It was the way you feel when something you have always been looking for without knowing you were looking for it starts to come into focus.

The closer it gets, the more you recognize it.

And the recognition feels like remembering something you had somehow forgotten even though you are sure you have never known it before.

It feels like home in a place you have never been.

That is what finding Jesus felt like to me.

And it started here in these early years in a classroom in Columbus in a house that smelled like cooking and had a cross on the main wall in the living room of a grandmother who loved him and was not ashamed to say so.

It started with destiny.

It started with her family.

It started with a story about a Friday afternoon 2,000 years ago and a man who forgave from a cross.

That is where it started.

I want to tell you about the first time I held a Bible.

I was 10 years old.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I was at Destiny’s house after school.

We had been doing homework at the kitchen table, and at some point, Destiny had gotten up to get us something to drink, and I was sitting there alone at the table.

And there was a Bible on the counter nearby, not hidden, not displayed dramatically, just sitting there the way a book sits in a house, where it belongs naturally, like it had always been there and would always be there.

It was well used.

The cover was slightly worn at the corners.

There were pages that had things underlined in them.

Someone had loved this book.

You could tell by looking at it that someone had spent real time with it.

I reached over and picked it up.

I did not have a plan.

I was not making a decision.

I just picked it up the way you pick up something that is within reach when your hands are idle.

I held it for a moment.

It was heavier than I expected.

I opened it to a random page somewhere in the middle, and the words I saw were from the book of Psalms, though I did not know at the time that it was called Psalms.

I read a few lines.

They were about God being a shelter, about finding refuge under God’s protection, about not being afraid.

The language was plain and direct and the feeling behind the words was immediate.

The way certain music reaches you before your mind has caught up with the notes.

I read a bit more.

I turned a few pages.

I was not reading carefully or systematically.

I was just grazing moving through it the way you move through something new that you are trying to get a feel for.

And then Destiny came back into the kitchen and saw me with it.

And she did not make it strange.

She just sat down and said something like, “Do you want to read it properly sometime?” I can show you where to start.

I said yes.

Before I had fully thought about whether I meant it, she showed me the Gospel of John.

She said her Sunday school teacher had told her that if someone wanted to understand who Jesus was, John was the place to start.

She found the first chapter and handed the Bible back to me.

I read the opening lines right there at the kitchen table.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

I did not fully understand what that meant, but something about those lines arrested me.

There was a weight in them, a density, like they were carrying more than they appeared to be carrying on the surface.

Like if you pressed on them, more would come out.

I asked Destiny if I could borrow the Bible to take home.

She looked at me for a moment and I could see her thinking, not calculating or scheming, just thinking, processing what I was asking in the context of knowing me and knowing my family.

And then she said she thought it might be better if we read it together here at her house.

She was not being unkind.

She was being practical in the way that only a true friend can be practical about your situation without making you feel small for it.

She understood that my home was not a place where a Bible appearing in my bag was going to be a neutral event.

She was protecting me.

So that became our arrangement.

A few times a week when I came to her house after school, we would sit together and read.

She would explain things she knew when neither of us understood something.

Sometimes her mother would explain or Grandma May, who seemed to know the Bible the way she knew her own address with no effort, completely from memory and familiarity.

I read slowly.

I was not rushing.

Every few verses I would have to stop and sit with what I had just read because the reading kept doing something to me and I needed to let it do what it was doing before I move forward.

The Gospel of John was not like anything I had read before.

The way Jesus spoke in it, the way he engaged with people, the woman at the well, the man who had been blind from birth, the way Jesus walked into those stories was not the way a distant authority figure walks into situations.

He was immediate.

He was present.

He noticed people.

He addressed what was actually wrong, not what was ostensibly wrong.

When the woman at the well came to draw water, he did not talk to her about water.

He talked to her about her life, about the specific shape of her particular loneliness.

And he did it without judgment, which was the thing that kept stopping me cold.

without judgment.

Over and over in those stories, he encountered people who by the standards of his own society and his own religion were people you were supposed to avoid or condemn or at minimum keep at a careful distance.

And he did not do any of those things.

He walked straight toward them.

He touched people that the religious rules said you were not supposed to touch.

He ate with people that proper religious society did not eat with.

And in every single case, the people he walked toward were changed by it.

Something happened to them in the encounter with him that did not happen in any other encounter in their lives.

I kept reading.

I could not stop reading.

Even when I was not at Destiny’s house, I was thinking about what I had read last and anticipating what I would read next.

I was thinking about the stories during school.

I was thinking about them at the dinner table with my family.

The stories were alive in my head in a way that was different from how I had experienced religious stories before.

They were not static.

They moved.

They breathed.

They had details in them that made them feel like things that had actually happened to real people in a real place.

The way John remembered the number of water pots at the wedding in Kaa.

