As she left on a Friday morning, I took her to the station.

We embraced on the platform.

She held me for a moment longer than usual and then she got on her train.

She called me that night from home.

I knew from the first second she spoke what the call was about.

Not because she was angry, she was not angry, which was in some ways harder to face than anger would have been.

She was quiet.

She was careful.

She asked me questions that were really only one question.

Asked several different ways.

I answered.

I told her everything.

I was shaking while I talked.

She was very quiet while I talked.

She cried.

I cried.

We were on the phone for a very long time.

And most of it was not words, just the sound of two people who loved each other in the middle of something that love alone was not enough to fix.

What she said at the end of that call, the specific words, I will not reproduce fully here, but the weight of what she communicated was this.

She believed I had made a choice that had consequences beyond just my own life.

That this was not simply about my personal faith.

That who I was meant something to more people than just me and that what I was choosing was not separable from what I owed to my family and my lineage.

I understood what she was saying.

I had always understood it.

I had lived with that understanding for over a year.

Had turned it over from every angle.

Had prayed about it more times than I could count.

But I had said yes in that apartment in November.

And the thing about saying yes to Jesus is that you cannot undo it.

And not because of theology, because of truth.

Because once you have tasted what is real, you cannot choose to believe it is not real.

The water was behind me.

The water was part of me now.

And I was going to have to live with everything that meant.

I want to be careful about how I tell this part of the story.

Not careful in the sense of softening it or making it easier to hear than it actually was.

I want to be careful because it involves people I love.

People who are real and still living.

People who made choices that hurt me enormously, but who I do not believe were ever cruel people.

They were people who believed what they believed and responded to what I did from inside that belief.

I try to hold that clearly.

It does not always make it less painful, but it is true.

and truth is the foundation of this entire story.

So I will not abandon it here.

I came home to Indonesia for good at the end of my second year in Utre.

My studies abroad were completed and I had a life to return to, a family to face, a conversation that had been begun on a phone call from the Netherlands and had to be continued in person.

I had not been naive enough to think that conversation was going to go well.

But I think I may have underestimated how thoroughly and systematically the world I was returning to would reorganize itself around what I had chosen.

Let me start with my father.

My father and I had always had a particular relationship, respectful, somewhat formal, with a deep undercurrent of genuine love that we express primarily through attention rather than words.

He paid attention to me.

He noticed things.

He remembered conversations.

He asked follow-up questions about things I had mentioned months earlier.

This was how he showed love.

He threw the particular attention of an engaged serious mind directed at you, and I had always felt it and valued it enormously.

After my mother told him, and I do not know exactly when she did this or what she said, I was not present for that conversation, and I have never asked.

He stopped calling me.

In itself, this was not unusual.

He was not a man who spent much time on the telephone.

But when I called him, there was a new quality to the calls.

He was polite.

He asked appropriate questions.

He was not cruel, but the attention was gone.

The specific personal attention that had always been the way I knew he loved me.

It was simply not there anymore.

He was performing a call rather than having one.

I returned home and saw him in person and the same thing was present in the room.

He was there.

He was functioning.

Yeah.

He asked about my flight and about my health and about my plans for the next stage of study.

He did not ask about my faith.

He did not mention it at all.

And the not mentioning was its own kind of statement.

It meant that what had happened was too significant to be addressed normally, that it had moved into a category of things that were simply not discussed, sealed behind a wall of dignified silence that was, I came to understand, how my father dealt with things that he found intolerable.

I
could have wished for anger.

Anger was at least engagement.

anger was at least acknowledgment that I was present and that what had happened between us was real and required response.

The silence was harder.

He said, “You have stepped outside the boundary of what I can acknowledge and I am managing this by behaving as if the thing that is most real to you does not exist.

” This went on for 2 years.

I want to say that simply so you understand the timeline.

2 years of careful, polite, hollow interactions with the man I had loved and respected more than almost any other person in my life.

Two years of calling on appropriate occasions and receiving appropriate responses and feeling the absence of him even when he was in the same room.

two years of writing him letters that he did not answer.

I wrote him letters because I needed him to know my thinking, my reasoning, what I had actually experienced, not the version of events that others would have given him.

I put everything into those letters that I could put into words.

Uh I do not know if he read them.

He did not respond.

