Indonesian Princess Goes Viral for Her Testimony: “Jesus Kept Coming to Me in My Dream”

Indonesia for Jesus.

INDONESIA FOR JESUS.

>> INDONESIA FOR JESUS.

>> Brothers and sisters, hear the good news.

Jesus offers salvation to all who believe.

Turn to him today.

>> That was me evangelizing on the streets of Indonesia, my beloved country.

And before I tell you what I lost, let me tell you what I had.

I want to start there because I think it matters.

When people hear stories like mine, stories of someone leaving one faith for another, they sometimes assume the person was unhappy from the beginning.

That they that they were mistreated or that they never really believed or that something was broken in their home that made them easy to pull away.

I want to be honest with you from the very first page.

That was not my story.

What I had was extraordinary.

What I came from was beautiful.

And that is what makes everything that followed so much harder to explain and so much more important for me to try.

>> Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our sister from Indonesia continues her story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

>> I was born into one of the most recognized royal households in Indonesia.

I will not say exactly which branch and I will not give you my full name because there are people in my family who are still living and still navigating the consequences of what I chose and I will not add to their burden by making this a public spectacle with names and family trees attached.

What I will tell you is that theraton the palace was not just a building to me.

It was the entire world.

My father was a figure of great dignity.

I will not say much about him now except to tell you that he was the kind of man whose presence changed a room when he entered it.

Not because he was loud or demanding, but because he carried something heavy and graceful at the same time.

He had a way of looking at you that made you feel both seen and measured.

I loved him deeply and I was also a little afraid of him.

The way you are afraid of something you respect so much you would rather not disappoint it.

My mother was the practical one, the one who managed the household and managed us children and managed my father’s schedule and the family’s social obligations all at once.

and she did it with a kind of effortless precision that I have never seen in anyone else before or since.

She was also the most devout person I knew.

Her faith was not something she wore for occasions.

It was her interior architecture.

It was how she was built.

Islam in our household was not separate from royal identity.

I want you to understand this clearly because it is important to everything else I am going to tell you.

For the royal houses of Java, especially Yoga Carta, Islam and royalty have been woven together for centuries.

The Sultan of Yogyakarta holds a title that includes religious authority.

The Satan festival which marks the birth of the prophet Muhammad is one of the most important royal ceremonies of the year.

The gamelan sets reserved for seaten are considered sacred and are only brought out for that occasion.

The royal legitimacy in yoga carta is inseparable from its Islamic identity.

So when I say I was Muslim, I do not just mean that my family happened to follow that religion the way some families casually belong to a faith.

I mean that my religion and my identity as a member of the royal house were one and the same thing.

To be who I was in that family in that palace was to be Muslim.

There was no gap between those two things.

No daylight between them at all.

We prayed five times a day in our household.

This was not a suggestion.

The call to prayer was the organizing rhythm of daily life.

Whatever was happening, whatever visitors were present, whatever meeting or meal was underway.

When the adhan came, things adjusted to accommodate it.

I learned to pray properly before I learned to write well.

I could recite significant portions of the Quran before I could do long division.

During Ramadan, the entire household transformed.

The rhythm of waking and sleeping shifted.

The kitchen operated on a different schedule.

There was a kind of collective discipline in the air that had its own beauty.

I will admit that honestly.

And the end of Ramadan 8 alfar was the most spectacular celebration of the year.

Extended family would arrive from everywhere.

Formal dress, a formal ceremony, the careful observance of every protocol.

It was overwhelming and magnificent and I was proud to be part of it.

I also had private Islamic education alongside my regular schooling.

A teacher came to the house several times a week and I learned Quranic recitation, basic Islamic Jewish prudence, the stories of the prophets, the history of the faith.

I was a good student, not because I was forced to be, but because I genuinely wanted to do things correctly.

I had a personality that wanted to get things right to understand the rules and follow them well.

So I did.

I recited.

I memorized.

I asked questions.

I listened to the answers.

By the time I was a teenager, I had more religious knowledge than many adults outside our circle.

And I knew it.

And it gave me a certain quiet confidence.

But here is the thing I have to tell you.

The thing I never told anyone for a very long time.

The thing I feel I owe you at the beginning of this story because without it nothing else makes sense.

I never felt anything.

Not nothing in the sense of boredom or inattention.

I was attentive.

I was present.

I did everything correctly and I did it sincerely.

But when I prayed, I felt like I was speaking into a room with no one in it.

When I recited Quran, the words were beautiful.

