I Was Sentenced To Death For Being A Christian — Then Gave Birth In Chains & Refused To Deny JESUS!

I Was Sentenced To Death For Being A Christian — Then Gave Birth In Chains & Refused To Deny JESUS!

My name is Safiya Dawoud.

I am 34 years old.

I am a wife, a mother of two children, a follower of Jesus Christ, and I am a woman who was sentenced to death for saying so.

I am here to tell you that he is, not because my life became easy after I chose him, not because the suffering was small or the price was cheap.

I am here to tell you that he is worth it precisely because I paid the full price and found him on the other side of every single thing they took from me.

I paid with my freedom.

I paid with my body.

I paid with the early months of my daughter’s life spent on a prison floor.

I paid with my husband’s presence, with my son’s childhood, with the safety and the ordinary life that most people take for granted every single day.

I paid all of it, and what I received in exchange was not a comfortable religion or a set of rules or a distant God who watched from far away while I suffered.

What I received was a presence, a companion, a voice in the dark of a prison cell that knew my name and knew my pain and never, not once, not for a single hour of the worst hours, left me alone in it.

That is what I want to tell you about, not just the suffering, though I will not hide the suffering from you.

I will not soften it or make it easier to hear than it actually was, but the presence inside the suffering, the one who was there on the cold floor, the one who was there when they read the sentence, the one who was there when I held my newborn daughter in chains and wondered if she would grow up without her mother.

He was there.

He was there for all of it, and by the time I finished telling you this story, I believe you will know, not just in your head, but somewhere deeper than your head, that he will be there for you, too.

My name is Safiya Dawoud, and this is my story.

I was born in Khartoum North, in a neighborhood called Hafaya, the second of four children.

My father’s name was Idris.

He was a Muslim man, not deeply religious, not a scholar, not someone who prayed his five prayers without fail, but Muslim in the way that identity works in Sudan, where your religion is not just what you believe, but who you are, where it is written into your name and your family and your legal existence before you are old enough to have an opinion about any of it.

My father left when I was 3 years old.

I have no memory of him that is not constructed from photographs and the careful edited stories my mother told us.

When we were young enough to need a father to be something other than what he was.

He left and he did not come back and he sent nothing.

No money, no letters, no word of any kind.

He simply removed himself from our lives the way you remove a stone from a path, without ceremony, without explanation, without apparent awareness that the path itself might need the stone for something.

My mother’s name was Adisa.

She was a Christian woman, a member of the Sudanese Episcopal Church, raised in the faith by her own mother, a woman whose belief was not performance or habit, but the actual living center of who she was.

After my father left, it was her faith that held our family together.

Not dramatically, not with grand gestures, but in the daily, quiet, sustaining way that real faith works.

The way she prayed before meals, the way she read her Bible at the kitchen table in the early morning before any of us were awake, the way she spoke about Jesus not as a distant historical figure, but as someone she had actual ongoing dealings with, someone whose opinion she considered and whose presence she relied on.

I grew up inside
that faith the way you grow up inside a language, absorbing it before you understand it, speaking it before you can explain it, knowing it in your body before your mind has the vocabulary to describe what you know.

I was baptized at 7.

I took my first communion at 9.

I knew the stories, the songs, the prayers.

I knew the shape of the faith before I knew its depth, and I loved Jesus the way a child loves the things that are simply part of her world, naturally, without drama, the way you love the smell of your mother’s kitchen or the sound of rain on a metal roof.

He was simply there.

He was simply mine.

What I did not know in those years of simple, uncomplicated childhood faith was that the father who had left when I was 3 had left something behind.

Not love, not provision, not presence, but a legal designation.

In Sudanese law, a child born to a Muslim father is legally Muslim.

It does not matter that the father was absent.

It does not matter that the mother is Christian.

It does not matter that the child was raised in a church, baptized, confirmed, and has never in her conscious life identified as anything other than a follower of Jesus.

On paper, in the eyes of the state, in the machinery of a legal system built on a specific interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, I was Muslim.

I had always been Muslim, and one day, when I was 31 years old and married and pregnant with my second child, the state decided to remind me of this fact.

I met Daniel when I was 24.

He was from the Nuba Mountains, a tall, serious, gentle man who worked as a secondary school teacher in Khartoum and who came to my church one Sunday with a colleague and sat three rows behind me and introduced himself afterward at the
gate with the particular careful courtesy of a man who does not want to presume, but also does not want to miss his moment.

