Syrian Pastor’s Wife Publicly Beaten and Asked to Deny Jesus Then She Did Something Unexpected

I want to start by telling you something that took me many years to fully understand.

The life I am about to describe to you.

The fear, the hiding, the loss, the pain, none of it destroyed my faith.

If anything, everything I went through is the very reason my faith is the only thing I am completely certain of today.

I have lost almost everything a a human being can lose in one lifetime.

I have buried a husband.

I have been beaten in public.

I have walked away from my country with three children and almost nothing else.

And I am sitting here in a small room in a country that is not mine telling you that Jesus is still Lord.

That is not something I say because it sounds good or because it is what someone in my position is supposed to say.

I say it because I have tested it with my actual life, with my blood, with my grief, and it held.

>> Hello viewers from around the world.

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

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

>> My name is Sana.

I was born in Syria and this is my story.

I need you to sit with me for a moment before we get to the hard parts.

Because the hard parts will not mean anything to you if you do not first understand the world I came from.

People hear the word Syria today and they think of destruction.

bombed buildings, displaced families, news footage of suffering, and all of that is true and all of it is real.

But Syria was not always that image.

Before it became what it became, it was a country with history so deep that most of the world does not fully grasp it.

It was a place where civilizations had risen and fallen and left their marks in the stones of cities that are older than most nations on earth.

And it was a place where Christianity had existed quietly and stubbornly for nearly 2,000 years.

I grew up in a small town in the northwestern part of Syria.

It was not a place you would find on any international map.

It was a town of ordinary size, ordinary rhythms, ordinary life.

The kind of place where the same families had lived on the same streets for so many generations that the town itself felt like an extension of family.

Everyone knew everyone.

The baker knew your father.

The woman at the end of the street had known your grandmother.

The children played together in the same lanes that their parents had played in as children.

There was a familiarity to the place that was comforting and sometimes suffocating in equal measure the way it is in any small community anywhere in the world.

I was the third of four children.

My father was a carpenter and furniture maker.

You a tradesman who worked with his hands and was respected in our town by people of all backgrounds because he did his work honestly and did it well.

My mother managed the home with the kind of quiet efficiency that made everything run without ever making a show of running it.

We were not wealthy.

We were not poor either.

We were a family that had enough and we knew it and we were grateful for it.

What I want you to understand most about my family though is not our economic situation or our social standing.

What I want you to understand is the faith that sat at the center of everything we were.

My father was a Christian man in the deepest most genuine sense of the word.

Not a man who attended church when it was convenient and kept his faith stored away on a shelf for Sundays.

T he was a man for whom Jesus was as real and present as any person in the room.

Every morning in our house began the same way.

Before the breakfast, before school preparations, before anything else, we gathered as a family and we prayed.

My father would lead us and his prayers were not the kind of prayers that feel rehearsed or performative.

They were conversations, real ones.

He talked to God the way you talk to someone you have known for many years and trust completely.

As a young child watching this, I absorbed something that I did not have the language to name yet.

I absorbed the idea that faith was not a religious obligation you performed but a living relationship you maintained.

He taught us his children to understand our position in Syria with both clarity and dignity.

He was careful about this.

He never made us feel that being a Christian minority in a Muslim majority country was something shameful.

But he also never pretended that it came without complications.

He would tell us that we were carrying something precious and that carrying something precious required wisdom about when and how you displayed it.

He drew a clear distinction for us between hiding your faith and being wise about how you lived it.

He said that a man who is wise about his circumstances is not a coward.

He is someone who understands the world he actually lives in, not the world he wishes he lived in.

My father walked that line every day of his life.

And he walked it without bitterness, without resentment, and without ever once suggesting that the price of our faith was too high.

My mother’s faith was expressed differently, but was no less deep.

She was a woman of very few religious words, but constant religious practice.

She prayed while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she moved through the ordinary tasks of her day.

She sang old hymns softly to herself in the kitchen, never loudly enough for the sound to travel beyond our walls, but present always as a kind of background music to our home.

If you had asked her to explain her theology, she probably would have been uncomfortable.

She was not a woman who talked about her faith so much as she inhabited it.

She loved Jesus the way she loved her children completely practically without needing to explain herself about it.

Watching her as I grew up though I learned something that no Sunday sermon ever fully taught me that faith lives most powerfully not in what you say about it but in how you move through each ordinary day because of it.

Our church was a simple building.

