a woman I had known through the church for years in a woman who had survived things I did not know the full details of before this day who began at some point during those hours to sing very quietly almost below the level of sound one of the old hymns a Syria Christian hymn that is very ancient and that I had grown up hearing in church she started it alone, sitting in her corner with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed and her lips moving.

And it spread through the room the way warmth spreads gradually, quietly, as one woman and then another joined in, each one softly enough that the aggregate was still barely a murmur.

It was not performance.

It was not morale building.

It was a group of frightened women who had been formed by the same faith and who were in the most desperate way doing the only thing they knew to do.

I joined them and my children looked at me and I nodded at them and I sang with my youngest on my lap and my oldest watching me with eyes that were too old for his face.

A guard shouted at us to stop and we stopped, but we had sung.

It was later that afternoon, when the light was changing and the temperature inside the room was dropping slightly, that I received information about what had happened.

A young fighter came into the building for reasons I no longer remember, some administrative matter.

He was young, younger than I expected.

And there was something about him that was not the same as the older men.

Something that could not fully close off whatever was moving in him about what he had witnessed or been part of.

He paused near where I was sitting.

He did not look directly at me.

He said a few words quietly in a way that was clearly intended for me alone.

He told me that the men had been brought to a public area, that they had been given a choice, that they had all refused, that they had died with prayers on their lips.

He said the last part with an expression I could not fully read, not pride, not contempt, something more complicated than either.

as though what he had seen had left a mark he had not anticipated.

He left without waiting for me to respond.

I want to tell you honestly what happened inside me when he said those words.

There was no collapse.

There was no screaming.

What happened was quieter and in some ways more complete than either of those things would have been.

It was a knowing, a confirmation of what I had felt earlier in the most physical part of myself cut at some point during the afternoon that I could not have named precisely.

I had felt Elias leave, not metaphorically.

I had felt it in the actual physical way that people who are deeply connected feel things.

And this young soldier’s words were the confirmation of what I already knew.

The grief did not rush in all at once.

It arrived in layers over time.

What arrived first was something stranger, a profound aching clarity.

Ilas had told me on the floor of our home that his faith was real enough to hold under the worst pressure.

He had not been wrong.

He had stood in a public square with armed men around him and been offered his life in exchange for denying Jesus.

And he had refused.

He had died with the name of Jesus on his lips.

The man I had watched for 15 years, the man who prayed before meals and read scripture every morning and sat on the floor late at night examining the honesty of his own faith.

That man had been exactly who he said he was when it cost him everything.

I held my children and I let that truth sit in me.

The grief and the devastating pride and the love were all present simultaneously, not separable from each other.

All of it one compound feeling that had no clean name, but that was as real as anything I have ever felt.

who survived the day.

What I later pieced together through information that came to me over subsequent days from different sources was that there had been some confusion or miscommunication among the ISIS fighters about what was to be done with the women and children.

A commander had given an order.

Yet, that order had not been clearly transmitted or had been countermanded by someone else or had simply been lost in the chaos of a group of men who were simultaneously managing multiple things in multiple locations.

In that confusion, the decision about us was delayed.

And then something elsewhere required their urgent attention, some engagement, some development in another part of the area and they left.

The guards took us out of the building, marched us to the edge of the neighborhood and expelled us.

Told us to go and not return.

I walked out of that neighborhood with my three children.

I had almost nothing.

I had the clothes we were wearing.

I had a small amount of money that I had had in my possession that morning and that they had not taken.

I had my children’s hands.

I had nothing else.

I need you to stay with that image for a moment.

A woman walking out of her neighborhood with three children.

The home she built behind her.

The man she loved already gone.

The street she had walked every day of her life for years, now occupied by men who had ended everything she had known.

The bread still on the counter, the shoes still by the door, all of it behind her, none of it available to her anymore, none of it retrievable.

She walked because walking was what was available.

Because stopping was not an option when you had three children who needed you to keep moving.

Because the road ahead, however unknown and frightening it was, was still a road, and roads can be walked.

I thought about what Elias had said, that a man who has nothing worth dying for has nothing worth living for.

He had proved both sides of that sentence.

He had died for something.

And what he had died for was the same thing that I was now going to have to find a way to keep living for.

Because if it was worth his death, it was worth my life.

I kept walking.

The weeks after Elas was taken were the weeks of simply surviving.