My title was addressed more quietly than I expected, and in some ways that quietness was more final than ceremony would have been.

There was no announcement, no formal ceremony of stripping.

I simply began to notice my absence from things, a family gathering I would normally have been invited to, and was not, my name missing from a list it would previously have appeared on.

a social occasion where I was present but introduced in a way that omitted the customary forms.

These were small signals but they were precise and they were consistent and I understood them clearly.

I was being removed from the official family narrative not through confrontation but through erasia.

The royal world is very good at making people disappear quietly when it needs to.

And it was doing that to me now.

My siblings, I had three, one older brother, one older sister, one younger brother.

My older brother was the one I was closest to in temperament and history.

We had always understood each other in that particular way that some siblings do.

not always agreeing, sometimes arguing, but with a basic comprehension of each other’s way of thinking that ran underneath everything else.

He did not cut me off.

What he did instead was something more complicated and in many ways more painful.

He maintained contact, but maintained it through a kind of careful compartmentalization.

He would see me.

He would talk to me about ordinary things, about his work and his family and current events.

He would not talk about my faith when I tried to explain when I tried to bring it into the conversation.

I he would listen, but I could feel him managing something while he listened, not rejecting what I was saying, but also not letting it land, keeping it at arms length in a way that was self-protective.

He loved me, but he did not know how to love me and also hold the reality of what I had done.

So he chose to love me by not fully acknowledging what I had done which meant he was loving a partial version of me and that was its own loneliness.

My older sister was less nuanced about it.

She was hurt and she was angry.

And she communicated both with a directness that was in its own way easier to handle than my father’s silence or my brother’s careful distance.

She told me clearly what she thought, that I had been selfish, that I had thought only of myself and not of the family’s position, and that I had taken something that belonged to all of them, and treated it as if it were only mine to decide about.

There was real pain in what she said.

I heard the pain under the anger.

I did not enjoy being its target, but I understood where it came from.

And I have never in all the years since stopped believing that she loved me, even when she was most cruel about it.

She simply did not have the tools to hold love and this kind of devastation in the same hands simultaneously.

My younger brother was 17 when all this came fully to light.

He was in the position of watching adults he respected navigate something that had no good resolution.

And he did what teenagers sometimes do in that situation.

He withdrew into an adolescent silence that was its own form of self-p protection.

We drifted.

He grew up.

We are in a different place now than we were then.

But those years of his adolescence in which I was a kind of shadow presence, present but compromised, the family member who had caused the fracture, I think those years left something in him that took a long time to heal.

The social consequences moved outward from the family in predictable waves.

People in the palace circle knew or sensed.

Some were discreet about it.

Some were not.

Old friends became awkward around me or stopped calling.

People who had previously been warm became carefully neutral.

I was navigated around rather than engaged with.

These were not dramatic ruptures in most cases, just the steady, quiet withdrawal of the social warmth that had been the natural atmosphere of my life.

the way the temperature of a room drops after the fire goes out.

And there were also more direct interventions.

An uncle who held religious authority within the family came to see me.

I want to describe this with fairness because he was not an unkind man.

He was a man who genuinely believed what he believed, who loved his family and his faith, and who saw my conversion as both a personal tragedy and a theological crisis that it was his responsibility to address.

He spent several hours with me.

He made his arguments carefully, drawing on scripture and Islamic theology, addressing what he understood to be the Christian claims about Jesus and explaining why he found them theologically untenable.

He was intelligent and he was sincere.

I listened to everything he said.

I asked questions.

I responded honestly when I disagreed.

The conversation was respectful, which I appreciated because it did not have to be.

When he left, I think we both knew that nothing had changed, that his arguments, as carefully constructed as they were, were not going to move me because the foundation of my faith was not primarily intellectual.

It was experiential.

You cannot argue someone out of something they know from the inside.

He had not been where I had been.

He had not felt what I had felt and there was no argument that could replicate that or dislodge it.

There was a job that disappeared.

I will not go into extensive detail because to do so would identify specific institutions and specific people.

What I will say is that there was an opportunity connected to cultural foundations with royal associations, an opportunity that aligned perfectly with my education and was genuinely suited to my abilities and that this opportunity was simply no longer available after my conversion became sufficiently known.

It was not explained to me this way.