If you walked past it without knowing what it was, you might have taken it for any modest structure on that street.

There was no architectural grandeur, no large visible cross above the door, nothing that announced itself dramatically to the neighborhood.

This was not an accident.

It was the practical wisdom of a community that understood its environment.

But inside what happened was anything but modest.

When I say that our church was the center of our community’s life, I do not mean that as a figure of speech.

It was literally the center.

It was the place where people brought their grief and their gratitude.

where marriages were blessed and children were dedicated and the dead were mourned.

Where the rhythms of the Christian year gave shape and meaning to the passage of time.

The Sunday service was long, 2 hours at minimum, often closer to three.

As a young child, I was frequently bored during the longer stretches.

I will not pretend otherwise.

I would count the tiles on the floor or watch dust moving in the light that came through the windows or fidget until my mother put her hand on my knee without looking at me, which was her signal to be still.

But even as a child who did not always understand what was being said or sung, I was aware that something real happened in that room.

There was a quality to the air in that church during worship that was different from anywhere else I went.

A presence that I could feel but could not explain.

I did not have words for it at age seven or 8.

I only knew it was real and that it was the same every week and that it had nothing to do with the building itself and everything to do with the people inside it and what they brought with them.

Easter was the highest point of our year.

In Syria, Easter for Christians carries a weight that is difficult to explain to people who have only ever celebrated it in places where Christianity is the majority.

When you are a minority, the resurrection of Jesus is not just a theological event you commemorate.

It is your own story.

The story of something that should have been finished by its enemies, but was not.

the story of a power that could not be contained by death.

You sing those resurrection hymns differently when your community has lived something of that same experience across many generations.

You sing them as people who have personal and historical reasons to believe that endings are not always what they appear to be.

The friction of being a Christian minority in Syria was something I became aware of gradually.

The way children become aware of complex realities piece by piece, incident by incident until the full picture assembles itself.

The first piece I remember clearly was a friendship that ended when I was 9 or 10 years old.

There was a girl I had played with since we were small children.

We had been in and out of each other’s homes.

We had shared food and games and the particular closeness that forms between girls who grow up side by side.

And then one day without explanation ah she stopped.

She was still polite when we passed each other at school, but the friendship was gone, switched off as completely as a light.

I eventually understood through the things children overhear and piece together, that her older sister had told her that good Muslim girls did not form close friendships with Christian children.

She was not a bad child.

She was a child who had been told something by someone she trusted and she obeyed it.

I did not hate her for it.

But I carried the loss of that friendship for a long time and I carried the lesson it came with.

That in our world, the faith you were born into could reach into your most ordinary relationships and change them in ways you had no power over.

There was a teacher I had around the age of 11 who made certain things very clear without ever being openly hostile.

Yet he was a devout man, visibly religious and in his classroom the casual assumption was that his world view was simply the correct one and all others were deficient variations.

He never singled me out directly.

He did not need to.

The remarks he made in general class discussions were sufficient comments that placed people of other faiths in a category that was clearly lesser, clearly tolerated at best, clearly in need of correction at worst.

He said these things pleasantly, the way you state facts that no reasonable person would dispute.

And in a classroom of children who were almost entirely Muslim, there was nobody to push back.

I would sit with something burning in my chest and say nothing.

Not because I had no thoughts, but because I was 11 years old and had already understood in the instinctive way children understand survival.

But that this was not a battle that would go well for me if I picked it.

I told my father about one of those classroom incidents.

I remember the evening clearly, sitting at the kitchen table after supper, everyone else having moved on, just my father and me.

I told him what the teacher had said and how it had made me feel.

He listened all the way through without interrupting, which was characteristic of him.

He had the patience to hear a thing completely before he responded to it.

And when I finished, he sat quietly for a moment and then he said something I never lost.

He told me that people would say many things about Jesus throughout my life.

Things that were wrong and sometimes things that were cruel, and that none of those things would change who Jesus actually was.

He said, “My job was not to outar argue everyone who had a wrong opinion, but to live so honestly and so well that my life itself became an argument that was harder to dismiss than any words.

” He said, “The most powerful thing I could offer as a testimony was the quality of person my faith made me.

I was 11 and I absorbed it more than I understood it.

But I never forgot it and I have come back to it hundreds of times in the years since.

As I grew into my teenage years and then into early adulthood, I watched Syria itself begin to change in ways that were subtle at first and then less subtle.