I want to describe them honestly because I think there is a version of this kind of story where the person telling it jumps quickly from the tragedy to the spiritual lessons and the triumphant declarations and I do not think that is honest.

What happened in those weeks was not triumphant.

It was survival in the most basic and unglamorous sense.

getting through each day, finding food for my children, finding somewhere safe to sleep, processing a grief so enormous that I could not face it directly, but had to approach it sideways in small pieces, the way you cannot look directly at the sun.

We were taken in by a family from our extended church network.

People who lived in a part of the area that was not yet as completely under ISIS control as our own neighborhood had been, or people who had a home and were willing to put us in it despite the risk that this carried.

They were a family of
remarkable, quiet courage.

They shared what they had without making us feel the weight of what we were costing them.

Their children played with my children.

And this, the ordinary sight of children playing, the sound of it, the way children find their way to games and laughter, even in the middle of adult catastrophe, was sometimes the only thing that kept me functional.

I could not leave Syria immediately.

This is something I want to explain with some care because I know it seems from the outside that the obvious thing to do was to leave as quickly as possible.

But the obvious thing was not the available thing.

We had almost nothing in terms of money or resources.

The journey to any border was not a walk in the park.

It was a long and dangerous route through terrain controlled by multiple factions requiring planning and money and connections that take time to assemble.

My children were small.

My mother, my father, having died sometime before all of this, was elderly and frightened and in no condition to be abandoned.

And there was something else.

There was the community.

What remained of the congregation that Elas had shepherded was scattered and shattered.

Most of the men were gone.

Families had been displaced.

But people were still in the area.

Women, elderly people, families who had nowhere else to go and no resources to get there.

And they were still meeting these remnants still gathering in the quietest possible ways in each other’s homes.

still reading the Bible together in whispers.

I was still praying, still trying to hold some thread of faith alive in conditions that made every meeting a risk.

I could not leave that, not immediately, not until I had done what I could do.

So I moved among them, not as their pastor, I was not that, and I had no title or formal role.

But I had been a pastor’s wife for years and I knew these people and I knew how to be present in the ways that a community in crisis needs presence.

I knew how to sit with someone in their grief without needing to fix it or fill the silence.

I knew how to read a passage of scripture to a room of frightened women and then wait with them in whatever the passage brought up.

I knew how to pray over someone with the kind of prayer that is not a performance but a genuine turning toward God on behalf of another person.

I did these things because Elias had modeled them to me over many years and because the spirit of God I believe fills the gaps that human capacity cannot fill when a person is being used in a place where they are needed.

I knew we were being watched.

The consciousness of being observed, of being known to the wrong people, had been present since before Elias was killed, but it had intensified significantly afterward.

I was a widow of a man they had killed for refusing to deny Jesus.

I was continuing to practice my faith.

I was continuing to gather with other believers.

I was making no secret within the community of who I was and what I believed.

None of this was invisible to people who were watching.

I was as careful as I knew how to be.

I was not reckless.

I took precautions.

I varied my roots.

I did not stay in any one location too long.

I was careful about who I spoke to, about what and in what settings.

But I was not willing to stop.

I need to say this plainly.

I was not able to make myself stop.

Not out of stubbornness or a death wish, but because stopping, going quiet, going underground, behaving as though my faith was something I was ashamed of or willing to pretend I did not have would have been a betrayal of alias that I was not capable of.

He had died rather than deny Jesus.

I was not going to hide Jesus while I was still alive.

They came for me on an ordinary morning.

That the way these things always seem to happen on ordinary mornings.

I was not at home.

I was returning from uh visiting an elderly woman from the community, a woman who was ill and alone [clears throat] and whom I had been going to sit with and pray with every few days.

I was walking back through the streets doing the ordinary thing that I had been doing for weeks when a group of armed men stopped me.

The public nature of what they did next was entirely deliberate.

I understood this in the moment and I have thought about it many times since.

They were not interested in dealing with me privately.

Private punishment accomplishes only one thing.

Public punishment accomplishes something much larger.

It sends a message through a whole community.

Every person who witnesses a public punishment is receiving a lesson about what happens to people who behave the way the person being punished has behaved.

Every person who watches becomes a warned person.

This is why they do it publicly.

This is why they chose a street and not a back room.

I was brought to an open area where people could see, but some had gathered or been brought to watch.