Nothing was said directly.

But I understood the sequence of events clearly, and I knew what had happened.

It was one of the cleaner illustrations of how thoroughly my change status had penetrated the practical architecture of my life.

I want to stop here in the middle of all this damage and tell you about something different because I think if I only tell you what fell, I will have given you an incomplete picture and an incomplete picture would be a kind of dishonesty.

There was a woman I met during this period.

I will call her Ibu Marta, which is not her name, but which captures something of who she was.

She was Chinese Indonesian in her late 60s and a member of a small church I had begun attending after I returned to Indonesia.

She had been a Christian her entire life.

Her family had been Christian for generations.

She had lived through things in Indonesia’s history that I will not detail here, but that those who know Indonesia’s history with its Chinese minority will understand.

Things that required a particular depth of faith to survive with love intact because survival without love is possible, but it is a kind of death of its own.

She was a small woman, very direct, very unimpressed by status or ceremony of any kind.

She found out what my background was because someone in the church told her, and her response to this information was entirely practical.

She invited me to her home for a meal.

She cooked for me a lot.

Every time I went to her home or which became more frequent during the worst of the period I am describing, she would cook something substantial and she would put it in front of me and she would sit across from me and she would ask me how
I was and she would listen to the answer and then sometimes she would say something and sometimes she would not say very much at all.

She had a gift for presence that did not require filling with words.

She could sit with you in silence without the silence being uncomfortable.

She was simply there solidly, warmly, without agenda.

I cried in her kitchen more times than I can count during those months and years.

Not because she prompted it, but because she was safe.

And I had so few places that were safe during that period.

She would put her hand on mine and not say anything particularly profound.

She would just be there.

And sometimes when I was leaving, she would say something simple that God saw what was happening, that God had not lost track of me, that I was not as alone as I felt.

I want to say clearly that woman kept me sane.

Not my theology, not my intellectual understanding of what I believed and why, not the arguments I had rehearsed against the objections I kept facing.

All of those things were important, and I am not dismissing them.

But what sustained me in the darkest stretches was the practical, physical, unglamorous love of a woman who cooked rice and sat with me while I cried and told me I was not alone.

The church at its best is exactly that.

not a building or a doctrine or a set of practices, but a woman with a stove and an open kitchen and an unshakable certainty that the God she served had not looked away from me.

Uh there was also during this period the sustaining power of the Psalms in a way I had not expected and cannot fully explain.

I had read the Psalms before but I read them differently now.

Psalm 27 became something I returned to again and again during the hardest stretches.

The combination of complete honesty about terror and complete confidence in God’s faithfulness.

The Psalms held both things simultaneously without resolving the tension dishonestly and that honesty was something I needed enormously.

The Psalms did not pretend that pain was not real.

They did not offer easy comfort.

They just kept coming back again and again to the same certainty that the God who had been present before was present still.

That the light had not gone out even when it was impossible to see.

I prayed.

I prayed a lot.

Some of my prayers during this period were not eloquent.

Some of them were essentially just stating facts that I was exhausted, that I was lonely, that I was grieving, that I needed help getting through the day.

And the help came not dramatically, not in the way of visible miracles or dramatic interventions, but it came in the quality of the morning after the very worst nights.

In the capacity to get up and function, and even sometimes to feel something that resembled hope in the church community that was small but real in Ibu Marta’s kitchen.

In the moments of reading that broke through the heaviness and reminded me of what was true, I want to tell you about one other thing that happened during this period because it would be dishonest to leave it out about 2 years into the worst of it.

Two years after my return in two years of my father’s silence, two years of navigating everything I have described.

My phone rang one evening, an ordinary evening.

Nothing particular about it.

I looked at the screen and it was my father’s number.

I answered.

He did not explain why he was calling.

He did not say anything about what had happened between us.

He did not offer an apology or an explanation or any of the things I had sometimes in my more human moments fantasized about receiving.

He simply asked how I was, whether I was eating properly, whether I was well.

The questions a parent asks a child, the most basic vocabulary of parental love.

I told him I was well.

I told him I was eating.

I asked about his health.

He told me the call lasted maybe 10 minutes.

When it ended, I sat very still for a long time.

It was not reconciliation.

It was not resolution.

It was not everything healing at once, which is not how things heal.

