After Khamenei Death Angry Muslims Burned Churches in Iran

After Khamenei Death Angry Muslims Burned Churches in Iran

I was part of the mob that burned three churches in Tehran.

The night the supreme leader died.

But in the middle of that fire, Jesus found me and I have never been the same.

I am still shaking as I record this.

What I did that night should have ended my life or put me in prison forever.

Instead, it became the night God interrupted everything I believed.

Stay with me until the end because what happened next is something I cannot explain without your help.

My name is Cena Moradi.

I am 31 years old.

I was born in Thran, Iran, and I now live in Toronto, Canada.

I have been here for 14 months.

I work at a warehouse near the lake shore.

And I attend a small Persianspeaking church on Sunday evenings with about 40 other Iranians who all have stories like mine.

Stories that start in fire and end somewhere they never expected.

I recorded this on a Tuesday night, sitting at my kitchen table after my roommate went to sleep.

The apartment is quiet.

The city outside is covered in snow.

And I need to say out loud what I have been carrying inside me since February 28th, 2026.

The night I helped burn the house of God.

And the night God refused to let that be the end of my story.

To understand what I did that night, you need to understand what I was before that night.

Not as an excuse.

I have stopped making excuses, but as a map.

Because if you want to understand how a man ends up standing in a street with fire behind him, you need to trace the road that brought him there.

And my road started long before I was old enough to choose any of it.

I was born in the summer of 1994 in a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Thran called Narmmak.

My father, Bzad Moradi, was a civil engineer who worked for a government infrastructure firm.

He was not poor and he was not rich.

He was exactly in the middle of everything, including his religion.

He prayed.

He fasted during Ramadan.

He believed in Islam without ever examining it very deeply.

The way you believe in gravity, you do not think about it.

It is simply the condition of your existence.

My mother Zeba was different.

She was the one who actually read.

She kept books in the house.

Persian poetry, history, some philosophy.

She was curious about the world in a way my father was not.

And she passed that curiosity to me.

She would sit with me after school and ask me what I thought about things.

Not what the teacher said, not what the Quran said, what I thought.

This was unusual in the world we lived in.

Most parents did not ask their children what they thought.

They told them what to think and expected obedience.

My mother’s curiosity was a gift, but it also meant that when I eventually found people willing to give me something to think deeply about and something to fight for, I was the kind of person who went all the way in.

I was the youngest of three children.

My oldest sister, Nasarin, was quiet and studious and became a pharmacist.

My brother, Cave, was the athlete, always playing football in the street outside our building, always with a group of friends around him.

I was the one in between.

Not as disciplined as Nasarin, not as social as cover.

I was the one who asked too many questions and felt things too deeply and did not yet know what to do with all of it.

School in Thran in the early 2000s was an experience I can describe simply.

You were taught to repeat, repeat the lessons, repeat the ideology, repeat the approved version of history.

Teachers were not interested in questions unless the questions led back to the approved answers.

I was not a bad student.

I was a frustrated one.

My mind wanted to go further than the curriculum allowed.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a system built on a concept called valat fak.

This translates roughly as the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.

In practice, it means that a supreme religious scholar, the supreme leader holds authority over all political and religious affairs of the country.

Every institution, every law, every major decision flows from his authority.

Children in Iranian schools do not just learn this as a political fact.

They learn it as a religious obligation.

Obeying the supreme leader is presented as equivalent to obeying God.

I absorbed this completely not because I was stupid because I was 12 years old and the entire world around me confirmed it.

My teachers confirmed it.

My textbooks confirmed it.

The Friday sermons at the mosque confirmed it.

The murals painted on building walls throughout Tehran confirmed it.

When everyone you know and everything you read says the same thing in the same tone of absolute certainty, you do not question it.

You become it.

The event that sharpened my politics from general religious devotion to something harder and more focused happened when I was 15.

It was the summer of 2009, the Green Movement.

Millions of Iranians poured into the streets to protest what they believed was a stolen election.

They were peaceful at first.

Ordinary people with green ribbons and signs calling for their votes to be counted.