I could see faces at windows.

I could see people on the edges of the space who had been doing something else and had stopped, frozen in place by what they were witnessing.

Among those faces, I could see some that I recognized.

women from the community, Christian women who had no power to intervene and who watched with faces that told me they were living through something themselves, their own private agony of witnessing.

A man spoke.

He stated the accusations against me in the formal manner that they used for this kind of public proceeding.

A Christian woman who had continued to practice and promote her faith in defiance of what was required.

A woman who had refused to accept the new order.

A woman who was therefore being given publicly and in front of witnesses while a final opportunity to correct her error.

The offer was what it always was.

Say the shahada.

Declare that there is no god but Allah.

that Muhammad is his prophet.

Renounce Jesus as Lord.

Do it here in public in front of these witnesses and you will be permitted to live.

I want to tell you the truth about what was happening inside me in those moments because I think it matters.

I was not calm.

My body knew what was about to happen and it was responding the way bodies respond to mortal threat.

The trembling in my hands that I could not control.

The weakness in my legs.

The strange heightened clarity that fear sometimes produces where you see everything very sharply and feel time moving differently.

All of that was present.

The fear was completely real.

And at the same time underneath it there was something else.

I keep returning to the image of solid ground beneath a storm because it remains the most accurate description I have.

The storm was real.

The fear was real and there was something underneath that the fear was unable to reach something that held something that was not being generated by my own will or my own strength because my own will and strength were clearly at their limit.

something that was being given to me in that moment from outside myself.

They asked me to deny Jesus.

I said no.

Not dramatically.

My voice was quieter than I wanted it to be because my body was frightened even while the deeper part of me was held.

I said that Jesus is my Lord.

I said I could not say otherwise.

I said it simply because the simple version was the true version and I had no capacity in that moment for anything more elaborate or what followed or that was the flogging.

I will describe it plainly because plain is the only honest way to describe physical pain and I will not dress it up into something it was not.

The instrument was thick and heavy.

The blows landed across my back and my shoulders with a force that was immediately and comprehensively agonizing.

Pain like that does not stay in one location.

It spreads.

It radiates.

It fills the body in a way that becomes its own weather system.

The ground was hard and hot beneath me.

The sun was overhead and [clears throat] direct.

I was aware of the watching faces, aware of the voices around me, aware with a particular sharpness of the faces of the women I knew among the watchers.

The women whose silent agony of watching was written plainly on their faces even from a distance.

Between blows, they asked the question again was, “Would I renounce Jesus? Would I say the words? would I accept the offer that was still even now on the table? I did not say the words each time they asked the question.

I had to find the answer again in that moment and it came from the same place and the same thing was there each time.

I cannot call it strength.

Strength on its own has a limit that can be reached and I was well past any natural limit of strength I might have had.

What was carrying me through each moment was not my own.

I know this sounds like uh the kind of claim that is convenient to make after the fact.

But I can only tell you what was true in my experience.

And what was true was that I should have broken and I did not break.

And the reason was not me.

At some point during this the situation changed.

A disturbance somewhere, a commotion that I could not see clearly from the ground, but that I could hear.

A rapid change in the quality of attention of the men around me.

Something was happening elsewhere that was urgent.

Communications between the fighters movement.

The focused attention of the men who had been concentrated on me shifted and fractured, pulled by something that required them immediately in another location.

The order to execute me was never given or if it was given at some point earlier, it was never carried out.

In the distraction and the movement that followed, I was simply left on the ground.

The scene dissolved around me.

The men moved.

The watching crowd dispersed in the uncertain way that crowds disperse when the event they were forced to witness has ended without a definitive conclusion.

And nobody is sure what they are allowed to do.

I was on the ground and then there were hands on me, women’s hands, gentle and careful and urgent.

Some of them were women I knew from our community who had watched what happened.

Some of them I did not know.

There was one woman, I didn’t know her name.

I still do not know her name, who I believe from her clothing was Muslim.

She came to me and she covered me with her own outer garment and she wept.

She did not say much that I was in a condition to retain clearly but she wept and she covered me and she was there.

I have thought about her many times.

I do not know what moved her to do that.

It I do not know what was happening inside her as she watched what happened and then came forward when the danger had passed.

I know only what she did and what she did was an act of such basic human solidarity that I have never been able to think about it without being moved.