We courted for 18 months.

We married in the church where I had been baptized in a ceremony that my mother wept through from beginning to end, not from sadness, but from the particular joy of a woman watching her daughter step into a life that looked like the answer to prayers she had been praying for years.

We were happy.

I want you to know that before I tell you everything else.

We were genuinely, ordinarily, beautifully happy.

We had a small apartment in the Bahri district of Khartoum North.

Daniel taught.

I worked part-time in a pharmacy.

Our son, Ezra, was born 2 years after our wedding, a serious little boy who had his father’s eyes and his grandmother, Adisa’s, habit of observing everything carefully before committing to a response.

Life was not luxurious.

Life in Sudan for a Christian family in the years I am describing was not without its pressures and its small daily navigations of a society that did not always make room for you comfortably, but it was life.

It was ours.

It was built on something real, and we knew it, and we were grateful for it every day.

Then my father reappeared.

Not in person, not with apology or explanation or the 30 years of absence addressed in any meaningful way.

He reappeared as a legal complaint filed by members of his family, relatives I had never met, people who had been strangers to me my entire life, alleging that I, as the daughter of a Muslim man, was living in apostasy, that my Christian marriage was invalid, that my Christian identity was a crime.

In Sudan, apostasy, the leaving of Islam, carries the death penalty.

I had never been Muslim in any way that a human being could recognize, but in any way that the law recognized, I had always been Muslim, and the law was not interested in the distinction.

The first time I heard the word apostasy applied to my own name, I was standing in my kitchen making tea.

Daniel took the call and came to find me, and I looked at his face and I knew before he spoke that something had shifted in our world in a way that was not going to shift back easily.

He told me quietly, with Ezra playing on the floor between us, what the complaint said and what it meant, and I stood there with the kettle in my hand, and I felt not fear, not yet.

Fear would come later.

I felt a profound and clarifying anger.

Not at God, not at my faith, at the idea that a man who had left when I was 3 years old, who had given me nothing, who had been absent for every single day of my formation as a human being, could now reach back across 30 years of absence and use his name to define me, could use a legal system to tell me who I was and who I was not allowed to be.

I put the kettle down.

I looked at Daniel and I said, “I am not recanting.

Whatever this becomes, I am not recanting.

” He looked at me for a long moment, then he nodded, once, slowly, with the expression of a man who already knew what his wife was going to say and had already decided he was going to stand beside her when she said it.

That decision, that single quiet nod in a kitchen in Bahri, was the beginning of everything that followed.

The arrest came 3 months later.

I was 6 months pregnant with Maral.

They came in the morning, two officers and a woman in a hijab who did not introduce herself, and they were not rough, but they were absolutely certain, the way people are certain when they have the full weight of a legal system behind them.

Ezra was 2 years old, and he clung to my leg when he saw the officers, and I bent down and held his face in my hands and told him that Mama was going to be fine and that he should go to Grandma Adisa and be a good boy.

He was 2 years old.

He did not understand.

He understood enough to cry.

They took Daniel separately.

I did not know where they were taking him.

I would not see him again for 7 months.

They took me to the criminal court in Khartoum.

The charges were read, apostasy, adultery, because in the court’s view, my marriage to Daniel, a Christian man, was invalid since I was legally Muslim, which made our life together something the law had a different and uglier name for.

I stood in that courtroom 6 months pregnant and I listened to them describe my marriage, my family, my faith, my life, and I felt something settle in me that I have no better word for than peace.

Not the peace of someone who is not afraid.

I was afraid.

My hands were trembling in my sides and I was aware of every movement in that courtroom with a heightened clarity of a person whose body knows it is in danger.

But underneath the fear, deeper than the fear, something was absolutely still.

Something that had been placed there a long time ago by a mother who read her Bible at a kitchen table in the early morning and who had taught me, without knowing she was teaching me, that the presence of Jesus is not a fair-weather arrangement, that he does not show up only when the circumstances are manageable, that he is specifically, particularly, personally present in the places where everything else has been stripped away.

The judge asked me if I
renounce my Christian faith and return to Islam.

I said no.

He asked me again.

In the courtroom, with the officers and the lawyers and the faces in the gallery and the weight of the state pressing down on that single syllable I had just spoken.

I said no.

He sentenced me to death by hanging, to be carried out after the birth of my child.