The government’s response was brutal.

The bas and right police moved into the crowds.

People were beaten.

People were arrested.

A young woman named Neda was shot in the street and her death was filmed and shared around the world.

I watched all of this from the window of my family’s apartment.

My father pulled me back from the window and told me to stay inside.

He was scared, not angry.

Scared.

But I was not scared.

I was confused because the government I had been taught to revere was the one giving orders to beat people in the streets.

The sacred institution was cracking down on its own citizens.

This confusion could have gone in many directions.

It could have made me question the regime.

It could have turned me into a reformist or a dissident.

For some of my friends, it did exactly that.

But for me, it went the other way because within days of the protests beginning, I encountered a group of older young men in our neighborhood who offered me a different explanation.

They said the protesters were agents of Western influence.

They said the United States and Israel were funding the unrest.

They said Iran’s enemies were using these naive young people to destabilize the revolution from the inside.

They said real Muslims needed to stand up and defend what the martyrs of 1979 had died to build.

This explanation was simpler and more satisfying than the confusion I felt watching people get beaten in the street.

It put the good and the evil in clear places.

It gave me an enemy.

It gave me a side and it gave me a community of people who were absolutely certain about everything which was intensely attractive to a 15-year-old boy who was certain about nothing.

I started spending more time with this group.

They met in the basement of a mosque a few streets from our building.

The man who led the discussions was in his late 30s and had served in the revolutionary guards.

He spoke about Islam not as a private faith but as a total system, a political system, a military system, a civilization in permanent conflict with the corrupted West.

He spoke about Christians and Jews, not as ordinary people with different beliefs, but as instruments of a larger conspiracy against Muslim civilization.

I listened with everything I had.

I was 15 and hungry for certainty, and this man was serving it in large portions.

By the time I was 17, I believed completely that the Islamic Republic was God’s government on earth, that its enemies were God’s enemies, that defending it was the same thing as worshiping God, that any action taken in its defense was automatically righteous.

My mother noticed the change in me.

She would ask me questions at dinner about things I was reading or things I believed, and I would give her the ideology backward forward.

Her expression during these conversations was something I only understood years later.

She was not angry with me.

She was watching something happen to her curious questioning son and she did not know how to stop it.

The curiosity she had encouraged in me had found a channel and the channel was flowing somewhere she could not follow.

My father was proud of my increasing religious conviction.

He did not know about the basement meetings, but he saw me praying more regularly and reading more religious texts and he approved.

In our world, an increasingly devout son was a success.

He never asked what the devotion was pointing toward.

I joined the passage at 18, the same year I started studying civil engineering at a university in Thran, following my father’s footsteps into the profession.

The passage membership was something I kept from my mother for several months.

When she found out, she sat across the table from me and held my face in her hands for a long moment.

Looking at me in that way, she had that saw further into a person than they wanted to be seen.

She did not tell me to leave.

She knew I would not listen.

She said only one thing.

She said, “Cena, I pray that whatever you are looking for, you find it before it costs you everything.

” I thought she was being dramatic.

I thought she was a loving woman who did not understand the importance of what I was doing.

I told her I was protecting our country and our faith.

She nodded slowly.

She released my face.

She went back to cooking and I carried her words in a closed room at the back of my mind for the next 12 years.

My engineering studies and my bases service ran parallel to each other for the next several years.

On paper, I was a university student becoming a professional.

Underneath that, I was being shaped into something else.

The Bas introduced me to a network of young men across Thran with similar backgrounds and similar beliefs.

We were not fringe extremists in our own understanding.

We were the loyal core, the ones who would stand when others retreated, the ones who could be trusted to do what needed to be done when the situation required it.

I graduated with my engineering degree in 2017.

I was 23.

I got a job with a construction firm that worked on government infrastructure projects which was also not coincidentally connected to people I knew through the revolutionary guards.

I was not wealthy but I was comfortable and I was embedded in a system that rewarded loyalty.

By my late 20s, I held a mid-level coordination role that put me between the Basiji volunteer network and the Revolutionary Guards logistics system.