I was helped to a nearby home.

The injuries from the beating were real and serious.

My back and shoulders badly hurt.

Movement painful and limited.

The kind of damage that takes weeks rather than days to recover from.

There was no real medical care available in our circumstances.

What there was was the community.

The women who came and sat with me, who brought what they had for the pain, who cared for my children while I could not, who maintained a quiet, constant, faithful presence around me.

In those days of recovery and in those days of being forced to be still that my mind went to places it usually moved too quickly to visit.

I was not angry.

I have examined this many times because I think it is the thing that surprises people most when I say it not because anger would have been wrong.

anger would have been completely understandable and nobody who knew what had happened to me could have blamed me for being consumed by it.

But it was not what I found when I looked inside myself during those days.

What I found was something harder to name and I think ultimately more useful.

It was a kind of stripped down clarity as though everything that was not essential had been removed by grief, by pain, by the cumulative weight of everything that had been taken.

And what was left was only what was real.

And what was real was Jesus.

He had been real in my father’s home when I was a child.

I waking up every morning to the sound of prayer.

He had been real in that small church where I had grown up in the singing that was always careful not to be too loud but was always completely genuine.

He had been real in the marriage I had with Elias, in the ministry we had shared.

In the prayers we had prayed together on the floor of our home late at night when the children were sleeping and we were asking God to be enough for whatever came.

He had been real on the day Elias was taken because Elias had stood in a public square and refused to deny him and died with his name on his lips.

He had been real in that locked room with 20 frightened women when an elderly woman began to sing and others joined her.

He had been real on the ground under the blows when I should have broken and did not break.

He had been real in the hands and tears of a woman whose name I would never know who covered me with her own garment.

None of what had been done to me had removed him.

They had taken everything else that could be taken.

They had taken Elias.

They had taken my home.

They had taken my security and my sense of a future I could plan and my confidence that tomorrow would resemble today.

They had beaten my body in public and tried to strip me of my dignity in front of witnesses and the one thing they wanted most.

The one thing all of it was designed to take.

They had not been able to touch.

He was still there.

He had held.

I lay in that borrowed room with my damaged body and my grieving heart and my three children sleeping nearby.

And I felt what the Bible calls the peace that passes understanding.

Not happiness, not the absence of pain, the not denial of the reality of everything that had happened, but a peace that was underneath all of it, deeper than all of it, more solid than any of the circumstances that were pressing against it.

the peace of knowing with a
certainty that had now been tested in fire that the thing you built your life on was real.

And I thought about alias.

I thought about his hands, his laugh, the way he prayed with his forehead sometimes against his folded hands.

I thought about what he had said that a man who has nothing worth dying for has nothing worth living for.

And I thought you showed me my love in the most public and most costly way available to you.

You showed me exactly who you were and who he was.

And I am still here and I am still his and they could not take that and they could not take it from you either.

But by this point the preparations to leave Syria had to begin in earnest.

The flogging had made one thing absolutely clear.

I would not survive another encounter.

The next time they came for me, the distraction that had saved my life would not come again.

I was known.

I was on a list.

Staying was no longer survivable.

But leaving took time and the preparations unfolded over the remaining weeks I was in Syria.

And during that time, I continued to do what I had been doing.

I continued to move among the community.

I healed slowly and I prayed constantly and I began to say the quiet, careful, partial goodbyes that cannot be announced as goodbyes because announcing them is dangerous.

I was not finished.

They had thought they were finishing me.

They had beaten me in public and left me on the ground and assumed that either the beating would break me or the next encounter would end me.

They were wrong on both counts.

I was still breathing.

I was still his.

And I was going to carry this story out of Syria with me to wherever I was going.

And I was going to speak it for the rest of my life.

Because this story was never only mine.

I did not leave Syria all at once.

That is not how it happens.

You do not simply decide and then go.

Leaving is its own long careful frightening process.

And it happens in stages that are each their own small act of courage or desperation or both.

There is the stage of deciding.

There is the stage of preparing which requires money and information and contacts and time.

All of which are in short supply when you are living in an ISIS controlled area as a recently fgged Christian widow with three children and an elderly mother.

There is the stage of actually moving which is the most dangerous stage and the one that requires you to commit fully because once you begin it you cannot go back and there is the stage after crossing which is its own country entirely.