There was a period roughly in my late teenage years when the political atmosphere began to carry a different charge.

Conversations that had once happened openly began to shift to private settings.

What news traveled through networks of trusted people rather than through official channels.

Families with members in other parts of the country were receiving reports that were alarming.

accounts of tensions escalating in ways that had not been seen before, of incidents between communities that were more violent than what anyone had previously experienced.

Our own town was not at the center of any of this in those years, but the ripples reached us.

I remember the incident that first made me understand in a visceral and not just intellectual way what we were living in.

A man from our church community, an older man who had run a small shop for decades, well known and generally respected across all communities in our town, had a small wooden cross hanging on the wall inside his shop.

not displayed aggressively, though not positioned to make a statement to anyone.

It was simply there the way a grandfather’s photograph might be there because it was part of who he was.

One night, someone set fire to his shop.

The damage was significant, but not total.

The fire was contained before it took the whole building.

But the shop was badly hurt and the man who had built it over a lifetime was left standing in the street looking at what remained of it.

There was no serious investigation.

No one was charged.

The community understood quietly and without needing to say it directly what had happened and why.

The cross on the wall had been the reason.

I was 12 years old.

My father did not shield us from this event.

He sat the family down and explained it plainly.

He was not dramatic about it.

He was a man who believed that the truth delivered with steadiness.

It was more useful than either panic or false reassurance.

He told us what had happened, why he believed it had happened, and what it told us about the world we lived in.

He told us that this was not what God wanted for any community, that it was wrong and nothing could make it right, but that it was real and we had to know it was real.

He told us that we could not let fear become the governing principle of our lives.

He told us that fear was natural, but that it could not be allowed to make our decisions for us.

I looked at my father’s hands on the table as he spoke.

They were the hands of a man who had spent his life working with wood, strong, calloused, marked by years of honest labor.

And those hands were completely still and steady on the table as he talked about our situation.

That stillness was not the stillness of someone who was not frightened.

I think it was the stillness of someone who had already made his peace with what his faith cost and had decided that the cost did not change the decision.

Over the following years, there were other incidents, smaller and larger.

They accumulated the way things accumulate in environments like ours, not as dramatic single events, but as a steady, low-level pressure that you learned to carry as a permanent feature of your life.

A Christian family’s vehicle vandalized because of a small fish symbol on it.

Young men from the church harassed on the street with slurs.

A pastor from a town nearby briefly detained and questioned about the content of his preaching, then released, but different afterward in a way everyone could see.

Yay.

None of these things made any kind of news beyond our community.

None of them were remarkable enough by the world’s indifferent standards to merit attention.

They were simply what life looked like for people like us.

And through all of it, our church held.

It held in a way that I think only communities that share a cost can hold.

The shared experience of pressure did not fracture us.

It solared us together more completely than comfort ever could have.

There was an elderly woman in our congregation, a widow who had lost her husband to illness years before and who had outlived him with tremendous dignity, who had a habit at the close of every Sunday service of saying quietly, almost to herself, but loud enough that people around her could hear, that they had not stopped us yet, and that they would not stop us.

She did not say it with aggression or bravado.

She said it with the absolute calm certainty of someone who has been tested over a long time and knows where she stands.

Every time she said it, the people around her would smile.

And there was in that smile a resilience and a tenderness that I carry to this day.

By the time I reached my early 20s, I had grown into a faith that was fully my own.

Not inherited on autopilot from my parents, though their example had shaped everything in me, but genuinely claimed, genuinely chosen.

I had looked at what being a Christian in Syria cost.

the friction, the exclusions, the incidents, the constant background awareness of being a minority in an environment that did not always regard you well.

And I had said clearly and consciously inside myself, yes, this is mine.

I choose this though not because it is easy, because it is true.

Because the presence I had felt in that church since I was a small child was real.

Because the man my father was, the peace my mother carried, the resilience of that elderly woman and all the others like her, all of it pointed to something that was actually there, that was actually holding them, that I wanted to be held by too.

This is the thing I most need you to understand before we go further.

Everything that I survived in the years that followed was survived by a woman who had chosen her faith with full knowledge of its cost.

I was not naive.

I was not someone who had never seen what the price looked like.

I had been watching the price being paid around me since I was a child.

I chose it anyway because the thing it purchased was worth more than anything giving it up could have preserved.

That is the ground I was standing on when everything came.