The way he remembered that it was cold that night when Peter was warming himself by the fire.

These were the details of someone who was there and could not forget what they saw.

It was during this period of reading that I reached the crucifixion in John’s account.

I had heard it from Grandma May the year before, but reading it for myself was different.

Reading it slowly, following it step by step through John’s eyes, was different.

There was something about the pacing of it, the way it took as long as it took.

The way John did not rush through the hard parts.

The way he recorded what Jesus said from the cross, including the moment when he looked down at his mother standing there watching him die and he made arrangement for someone to take care of her.

He was on the cross and he looked at his mother and he was thinking about who was going to look after her after he was gone.

I had to stop reading at that point.

I sat with that image for a long time and then I read the resurrection.

I do not know how to explain to you what happened when I read the resurrection.

I do not have precise language for it.

I had heard that Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead.

I knew that this was the central claim of the faith.

But knowing it as information and reading it in the account of someone who was there, who walked into that tomb and saw it empty, who touched the folded cloths and processed the confusion of what that meant, and then the encounters, Mary in the garden thinking he was the gardener until he said her name.

The disciples behind locked doors, and suddenly he was there in the room with them.

Thomas, the one who said he would not believe unless he touched the wounds himself.

And then Jesus appearing specifically for Thomas and offering him exactly that.

Touch, see, believe.

Something happened in my chest when I read those resurrection accounts.

Something that I can only describe as a door opening.

Not a metaphorical door.

I mean, I physically felt something open.

some interior space that had been closed or perhaps had never been opened before and air came into it.

And along with the air came something else came a certainty, not a reasoned certainty, not a conclusion arrived at through logic, a felt certainty, the kind that lives in the body and not in the head.

the kind that does not need an argument because it comes from a different place than arguments come from.

I thought this is real.

I thought this actually happened.

I thought this man is not dead.

I was 10 years old sitting in my friend’s kitchen and I was certain with my whole body that Jesus Christ was not dead.

That he was real.

that the resurrection was not a story invented by desperate people who needed comfort.

It was an event.

It was the most important event in human history.

And nobody had made me believe it.

No argument had convinced me.

No preacher had won me over.

I had just read it.

And something in me had recognized it the way you recognize the truth.

Not because someone told you it was true, but because some part of you already knew and was simply waiting for the confirmation.

I sat there for probably 10 minutes without moving.

Destiny had left the kitchen to do something and I was alone with what had just happened in me.

And in that 10 minutes, something settled.

Something landed.

I was not confused.

I was not frightened.

I was not in conflict.

Everything was very quiet inside me in a way that felt different from ordinary quiet.

It felt like the quiet after something very important has been said and everyone in the room is sitting with the weight of it.

I knew in that moment sitting at that kitchen table at 10 years old that I believed in Jesus.

not just believed things about him, believed in him, believed he was who John said he was, believed he was real and present and not finished.

I had not gone to church yet.

I had not said a formal prayer of commitment.

I had not talked to a pastor or a counselor or anyone official.

I had just read a book that had been sitting on a counter and Jesus had found me in it.

That is my testimony.

That is the center of it.

Everything else, the church, the formal decision, the family transformation, all of that came later and all of it matters.

But the real thing, the thing that happened first, the thing that nothing can take away happened at a kitchen table with a borrowed Bible and no one else in the room.

It happened quietly.

It happened personally.

It happened in the way I believe God does many of the most important things in the small still moments that nobody sees coming.

After that day, everything in me intensified.

I needed to know more.

I needed to understand more.

I started asking Destiny and her family more direct questions, not gentle probing questions anymore, but real questions.

Theological questions that a 10-year-old should not have been thinking about, but was.

I asked about the Trinity because that was the thing that confused me most.

the idea of God as father, son, and holy spirit, which seemed to contradict the most fundamental thing I had been raised on, which was that God was one, indivisible without partners.

I asked about what happened when Jesus was on the cross, what it meant, why it was necessary, what exactly was accomplished.

I asked about the Holy Spirit, about what the Holy Spirit actually was and how it worked.

Destiny’s mother, Sister Williams, started having these conversations with me seriously.

She sat with me on several occasions and walked through things carefully and patiently.

She was not preaching at me.

She was explaining to someone who genuinely wanted to understand.

She recommended that I read the book of Romans because she said it explained in the clearest way what the cross was about, what it accomplished, why it was necessary.

So I did.

I read Romans slowly, going back over sections, asking about what I did not understand.

And the more I understood, the more the whole thing cohered into something I could not find.

A reason to refuse.

Not intellectually, not emotionally, not spiritually.

The story made sense in a way that went beyond logic.

It made sense in the deepest part of me.

The idea that the distance between God and humanity was a real problem that needed a real solution.

The idea that the solution could not come from human effort because the problem was larger than human effort could address.