I want to tell you what nobody tells you about prison, not the physical conditions.

People imagine those easily enough.

The small cells, the poor food, the absence of privacy, the noise that never fully stops even in the middle of the night.

People can imagine those things.

What people cannot imagine, what I could not have imagined before I lived it, is what happens to time inside a prison when you are waiting for death.

Time does not move the way it moves in ordinary life.

It does not flow.

It pools.

It sits in corners and refuses to drain.

A single single afternoon in that cell could feel longer than a month of ordinary living and a week could pass in what felt like a single long gray day with no edges.

You lose the markers.

You lose the rhythm of a life that has shape and purpose and forward motion.

What you are left with is now.

Just now.

Just this moment.

Just this cell.

Just this chain.

Just this concrete and this heat and this waiting.

I want to tell you something about that waiting, because this is the part of my story that I think matters most.

This is the part where I stop being a headline.

Woman sentenced to death, pregnant prisoner, chained at childbirth.

And become something more specific and more human than a headline can hold.

Because in that waiting, in that pool of slow, terrible time, I was not alone.

And the one who was with me was not a concept or a tradition or a set of beliefs I was clinging to out of stubbornness.

He was present, personally, specifically, unmistakably present.

And I need to tell you about that presence before I tell you anything else about those months, because without that presence, the rest of the story has no explanation.

The first night in my cell, a cell I shared with five other women, three of whom were there for reasons that had nothing to do with religion, two of whom were also Christian women caught in similar legal situations to my own.

I lay on the thin mat they had given me and I put my hand on my stomach where Mayral was moving.

That particular restless nighttime movement of a baby who has her own schedule and her own agenda regardless of external circumstances, and I talked to Jesus the way my mother had taught me to talk to him.

Not with formal prayer language, not with the carefully constructed sentences of public worship.

Just talking.

The way you talk to someone who is in the room with you.

I said, “I am in a prison cell and my husband is somewhere I cannot reach and my son is with my mother and I do not know what is going to happen to me or to this baby or to any of us.

I am not going to pretend I am not frightened.

I am frightened, but I need you to know that I am not sorry.

I am not sorry for what I said in that courtroom and I am not going to be sorry and I need you to be here because I cannot do this without you being here.

” And he was there.

That is the only way I know to say it.

He was there the way he had always been there, the way he had been there in my mother’s kitchen and in my childhood church and in the ordinary happy days of my life with Daniel and Ezra.

But more.

Closer.

As if the stripping away of everything else had removed the distance, had taken away all the insulation that ordinary comfortable life places between a person and the presence of God.

And what was left was just him and me and a prison mat and a baby moving in the dark.

And something in that closeness was so real and so warm and so completely without condemnation that I wept.

Not from grief, though there was grief.

But from the shock of being known, of being found in the exact place where I was, of discovering that the sentence I had been given by a human court had no authority over the one who had been with me since before I was born.

I slept that night in a prison cell on a thin mat with chains on my ankles and a death sentence over my head.

I slept.

One of the other women told me in the morning that she had watched me fall asleep and had not understood how it was possible.

I told her I had not done it alone.

She looked at me for a long time after that.

Her name was Amira.

By the end of the second week, she had asked me to tell her more about the one who had helped me sleep, but that is her story to tell, not mine.

The months in that cell had a texture that I can only describe as both the worst and the most sacred time of my life simultaneously.

I do not know how to separate those two things because they were not separate.

The suffering was real.

I will not soften it for you.

The heat in that cell in the Sudanese summer was a physical assault.

The food was inadequate, which for a pregnant woman is not just discomfort, but danger.

The chains made sleep difficult and movement painful and the most basic physical functions a daily humiliation.

I was not permitted regular visits.

My mother came twice in 4 months, twice with Ezra.

And I held my son through the visiting room barrier and felt his small body and smelled his hair and told him mama was fine and that Jesus was taking care of her and that he needed to eat his vegetables and listen to Grandma Adisa.

He was 2 years old.

He told me very seriously that he did not like the vegetables at Grandma’s house and that she put things in them.

I laughed so hard the guard looked alarmed.

My son, in a prison visiting room in the middle of the worst chapter of my life, made me laugh until I could not breathe.

I held onto that laughter for weeks afterward.

I took it out and looked at it on the hard days the way you take out a photograph of someone you love.

I wrote letters.