And then I met IAS.

But that comes next.

I did not meet Elias through any remarkable circumstance.

There was no dramatic moment, no single instant that I can point to and say everything changed at exactly that second.

Real life, in my experience, rarely delivers the moments that stories promise.

What it delivers instead is a slow, quiet accumulation.

Small interactions that seem unremarkable in themselves, but that together add up to something that changes everything.

That is how I came to know Ilas slowly, honestly, in the ordinary way that things that last are usually built.

He came from a town not far from ours.

His family had been Christian for as many generations as anyone had bothered to count.

The same deep roots that my own family had are the same kind of faith that had survived long enough in that part of the world to stop being something you debated and become something you simply were.

He had come to our area for work.

There was a construction or repair project of some kind that had brought him and a small group from his town.

And the way it tends to go in tightlyworked Christian communities, someone who knew his family connected him to our church before he had been in the area a full week.

He first appeared on a Sunday morning sitting toward the back of the church following the service carefully.

I noticed him in the way you notice any unfamiliar face in a small congregation because you know everyone and a new face stands out automatically.

He was not a physically imposing man.

medium height, medium build, dark hair are the kind of face that did not announce itself immediately, but that revealed itself gradually, detail by detail over time.

He sat with his full attention on the service, not glancing around to assess the room the way a newcomer often does.

He was simply present.

That was the first thing I noticed about him, that he was fully present wherever he was.

After the service, the congregation gathered the way it always did, in the yard outside or in the hall attached to the building, eating together, talking, doing the things that Christian communities do when the formal service ends and the real fellowship begins.

My father, who had an instinct for people on the edges of a gathering, went to Elias and drew him in the way my father always did with anyone who seemed to need drawing in.

He introduced him around, including to our family.

We exchanged perhaps 20 words that first Sunday.

He was polite, careful with his speech, asked questions about the community in a way that showed he was genuinely curious rather than just making conversation.

He mentioned his own family with warmth.

He said something brief about his own faith and background.

Not in a way that performed it or displayed it, but in the simple matterof fact way that a man mentions a fact about himself when it is relevant and true.

And then the gathering moved on as gatherings do, and I thought nothing more of it.

He stayed in our area for months, the work having extended beyond its original scope.

And in those months, he became a consistent presence at church and then a growing presence in the broader community and then a regular guest in our home.

My father had taken a genuine liking to him.

Yet they would sit together after meals and talk for long stretches about things that men in that community talked about.

The state of the country, the church, the meaning of things, the way faith operated in practical daily life.

I would be present for some of these conversations and I would listen.

And what I heard over those months built my understanding of Elias more slowly and more thoroughly than any deliberate courtship could have.

He was consistent.

That was the quality that looking back I think I valued most and noticed most clearly.

He was the same person whether he was in the church service or at our kitchen table or helping with some physical task around the property.

the same tone, the same manner, the same underlying orientation toward the people around him.

He did not perform differently for different audiences.

He did not have a public version and a private version of himself that differed significantly.

He was simply steadily himself.

In a world of considerable uncertainty, in a country where the ground was beginning to feel less stable by the year, this quality of steadiness and consistency in a person was more attractive than I can adequately put into words.

I became aware of my feelings for him gradually and without drama.

Somewhere around the sixth or seventh month of knowing him, I had to acknowledge to myself that what I felt when he was present was different from what I felt with anyone else.

It was not something I acted on.

I was not the kind of woman to push at something like this.

I was raised in a community and a culture where these things moved along certain paths and I was content to move along those paths.

I prayed about it.

Yo, I told God what I felt honestly because I had learned from my father that honest prayer was the only kind worth offering and I left it there.

I watched to see what would happen.

What happened was that Elias went to my father.

He approached my father in the way that the tradition of our community called for, the way it had been done for generations, and the way both of them, being the kind of men they were, naturally observed without it needing to be explained.

He told my father that he had developed deep feelings for me, that he had great respect for our family, that he was serious in his intentions and wanted to pursue the possibility of marriage with my father’s blessing and with my full
and willing agreement.

My father told him he would pray about it and speak with my mother and with me.

Uh the conversation my father had with me about it was one of the most careful conversations of my life.

He was not a man who would decide something like this for his daughter.

He sat with me and told me what Elias had said, told me what he himself had observed about the man over the months he had known him and then asked me directly and without ceremony what I felt.

I told him the truth.