I organized people and resources for operations that I will describe honestly but not in complete detail.

I was part of crowd management operations during political events.

I was involved in identifying and monitoring individuals considered threats to state security.

Some of these individuals were political dissident.

Some were journalists.

Some were members of minority religious communities, including underground Christian congregations.

I had convinced myself that this was righteous work, that I was protecting something sacred, that the people I monitored and reported on had brought their trouble on themselves by choosing to work against the Islamic Republic.

I was skilled at not thinking about what happened to them after I submitted my reports.

I was also, though I would not have admitted it to anyone, including myself, deeply unhappy.

Not in a way I could name or locate.

More like a background noise that I could drown out with work and ideology and the company of people who were all playing the same game of certainty.

But in the quiet moments, in the space between sleep and in waking, the noise was there.

something hollow at the center of everything I had built.

Something that all the conviction in the world could not fill.

I did not know what I was missing.

I only knew that something was missing.

And I had no idea that the night I am about to describe would be the beginning of finding it.

I will tell you about February 28th, 2026.

The way I lived it, from the beginning of that day to the end of it, because every hour matters.

I was at my desk in my apartment at 6:00 in the morning when the first message came in.

I had been awake for an hour already reviewing coordination documents for an event scheduled the following week.

The message came from a senior contact in the guards.

It was four words in Persian.

The leader has fallen.

I read it twice.

Then I called the number back and got no answer.

I turned on the television and stood in front of it in my socks and a t-shirt while the news assembled itself into the thing.

It was the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Kam.

The compound in the north of Thran, Israeli jets.

A strike so precise and so devastating that the compound had been effectively erased.

Multiple senior officials dead.

The state broadcaster initially reporting technical difficulties before switching to Quran recitation which in Iran means one thing.

Someone enormous has died.

I sat down on my couch very slowly.

The room felt wrong.

Not visually, just wrong.

Like the air pressure had changed.

I had structured my entire adult life around the institution.

And at the very top of that institution was a man who had always simply been there the way mountains are simply there.

And now he was not there anymore.

And the mountain was gone.

And I did not know what the landscape looked like without it.

My phone was filling with messages from bases contacts from colleagues from the man I will call Davood.

My direct commander in the network I operated in.

a short and intense man from Mashad with a reputation for absolute ruthlessness who had once told me that sentiment was a luxury the revolution could not afford.

Davo called me at 7:30.

His voice was controlled but underneath the control was something I recognized as rage.

He said the enemies were celebrating.

He said he had seen messages from dissident channels and from Western media outlets that were already framing the strike as a victory.

He said that Iranians who had been secretly praying for the regime’s end were showing their true faces.

That way, he said, “We had a list and it was time to make a statement.

” I knew what the list contained.

I had contributed to it.

Locations of underground churches across our district.

Three in particular that we had been monitoring for months.

congregations of Iranians who had quietly and at great personal risk left Islam and were meeting in private homes and converted commercial spaces to worship Jesus Christ.

I want to stop here and tell you what I believed about these people at that moment.

I believe they were traitors not to politics to civilization to God.

I had been taught that a Muslim who leaves Islam is the worst kind of apostate.

That the act of conversion is not a private spiritual decision but a public act of war against the community of believers.

That such people were agents of western cultural imperialism deliberately cultivated by foreign Christian organizations to weaken Iran from the inside.

I had submitted reports on some of these people.

I knew their names.

I knew their family situations.

I had never felt guilt about any of it.

On the morning of February 28th, with the Supreme Leader’s death filling every screen and the rage in my chest burning hotter than anything I had felt since 2009, the guilt was still not there.

What was there was a cold and focused certainty that these people needed to understand that there were consequences for celebrating in silence.

We gathered in a parking structure in the Shahak a Garb district at 9:00 in the morning.

There were perhaps 20 of us.

Some I knew well.

Some were faces I recognized from operations over the years.

Some I had never seen before.

David spoke briefly.

He said this was not an organized state operation.

He said this was citizens expressing their grief and their anger.

He said whatever happened today was the natural result of what had been done to Iran.

