When it was finally clear, when everything finally made sense, I did not want to walk away.

I ran toward it.

Even as an 11-year-old girl who understood what it was going to cost her and her family, even knowing the difficulty that was coming, I ran toward it because you do not walk away from something that has been looking for you your whole life.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

That is for later.

For now, I just want you to sit with the picture of who I was and where I came from.

A girl from a good family, a Muslim home, a Middle Eastern heritage, a warm mother and a hard-working, faithful father, a brother who drove me crazy in the way that younger brothers are designed to do.

A school where I was slightly on the outside of some conversations.

A heart full of questions that did not have answers yet.

A memory of one night in a sick bed that I kept folded up inside me like something precious that I did not yet understand.

That is where this story begins.

That is the house I was born into.

And that is the girl who was going to find something or perhaps be found by something that would change not just her own life but the lives of every single person in that house.

I did not know any of that was coming.

I was just a kid.

But God knew.

And I believe with everything in me that he had been repairing the way for a very long time before I ever took the first step.

I want to tell you about a girl named Destiny.

Destiny Williams came into my life in the third grade when I was eight going on nine and she changed everything without either of us understanding that was what was happening.

She sat two seats away from me in our classroom.

And she was the kind of person who was impossible to ignore, not because she was loud or showy, but because she had this quality about her that I can only describe as settled.

Even as a 9-year-old, Destiny seemed settled in herself in a way that most children are not.

She was not the most popular girl in class.

She was not the one who had the most friends or the newest shoes or the loudest personality, but there was something about her that made you want to be near her.

A steadiness, a warmth.

She was just one of those people.

We became friends gradually.

The way children make friends, sitting near each other, working on projects together, talking at recess.

And one of the things I noticed about Destiny early on, one of the first things that made her slightly different from my other friends was that she talked about her family in a way that made them sound like people I wanted to meet.

Not because they were glamorous or unusual, but because the way she described ordinary moments in her house made those moments sound full of something.

She would talk about Sunday mornings at her house and her whole face would change.

She would talk about her grandmother cooking and everyone sitting around the table and her father leading a prayer before they ate.

And the way she talked about it was not like a child reciting something they had been told was important.

It was like she was telling you about something she genuinely loved, something that was one of the best parts of her week.

I paid attention to that.

I paid attention because I had something similar in my own home, those Ramadan evenings I told you about where there was warmth and connection around the table.

And I recognized the quality of what Destiny was describing because I had tasted something like it.

But there was also something in her description that felt slightly different from my own experience.

Something I could not immediately identify.

There was a lightness in how she talked about it.

Not lightness in the sense of it not being serious, but lightness in the sense of joy.

Pure joy.

Like going to church on Sunday was not a duty she performed but a gift she received.

And I remember turning that observation over in my mind because it was interesting to me because duty and gift are not the same thing even when they look the same from the outside.

Destiny was also the first person who ever talked to me about Jesus in a personal way.

Not in a classroom way.

Not in the way a textbook mentions Jesus as a historical figure.

In a personal way.

the way you talk about someone you actually know.

She mentioned him in normal conversation sometimes, the way you would mention someone who had done something kind for your family.

And it always caught my attention because of how natural it sounded coming from her.

It was not performed.

It was not like she was trying to teach me something.

She was just talking about her life and Jesus was in her life the way a real person is in a life present connected to things that happened connected to how she felt about things.

I did not ask her a lot of questions about it in those early days.

I mostly listened.

I was curious but I was also careful because I already understood by that age that faith was a sensitive topic.

I knew my parents had clear feelings about what our family believed and I was not trying to go somewhere I was not supposed to go.

I was just listening, absorbing, filing things away.

The first time I went to Destiny’s house was sometime in fourth grade.

We had become real friends by then.

The kind of friends who called each other and did homework together and told each other things they did not tell other people.

Her mother had called my mother and they had a proper conversation about it.

And my mother, after meeting Destiny a couple of times at school pickup and deciding she liked her, said yes, I could go for a Saturday afternoon.

Destiny lived about 15 minutes from us in a part of Columbus that was mostly black families, some of whom had been in that neighborhood for generations.

Her house was not a large house, but it was full.

Her mother, her father, her grandmother, who everyone called Grandma May, her older brother, and her younger sister.

The house had things on the walls, pictures, and artwork.

And in the living room, a cross, a wooden one that was not small.

It was probably 30 cm tall, hanging on the main wall.

Below it was a small framed verse.

I could not read it properly from where I was standing because I did not want to stare.

But I saw the cross.

It was not the first time I had seen a cross.

You see crosses everywhere in America on buildings, on jewelry, on cars.

But seeing it in someone’s home like that as the central thing on the main wall of the living room as clearly the most important thing in that space, that was different.