I told him I had developed strong feelings and that I believed Elias was a genuinely good man.

My father was quiet for a moment after I finished.

The way he was always quiet before he said something that mattered and then he told me he thought so too and that he was prepared to give his blessing.

Our engagement lasted several months, but we were not alone together in the way that couples in other contexts might be.

Our culture and our faith both shaped the structure of how this time unfolded.

And we both honored that structure without experiencing it as a constraint.

We met in family settings, in church settings, in the gathered spaces of our community.

We talked more and more deeply over time.

We prayed together, which was something I had not done with anyone outside my own family.

And the experience of praying with alias told me more about who he was than almost any conversation could have.

The way a person prays tells you what they actually believe about God, not just what they say they believe.

His prayers were direct, honest, and personal in a way that confirmed everything I had already come to see in him.

We were married in our church.

It was not a large wedding.

The times and the finances and our own preferences conspired to keep it intimate.

What we had was the people who mattered most.

both families, our closest community members, the pastor who had known me since I was a child.

The ceremony itself was everything I needed it to be.

Scripture was read, vows were spoken.

We took communion together for the first time as husband and wife, which in our tradition is among the most significant things that happen in a marriage ceremony.

the acknowledgment that this union is built on and sustained by something beyond the two people in it.

There was singing.

There was a meal afterward prepared over two days by the women of the church who had arrived with their pots and their love and their unsolicited opinions about quantities of food.

and who turned the preparation itself into a celebration that was as meaningful as the ceremony.

I stood at the front of that small church beside Elas and listened to our pastor talk about the covenant they were witnessing and I felt peace complete inexplicable allencompassing peace.

The kind that tells you not that nothing difficult will ever come, [clears throat] but that you are exactly where you are supposed to be with exactly the person you are supposed to be beside.

Everything in my life had been building toward this moment of standing next to a man who loved Jesus the way I loved Jesus in a community that had cost us all something to belong to.

Making promises before God in a country that did not always make room for people like us.

I was completely fully and deeply happy.

Our early years of marriage were the years I return to most often in my memory now.

Not because they were without difficulty.

Life in Syria by that point was never entirely without a difficulty, but because they contained a quality of ordinary happiness that I understand now was a gift I did not fully appreciate while I was living inside it.

We built a home together, small but ours.

We cooked together in the evenings and talked about the day.

He had a dry, quiet humor that caught you offguard because it appeared so unexpectedly from behind his usual seriousness, and it made me laugh in a way that started deep.

A real laugh, not a polite one.

We read scripture together in the mornings the way my parents had prayed together in the mornings.

We argued about small things and resolved them quickly because neither of us was built for sustained conflict.

We were good together.

We fit.

He had felt even before we married the beginning of what he understood to be a calling.

a calling toward pastoral work, toward leading and shephering a community of believers.

He was careful about it in the way he was careful about everything important.

He did not rush toward it or assume it without examination.

He spent a long time praying about whether what he was feeling was genuinely a call or simply a desire he was projecting onto God’s will for him.

He wanted to know the difference.

That kind of honest self-examination, the willingness to question his own motives and not simply trust them was one of the things I admired most about him.

with he did not want to serve the church out of ambition or the need to feel significant.

He wanted to serve it because he had been called and he wanted to be certain about the difference.

By the time our first child was born a son whose name I will not use here because I will always be protective of my children even in their stories.

Elas had begun to shepherd a small and quiet congregation.

I say quiet because everything about the way the church functioned in our context was by necessity quiet.

It was not a congregation with a building and a listed address and a published schedule of services.

It was a group of believers who rotated among homes, who gathered without announcing themselves, who worshiped with awareness that the wrong ears in the wrong moment could create consequences.

This was the reality of church life for many Christian communities in Syria by this point.

Not all churches operated this way.

Some were established enough and in areas stable enough to function more openly.

But in our area, in our circumstances, this was how we did it.

And the people Aaliyah served were extraordinary.

I use that word carefully because I know it is used loosely, but I mean it precisely.

They were ordinary in every external sense.

trades people, homemakers, elderly people, young people making difficult choices about staying in a country that was becoming increasingly unsafe for them.

But their faith was extraordinary, not performed, actually lived.

Families who had held on to their Christian identity through decades of pressure without it becoming smaller or more defensive.

but if anything more essential and more alive.

Elderly people who had seen and survived things that most of their country would never know about and whose peace was earned rather than assumed.