He said we should not record anything or communicate through our phones any further.

He gave each group of four men a location.

My group’s first location was a house in the Punak neighborhood, a two-story building with a blue metal gate that I had driven past a dozen times during monitoring operations.

We knew the family who lived there hosted a congregation of approximately 30 people.

The meetings happened on Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings.

It was a Tuesday.

The building would be largely empty.

I am going to tell you the next part plainly without softening it.

We forced the gate.

We went inside.

We searched the building quickly to confirm it was empty.

It was.

There were chairs arranged in a circle in the main room.

There were Bibles in Persian on a small shelf.

There were handdrawn pictures on the wall that looked like they had been made by children.

A cross made of painted cardboard.

A banner with words from what I later learned was Psalm 23.

One of the men in my group knocked the shelf of Bibles to the floor.

I remember the sound they made, that flat sound of books hitting tile.

Another man began pulling the chairs apart.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked at the children’s drawings on the wall and something happened that I was not prepared for.

A single thought came through the noise in my chest with unusual clarity.

Children worship here.

I pushed the thought aside immediately.

I picked up one of the overturned Bibles from the floor and dropped it again.

I told myself these were propaganda materials.

I told myself the children who made those drawings had been brought here by misguided parents.

I told myself I was doing them a service by dismantling the place that had confused them.

The fire was set in the back room where the Bibles had been stacked.

We were outside and moving before it took hold fully.

The second location was further into the district, a converted storage space above a shop that had been quietly renovated into a meeting room.

This one I had personally identified during a monitoring operation 8 months earlier.

I had stood in the street below and photographed the entrance and submitted the images in a report.

I knew this space.

I had put it on a list.

When we arrived, we forced the exterior door and climbed the internal staircase.

The space was empty at first check.

One of the men began piling papers and materials from a table near the wall to accelerate the fire.

And that is when I heard it from behind a closed door at the back of the room.

There was a sound.

I thought at first it was the building settling.

Old buildings in Thran make sounds.

Then it came again.

A small sound.

The kind of sound that is unmistakably human, even when it is barely audible.

I crossed the room in five steps and pushed open the door.

There was a boy sitting on the floor in the corner of a small storage room.

He was maybe 7 years old, dark eyes, a green jacket that was too big for him.

He was pressed against the wall with his knees pulled up to his chest, and he was looking at me with an expression that I have seen in my mind every single day since that morning.

He was not crying.

He was past crying.

He was in that place children go.

When fear has gone beyond tears, completely still, completely quiet, watching me with eyes that asked the question they were too frightened to say out loud.

I do not know how he had come to be there.

Perhaps his parents had brought him early for some reason and left him when danger came.

Perhaps he had hidden on his own when he heard the noise downstairs.

I do not know.

I only know that he was there and I was there and he was looking at me.

Everything I had told myself in the first building that these were the right people to be afraid of us that this was righteous action that the children were confused victims of misguided parents.

All of it became completely impossible to think in that moment because I was not looking at an ideological category.

I was looking at a 7-year-old boy in a green jacket who was terrified and alone and who had not done a single thing to anyone.

I heard the other men moving behind me.

I heard someone saying something about getting out.

I heard the first sounds of the fire starting in the main room.

I reached down and I picked the boy up off the floor.

He grabbed my jacket with both hands.

He did not make a sound.

He just held on.

I put my arm around him and carried him toward the staircase.

The smoke was beginning to move through the room from the fire in the outer space.

I held his face against my shoulder to keep him from breathing it.

I went down the stairs and through the exterior door and into the street.

A woman was already running toward us from across the street.

She had clearly been watching from somewhere nearby, unable to come in but unable to leave.

When she saw the boy, she made a sound I cannot describe accurately.

Not a scream, something deeper than a scream.

She crossed the distance between us in seconds and took him from my arms and pressed him against her chest and turned immediately away from me, walking fast then faster until she was running.

She never looked at my face.

David appeared at my shoulder and told me in a flat voice to move.

His stone said that what I had just done was an inconvenience, not a mercy.