I want to tell you about all of it, not the specific operational details of how we moved because some of those details involve people who helped us and who are still living in circumstances where those details could endanger them.

But the experience of it, what it was like to leave a country that had held everything you ever were, the money came together slowly from the community.

This is one of the things I want people to understand about what a Christian community does when it is actually functioning as it was designed to.

It pulls what it has for the ones who need it.

There was no wealthy donor who wrote a large check.

There were many people, most of them with very little, who gave what they could give and what arrived from that accumulation was enough to make the journey possible.

Some of these people would never leave Syria.

Some of them were elderly and had no desire to leave and no ability to leave.

They gave what they had to help me take my children to safety.

And I carry that with me in a way I will never be able to fully repay.

The information about roots came through the same networks that the community had always used to share information.

The quiet, careful or person-toperson channels that are the nervous system of any minority community in a hostile environment.

Who knew which routes were currently passable? Which checkpoints were likely to be manageable and which were to be avoided? what the situation was in the areas between us and the border.

These things changed daily in some cases and the information had to be current to be useful.

There were people who tracked this and shared it quietly and at personal risk because they believed that getting families to safety was worth that risk.

My mother.

I have not spoken enough about my mother in this telling, and I want to pause here and give her the space she deserves.

She was an elderly woman by this point, small and slower than she had been, had or with the slightly confused quality that age sometimes brings, where the present moment and the past are not always clearly separated.

She had lost her husband.

She had just lost a son-in-law she loved.

She was living in the middle of a situation that would have broken most people a generation younger than her.

And yet she was my mother.

She was the same woman who had stirred pots and sung hymns quietly in her kitchen for as long as I had known her.

The crisis had not emptied her of herself.

It had, if anything, compressed her down to the essence of herself, and the essence was unbroken.

Getting her out with us was both the most difficult logistical part of the plan, and the part I was least willing to compromise on.

She could not move quickly.

She could not manage terrain that was too difficult.

do.

She needed more care and more patience and more attention than the children in some ways because the children were young enough to be adaptable in the way that children are.

While she was old enough that the disruption of everything familiar was its own kind of damage.

But she was my mother and there was never a version of leaving Syria that did not include her.

The morning we left and it was a morning again because the ordinary mornings of your life keep presenting themselves as the setting for the extraordinary moments within it.

I was up before the first light.

The house was quiet and dark, and I moved through it carefully, not turning on lights, waking the children gently, and in the particular order that their temperaments required.

My oldest woke cleanly, and was immediately alert in the way he always was, the boy who had his father’s quality of complete presence upon waking.

My middle one needed a moment of gentle coaxing.

Her body reluctant to leave sleep.

My youngest I carried, still mostly asleep, her head on my shoulder and her arms around my neck.

We each had a bag small enough to carry without slowing down.

Inside mine was everything practical that we needed and also a small Bible.

Not Elias’s Bible that was still in the home that was no longer our home.

This was a Bible that had been given to me by one of the women of the community in the days after the flogging.

An old copy with a worn cover and some loose pages pressed into my hands by a woman who said simply that I should take it.

I held it against my body throughout the entire journey.

the way you hold something you cannot afford to lose.

My mother walked beside me.

She did not complain.

She did not ask unnecessary questions.

She had understood what was happening and she had made her own internal adjustments to it in the way she always made her adjustments quietly in prayer without making her fear someone else’s problem.

She put her hand in mine at one point during the walk and held it and we walked that way for a while without speaking.

Her hand in mine felt like everything she had ever said to me without words.

The journey took us through multiple kinds of terrain and multiple kinds of danger.

There were stretches by vehicle.

people who were moving in the same direction and who let us join them.

People who had their own reasons for making the journey and who were not interested in our story only in moving.

There were stretches on foot where the road was not safe for vehicles or where the route required us to move through areas that were of any established road.

There were hours of waiting in locations that felt exposed, waiting for something or someone that had been arranged and that we could only trust would materialize.

The checkpoints were the worst of it, not because they were always the most physically difficult sections, but because they were the sections of most concentrated fear.

When you approach a checkpoint with three children and an elderly mother and documents that may or may not be sufficient and a soldier whose mood and whose instructions you cannot know in advance, the space between you and that checkpoint is the longest space in the world.

I prayed at everyone, not elaborate prayers.

The simplest possible request, let us through.

Let my children through.