Young people who could have left but chose to stay because they believed their presence in their community was itself a form of faithfulness.

Elias moved among these people with a humility and a genuiness that I watched and marveled at.

He was not a dramatic preacher.

He did not have the kind of presence that fills a room before he has said a word.

He was quiet and plain and direct.

And when he spoke about Jesus, it was the speech of a man who was talking about someone he knew personally, not a historical figure or a theological proposition.

People responded to this.

They trusted him.

They brought him their real problems and their real doubts and their real fears.

And he met all of it honestly.

He did not give easy answers to hard questions.

He sat in the hard questions with people and trusted that Jesus was present in the sitting, watching him be that man, watching him be in his calling.

The same man I knew at home with the same honesty and the same steadiness and the same quality of genuine presence deepened my love for him in a way that I did not know love could still deepen after years of marriage.

There is a particular kind of love that comes from watching the person you married be exactly who they said they were consistently over time under pressure.

It is different from the love of courtship or the love of early marriage.

It is quieter and heavier and more certain.

I loved Elas with that love.

We had three children.

Each birth was its own complete joy.

Arrow.

Even as the world outside our home was becoming more complicated and more frightening with each year, Syria had fractured badly.

The civil war that began in 2011 had opened up layers of conflict that went far deeper than the original dispute, revealing fractures and resentments and power struggles that had been present for a long time.

beneath a surface stability that turned out to be more fragile than anyone had understood.

Different factions were fighting different battles simultaneously.

The government, the opposition, foreign interests, regional militias, all of it layered and intersecting in a violence that consumed ordinary people who wanted none of it.

And into that chaos came the group the world would come to call ISIS.

The first time I heard the name clearly enough to understand its significance.

I was in our kitchen and Alias was at the other room talking with one of the men from the congregation.

They were speaking in the lowered voices that men use when they are discussing something serious and do not want to alarm the household.

I listened without making myself known.

I heard enough to understand that what was being discussed was not another faction in an already complex civil conflict.

What was being discussed was something categorically different in its intentions and its methods.

a group that was not simply fighting for political control, but was actively and violently enforcing a particular religious order on every territory it took.

And that for Christians, this group had a very specific and very clear agenda.

That evening, after the visitor had gone, I asked Elas directly about what I had heard.

Thus, he did not try to minimize it or spare me from it.

He told me what he knew at that point, which was still incomplete, but was already disturbing.

He told me that the reports from areas where this group had taken control, were unlike anything else that had happened in the conflict so far.

He told me that Christians in those areas had been given choices.

convert, pay a punishing tax and submit to secondass status, or face the third option.

He told me that many had been killed, that churches had been destroyed, that communities that had existed for centuries had been driven out within days.

And then he told me that he did not think we should leave.

He said it carefully.

He said it as a man who had thought and prayed about it, not as a man making a reckless or unexamined decision.

Yet he said that the people in the congregation had nowhere to go and no one else.

He said that if he left, he was not sure what would hold that community together.

He said he felt as clearly as he had ever felt anything from God that his place was there.

He asked me what I thought.

He genuinely asked he was not presenting a decision already made and seeking my agreement.

He was asking his partner, the woman he had made his life with, what she thought.

I held that question a long time in silence.

I was a mother of small children.

I was a daughter with an aging mother.

I was a woman with every practical reason to want safety.

And I was also a woman who had chosen her faith knowingly and had watched what faith looked like when it was backed by actual conviction.

I looked at my husband across the room and I saw a man who was not asking me to be reckless with our lives.

I saw a man who had counted the cost and made a decision before God.

And I knew that whatever happened, I was beside him in it.

We were one.

We had promised that.

I told him I was with him.

We stayed.

The months that followed were some of the most difficult we had lived through.

The news from surrounding areas was consistently terrible.

Every week brought reports that were harder to process than the week before.

Whole Christian communities gone.

Churches turned to rubble or repurposed under the black flag.

Names of people we knew or knew of reported dead or missing.

The circle of safety was shrinking steadily and visibly, and we were watching it shrink from inside it.

And yet the congregation held more than held.

It went deeper.

There is something that happens to a community when it faces genuine threat together.

The superficial things fall away.

The petty conflicts and the small rivalries and the issues that take up space in a community that has never been seriously tested simply dissolve.

What is left is what was real all along.

And what was real in our congregation was a love for God and for each other that I had never seen more clearly than in those frightened and faithful months.

