to talk about without emotion.

Not the performed warmth of people who are trying to seem welcoming.

the actual warmth of people who understood something about what it meant to need community, who had perhaps their own experiences of displacement and loss, even if not identical to mine, who recognized in us something they knew how to respond to.

There was food.

There were people who sat with my children and played with them while I talked with adults for the first time in months without needing to manage every word for safety.

There was a woman who sat beside me and held my hand for a long time without asking me anything, who seemed to understand that what I needed in that moment was not to be processed through questions, but to be held.

I felt safe for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember.

I felt safe.

Not permanently safe.

Not the kind of safe that means nothing difficult will ever happen again.

I was realistic enough and experienced enough to know that the world does not offer that kind of safe.

But the specific terror of living in a place where armed men could come through your door, but where your faith could get you beaten or killed, where the name of Jesus had to be spoken quietly and only in trusted company.

That specific terror was gone.

I could pray aloud.

I could speak of Jesus by name in conversation.

I could walk into a building on Sunday morning that everyone knew was a church without scanning the surroundings as I approached.

These things sound small.

They are not small.

My mother arrived some weeks after us through a separate arrangement that was its own complicated and frightening process that I will not detail here.

When she walked through the door, when I saw her standing there, smaller than she had seemed in Syria, slower, but herself, entirely herself, I understood in a way I had not let myself fully feel before, just how much I had been carrying the fear of losing her, too.

Oh, the reunion was not dramatic.

We held each other for a long time in the entryway of a small apartment we had been placed in, and neither of us said very much because neither of us needed to.

She was there, I was there, we were both alive.

The rest could be spoken later or not at all.

In this new place with the practical stability that began slowly to accumulate around us, a school for the children, a structure to the days, the growing familiarity with the routines of the city.

I began to do what I have been doing since telling the story.

First to individuals in the church community, then to groups, then in settings outside the original church.

As words spread in the way that word spreads in connected communities.

Each telling costs something.

I have never stood up to tell this story without it costing something.

But each telling also gives something.

and not just to the people listening.

The act of speaking it out loud, of taking these things that happened in the dark and in the violence and in the grief and bringing them into a room full of people who are willing to receive them is its own form of survival, its own form of testimony that what happened did not finish me.

I want to speak to you now directly to whoever you are wherever you are reading this.

If you are a Christian, I want to say something that I hope you will hear in the spirit of love that it is offered in and not as criticism.

Do not take him for granted, please.

I know that sounds simple and perhaps even obvious and maybe you have heard it said before in settings that made it feel like a stock phrase rather than a real plea.

What? But I am asking you to hear it from someone who has stood in the place where taking him for granted is simply no longer possible.

where the question of whether he is real and whether he is worth it is not an academic one but a question your life is requiring you to answer in real time under real pressure with real consequences from that place he is worth it not in a vague or sentimental sense in the most practical tested confirmed by experienced sense I know how to Express.

He was present in the locked room with the frightened women.

He was in the singing that spread through that room before the guard shouted at us to stop.

He was in whatever held me together on the ground while they asked me again and again to deny him and I could not.

He was in the hands of a woman whose name I still do not know who covered me with her own garment and wept.

He was in every checkpoint on the road out of Syria.

He was in the open door of a church in a new country on a Sunday morning when people were singing at full volume and I stood at the back and fell apart in the best possible way.

He is real.

He was enough.

He is enough.

If your life has not yet required you to test this the way mine required me to test it, I am not saying that is a failure.

I am saying it is a mercy.

But please do not let the mercy of an untested faith make you casual about the thing you have been given.

The people who stand at that altar every Sunday in your comfortable church in your country where nobody will arrest you for it, they are carrying a gift that I watched men die rather than surrender.

Or do not hold it lightly.

And if you are not a Christian, if you are reading this from a place of different belief or no belief at all, I am not writing this to argue you into anything.

Arguments are not what bring people to faith and I have never believed otherwise.

I am simply asking you one honest question that I ask with full and genuine respect for wherever you are.

What would you not deny? Think about that carefully.

Every person alive has something that is functionally their foundation.

The thing their identity is built on.

The thing their decisions come from, the thing they would not surrender even under the worst pressure.

For some people it is their family.

For some it is a country or a cause.

For some it is a set of convictions about human dignity or justice.

For some it is a god by a different name or a god by no name or a philosophical framework that functions in the place where others put god.

Whatever that thing is, whatever you would not deny if the denying was demanded of you.

That is what you are actually living by.

Regardless of what you call it, I am not asking you to adopt mine.

I am only asking you to know your own.

Because the people who go through the worst things the world can do to a person with any kind of intact core are the people who knew before it happened, what they were made of, and what they stood on.

I had that because my father made sure I had it.

Because I grew up watching people who had it.

Because when the pressure came, I already knew the answer.

And the answer was already deep enough that it could not be reached by what came against it.

Whatever your foundation is, know it.

Would test it in the small quiet moments before the large terrible ones demanded of you.

I want to end with Ilas.

I always want to end with Ilas.

People ask me sometimes how I carry the grief of his loss.

It is a genuine question and it deserves a genuine answer.

The answer is that you do not so much carry grief as you learn to walk while it walks beside you.

It never fully leaves.

I do not expect it to.

What changes is not the presence of it but your relationship to it.

You stop fighting it and it stops fighting you.

And gradually over time you come to an arrangement with it where it can be present without preventing everything else from being present too.

Love and grief are made of same material.

The grief is the shape the love takes when the person is gone.

And because I do not want to stop loving him, I I do not expect to stop grieving him.

What I have is memory.

Memory is not as good as presence.

I want to be honest about that.

I would have Elias’s back in a breath if that were possible.

But memory is what I have, and I have chosen to hold it well rather than push it away.

I remember small things most, not the large moments.

The large moments are important and I carry them too.

But it is the small ones that come to me most often in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day.

The way he smelled like wood shavings and old paper.

The wood from work he did around the house.

And the paper from the Bible he carried everywhere and handled constantly until it was soft with use.

the particular way he laughed when something genuinely caught him offguard.

Not a polite social laugh, but a real one that came from somewhere below his usual composure and that always surprised him slightly as much as it surprised anyone else.

The way he said good night to each child individually, going to each bed and kneeling down and taking their hand and praying over them in a few quiet words, never rushing, never doing one child’s good night while already mentally moving to the next.

The way he looked at me across a room full of people and the look said without any words, “You still you.

That is the man they killed.

That quiet, faithful, fully present man with his worn Bible and his dry humor and his absolute certainty about the one thing he was not willing to be uncertain about.

Jesus is Lord, and that is not negotiable, not even at the cost of everything.

And here I am having paid close to everything myself.

Still here, still his.

The children he prayed over every night are growing into people he would be unspeakably proud of.

The faith he died for is the same faith I woke up with this morning.

The same faith I will take to bed tonight.

The same faith I will carry every remaining day of my life.

They thought they could silence my Jesus.

They did not understand what they were dealing with.

He does not go silent.

He does not retreat.

He does not fold under the weight of what human beings do to each other or to the people who carry his name.

He is not diminished by suffering.

He is in the most confusing and the most real and the most confirmed by everything I have lived.

truth I possess most present in the suffering.

Be most fully himself in the places where nothing else is enough.

Most audible in the rooms where everything else has gone quiet.

I am alive.

My children are alive.

My mother is alive.

The faith for which Elias gave everything is alive in me.

in my children, in the community I left behind, who are still meeting and whispers and still singing carefully and still refusing every single day to let go.

They could not silence my Jesus.

He is speaking

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