The Arabic is genuinely architecturally beautiful, but they did not land on me the way I sense they were supposed to land.

I watched my mother pray, and something was happening to her that I could see from across the room.

some interior activity that showed in her face.

A settling, a peace, a communication.

I wanted that.

I imitated everything she did.

I prayed at the same hours in the same manner a with the same words and I waited for it to happen to me and it did not.

I told myself this was normal.

That faith was discipline not feeling.

that mature faith was not about sensation but about obedience and consistency.

I heard these things from teachers and I chose to believe them because the alternative was troubling.

The alternative was that something was wrong with me that I was somehow spiritually defective in a way that others in my family were not and I could not accept that.

not in that household, not with those expectations, not as the person I was supposed to be.

So I kept going.

I kept praying.

I kept reciting.

I kept fasting every Ramadan with full sincerity.

I kept doing everything right and I kept feeling nothing.

There is a memory that comes back to me now that I think contains the seed of everything that happened later.

I was 12 years old.

It was the last night of Ramadan, the night before 8.

In our household, this night was filled with activity, preparations for the following day, the sounds of the kitchen, relatives arriving, a kind of productive, joyful chaos everywhere.

And I had completed my prayers, and I had gone to my room for a moment of quiet.

And I sat on the floor, not on the bed, just on the floor by the window.

And I cried.

I did not know why I was crying.

I was not unhappy in any way I could point to.

My life was good.

I was healthy.

I was loved.

The following day would be beautiful.

There was nothing wrong.

And yet I was sitting on the floor of my room on the last night of Ramadan, 12 years old, or crying in a way that came from somewhere I could not locate.

I wiped my face and went back to the family and no one knew.

And I told myself it was tiredness from the fasting month.

And I believed that explanation because I needed to.

But I know now what it was.

I know now that I was grieving something I had not yet found.

That the longing in me was so deep and so specific that it leaked out that night in tears I could not explain.

I was 12 years old and I was lonely in a way that had nothing to do with the people around me and everything to do with the absence of a presence I had never yet encountered.

I am telling you this not to suggest that there was something deficient in what my family gave me.

They gave me everything they had.

My mother’s faith was real and it was hers and it sustained her in ways I could see plainly.

I am not saying Islam could not have reached someone else in my position.

I am saying it did not reach me and I spent years trying to understand why.

And now I think I simply understand it differently.

Some people are knit in a particular way and they require a particular key and no amount of trying the wrong key will open the door no matter how sincere the trying.

Growing up royal in Java carries a weight that is hard to communicate to people who have not experienced something like it.

There is a concept in Japanese royal culture called wahu.

A divine grace or blessing that is understood to flow through certain bloodlines conferring on the bearers of that blood a spiritual authority and a special relationship with the divine.

It is not a concept that is Islamic in origin.

It predates Islam in Javanese spiritual culture, but it had been absorbed into the general atmosphere of our household and our understanding of ourselves.

We were not ordinary people.

We were not meant to be ordinary people.

The blood in our veins carried history and obligation and something that was supposed to be sacred.

I believed this as a child, not in an arrogant way.

I was not raised to be arrogant.

Quite the opposite.

My mother was strict about humility and proper behavior, but in the way a fish believes in water.

It was simply the reality I swam in.

My identity was a container that had been filled before I was born, and I was just growing into it.

But here is what I started to notice as I got older.

As I moved from childhood into adolescence, the container was beautiful.

The container was impressive, but it was just a container.

And I was supposed to be more than a container.

I was a person with a mind that was becoming more active and more questioning, with a heart that wanted something real to hold on to, something that was not just tradition or bloodline or ceremony, something that was mine in a way that no title could be mine, something personal that no family decision could give or
take away.

I do not want to make it sound like I was miserable or rebellious.

I was neither.

I was a good daughter.

I followed the rules.

I excelled in my studies.

Because in our family, being educated was taken seriously.

My parents were not people who believed girls should be decorative or domestically confined.

They had high expectations of intellectual achievement for all their children.

Now, I had close friendships within our circle.

I had a sense of humor.

I could laugh easily.

My childhood had real joy in it.

And I am grateful for that.

But underneath all of it, running like a thread through every year was this unnamed hunger.

This sense that I was looking for something I could not describe.

this feeling and I am going to use the most honest word I can of incompleteness like a sentence that ends without a full stop like a note that never resolves.

By the time I was 15 or 16, I had started to read more broadly on my own.

Not religious texts at this point, just literature, history, philosophy in the way that teenagers sometimes stumble into it.