His stone said we had places to be and sentiment was still a luxury the revolution could not afford.

I moved.

I got into the vehicle.

I sat in the back seat with my hands in my lap and I looked at my hands and I noticed that they were not shaking.

That seemed important in some way I could not explain.

Men who do terrible things and feel nothing about them have steady hands.

I had been that kind of man for a long time.

But my hands were not steady.

They were very still in a way that was different from steady.

They were still the way a person is a still when something has stopped in them.

When something has simply and completely stopped.

The third location that day was not reached.

There were reports of security forces moving into the area ahead of schedule.

David made a decision and we dispersed.

I drove back to my apartment alone.

I parked on the street and sat in my car for a long time before going inside.

The news on my phone was cascading.

The international coverage of the Supreme Leader’s death was enormous.

The images of the destroyed compound were everywhere.

And already beginning to appear alongside them were images of burning buildings in Thran.

One of the images was a building I recognized.

A building I had held its satellite 2 hours earlier.

I turned my phone face down on the passenger seat.

I sat in the silence of the car and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely nothing to tell myself about what I had done.

All the language was gone.

The ideology, the justifications, the categories that turned human beings into threat and righteous action into the same thing of violence.

All of it had evacuated the moment I saw a seven-year-old boy in a green jacket sitting alone in a corner with his knees against his chest.

I had built a church on fire.

I had done it with intention and conviction and certainty.

And none of that certainty had survived 30 seconds in a room with a child.

I went upstairs to my apartment and sat at my kitchen table in the silence and waited for something I could not name.

The security services came to my apartment building.

3 days later, not for me specifically.

There were widespread sweeps in the days after the church burnings as the regime attempted to simultaneously suppress the evidence that organized groups had been involved and remove individuals who could be identified.

The paradox of the Islamic Republic doing damage control on violence it had implicitly authorized was not something I was capable of appreciating at the time.

I was not arrested in that sweep, but I was summoned.

A contact who I had worked with for years told me through a secure channel to come in for questioning.

He said it was routine.

He said it was just to clarify my whereabouts and activities on the 28th.

He said nothing would happen to me.

I did not believe him.

I had been inside this system long enough to know that nothing would happen to me was what they said right before something happened to you.

The regime was looking for people to assign culpability to.

Low-level organizers and participants in the church attacks were convenient.

We were useful when they needed ground level action.

We were equally useful when they needed someone to blame.

When the action created international attention they did not want.

For the first time in my adult life, I did not do what I was told.

I did not go in.

I told the contact I was ill.

I bought myself 24 hours.

And in those 24 hours, I made a decision that I had been circling without realizing it since the moment I sat in my car outside my building and turned my phone face down.

I called my sister Nasarin.

She was the pharmacist, the quiet one, the one who had stayed out of everything.

She answered immediately and I told her I needed her help and that I could not explain everything, but that I needed to leave Thran and I needed to do it before the following morning.

She was silent for 3 seconds.

Then she said, “I know.

I have been waiting for you to call.

I did not understand what she meant by that at the time.

I understand it now.

” Nazarin had a colleague whose husband worked in transportation logistics.

Through a series of conversations I was not part of, arrangements were made for me to travel to a city in northwestern Iran near the Turkish border.

From there, through people I will not name, I crossed into Turkey on foot through a mountainous route that I was not prepared for physically and that took 2 days.

I will not describe those two days in detail.

What I will tell you is that at one point halfway through the second night, I was sitting on a rock in the dark on the side of a mountain in temperatures well below freezing, completely alone, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction, uncertain whether the next step of the route would appear as promised.

And I
said something out loud into the cold dark that I had never said before in my entire life.

I said if there is a God who actually sees me right now, I need you to tell me that.

Not Allah but not in the formal Arabic of prayer.

Not in any religious frame at all.

Just those words raw and unformulated and more honest than anything I had said in the previous decade of devoted religious practice.

If there is a God who actually sees me right now, nothing dramatic happened.

The dark stayed dark.

The cold stayed cold.

The mountains stayed silent.

But something changed inside the silence.

Something shifted in the quality of the quiet.