This is the thing that kept me sane and kept me rooted and kept me connected to something larger than the four walls of that cell.

I wrote letters to my church, the small Episcopal congregation in Khartoum North where I had grown up, where my mother still worshipped every Sunday, where Daniel and I had been married.

I wrote to the pastor, to the women’s fellowship, to the young people’s group.

I wrote on whatever paper I could obtain with a pen that was inspected every time it passed through the guards.

I wrote about what I was experiencing, not to complain.

I made a decision early in those months that my letters would not be letters of complaint, that I would not use the only connection I had to my community as a vehicle for my own distress.

I wrote about what I was learning, about what the cell was teaching me that the comfortable life had not been able to teach, about what it means to have nothing left but Jesus and to discover that Jesus is not nothing.

I wrote, “When everything that can be taken is taken, what remains is what was always real.

I did not know this before.

I thought I knew it.

I had heard it said and I had believed it with the belief you give to things you have not yet been required to prove.

Now I am proving it every day on this mat in this cell.

And I want to tell you, the ones who are sitting in your houses with your families and your ordinary lives and your comfortable faith, do not wait for the cell to find out what is real.

Find out now.

Press into him now.

Because what I have found in here, in the stripping, in the chains, in the waiting, this closeness, this presence, this absolutely unshakable sense of being known and held, I would not trade it for the comfortable life I had before.

I would not go back, even knowing what was coming.

I would walk into that courtroom again and say no again.

Because what I have found on the other side of that no is worth every single thing it cost.

My pastor read those letters to the congregation.

He later told me that grown men and women wept during the reading.

That people who had been drifting in their faith came back.

That something in the letters, some quality of certainty that could only come from a place where certainty had been tested to its absolute limit, reached people in a way that years of comfortable Sunday sermons had not reached them.

I did not write those letters to be a preacher.

I wrote them because writing was the only thing I could do and because the one who was with me in that cell was too real and too present and too magnificent to keep to myself.

But he used them anyway.

He used a pregnant woman’s prison letters the way he uses everything, beyond what the instrument intended, beyond what the instrument could see.

Mayral came on a Tuesday morning in May.

The labor began at 2:00 in the morning.

I had been warned by the other women, the ones who had been there longer, that the prison’s medical response to childbirth was slow and inconsistent.

I was not surprised when the contractions grew strong and close together and the guards came and the request to remove the chains was refused.

I was not surprised, but I want to tell you that not being surprised does not mean not feeling it.

It means feeling it without the additional shock of the unexpected.

I felt it.

I felt the full weight of what it meant that the state that had sentenced me to death was also the state that looked at a woman in active labor and decided that the chains stayed on.

I felt it with a grief and a rage that I laid before Jesus in the 30 seconds between contractions when I had breath to speak and I told him, “I need you here.

” Right now, I need you on this floor with me.

He was on that floor with me.

I cannot explain it medically or scientifically and I’m not going to try.

What I can tell you is that in the middle of the most physically agonizing experience of my life in circumstances that were degrading and dangerous and wrong in every way that something can be wrong, there was a warmth.

There was a presence that was not one of the three women around me, not Amira who held my left hand, not the older woman whose name I never properly learned who held my right, not the young girl who pressed a wet cloth to my forehead and prayed in a whisper the whole time.

Alongside all of them and closer than all of them was something else, someone else.

And in the moments when the pain was at its peak and my vision went white and I thought I could not continue.

In those exact moments, the warmth intensified as if he was pressing closer precisely when the pressure was greatest.

As if the worst moments were the moments he chose to make his presence most undeniable.

Myra was born at 4:17 in the morning.

She came into the world on a concrete floor in a prison cell in Omdurman and she cried with the full-throated outrage of a healthy baby who has opinions about her circumstances.

And that cry was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard in my life.

They cut the cord with scissors that a guard produced after being asked three times.

They wrapped her in a cloth that one of the women had saved from her own belongings.

And they put her in my arms.

I held her and the chains were still on my ankles and the floor was still cold and outside the cell, the prison was beginning its slow morning noise and none of that was different.

Everything was different.

I held my daughter and I said her name, Maral, light reflecting off water.

And I said to the one who had been on that floor with me, “Thank you.

” Just that.

Just thank you because there was nothing else large enough and nothing else was needed.

She was perfect.

She was completely, entirely, furiously perfect.

The weeks after Maral’s birth were their own kind of suffering and their own kind of grace simultaneously.