I was curious about everything.

I read about different cultures and different belief systems, not because I was looking to leave my own, but because I was a curious person in a household that valued learning.

And some of what I read made me think, not in a destabilizing way, yet just in a way that opened windows in a room I had previously thought had only walls.

I had one close friend outside the palace circle.

Her family was middle class, no royal connection, and she was Christian.

She had been my friend since primary school because we were placed in the same class and we discovered we both loved to read and we both thought in similar ways.

My mother knew about the friendship and did not discourage it because my mother was not the kind of person who was threatened by difference.

She was secure enough in her own faith that the existence of other faiths did not feel like a threat to her.

The friendship was not something that was hidden or complicated.

Uh she was just my friend.

Her name I will not share.

I will just say she was the kind of person whose faith was also visible from the outside the way my mother’s was.

But hers had a different quality where my mother’s faith looked like discipline and order and something that had been built carefully over decades.

My friend’s faith looked like it was just part of her breathing.

She didn’t talk about it much.

She didn’t push it on me at all.

But it was present in how she moved through difficulties.

In how she treated people who were unkind to her, in a kind of groundedness she had that I envied without knowing I was envying it.

When I was 17, she told me that a small prayer group met at a family friend’s house.

a casual gathering on Sunday evenings and she mentioned it almost in passing.

But the way you mention something you’re doing that week, not as an invitation particularly, just as information.

I don’t know why I said I would come.

It was not like me.

I was not someone who acted on impulse.

I was careful and considered in most things.

The palace had that effect on you.

Everything had a proper procedure.

So you learned to think before you moved and going to a Christian prayer meeting was not something that fit any proper procedure in my world.

It was not forbidden exactly.

We were not that kind of household and I was not going to be locked in my room for attending something out of curiosity.

But it was unusual.

It was stepping outside the container in a small way.

And yet something in me said yes before my mind had finished thinking it through.

Is something pulled me in a direction I had not previously considered walking.

I did not understand it at the time.

I understand it now, but I did not understand it then.

I told my mother I was going to a study group at my friend’s house, which was not entirely untrue.

She did not ask questions.

I got in the car and my driver took me and I walked into that house and I sat down in a circle of people and my life began slowly to change in a way I would not have been able to predict or prepare for even if I had tried.

I did not feel anything remarkable that first evening.

No lightning, no voice, no dramatic moment.

It was just people, ordinary people sitting in a circle in an ordinary living room with simple furniture and a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.

They sang some songs I did not know.

They prayed, taking turns in a way that was unlike anything I had ever heard.

And one woman in the circle, older, maybe in her 60s, prayed in a way that stopped something in me completely.

She was not reciting.

She was talking.

She was talking to someone as if that someone was right there in the room.

And she was crying, but not the crying of sadness.

I know the difference.

I have cried both ways.

It was the crying of someone who is flooded by something good, something overwhelming in the best possible way.

She spoke about her weak, about a difficulty she had been through, and she spoke to whatever she was speaking to as if the response was guaranteed, as if being heard was not a question she had any doubt about.

I sat in that circle and I watched her and something in me went very very quiet.

I did not know what I was watching.

I did not have a theological framework for it yet.

I just knew that I had prayed five times a day for 17 years.

And I had never once looked the way that woman looked.

And I had wanted to look that way without knowing I wanted it.

I had wanted exactly that for as long as I could remember.

I went home that night and I sat in my room and I did not cry this time.

I just sat very still and I thought and what I thought was not yet belief, not yet searching, not yet anything I could name.

It was just a question, small and quiet, floating in the middle of everything I thought I knew.

What if there is something I am missing? That was all, just that question, small as a seed.

I did not know then that seeds like that once they land do not stop growing.

I did not know that the question I was sitting with that night in my room was going to follow me for the next several years, growing roots in the dark, in silence beneath everything else in my life.

I was 17 years old, a princess of the palace, properly raised, properly educated, properly Muslim, properly everything I was supposed to be.

and a question had just cracked something open in me that I would never be able to fully close again.

That is where this story really begins.

I want to be honest about the months that followed that first prayer meeting.

They were not dramatic.

Nothing happened quickly.

The crack that had opened in me that evening was real, but it was small and my life was large.

And most of the time my life simply continued without giving that crack much space to widen.

I was in my final years of school.

I was preparing for university entrance examinations that carried significant weight in our household.

My parents had expectations about where I would study and what I would study.

And those expectations were reasonable and I respected them.

There was family life, social obligations, ceremonies to attend, relatives to receive.