People prayed with a desperation and an honesty that I have never since seen equaled in any comfortable setting.

They wept openly and without embarrassment.

They held each other.

They shared what they had.

They showed up for each other with a consistency and a willingness that required no organization or instruction.

They simply did it because that is what you do when you are really the church and not just attending it.

Ilas preached during those months from the parts of scripture that speak to suffering and perseverance.

He preached from the Psalms those ancient cries of people who were terrified and faithful simultaneously.

He preached from Hebrews that long sustained argument for holding on when everything inside you wants to let go.

He preached from the letters of Paul written by a man who knew exactly what it cost to carry Jesus into a world that did not want him.

And the people received those sermons not as theological instruction but as bread as the specific thing they needed to keep moving.

There was a night close to the end of our life as we knew it.

And when the children were asleep and the house was quiet and Elias and I sat together on the floor of the main room.

We did this sometimes.

sat on the floor with our backs against the wall because there was something about the groundedness of it that felt more real than furniture.

When we needed to talk about real things, we talked about the children, about what we hoped for them and what we feared for them and what we were trying to build in them that would hold regardless of what came.

We talked about faith, about what it meant to trust God not as a comfort but as an actual conviction.

To trust him when the circumstances made trust feel irrational.

To believe that he was present and that he was enough when the evidence visible to the human eye was pointing in a different direction.

And at some point in that conversation, Galas went quiet for a moment.

And then he said that he had been spending a lot of time examining his own faith, not doubting it, examining it, asking himself whether it was real enough, whether it was the kind of faith that would hold under the worst pressure or whether it was the kind that looked solid until it was actually tested and then crumbled.

He said he believed it was real enough.

He said he believed that if the moment came, the moment where holding onto Jesus cost him the most expensive thing he had, he would hold.

He said it quietly and without drama.

The way you state a thing you are genuinely certain of rather than a thing you are performing certainty about.

I did not argue with this.

I did not pull back from it the way a frightened wife might pull back saying no that will not happen.

We will be fine.

I did not do that because I understood what he was saying and because I had been asking myself the same questions and because a part of me already knew in the way you know things that your mind has not yet fully permitted itself to acknowledge that a moment was coming.

I lay awake that night beside him after he fell asleep.

I listened to him breathe.

I memorized the sound of it without knowing I was doing it.

I thought about everything.

My father, my mother, the elderly woman in the church with her quiet certainty.

The shop burned because of a cross on a wall.

The friendship that had simply stopped one day when I was 9 years old.

I thought about the accumulation of it, the long slow building of cost and consequence that had been our community’s life for as long as I could remember.

And [clears throat] I prayed, not eloquently, honestly, I prayed that whatever was coming, we would not let go.

I prayed that Jesus would be enough.

I prayed the only prayer that felt real, which was simply hold us.

He was about to be asked to honor that prayer in a way I could not have fully imagined.

And so was I.

I have told this part of the story in several different places to several different groups of people and I have noticed something consistent.

When I get to this part, people stop moving.

They stop shifting in their seats or checking on their children or glancing at their phones.

They go still.

I think the stillness is partly grief and partly something else.

Some recognition that what they are about to hear is one of those things that once you have heard it, you cannot simply put back where it was.

You carry it differently afterward.

So I am going to ask you to be still with me now and let me tell it plainly.

The morning Elias was taken was an ordinary morning.

I need you to hold that because it matters.

Because there is something about the ordinariness of it that is its own particular cruelty.

The worst mornings of your life do not announce themselves.

They begin the way every other morning begins.

The light comes in through the same windows.

The sounds from the street are the same sounds you have heard every morning for years.

The smell of bread and tea and the particular smell of a house that belongs to you is exactly as it always is.

Nothing in the fabric of ordinary morning tells you that this is the last ordinary morning you will have for a very long time, perhaps forever.

I was in the kitchen.

The children were getting ready.

The oldest preparing for school, the middle one eating, the youngest still slow and sleepy and needing to be managed through the morning routine that every small child requires.

Elas had been up before me, as he always was.

He rose early every morning to pray without exception the way his father had and the way he had done for as long as I had known him.

By the time I was in the kitchen, he had finished his morning prayer and was moving through the house in the quiet, purposeful way he moved, getting ready for his day.

He came into the kitchen.

We spoke the way married people speak in the mornings.