That made an impression on me because in my home, the most important thing on the wall near the front door was the calligraphy in Arabic.

It was also a declaration.

It was also a statement of what the house was and what the family believed and seeing Destiny’s family’s version of that.

Seeing their declaration on their wall, I felt a recognition.

These people are serious about this.

I thought this is not just background noise to them.

This is the center.

Destiny’s mother, Sister Williams, as people called her, was one of the warmest people I had ever met.

She welcomed me into that house as if she had been expecting me.

Not in a strange way, but in the way that genuinely hospitable.

People make you feel like you’re being there was not an imposition, but a pleasure.

She fed me within 30 minutes of my arrival.

She asked me questions about myself and actually listened to my answers.

She talked to me like I was a whole person with thoughts worth hearing even though I was just a kid.

And there was something in how that family moved through their house on that Saturday afternoon that I kept noticing and could not stop noticing.

There was a peace in that house, a specific kind of peace that is hard to explain.

It was not that nothing difficult had ever happened to those people.

Even a child could sense that these were people who had navigated hard things, but there was a groundedness, a settledness that underlay everything.

Even when the grandmother and the older brother had a disagreement about something during lunch and things got briefly tense, it resolved quickly and without lasting damage.

And underneath the brief tension, the peace was still there.

It was structural.

It was in the bones of the house.

I had peace in my home, too.

And I want to be clear about that.

But what I felt in Destiny’s house that day was a specific kind of peace that I had not felt before and could not immediately explain.

I went home that evening thoughtful, not troubled, not confused, just thoughtful, carrying something in my mind that I needed to sit with.

Over the next year or so, I spent more time at Destiny’s house.

Her family became familiar to me.

Grandma May, who had this extraordinary way of speaking that felt like she was always slightly in the middle of a sermon, even when she was just talking about the weather.

Destiny’s father, who was quiet, but who had a presence when he walked into a room.

Not intimidating, more like the feeling of something solid arriving.

and Destiny’s mother who I grew to love in the way you love a person who shows you what genuine goodness looks like when it is not performing for anyone.

I observed things in that family that I had not seen before, not because my family was deficient, but because these things were specific to how their faith expressed itself.

The way Destiny’s father spoke to her mother with a consideration and a tenderness that was not sentimental, but was clearly purposeful, like he was aware that how he treated her mattered, and he had decided it was going to matter to him to get it right.

The way Grandma May prayed, not just before meals, but sometimes in the middle of a conversation if something came up that seemed to call for it just naturally.

No big announcement, just moving into prayer.

The way you move into a different gear.

The way the whole family treated hard news or difficult situations, not with denial and not with panic, but with this calm confidence that the situation was not outside of something’s control, that there was a framework for it that they were held.

I am telling you about all of this because I want you to understand that what first drew me toward Jesus was not a theological argument.

It was not someone sitting me down and explaining to me why Christianity was correct and Islam was wrong.

It was nothing like that.

What first drew me toward Jesus was seeing what knowing him did to people.

What it made them like, what it built in them.

I saw it in destiny.

I saw it in her family.

And I wanted to understand the source of what I was seeing.

That is an important thing I think because a lot of people assume conversion is about being convinced of facts about one side of an argument winning over another side.

And maybe for some people that is how it happens.

But for me it started with something much simpler and much more human than that.

It started with looking at a family and thinking there is something real in there, something I don’t have a name for yet, something I want to understand.

The first time I heard the story of the crucifixion in real detail, I was at Destiny’s house during Easter.

I was 9 years old.

I had been invited to spend Good Friday afternoon with her family and Grandma May had decided that she was going to tell the Easter story to the children in the living room.

It was not a formal lesson.

It was just Grandma May sitting in her chair with me and Destiny and Destiny’s little sister on the floor in front of her and Grandma May talking.

I had heard about Jesus before.

I knew his name.

I knew from the version I had been taught, that he was a prophet and that Christians believe things about him that Muslims did not believe.

But I had never heard the full story of Good Friday told by someone who loved him.

That is the key thing.

I had heard facts.

I had not heard the story told by someone to whom it was personal.

Grandma May started from the garden from the night Jesus was in prayer.

so intense that the sweat came off him like drops of blood, knowing what was coming and asking if there was any other way and then in the end saying not my will but yours.

She talked about the betrayal.

She talked about the trial where they asked him questions to trap him and he answered with such quiet authority that the people asking the questions did not know what to do with him.

She talked about the walk, carrying the weight of the cross through a crowd that was screaming at him.

Some of them people who had been fed by his hands not long before.

She talked about the nails.

I sat very still.

I was not moving.

I was barely breathing.

She talked about the words he said from the cross.

She talked about the forgiveness he extended from the cross to the people who had put him there while he was still hanging on it.

Not after, not once he was safe, while he was there, while it was still happening.