The palace did not slow down.

It did not make space for private internal questioning.

It simply moved forward the way it always had on its ancient well-worn rhythm, and I moved with it.

But something had shifted in a small way that I noticed.

When I prayed the five prayers, I paid attention differently.

Not with more devotion.

I am not sure it was that.

But I was listening in a different way.

I was noticing the gap more consciously.

The gap between the words I was saying and any felt sense of response.

Before I had told myself the gap was normal, that it was the nature of mature faith.

That feeling was not the point.

Now I was less sure about that explanation because I had seen something in that living room in the face of that woman praying that suggested the gap did not have to be there.

That it was possible for prayer to feel like a real conversation, a real exchange.

I had seen it with my own eyes and I could not unsee it.

My friend did not press me.

I want to make this clear because it is important.

She did not follow up with me to ask how I felt or what I thought.

She did not leave Christian books in my bag.

She was just my friend as she had always been.

She mentioned the prayer group sometimes in conversation but lightly without weight.

She trusted something I think that I did not trust yet of she trusted that whatever had started was going to continue without her having to push it.

A few months after that first visit I went back and then I went a third time.

The third time I went, there was a young man there who was studying theology in Yoga Carta, a seminarian, and he spoke briefly that evening about something I had never heard framed in quite that way before.

He spoke about the nature of God as father, not God as sovereign, not God as judge, not God as lawgiver, all of which I understood within my own framework, but God as father in a personal intimate sense.

He spoke about the idea that this God wanted to know individual people, not be woripped by them from a distance, but actually know them.

The way a father knows a child by name, by the specific texture of their particular life.

Oh, I sat with that for a long time afterward.

The God I had grown up with was great and powerful and worthy of submission and worship, and I believed all of that sincerely.

But the God I had grown up with was not someone you had a conversation with.

The God I had grown up with received your prayers and you hoped they were accepted.

There was always that question of acceptance of whether you had done enough, been sincere enough, performed the ritual correctly enough for your prayer to reach.

The distance was built into the structure.

The distance was part of the theology.

The idea of a God who wanted to know me personally, who was in fact already looking for me, who did not need me to perfect my approach before engaging.

This was so different from what I understood that I could not immediately evaluate it.

It was simply something I had not heard before, sitting quietly in my mind next to everything else.

I got a Bible sometime during this period.

I want to be careful about how I say this because I do not want to over dramatize it.

Getting a Bible was not a dramatically covert operation.

Books were books in our household and I had a lot of them and privacy was generally respected.

But I was careful about it.

I bought it on my own from a Christian bookshop on a day I was out without my driver, just me and my friend.

And I carried it home in a regular shopping bag and put it on a lower shelf of my bookcase behind some other books.

I want to tell you what it felt like the first time I sat down to actually read it.

not as a theological exercise but just as a reader the way I read any book I did not know where to start and so my friend had suggested the gospels I started with Matthew the first several chapters the genealogy the nativity narrative were interesting but did not stop me and then I reached the sermon on the mount I had heard about the sermon on on the mount.

I knew
enough about Christianity to know it was considered an important text, but I had never read it in full, slowly with attention.

And when I did, something happened that I am still not entirely able to explain.

Not in the dramatic section about turning the other cheek or loving your enemies, though those things struck me too.

But in the opening sentences, the biatitudes, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

I read that sentence and I stopped.

I read it again.

I have been writing this story for some time now and I have been trying to decide how to describe what happened when I read that sentence.

And the honest answer is that I cannot fully describe it.

I can tell you the physical facts.

I was sitting on my bed, late afternoon light coming through the curtains, no one else in my room.

I read the sentence and something shifted in my chest.

A physical sensation that was not quite pain and not quite relief, but contained both.

And I thought about the 12-year-old girl on the floor by her window on the last night of Ramadan crying without knowing why.

I thought about the years of praying into silence and feeling nothing back.

I thought about the hunger I had carried for as long as I could remember without having a name for it.

Here was a text that said, “The morning has a purpose.

” The morning leads somewhere.

The morning is not a mistake or a deficiency.

It is a state that is followed by something.

I did not convert that day.

I did not even fully understand what I was feeling that day.

But I kept reading.

I read through Matthew, through Mark, through Luke.

I read the parables.

I read the healing accounts.

I read the way Jesus talked to people, the individual people, the ones nobody else was talking to, the ones at the edges of the crowd, the ones with the wrong profession or the wrong reputation or the wrong history.

He kept noticing the people that the official structures of religion had determined were too compromised to be worth noticing.