The idea that God himself came into the problem and absorbed its consequences in order to resolve it.

The idea that the cross was not a tragedy but a purpose.

Not a defeat but an act of the most precise and determined love imaginable.

I I thought about that God I had felt in my sick bed at 8 years old.

The close God, the warm presence.

And suddenly I had a name for it.

Suddenly I understood who that was.

Suddenly everything that had been just out of reach in my understanding of God clicked into place with a clarity that made me want to cry.

not from sadness, from recognition, from relief, from the feeling of something finally making sense that you have been trying to understand for years.

Then the dream started.

I do not talk about this part of my story often because I know that people hear I had a dream and they think you are either making it up for dramatic effect or you are someone who puts too much weight on their subconscious.

I am not asking you to take this as theological evidence.

I am just telling you what happened to me.

I am telling you my experience and my experience included a dream that I have never been able to dismiss or explain away and it happened when I was 10 years old and I still remember every detail of it.

I dreamed that I was in a place that was very bright, not uncomfortably bright, not like staring into a light, but suffused with brightness.

The way a room is bright on a clear morning when the curtains are open and the sun is at the right angle.

I was standing in this bright place and I was aware that someone was nearby.

I could not see them clearly at first.

The brightness was not obscuring them exactly.

It was more like the brightness was coming from them and my eyes were adjusting and then I saw him.

I cannot tell you how I knew it was him.

I just knew.

The way in a dream you know things without being told them.

He was not the way he is depicted in the paintings.

The long pale face and the distant expression.

He was present.

He was warm.

There was something about his face that I cannot describe adequately except to say that looking at it felt like being known completely and being loved completely at the same time.

And those two things being fully known and being fully loved happened simultaneously.

And that combination was more overwhelming than anything I had ever felt in waking life.

He did not say many words to me.

What he said was essentially, I have been looking for you.

Come.

That was it.

That was the dream.

I woke up from it and I was not frightened.

I was not disturbed.

I was crying, but not from sadness.

I was crying from the same feeling I had experienced at Destiny’s kitchen table, but amplified.

the relief, the recognition, the feeling of a door that had been shut for a long time standing open.

I lay in my bed in the dark of my room in my Muslim family’s house in Columbus, Ohio, and I said quietly, just my lips moving, not making sound, “Okay, I’m here.

I’m coming.

” I was 10 years old.

The weeks after that dream were some of the most complicated I had experienced up to that point in my life.

Because here is the thing about being a child.

You are not independent.

You do not live your own life.

You live inside your family’s life, inside their decisions and their structures and their beliefs.

And I was starting to have a reality inside me that was growing every day.

And that had almost nothing to do with the reality.

I was living outwardly at home as the daughter of Tariq and Nadia Hassan.

I was still doing everything I was supposed to do at home.

When Ramadan came, I fasted the days my mother asked me to fast.

When it was prayer time, I observed it.

Outwardly, nothing had changed.

But inside, everything had changed.

And that gap between my inner reality and my outer reality was becoming harder to sustain.

Not because I was being dishonest exactly, but because when something is real and large and living in you, containing it is exhausting.

It presses against the walls, it wants out.

I told Destiny.

I told her one afternoon on the way home from school, walking the few blocks we walked together before going our separate ways.

I told her that I thought I believed in Jesus.

I told her about the kitchen table moment.

I told her about the dream.

I did not tell her everything, the full depth of what I had been carrying because I did not have the language for all of it yet.

But I told her the essential thing.

I believed something had happened in me.

I was different from what I had been.

She stopped walking when I said it.

She turned and looked at me and her face did something I was not prepared for.

She looked for just a moment like she was going to cry.

And then she pulled me into a hug, which was unusual because we were not particularly a hugging kind of friendship.

and she held on for a few seconds and then stepped back and looked at me with that settled quality I had always admired in her and she said simply, “I knew it.

I prayed for you.

I have been praying for you for a long time.

I did not know what to say to that.

” The idea that someone had been praying for me specifically, bringing my name to Jesus in their private prayers was both touching and slightly overwhelming.

I had been found by something.

But I was also beginning to understand that this finding had not been accidental.

Someone had been asking for it.

The first Sunday I went to church was a few weeks after that conversation with Destiny.

My parents knew I was going.

I had told my mother that I wanted to go with Destiny’s family to their church.

I had been careful about how I presented it.

I told her I was curious.

I told her it was important to understand different faiths.

I did not lie, but I was not telling her the full truth either.

My mother had looked at me for a long moment when I asked, the way she sometimes looked at me when she was trying to read past what I was saying to what I was not saying.

And then she had said one time and she wanted to speak with Destiny’s mother first.

Sister Williams and my mother had a phone conversation.

I do not know exactly what was said, but my mother came to me afterward and said I could go.

Destiny’s family’s church was a midsize black church in their neighborhood.

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