Things heal slowly and incompletely and with setbacks and over years.

But it was him choosing to call.

It was him after 2 years deciding that he was not ready to let the silence be the whole story.

It was a small crack in a wall I had been afraid was permanent.

I wept when the call ended.

Not from sadness, not from relief exactly, from something more complicated than either.

from the recognition that love is more stubborn than rupture.

That it persists and finds its way through in small unglamorous ways.

That my father, dignified and traditional and wounded by what I had done, could not finally let two years be the last word.

I do not want to overstate what that phone call was.

I have been careful not to do that.

It was one phone call.

The relationship did not restore to what it had been.

It began from that point a slow and partial and still ongoing thawing.

But that phone call meant that the wall between us was not infinite.

And that was more than I had allowed myself to hope for.

And it was enough.

For that moment it was enough.

The road that I was on had not become shorter by this point.

The costs I had absorbed were real and lasting in some ways that I have had to make peace with.

But I was still standing, 30some years old, a long way from the palace and from everything the palace had meant.

But standing, still believing, still knowing that what I had found on a Tuesday in November in Utre was more real than anything I had lost.

Even the things I had loved still standing.

I am going to talk to you directly in this final part.

I have been talking to you throughout this entire story.

But in this last section, I want to drop whatever small remaining distance there is and just speak to you plainly, person to person because this story is not mine alone.

The reason I agreed to tell it, the reason I have spent time putting all of this into words is because I believe it belongs to more people than just me.

I believe some part of what I have described will reach into the experience of someone reading it and I want to be fully present for that.

I want to be as direct and as honest as I know how to be.

Let me start with Christians.

If you are a Christian reading this, I want to say something to you that I mean completely sincerely without condescension or judgment.

Do not waste what you have.

I do not mean this as a criticism.

I mean it as someone who spent the first 20 years of her life looking for what you already hold and who now sometimes watches people treat their faith as an inconvenient obligation, a social identity, a box checked on a form, a tradition maintained for comfort.

And it breaks something in me.

Not with anger, with sadness, because I know what it cost.

I know what the searching costs.

I know what the finding felt like.

And I know that many people who have been holding this their whole lives have become so accustomed to the weight of it that they have forgotten it is treasure.

Your faith is alive.

Not a system, not a set of practices, not a cultural inheritance, not a family tradition.

Alive.

The God you pray to is not a principle or a force or an energy in the universe.

He is a person who knows your name.

The distance you feel when you pray, if you feel it, is not permanent.

It is not the nature of things.

I am a witness to what happens when that distance closes.

And it can close.

Not because you perfect your technique, but because you ask for it with honesty.

Just honesty.

That is what I had that November in Utrect.

Not eloquence, not perfect theology, not a long record of faithful observance, just honesty, just the willingness to say what was actually true.

So if you have been going through the motions, I say this with all the gentleness I have, stop not stop going to church or stop reading or stop the practices.

Stop going through the motions.

Start meaning it again.

Start bringing the real things, the difficult things, the questions you have been afraid to ask inside a faith community.

The doubts you have been hiding because doubt seems like weakness, bring them.

He is not fragile.

He does not need your performance.

He wants your presence, just your actual presence.

And if your faith is alive and real and sustaining, do not take it for granted.

I am serious.

I did not have it for 20 years.

I know what its absence feels like.

I know the specific texture of praying into silence and feeling nothing return.

What you have is extraordinary.

Treat it that way.

Now I want to talk to those of you who are where I was somewhere in the searching.

You may be Muslim as I was.

You may be from another faith tradition entirely.

You may have no faith and be reading this with a skepticism that is honest and deserved.

You may be someone who was raised religious and walked away and is not sure where you are now.

I am not writing this section to argue with any of you.

I am not qualified for that and it is not my calling.

I am simply going to tell you what I know from my own life and you can do with it what you will.

I prayed five times a day for 17 years.

I recited the Quran.

I fasted through every Ramadan of my childhood and adolescence and early adulthood.

I did these things sincerely and with real effort and within a community of people whose faith was genuine and whose lives were shaped by it in good ways.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that Islam produced nothing good in my life or the lives of the people around me.

It would not be true and I would not say it.

My mother is one of the best human beings I have ever known and her faith is the thing that made her who she is.