I recognize something in those people.

I am not saying my life was hard in the way their lives were hard.

My life was by any material measure extraordinarily comfortable and privileged.

But I recognize the quality of their situation.

The being outside the circle.

The being judged by a standard you had tried to meet and somehow still fallen short of.

the being looked at and found wanting.

I had felt that in the spiritual space my whole life.

I had done everything correctly and I still felt like I was outside the circle.

Jesus kept going to those people.

That was the thing.

He kept walking toward the ones the system had already written off.

I finished school and I began university in Yogy Carta.

My life expanded somewhat.

More freedom of movement, a broader social world, the beginning of the intellectual independence that university creates.

I was still living within the family framework, still attending family religious observances, and still performing all the practices that were expected of me.

I had not told anyone what I was thinking or reading.

It was an entirely interior process and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could.

In my second year of university, I was offered a scholarship to continue part of my studies in the Netherlands.

This was not unusual for people from families like mine.

European academic connections have been part of elite Indonesian life for generations.

My family was proud of this.

My father in particular saw it as exactly the right kind of achievement.

I was going to Utrect.

I want to pause here and say something about what it means to leave a place like the Katen for the first time.

I had traveled before, of course, family trips, regional visits, but living elsewhere, living independently for the first time in my life, a in a country where nobody knew my name, where my title meant absolutely nothing, where I was just a foreign student with a good academic record.

This was a kind of
freedom I had not previously experienced.

and it was both exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

I arrived in Utrect in September when the city is still warm enough to be pleasant but you can feel the northern winter beginning to gather at the edges.

The light there is different from Yogyakarta, lower in the sky, more angled, turning everything gold in the afternoon in a way that is beautiful but also has a kind of melancholy in it.

I found a small apartment.

I began my classes.

I learned how to navigate the city, how to cook for myself, how to be alone in a way I never had been before.

And without the constant structure of the palace, without the five prayers being the rhythm of an entire household around me, without the social weight of being watched and known and placed within a hierarchy that had specific expectations of me every hour of every day, I was free to think in a way I had not previously been free to think.

Not free because anyone had previously prevented me.

Free because the space around me had changed and the space inside me responded by opening up.

I found the Indonesian Christian congregation in Utrect almost by accident.

A notice in a community newsletter that several Indonesian students received mentioning a Sunday service in Indonesian.

I went out of curiosity more than anything.

The community was small, maybe 30 people on a good Sunday, mostly students, some older Indonesians who had been in the Netherlands for many years.

It was warm in the way that Indonesian community gatherings abroad always are.

the food, the easy noise, the switching between Indonesian and Dutch, the automatic friendliness toward a new face.

The pastor was a quiet, thoughtful man from Manado.

And I will say that because Mina Hassan Indonesians have been predominantly Christian for generations and it was natural that he would lead this congregation.

He had a kind of intellectual gentleness that I responded to immediately.

He did not preach aggressively.

He did not perform emotion.

He simply opened texts and thought through them out loud and invited the congregation to think with him.

I sat in the back the first Sunday.

I observed.

I listened.

I was not ready to participate, but I was paying very careful attention.

After the service, there was coffee and food, and the pastor spoke to everyone individually, briefly, the way good pastors do.

When he reached me, he asked my name and where I was from and what I was studying.

I told him.

He said that was interesting and asked if I had been a Christian for long.

I told him no, I was just visiting.

He said that was fine.

He said he was glad I had come and that I was welcome anytime.

He did not press.

I went back the following Sunday and the Sunday after that.

Within a month I was attending regularly.

Within 2 months, I was having occasional conversations with the pastor after the service.

I began asking him the questions I had been carrying for years about Jesus, about the trinity, about salvation, about how this religion understood the relationship between God and human beings.

I had many questions.

Some of them were skeptical questions.

the kind you ask when you are testing whether something holds up under examination.

Some of them were hungry questions, the kind you ask when you already believe the answer is going to be yes, but you need to hear it out loud.

He was a patient man.

He answered what he could answer and acknowledge what was genuinely uncertain or theologically complex.

He never made me feel that questions were unwelcome or dangerous.

He treated them as signs of a genuine searching mind, which they were.

But I want to be honest about something important.

The intellectual side, the theological questions, the comparative study, the reading I was doing, that was all significant.

It mattered.

It helped build the structure of my understanding.

But it was not what was converting me.

What was converting me was something else entirely, something less articulable.