Nursing a newborn in a prison cell is not what a mother imagines for her child.

The inadequate food affected my milk.

The heat was hard on a newborn.

The noise of the prison, the metal doors, the shouting, the night sounds startled her constantly in those early weeks.

I held her through all of it and talked to her and sang to her the songs my mother had sung to me, the old church songs in Arabic that I had learned before I could read and she would calm when I sang in the way that babies calm when they recognize something familiar in an unfamiliar world.

She recognized my voice.

She had been listening to it for 9 months on the other side of a wall of skin and water and now she turned toward it in the dark of the cell the way a plant turns toward light.

That turning, that small instinctive trust, it broke me open every time.

Every single time.

I was still under a death sentence.

I want to be clear about that because I think sometimes in the telling of a story like this, the miraculous parts create an impression that the danger had passed.

That the worst was over, that God’s presence in the cell meant the situation had resolved.

It had not resolved.

I was still a woman sentenced to death in a country where that sentence was legally valid.

Myra was a baby in a death row cell.

Ezra was with my mother who was doing everything she could and was herself a woman in her 60s carrying more than any woman her age should be asked to carry.

Daniel was in a separate facility and I did not know his condition.

The letters I wrote continued.

The prayers in that cell continued and the waiting continued.

What also continued, what never stopped, not for a single day of those months, was the presence.

He was there for the birth and he was there for the hard weeks after and he was there on the mornings when I woke with Maral on my chest and the chains on my ankles and the weight of everything pressing down.

And I lay there in the moment before full waking and felt him the way you feel sunlight on your face, not seen, not heard, but undeniably, physically, warmly real.

And I would take a breath and say good morning to him the way my mother had said good morning to him at her kitchen table for 50 years.

And I would begin another day.

I wrote in one of my letters, “I used to think that faith was something you maintained, something you work to keep in good condition like a house that needs regular attention or it falls into disrepair.

” I understand now that faith is not maintenance.

Faith is discovery.

Every day in the cell I discover that he is here, not because I have maintained anything, because he simply is, because his presence does not depend on my performance or my consistency or my spiritual condition.

It depends on his nature.

And his nature is to be here.

To be with the ones who are in the chains, to be on the floors that the powerful have decided the powerless deserve.

He was on this floor before I arrived and he will be on this floor after I leave and he is on every floor in every cell in every prison where someone is paying a price for his name tonight.

That is who he is.

That is what he does.

And I am a witness.

The pressure, when it came, came from outside Sudan entirely.

I did not know this while it was happening.

Inside the cell, I knew very little of what was occurring in the world beyond the prison walls, but my letters were being read.

My pastor had shared them beyond the congregation to other churches, to Christian organizations, to human rights groups.

Photographs of Maral, taken by a guard who was moved by something she could not name and who risked her position to use a phone camera for 30 seconds, made their way out of the prison and onto the screens of people in countries I had never been to.

Lawyers I had never met filed documents in courts I had never heard of.

Diplomats made phone calls.

Organizations whose names I would only learn months later began applying the kind of sustained, organized, international pressure that governments find difficult to absorb indefinitely.

I knew none of this.

I was in my cell nursing Maral, writing my letters, singing the old songs, talking to Jesus in the dark.

I was doing the only things I could do, the small faithful things that were within my reach.

And the things that were outside my reach were being done by others.

By the body, by the people who had read the letters and had been moved and had moved.

I think about this often now, the way the church worked in that season, how my part was the cell and the chains and the letters and other people’s part was the phone calls and the lawyers and the documents and no single part was sufficient alone and together they were enough.

That is what the body does when
it is functioning the way it was meant to function.

Each part does what it can do and trust the other parts to do what they can do and the head, who is Jesus, holds it all together and directs it toward an outcome that none of the parts could have engineered individually.

The sentence was overturned on a Thursday.

I was told by the warden, a woman who delivered the news with a professional neutrality that could not quite conceal the fact that she was relieved.

But the legal basis was technical, procedural errors in the original case combined with the international legal arguments that the lawyers had constructed.

The apostasy charge was not declared wrong in principle by the Sudanese court, but it was declared improperly applied in my specific case.

Which meant I was free.

Which meant Maral was free.

Which meant that the chains came off my ankles for the first time in 5 months and I stood in the warden’s office on legs that felt unfamiliar under me.