I honor that.

But here is what I will tell you simply and without decoration.

I prayed five times a day for 17 years and I never felt heard.

And I said one sentence in a dark apartment in Utre and everything changed.

I am not telling you to analyze that.

I am not telling you to immediately trust it or to act on it or to make any decision based on it.

I am just telling you what happened to me.

These are the facts of my experience.

I am a reasonably intelligent person with a good education and a suspicious mind and a strong aversion to easy answers and sentimentality.

And I am telling you that the thing I experienced was real.

It was not a feeling I manufactured.

It was not a psychological need I filled with convenient belief.

It was real in the way that the floor under your feet is real.

In the way that hunger is real, in the way that grief is real, realer than all of those things, actually, if you are somewhere in the searching, if you are reading a Bible the way I did, in secret or in private or with one eye over your shoulder, I want to say to you, keep reading.

You are not doing something dangerous.

You are doing something brave.

The truth does not need your protection.

It will hold up under examination.

I examined it from every angle I could find over years with serious attention and it held.

It holds.

If you are afraid of what will happen if you believe, if you are looking as I was looking at the cost of the decision and the cost is enormous and real and you are wondering whether it is worth it, I cannot tell you that it will not cost you.

I cannot promise you the cost will be different from mine or easier than mine.

It might be harder.

It might be different in ways I cannot predict.

What I can tell you is this.

There is no version of my life in which I regret what I chose.

Not in the darkest moments of it.

Not when my father did not answer my calls.

Not when my title disappeared from the documents.

Not when my sister said things I had to work hard to forgive.

Not once.

because what I found is worth more than anything I lost.

And I say that as someone who genuinely deeply loved what she lost.

The Bible says, and I read this early, and it struck me, and it still strikes me, what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? I had a significant portion of the world as it was handed to me.

I had a title and a palace and a lineage and a community and a social position that most people on earth will never touch.

And none of it reached the place in me that needed reaching.

None of it quieted the hunger.

None of it made the 12-year-old on the floor stop crying.

And what quieted it was not more of the world.

It was something that the world did not contain and could not manufacture.

If you are not a Christian and you have read this entire story with respect and an open mind, I honor you for that.

I do not take it for granted.

I know this is a complicated story to read from the outside of the faith I am now inside.

I know it raises questions.

I know it may make you uncomfortable in ways that are worth sitting with.

All I ask is that you do sit with them.

Not that you make any particular decision.

Not that you rush anywhere.

Not that you respond to this with any action other than honest reflection.

But if something in this story has stirred something in you, if any part of what I described resonated with something you carry, do not simply move on and let that stirring die.

It costs nothing to attend to a feeling of that kind.

It costs a great deal to ignore one.

I want to say something now about where I am with my family because I think it would be dishonest to end this story without it.

I have described the damage clearly.

Now let me describe with equal clarity where things stand in a different way.

My father and I speak regularly now regularly.

Not daily, but with consistency.

He does not ask about my faith.

I do not press it on him.

We have found over years of slow and careful work a version of our relationship that contains his love for me and my love for him.

And also the reality that we stand in different places spiritually and that this does not have to be resolved for the love to be real.

This has taken years.

There are still moments of distance.

There are still subjects that close like doors.

But he is my father.

He calls.

He asks if I am eating.

He remembers things I mentioned before.

The attention is back partially carefully.

And I am deeply grateful for every fraction of it.

My older brother has started asking me questions about my faith.

Not to challenge me, just to understand.

He comes to me with curiosity.

quiet, private, the way he does everything and asks things that tell me he has been thinking, turning things over in the way that thoughtful people do when they are given enough time and space.

I do not know where he is.

I do not know where he will end up.

I do not tell him what to believe.

I just answer what he asks and I pray.

And I trust the God who found me in Utre to be capable of finding my brother in Yogyarta without my help managing the timeline.

My older sister and I have reached something cautious and real.

The anger has settled.

What is underneath the anger which was always love is more visible now.

We are not close in the way we once were and we may never be fully but we can sit together at a family meal.

We can talk about things other than this.

We are both trying in our different ways to hold the family together across a fracture that cannot be undone and the trying itself is a form of love even when it is imperfect.