It was the quality of the presence I felt when I was in that small congregation singing songs in Indonesian in a gray Dutch city far from home.

It was the way the pastor prayed, not elaborately, not performatively, but with a specificity about his own life and the lives of the people in the room that indicated clearly he believed he was being heard.

It was the sense in the room every Sunday that whatever we were doing here was not a performance of faith, but an actual activity.

that we were not firing words into a ceiling, that the ceiling, so to speak, was not there.

I began to pray differently during this period, not five times a day in the formal structure I had grown up with.

I had already in the privacy of my apartment let that practice go with more grief than relief actually because it was the loss of something that had been my entire framework for understanding my relationship with God.

But I began to talk, just talk at night, mostly before sleep in my apartment in Indonesian in the most simple and direct language I could find.

I told whatever I was talking to about my day, about what I was afraid of, about what I missed from home, about the questions I was still carrying.

And something was different.

Something was different from every prayer I had ever prayed in 17 years of praying the right way at the right times with the right words.

Something was listening.

I know how that sounds.

I know that someone reading this from outside that experience could explain it several ways.

as the psychological effect of being alone for the first time and as the relief of free expression as the normal human experience of talking to oneself in a new way.

I have considered all those explanations.

I considered them at the time.

I am not someone who ignores alternative explanations.

I am educated enough to take them seriously.

But here is what I will say to those explanations.

I had been alone before.

I had talked to myself before.

I had cried before.

I had prayed sincerely before.

None of those things produced what I was experiencing in that apartment in Utrect.

This was specific.

This was responsive.

This was not like speaking into a room with no one in it.

This was like the opposite of that.

I was not converted yet.

I want to be clear about the sequence because it matters.

I believed something was happening.

I believed increasingly that the person I was directing my informal prayers toward was real and present.

But I had not made a decision.

I had not said anything definitive out loud.

I had not crossed any formal threshold, but I was standing at the door, and this is where the other weight began to make itself felt.

the weight I had managed to mostly set aside while I was reading and thinking and questioning and attending Sunday services quietly in the back row.

The weight of what all of this would mean, not in the abstract, not theologically, but practically for my family, for my identity, for my title, for everything I had been raised to be and to carry.

Because in Indonesia, leaving Islam is not a private decision.

It is not something that stays between you and God.

It has legal dimensions.

The marriage act, matters of inheritance.

The way your identity is classified by the state.

It has social dimensions that in a royal family of our standing are enormous.

It has implications for your relationships, your standing, your entire place in the architecture of the world you were born into.

I knew all of this.

I had not been living in the palace for 20 years without understanding how things worked.

And I knew I knew with a certainty that grew alongside my faith in those months in Utrect that if I walked through that door, I was walking away from something I could never fully walk back to.

That the person who came out the other side of this decision would not be able to return to the place she had come from, not in any complete way.

I knew all of that and still I stood at the door because the other side of it was something I had been hungry for since I was 12 years old sitting on the floor of my room crying tears I could not explain and I had found it or rather and I believe this more completely now than I did then it had found me.

I want to tell you about a Tuesday evening in November.

By this point, I had been in Utre for about 14 months.

I knew the city well by then.

I knew which bakery opened earliest, and which canal path was most beautiful in the fog, and which library corner was quiet enough to think in.

I had a small life there, honest and manageable, nothing like the life I had come from, and I had started to love it in a quiet way.

The simplicity of it, the anonymity of it, the fact that I was just a person there, not a title, not an expectation, just a person with a bag of groceries walking home in the rain.

It had been raining for 3 days by the Tuesday.

I am telling you about the kind of northern European November rain that is not dramatic.

No thunder, no wind, just a steady gray persistence that soaks everything slowly and makes you feel that the whole world has turned the same color.

I had been home all day studying.

I had made tea at some point, forgotten it, made more tea.

By evening, I was tired in the way that is not physical tiredness, but something deeper.

a tiredness of the mind that comes from carrying something heavy for a long time without putting it down.

I had been circling the same question for weeks, months.

Honestly, I believed that part was no longer the question.

I had moved past the stage of intellectual uncertainty sometime before this evening.

I knew what I believed.

I believed that Jesus was who he said he was.

I believed that the resurrection was a real event.

I believe that everything I had been reading and hearing and praying over for the past year and more was not a story or a philosophy or a cultural system but was actually true.

I had arrived at that belief not through a single moment of revelation but through the accumulation of hundreds of small moments.

A sentence in the biatitudes, a woman crying while she prayed.

The specific quality of silence in that small congregation in Utre.