And I held my daughter against my chest and I wept in a way that had nothing to do with sadness.

Daniel was released the same day.

I did not know this until I walked out of the prison gates and he was there.

He was thinner.

He had something in his eyes that had not been there before, a depth, a gravity, the look of a man who has been somewhere difficult and has come back changed but not broken.

He held out his arms and I walked into them with Maral between us and we stood like that outside the gates of Omdurman women’s prison while the Sudanese sun came down on us and neither of us spoke for a long time.

There was nothing to say that the holding did not say better.

Ezra was brought by my mother that evening.

He walked into the room where we were staying, a church safe house in Khartoum, and he saw me and he stopped walking and looked at me very seriously, the way he looks at everything before he commits to a response.

And then he ran.

He ran across that room and hit me at full speed the way 2-year-olds run, without brakes, without reservation, with a complete and terrifying trust of a small person who was absolutely certain that the person they are running
toward will catch them.

I caught him.

I held him and Maral simultaneously, one in each arm, and Daniel had his arms around all of us.

And my mother stood in the doorway of that room with her hand over her mouth and her eyes full.

And I looked at her over my children’s heads, and I thought of all the mornings she had sat at that kitchen table with her Bible, all the years of faithful ordinary prayer, all the quiet steady trust that had been the architecture of my childhood.

And I understood that what I had lived in that cell was not separate from what she had lived at that table.

It was the same faith, just tested at a different temperature.

We left Sudan 6 weeks after my release.

The legal situation remained precarious.

The apostasy charge had been overturned on procedural grounds, not dismissed, and there were people who had not finished with us.

The same networks that exist for people like Omar, like Tariq, like Sheikh Ziyad, the quiet people who do the quiet things, helped us move.

We are in a safe country now.

I will not say which one.

I will say that my children go to school, and Daniel has found work, and on Sunday mornings we sit in a church that does not have marble floors or chandeliers, just plastic chairs and bad coffee and people who have paid prices of their own.

And we worship the one who was on the floor with me.

I speak sometimes to groups, churches, conferences, small gatherings of people who want to hear the story firsthand.

And always at some point, someone asks me the question I understand they need to ask.

They look at me, at this ordinary woman, this mother, this person who looks like someone you might stand behind in a grocery queue.

And they ask, “Was it worth it? Was all of it worth it?” And I always take a breath before I answer.

Not because I am uncertain, because the answer is so large that I want to give it the space it deserves.

Yes.

It was worth it.

Not because the suffering was small.

It was not small.

Not because God made it easy.

He did not make it easy.

But because in the cell, in the chains, in the labor, on the cold floor, in the letters, in the long slow pulling days of waiting, I found something that I did not have before.

I found the depth of him.

I found what he is like when everything else is gone.

I found the the presence I had known in my mother’s house and in my childhood church and in the ordinary happy days of my life with Daniel was not a fair-weather presence.

Was not a comfortable circumstances presence.

Was not a presence that required a certain quality of life in order to show up.

I found that he is specifically, particularly, personally that he chose the floor, that he has always chosen the floor, that the one who was born in a stable and died on a cross is not surprised by concrete and chains, and he is not absent from them.

He is there.

He has always been there.

He is there for you, wherever your floor is, whatever your chain is, whatever the thing is that you are facing that feels too heavy, too dark, too final for any presence to penetrate, he is already there.

He was there before you arrived.

He’s waiting for you to find him in it.

My name is Safiya Dawd.

I was sentenced to death for his name.

I gave birth in chains for his name.

I lost months with my son and years of safety and the country I was born in for his name.

And I would do it again without hesitation, without reservation, every single time.

My prayer requests for Daniel, that the things he carried in his own prison would continue to heal in the light of the one who heals completely.

For Ezra, that what he lost in those months would be restored to him in ways only a father can restore.

For Maral, born on a prison floor in chains, that she would grow up knowing that her first bed was held by the same hands that hold the stars.

For my mother Edissa, who sat at a kitchen table for 50 years and prayed and whose faithfulness became the foundation everything else was built on.

For the women who held my hands on that floor, Amira and the others whose names I carry, that the one who was present in that cell would find each of them fully.

And for every person reading or listening to this story who is in their own kind of prison tonight, the visible kind and the invisible kind, that they would know he is already there.

That the chains do not keep him out.

That the floor is not beneath his willingness to come.

He is there.

He is always there.