The way a room changes when someone enters it even before you see them.

A presence.

That is the only word I have for it.

Even now after 3 years of trying to find a better one.

A presence that was not the mountain and was not the cold and was not my own frightened thoughts.

Something else.

something that made the darkness feel inhabited instead of empty.

I stood up and the next guide appeared 20 minutes later exactly as promised and I crossed into Turkey by morning.

I spent 6 weeks in Istanbul in a neighborhood called Axarai where many Iranians in transit live.

I had almost no money.

I slept on a floor in a shared room with four other men in similar situations.

I ate very little.

I had almost nothing to do during the long days except think.

And what I thought about almost without choosing to was the boy in the green jacket.

I thought about why I had gone back for him.

I had asked myself this question a 100 times and I could not land on a satisfying answer.

Instinct maybe.

Basic human response to a child in danger.

That was the simplest explanation.

But something about the simplest explanation did not close the question completely.

Because I had been around children in difficult situations before during my years of operations, I had submitted reports that I knew would result in families being disrupted, parents being detained, children being left without a guardian.

I had done that without going back for anyone.

Why that boy? Why that moment? Why did something in me stop and reverse direction in a way it had never reversed before? In Axarai, I met a man named Arash at a tea house where Iranians gathered in the evenings.

He was maybe 45.

He had been in IstAnul for 2 years waiting for asylum processing.

He was quiet and careful in the way that people become when they have been through a great deal.

We took it for several evenings before he told me anything about himself.

When he did, the first thing he told me was that he was a Christian, a former Muslim who had given his life to Jesus Christ 8 years earlier while sitting in a prison cell in Evan.

He said he had been arrested for distributing Bibles.

He said the experience in that cell had been the beginning of something he could not have predicted.

I did not walk away from that conversation.

Something kept me in my chair, something that felt like the presence on the mountain, the same quality of attention in the air.

I asked him to tell me more.

Arash talked for three evenings.

He did not argue theology with me.

He did not attack Islam or try to create a debate.

He simply told me his story.

He talked about the Jesus he had encountered, not the corrupted Bible weak prophet version.

I had been taught about the Jesus of the Gospels.

The one who walked into situations where religious power had decided someone was less than human and said this person matters.

The one who touched lepers.

Who spoke to women in public.

Who told a thieving tax collector, “Come down from your tree.

I am coming to your house today.

” The one who said, “The greatest command was not submission but love.

” I had questions that came out of me faster than I could organize them.

They were not the combative questions I had once used to attack my mother’s curiosity.

They were genuine.

What did he say exactly? What does the resurrection mean? Why does the cross matter? If God is God, why did he need to become a man? Arash answered what he could and admitted plainly when he did not have an answer.

That honesty moved me more than a perfect argument would have.

I had spent my life among people who had an answer for everything.

People who were certain about every detail of God’s will and God’s demand.

This man sitting across from me in a tea house in Istanbul was saying he did not know.

And let me tell you what I do know instead.

There was something in that combination of humility and conviction that I had never encountered in 20 years of Islamic devotion.

On the fourth evening, Arash gave me a Farsy New Testament, a small paperback with a plain cover.

He said I could read it or not read it.

He said he would not ask me about it.

He said Jesus could speak for himself if I gave him the chance.

I went back to the room I shared with four strangers and I read the Gospel of John from beginning to end in one sitting on a floor with a phone flashlight because the overhead bulb had burned out.

I will tell you the verse that stopped me.

Not the verse I expected to stop me.

Not the famous ones I had heard quoted before.

Chapter 11:35.

It is the shortest verse in the Bible.

Two words in English in far equally short.

Jesus wept.

He was standing at the tomb of a man named Lazarus whom he loved.

He knew he was about to raise him from the dead.

He had the power to reverse death in his hands.

And he still wept.

He wept because the people around him were weeping.

He wept because grief was real even when resurrection was coming.

He wept because love does not skip over pain to get to the solution.

I read those two words in a dark room in Istanbul.

And I put the book down on the floor and I pressed my hands over my face because the God I had been given as a child did not weep.