I have thought a great deal in the years since everything I have described about the concept of wahu that divine grace flowing through royal blood that I grew up believing in.

I used to think that I had by converting broken with that idea entirely, abandoned it as a Japanese cultural construct that I had outgrown.

But I think differently about it now.

I think my ancestors were reaching for something.

The idea that the divine chooses certain people and invests in them and flows through them into the world, that is not a false idea.

It is an incomplete one because what they were reaching toward was a grace that does not flow through bloodlines or royal titles or inherited status.

It flows through a cross.

It is available to everyone.

The humblest person alive can stand in the flow of it and be entirely soaked.

The most elevated person alive cannot access an extra drop of it through their elevation.

That has always been the scandal of it.

The thing that has made powerful people deeply uncomfortable about Jesus from the very first century.

He made the grace completely democratic, completely with no exceptions, with no premium tier.

I grew up believing that who I was by birth made me special in the eyes of heaven.

I now believe that everyone is special in the eyes of heaven, which is a completely different and much more astonishing thing to believe.

I want to say something about suffering before I close because I have described a great deal of it and I want to make sure I have been honest about what it taught me rather than just cataloging what it cost.

Suffering is not the evidence that God has abandoned you.

I know this sounds like something on a greeting card.

And I want to be very clear that I mean it as something far more concrete than that.

I know it because I live through the version where I was most certain I was alone.

Where the silence from my father was total.

Where the social architecture of everything I had known had rearranged itself around my absence.

where the loss was real and daily and physical in the way that loss is when it involves people who are still alive and still present but simply no longer reaching for you.

During all of that, the presence I had encountered in Utrect did not retreat.

It did not diminish.

If anything, the experience of those years is that the presence was more available, more tangible, more real during the worst of it than it has ever been during easier times.

I do not fully understand why.

I do not have a tidy theological explanation.

I just know what was true in my experience.

And what was true was that I was not alone in any of it.

Not for a single day.

The palace that I came from is still beautiful.

I have passed by it in recent years and it is still beautiful in the way it has always been with its open pavilions and its incense and its quiet dignified motion.

I do not look at it with bitterness.

I look at it the way you look at a place where a significant part of your life happened with recognition, with memory, with a complicated affection that does not require everything to be uncomplicated to be real.

I am glad I came from there.

I am glad I know what it contains.

I am also clear that what I was most looking for was never inside those walls and that no palace, however beautiful, however ancient, however freightated with history and grace and the long human reaching toward the divine is large
enough to contain what I eventually found.

I am going to end this story the way I began it simply.

No grand rhetorical gestures, just a person telling the truth.

If you are reading this and something in you has stirred, something small, something you might dismiss if you are not careful, I want to ask you not to dismiss it.

I felt that stirring at 12 years old and I spent years explaining it away.

I became very good at explaining it away.

I had excellent explanations, theological, psychological, cultural, circumstantial.

None of them were true.

The true explanation was simple, and I kept refusing it because simple things that are enormous are frightening.

But the stirring was real.

The stirring had a source.

And the source is not an idea or a tradition or a system or a story.

The source is a person who is right now as you read this aware that you exist.

Not aware of you as a category or a demographic or a soul among millions of souls.

Aware of you specifically.

The version of you that sits in the room alone and feels the distance.

The version of you that has done everything correctly and felt nothing in return.

The version of you that cried once without knowing why and told yourself it was tiredness.

He knows that version.

He has known it longer than you have.

And he is asking you the same thing he asked Martha at the edge of a tomb in a village 2,000 years ago.

Do you believe this? You do not have to have everything figured out to answer.

I did not have anything figured out.

I had a room and rain and a worn Bible and and the honesty to say what was true.

That was enough.

It is enough.

It has always been enough.

Whatever you lose, and you may lose things, real things, important things, things you love, you will not regret this.

I am willing to stake everything on that.

And everything is in fact what I staked.

I know what the other side of that gamble looks like from the inside.

And I am telling you with everything I have, it is worth it.

His name is Jesus.

He found me inside a palace, inside a tradition, inside a faith that held everything except the thing I most needed.

He found me in a city far from home in the rain on a Tuesday at the end of myself.

He will find you too.

You only have to let him.

I do not know your name.

I have not told you mine.

But I know we have been sitting here together, you and I, through everything I have described.

 

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