The brief, warm, practical words that are not remarkable in themselves, but that are the texture of a shared life.

The small verbal gestures that confirm without ever stating it, I am here.

You are here.

We are in this together.

He ate something.

Yo, he looked tired in the way he had been looking tired for weeks.

The tiredness that is not physical but comes from carrying sustained worry and responsibility.

But he was calm.

He was always calm.

That deeprooted steadiness that had been one of the first things I saw in him.

The sounds from outside changed before anything else.

This is how it begins.

Not with an announcement, with a change in the sounds.

vehicles more than one moving with purpose.

Voices that were louder and more authoritative than the ordinary voices of the street.

A quality of movement and noise that is instantly instinctively recognizable as threat before your conscious mind has processed it into language.

The body knows.

The body knew before I did.

They came into our neighborhood very quickly.

There were many of them armed, all dressed in the manner we had seen in reports and heard described by people who had experienced this in other areas.

The black clothing, the weapons, the manner of men who had decided they were operating under an authority that superseded anything that might push back at them.

They moved through the streets and they went into houses and they took the Christian men when they came to our door.

I was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Elas was in the main room.

The door opened.

I will not reconstruct the mechanics of it because some of those details belong to me and not to anyone else.

And they were there, several of them, inside our home, which was the home where my children’s shoes were lined up by the door and my bread was on the counter, and the ordinary evidence of our ordinary life was everywhere.

They wanted the men.

This became clear immediately.

They were moving through the neighborhood, taking the Christian men, gathering them for something.

IAS was in the room and there was no question about what was going to happen.

I moved toward him and the soldier put his arm across my path, not striking me but stopping me with a force that told me very clearly that this was not a situation I had any power in.

I will not describe in detail the moments of Ilias being taken because those moments are mine in a way that I do not know how to share without losing something I need to keep.

What I will tell you is the thing that I have never stopped seeing which is the way he looked at me before they moved him out.

He looked back at me from across our room and I saw everything in that look.

15 years of marriage, every conversation, every prayer, every ordinary morning like this one.

Every difficult night sitting on the floor talking about whether our faith was real enough.

Everything we had been to each other and everything we had built was in that look compressed into a few seconds because there were no seconds left for words.

That look told me everything he needed me to know.

It told me he was not destroyed by what was happening.

It told me he was held and it told me he knew I was held too, even though I did not feel it yet.

And then he was gone.

The women and children of the neighborhood were gathered and taken under guard to one of the larger houses in the area.

The men having been marched in a different direction.

There were perhaps 20 of us, maybe more.

I did not count.

We were compressed into rooms that were not designed to hold that many people.

While with armed guards at the perimeter and no information about what was happening or what was going to happen, children cried.

Some women prayed aloud.

Some were completely silent in a way that was somehow more frightening than any noise.

The waiting that followed was some of the most difficult hours of my life.

When there is action, when there is something to do, when you are moving or fighting or making decisions, the body and the mind have somewhere to put their energy.

When you are locked in a room waiting with no information, the mind has nowhere to go but the worst possibilities, and it goes there methodically and without mercy.

I held my youngest on my lap and tried to keep my face from telling her what I was feeling inside.

My oldest sat close to me with the careful face of a child who is trying very hard to understand a situation beyond his years.

My middle one was quiet in a way that was not natural for her.

pressed against my side with both hands gripping my clothing, I prayed, not with eloquence, with the raw, simple words of a person who is terrified and has nothing to offer but honesty.

I did not ask God to make it not be what it clearly was.

I asked him to be present, to be present in whatever was happening to Elias wherever they had taken him.

to be present in this locked room with 20 frightened women and their children.

To be enough, I kept coming back to that be enough.

I knew what was possible.

I had known for months what was possible.

I was asking not for a miracle that undid the situation, but for the presence of God inside it.

And he was there.

I want to say this clearly and without sentimentality.

In that locked room in the worst hours of my life to that point, God was present in a way I could feel.

It was not comfort in any ordinary sense.

I was not comforted.

I was terrified.

But underneath the terror, there was something holding something that the terror could shake but could not reach the bottom of.

I have tried many times to describe this to people and I always feel that words are insufficient.

The closest I can get is this.

It was like being in a terrible storm.

But knowing that the ground beneath you was solid.

That regardless of how violent the storm became, the ground would hold.

The storm was very real.

The ground was also very real.

There was an older woman in that room.

Continue reading….
Next »