She talked about how he took care of his mother even while he was dying.

She talked about the moment when he said it was finished and then he was gone.

And then she talked about what the disciples felt in the days after.

The despair of it, the feeling of everything falling apart and nothing making sense and all the hope dying, the heaviness of those three days.

And then she talked about Sunday morning.

I cannot tell you exactly what I felt during that story.

I was 9 years old and did not have the emotional vocabulary to categorize what was happening inside me while Grandma May talked.

But I can tell you that something happened.

Something broke open in the middle of my chest in the way a window breaks open to let in air.

Not violently, just suddenly.

There is air where before there was stuffiness.

Something in me responded to that story in a way that I had not experienced before with any religious story I had been told.

What I kept returning to in my head even after that afternoon was over.

Even after I went home and went through the rest of my day was the forgiveness from the cross.

That detail would not leave me.

The idea of someone being hurt to that degree, killed in that way by people who should have known better and choosing in the middle of it to forgive rather than to curse.

Choosing in the middle of dying to pray for the people who were making him die.

I had been taught about forgiveness.

My own faith tradition spoke about forgiveness.

But there was something in this specific image, something in the particular strangeness and beauty of forgiving from a position of total vulnerability and pain that struck me in a way I could not shake.

It felt like something I had never encountered before.

It felt like a kind of love I did not have a frame for.

A love that did not make natural sense.

A love that went further than love is supposed to be able to go.

I went home that day carrying that image with me, the cross, the words from the cross.

And I went into my room and sat on my bed and thought about it for a long time.

Something shifted after that Good Friday afternoon.

It was not dramatic.

It was not sudden, but something in me started leaning more noticeably in a particular direction.

I started asking destiny questions.

Careful questions at first.

The way you put your foot on ice to test whether it will hold your weight.

Questions about what she believed and why.

About what her family believed.

About what it actually meant to them in their everyday lives to be Christian.

Destiny was a good person to ask these questions to because she was honest without being pushy.

She did not seize on my curiosity as an opportunity to convert me.

She just answered my questions the way a friend answers a friend’s genuine questions straightforwardly, personally, without pressure.

when she did not know the answer to something she said she did not know.

That honesty made me trust her more.

I started noticing Christianity in my environment in a more active way.

I had always been aware of it peripherally.

the Christmas concerts, the Easter break at school, the crosses on buildings.

But now I was looking more intentionally.

When we drove past a church on a Sunday morning, and there were people outside talking, and the doors were open, I looked.

I noticed what church buildings looked like.

I noticed the way people dressed when they came out of them.

I noticed the signs outside churches with their weekly messages.

I started reading those signs.

Some of them were ordinary.

Some of them said something that made me think.

I also started quietly and privately wondering about Jesus in a more personal way.

Not as a historical figure, not as a subject to be studied, but as a person.

Who was he really? Not what did Christians believe about him in theory, but who was he? What did he actually do and say? What was he actually like? I was curious about him the way you are curious about someone you have heard about from multiple people and you want to meet for yourself instead of relying on secondhand accounts.

I did not act on that curiosity right away.

It lived inside me for a while, growing quietly without my feeding it deliberately.

I was still the same girl I had always been.

I was still going through the Ramadan rituals with my family.

I was still praying in the way I had been taught.

I was still Amira, the daughter of Tariq and Nadia Hassan, the girl who came from a Muslim home and was proud of her heritage.

I was not doing anything about the thing growing in me because I did not know what to do about it and because part of me was afraid of what doing something about it would mean.

But I could feel it.

That is the thing.

I could feel it growing the way you can feel a plant growing even when you cannot see it moving.

Something was coming up from the ground in me.

Something had been planted and it was alive and it was moving upward and I was going to have to deal with it eventually.

I did not know then that it was going to change everything.

I did not know that by the time I was 11 years old, the entirety of my family’s life was going to look different.

I did not know that my father, the man who stopped everything five times a day to face Mecca and pray, was going to one day stand in a church and give his life to Jesus Christ.

I did not know any of that was coming.

But the seed had been planted.

The ground had been prepared.

And something in me had already decided even if my mind had not consciously caught up yet that I was going to follow this wherever it led.

There is one more thing I want to say about this period of my life about these early years of growing curiosity and quiet observation.

Before I move into what actually happened next, I want to say something about the quality of what I was feeling because I think it matters.

I was not feeling rebellious.

I was not trying to reject my parents or my culture or my heritage.

I was not a confused kid trying to fit in with American culture by adopting the religion of my classmates.

That is what some people might assume and I understand why they might assume it but it was not true.

I was not running away from something.

I was being pulled towards something.

And those two things feel completely different from the inside.

Running away comes from pain.

Running away comes from rejection and wanting to escape.

What I was experiencing was not escape.

It was attraction.

Continue reading….
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