The way my own prayers in my apartment felt different from every prayer I had ever prayed before.

It had built up slowly and thoroughly.

The way foundations are built, not dramatically, but solidly.

What I was circling was not the question of belief.

It was the question of commitment.

The because to say yes formally, to be baptized, to cross the threshold officially, to make it something real and not just an interior process happening privately in my apartment, was to start a clock that could not be stopped.

It was to begin a sequence of events that I could see stretching out ahead of me with great clarity and very little that was easy in them.

My family, my father, my mother, whose faith was her interior architecture and to whom my conversion would feel like a personal wound, a failure of her mothering, an accusation against everything she had built her life on.

my siblings, the palace, the community, the layers and layers of identity and obligation that were woven together so tightly that pulling one thread was going to affect all the others.

I sat with this for a long time that evening, the rain outside, the small lamp on the apartment very quiet, and then I picked up my Bible because that was what I did in the evenings now.

It had become as natural to me as breathing, and I opened it, not to any particular page deliberately, just opened it, and it fell open to John 11.

I had read this chapter before, The Raising of Lazarus.

I knew the story, but I read it again that night because it was where the book had opened, and I was a reader who believed in following where you land.

I read the whole account carefully.

Mary and Martha’s grief, the community of mourers, Jesus arriving after Lazarus had been dead 4 days already past any ordinary hope of intervention.

And what struck me that night, reading it in my small apartment in Utre with the rain against the window, was not the miracle itself.

It was the verses before it.

Martha tells Jesus her brother would not have died if he had come sooner.

She is grieving and she is honest about her grief and she does not pretend otherwise.

And Jesus says something to her that the chapter records carefully the words he chose very deliberately.

I am the resurrection and the life.

Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.

Do you believe this? Do you believe this? He asks her directly.

He does not explain further.

He does not provide additional evidence.

He does not give her a theological argument or a list of reasons.

He simply says what he is and then he asks her, “Do you believe it?” I sat with that question for a long time and then at some point I cannot tell you exactly when because it did not feel like a dramatic moment or it felt more like the natural end of something that had been in motion for a long time.

I put the book down on the bed beside me and I spoke out loud in Indonesian in the dark to the presence I had been becoming increasingly certain of for over a year.

I said that I believed I said it simply.

I said I was afraid of what was going to happen when I walked this out into my actual life.

But that the fear did not change what was true.

And what was true was that I believed.

I said I had been looking for this my entire life without knowing what I was looking for.

And now I knew and I was not going to pretend otherwise.

It was not an eloquent prayer.

It was not the prayer of someone who had been taught to pray like this.

I was still learning that, still learning the language of it.

It was just a person in a room telling the truth out loud to someone she was increasingly certain was listening.

I cried, not like the 12year-old on the floor on the last night of Ramadan.

This was different.

That crying had been grief without a destination.

This crying was relief.

The kind of relief that comes when you have been holding something for so long that you had forgotten you were holding it and then you finally put it down and your body has to process the weight that is suddenly gone.

I sat in that apartment for a long time afterward, not doing anything, not reading, not thinking in any structured way, just sitting in something I can only describe as a quality of presence that was new to me and that I trusted completely.

I went to the pastor the following week and I told him I was ready to be baptized.

He did not make a production of this.

He asked me several questions thoughtfully, carefully, the way he did everything to understand where I was and what I understood and whether this was a settled decision or one still in process.

He was not trying to stop me.

He was making sure he understood clearly who he was dealing with.

I told him what had happened, not everything.

There are things I have only been able to articulate in writing years later, but enough.

He listened.

He was quiet for a moment when I finished, and then he said that he was glad and that we would prepare together.

Over the following 3 months, he met with me regularly.

We went through the basics of Christian faith systematically.

What baptism meant, what membership in the body of Christ meant, what my responsibilities and rights were as someone entering the faith formally.

I absorbed all of it carefully.

I asked many questions.

Some of them were quite technical.

I was still an educated person who needed to understand the architecture of things before she could fully inhabit them.

He was always patient.

I want to say something about those three months because they were among the most quietly significant months of my life.

While on the surface I was still a foreign student living in Utre, studying, grocery shopping, navigating the Dutch winter.

Underneath there was something happening that I can only describe as a consolidation.

All the things I had been reading and thinking and feeling over the previous year were being given structure and language.

The beliefs that had been forming in me were being examined carefully and found to be genuinely mine, not borrowed, not imposed, but arrived at through my own searching.

The pastor was helping me build something I would need later.