The God I had been given was never moved by human pain.

He demanded, he judged, he rewarded obedience and punished weakness.

He did not stand at tombs and weep with the people who were mourning.

But this one did, and something cracked open in me that had been sealed shut since I was 15 years old.

I did not pray a formal prayer that night.

I did not know the right words.

I just said in the dark with my hands over my face, “I want to know this God, the one who weeps, the one who went back for people.

Show me if this is real.

The presence I had felt on the mountain came back into the room.

Quieter than a sound, warmer than the temperature of the air, and in it as clear as anything I have experienced in my physical life.

A single communication that was not quite words, but was more than feeling.

I already know you.

I have been with you even on the mountain.

I did not sleep that night.

I lay on the floor in the dark and let something settle in me that I do not have adequate language to describe.

It was not happiness exactly.

It was more like arriving, like a journey that had been going on longer than I knew had reached the place it was always heading.

The asylum process took 14 months in total, 6 weeks in Istanbul, 2 months in a processing center in Germany, then Canada.

The specific details of how I qualified for refugee status in Canada I will not go into completely but the core of my case was religious persecution.

A former member of the passage who had converted to Christianity faced verifiable and documented threats in Iran.

The case was not difficult to make because it was entirely true.

I arrived in Toronto in January of 2025.

Mus the city was cold in a way that tan in winter is not cold.

Thrron gets cold in patches.

A few genuinely frozen weeks in February.

Toronto in January is a different conversation entirely.

The cold here has depth.

It settles into the city and does not move.

I walked out of the airport into it and the air hit my face and I stopped walking for a moment on the sidewalk with my single bag and just breathed it.

Cold air in a free country.

That is something you do not understand until you have lived without the second part.

A resettlement worker named David met me at Arrivals.

He was Iranian Canadian, a man in his 50s who had come to Canada as a student in the 1980s and never gone back.

He drove me to a small apartment that had been arranged through a church refugee sponsorship program.

The apartment had a bed and a table and a window overlooking a street full of people who were simply going about their lives.

I sat at that table the first night and watched people walk past below me for an hour.

No one was watching them.

No one was recording their movements.

No one was assessing whether their behavior was sufficiently loyal to any system.

They were just people walking on a street.

I found the Persian speaking church through David who attended it himself.

It meets on Sunday evenings in a community room rented from a larger church.

When I walked in the first time, there were about 30 people, Iranians of various ages, former Muslims almost entirely, people with the stories.

You can see it in how they hold themselves.

There is a specific kind of relief in a room full of people who have come through something difficult and found themselves on the other side of it and are still learning what the other side looks like.

The pastor, a man named Hormos, shook my hand and looked at me with eyes that recognized something without needing details.

He had come to Canada 20 years ago under circumstances I have only partially heard.

He said simply that he was glad I was here and that this was a safe place.

I sat in a plastic chair in a circle of other plastic chairs and listened to people pray in Farsy and I cried through most of the service.

Not from sadness, not quite.

From the specific emotion you feel when you have been carrying something alone for a long time and you finally set it down in a room where other people understand the weight of it.

I have been coming back every Sunday since.

There are things I carry that do not go away easily.

I want to be honest with you about this because I think testimonies that end with everything resolved and tied up cleanly are not entirely honest.

I still see the boy in the green jacket when I close my eyes at night.

I still see the children’s drawings on the wall of the first building.

The cross made of cardboard, the banner from Psalm 23.

I burned a place where children worshiped God.

That is true.

That happened.

Jesus’s grace does not erase the fact that it happened.

It means that even that is not outside the reach of what he can redeem.

But redeeming something is different from erasing it.

The scar is still there.

The weight is still real.

What grace does is it means I do not carry the weight alone.

That is the thing I could not have imagined from the inside of my old life.

That there was a God interested not in my performance of righteousness but in my actual self.

The actual cena moradi underneath all the layers of training and ideology and certainty.

The boy who asked too many questions.

The young man who found certainty and used it as a weapon.

The man who stood in a burning room and heard a child and went back.