A foundation solid enough to stand on.

When the ground outside shook and the ground outside was going to shake, I knew that I was building deliberately.

The baptism was in February, a Saturday morning.

The congregation gathered in the small church where we met each Sunday.

It was cold outside.

The church was not elaborate, just a rented hall really, with chairs arranged in a circle and a wooden cross on the wall and a baptismal pool they brought in specially not a permanent fixture.

About 25 people were there.

I knew most of them by this point.

They had become without my fully realizing it.

The first community outside my family that felt like home.

I had prayed the night before for a very long time.

I thought about my mother.

I thought about my father.

I thought about the palace and the rituals and the life I was moving away from.

Not with anger, not with contempt for any of it, with grief.

actually genuine grief because loving something and leaving it are not contradictions.

And I loved the people I came from even as I was walking away from what they had built for me.

When I stood at the edge of the water that morning, I was trembling.

Not from cold, though it was cold, from something else, from the weight of what the moment was.

The pastor said the words that are said about faith, about death to the old life, about resurrection, and then I went under.

I want to try to tell you what it was like in that moment beneath the water.

The world went silent in a way that was completely different from the silence I had felt during 17 years of prayer.

That silence had always felt like an absence.

This silence was full.

It was not empty space.

It was presence.

It was as if everything unnecessary had been stripped away for one moment.

And what was left was just the truth of what I was and who I belonged to.

I came up from the water and I was crying before I could stop myself.

The congregation was singing something softly.

The pastor had his hand on my shoulder.

The room was warm despite the February cold outside.

I had been many things.

A princess, a student, a diplomat’s daughter, a keeper of ceremony and tradition and bloodline, and all the weight that came with them.

I had carried a lot of titles, some of them heavy.

But in that moment, dripping and crying in a rented hole in Utrect, I was just a child of God.

And that was the only title that felt for the first time in my life completely and entirely real.

I want to tell you about the months that followed the baptism because they are important and because they were not easy and I think honesty requires me not to skip them.

I went home for Eid that year.

This was about 3 months after my baptism.

I want to be very clear about why I went not to deceive my family but because I was not ready.

I know that is complicated and I have made peace with the complication over years of thinking about it.

I was a new believer who had just made the most significant decision of her life and I was not yet strong enough to stand in the full consequence of that decision.

I was still learning what I believed and how to hold it.

I went home and I sat through the family prayers and the aid celebrations and I was present in body but I was somewhere else entirely inside.

It was not comfortable.

It was actually one of the harder things I have ever done.

I watched my mother pray on Eid morning.

I watched her face while she prayed.

Her real faith, her genuine devotion.

uh the thing that had sustained her through 40some years of her life.

And I loved her so much in that moment that I could barely stay in the room because I knew that what I was going to have to tell her eventually was going to cause her pain that I could not prevent and could not absorb on her behalf.

I was going to hurt her, not intentionally, not carelessly, but inevitably.

And I sat there on Eid morning watching her pray.

And I accepted that.

And it was one of the heaviest things I have ever accepted.

The double life was not something I could sustain indefinitely, and I knew it.

I was not built for pretending.

The longer I lived inside the faith that was now mine, the harder it became to perform a faith that was no longer mine.

The prayers felt wrong in a way they had not felt wrong before my baptism before.

They had felt hollow, but not dishonest.

Now they felt dishonest, which was worse, which was unbearable to someone who valued truth the way I valued it.

Back in Utrect, something else was beginning that would accelerate everything.

I had grown careless with my Bible.

Or perhaps I had stopped caring as much about hiding it because the hiding felt like a denial that was becoming harder to sustain.

I had left it on my desk one afternoon in a visible place when my room was in the kind of comfortable disorder that happens when you have lived somewhere long enough to stop performing tidiness.

My mother came to Utre to visit me that spring.

I had known she was coming and I had made efforts to tidy the apartment, but I missed the Bible.

I missed it because it had become so natural a part of my environment that I no longer registered it as something requiring attention.

It was just there on my desk next to my study notebooks the way your most ordinary possessions are just there.

She saw it on the second day of her visit.

She did not react immediately.

She picked it up.

She looked at it.

the cover, the title, the fact that it was worn and annotated, not a fresh purchase, not something recently acquired.

She put it back down.

We had lunch together, the two of us, and we talked about other things.

She stayed another 2 days, and we talked about my studies and my friends and the family news and plans for when I would come home next.

She was normal and warm and entirely herself and I was trying to match her and mostly failing and she said nothing about the Bible.

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