Grace says all of that is known and none of it is the end of the story.

I have thought often about what my mother said to me when I told her I was joining the bas.

I pray that whatever you are looking for, you find it before it costs you everything.

She saw it before I did.

Mothers often do.

I called her from Toronto 2 months after I arrived.

It was the first time we had spoken in over a year.

She did not know where I was or what had happened.

I told her I was safe.

I told her I was in Canada.

I told her what I am telling you now.

That I had found what I was looking for.

That it had cost nearly everything.

That somehow there was something left.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said she had been praying for me every single night since the day I joined the bas.

She said she had asked God to find me regardless of where I went or what I did.

She said she had believed for 12 years that I would come home to myself eventually.

I asked her who she had been praying to.

She said she did not have a simple answer to that question.

She said she had prayed to God with everything she had and that everything she knew about God was that he was the kind of God who answers the prayers of mothers who will not stop asking.

She said she would talk to me more about that when she saw me.

She is coming to Toronto in June.

I have received enough from the warehouse job to take her to dinner at a restaurant she can choose herself.

She can order anything on the menu and I will sit across from her and let her look at my face the way she has always looked at my face all the way through to whatever is underneath.

And this time I will not have anything to hide.

I want to speak to anyone watching this who is where I was.

Not in the message specifically, but in that place of absolute certainty that has stopped asking questions that has decided which people matter and which people do not that has learning to use religious language to do things that have no real relationship to God.

I want to tell you that the certainty is not the thing you think it is.

It feels like strength.

It is not a strength.

Strength is what you need to ask the questions that the certainty was built to prevent.

Strength is sitting in a dark room in Istanbul with a book you were always told was corrupt and reading it with open eyes.

Strength is admitting that a 7-year-old boy in a green jacket is more important than the ideology that put you in the same room as him.

I also want to speak to the Iranians who were in those churches, the ones whose meeting spaces were burned.

I know some of you may watch content like this.

I want you to know that the man who helped do what was done is not that man anymore.

I know that is not sufficient.

I know that saying I am different now does not restore what was lost.

But I am saying it because it is true and because I believe you deserve to hear it directly from the person who owes it to you.

And I want to say one thing about the boy.

If by any means this reaches the family, if the woman who grabbed him from my arms ever encounters this testimony, I want her to know that her son is the reason I am alive.

Not physically, he was not in danger of dying, but spiritually.

He is the reason the question cracked open.

He is the reason I was sitting on a mountain in the dark talking to a god I had never actually met.

He is the reason I was in a tea house in Istanbul asking Arash what the resurrection means.

He is the reason I am sitting at a kitchen table in Toronto in the snow telling this story.

I do not know if God placed him there for me.

That feels like a claim too large to make about a child.

But I know that God used him.

I know that God used 30 seconds in a back room to interrupt 20 years of certainty with the simple face of a frightened little boy.

And I know that whatever happens from here, I will spend the rest of my life trying to be the kind of person who goes back into the room, not to take, to carry out, to protect, to be useful to something other than power.

That is what following Jesus looks like to me.

From where I am standing right now, 14 months into this new life, still learning the songs at a church, still working through the gospels with hormones on Wednesday evenings, still carrying the weight of what I did, still finding that the weight is bearable.

In a way, it was not when I carried it alone.

If you are watching this and something in you is responding to it, I am not going to tell you what to decide.

I am going to tell you what I did on a mountain in the dark with no plan and no theology and no language for what I was asking.

I looked at the darkness and I said if there is a God who sees me show [snorts] me that that is enough.

You do not need the right words.

You do not need the right background.

You do not need to have been a good person.

I was not a good person and something still came into that silence.

He is not afraid of what you have done.

He has seen it already and he came looking for you anyway.

If this story has moved something in you that you want to hold on to, write in the comments.

He went back for me.

Let it be the first honest thing you have said in a long time.

My name is Cena Muradi.

I am 31 years old.

I live in Toronto, Canada.

I helped burn churches in the name of a God I had never met.

And the God I had never met went into the fire after me.

That is my testimony.

That is all of it.