We got through everyone.

I do not say this lightly or without weight.

I know what getting through every checkpoint meant.

I know people who did not get through.

I know stories from the same roads we traveled of families who were turned back or worse.

I have no explanation for why we made it through.

That does not involve the direct intervention of a god who was present in that journey.

I do not offer that as an argument for you to accept or reject.

I offer it as the most honest account I can give of my own experience.

My youngest fell asleep on my back during the longest walking stretch carried in a way that distributed her weight across my still healing injuries.

The pain was significant but manageable.

You manage it because the child needs to be carried and you are the one who has to carry her.

The body finds capacity that you did not know you had when the alternative to finding it is not acceptable.

There was a moment somewhere in the journey that I cannot place precisely on any map.

When we when we came over a rise in the terrain and I could see the border crossing in the distance.

It was still far.

There was still ground to cover, but it was visible.

And something happened in me that I can only describe as the first exhale of a breath I had been holding for longer than I could calculate.

Not relief.

It was too early for relief, but permission.

Permission from my own body to acknowledge that this was real, that we were moving, that the ground was changing beneath our feet.

When we crossed, when we were through and the ground under us was no longer Syrian ground, I stood still for a long moment.

My children were around me.

My mother was beside me.

The road stretched ahead of us into a country we had never lived in and knew almost nothing about.

The sun was at a particular angle in the sky.

I stood there and I cried in a way I had not cried since the very earliest days after Elias was taken.

Not the controlled careful grief of a woman who could not afford to be disabled by her emotions in front of her children, but the full unmanaged uncontrolled weeping of a person who has survived something that should not have been survivable.

My children gathered around me.

My oldest held my hand.

My youngest pressed her face against my stomach.

My mother put her hand on my back, but on the exact spot that still hurt from the flogging and she did not say anything.

She just kept her hand there.

We stayed like that for a while and then we moved on because moving on was what was next.

The country we arrived in was not a paradise.

I want to be clear about this because I think there is sometimes an expectation in stories of people escaping terrible places that the escape itself resolves everything.

It does not.

It ends one category of danger and begins another category of difficulty.

We were refugees now, which meant we existed in a legal liinal space, present in a country that was not ours, dependent on processes and institutions and decisions that were being made about us rather than by us, uncertain about our status and our
future in a way that was its own particular anxiety.

What the practical dimensions of being a refugee are things that people who have never experienced it cannot fully imagine.

There is the registration presenting yourself to authorities and being documented as a displaced person which involves surrendering a certain kind of agency over your own story to an institutional process.

There is the waiting which is a permanent feature of refugee life.

Waiting for decisions, waiting for approvals, waiting for clarity about what you are allowed to do and where you are allowed to go.

There is the condensed living, small spaces, limited resources, proximity to many other people who are also in difficult circumstances and who carry their own grief and trauma and need.

There is the disorientation of a new place, new sounds, new routines, a city that has its own rhythms that you are not part of.

uh people who move through their ordinary lives around you while you are trying to figure out how to have a life at all.

My children struggled.

I will say this plainly because they were real children in a real situation and their struggle was real and it mattered.

My oldest became more inward and vigilant than a child of his age should need to be.

Waking at small sounds, always tracking exits and entrances, carrying in his small body the learned alertness of a child who has lived in a place where the wrong kind of attention could mean the wrong kind of outcome.

My middle one became attached to me in a way that was different from ordinary childhood attachment, needing to know where I was at all times.

distressed by any distance between us.

Added the insecurity showing up in her sleep and in her eating and in the way she clung when I tried to move, even a few steps away.

My youngest, still small enough that much of what had happened lived in her as atmosphere rather than memory, was more resilient in some ways.

Still capable of being delighted by small things, still able to find her way to play.

Still someone who could laugh with her whole body in the way that small children do when nothing has yet taught them to hold back.

Watching her laugh in the middle of everything.

Watching the complete uncomplicated joy of my youngest child finding something funny in our difficult and uncertain circumstances was one of the things that most held me together in those months.

Not because it took the pain away, but because it reminded me that life, actual living, odd continued even in the middle of catastrophe.

That laughter was still possible.

That small joys were still real.

That the world was not entirely consumed by what had consumed us.

I found the church through connections, Christian network, finding Christian network in the way that these communities have always found each other across borders and distances.

Word traveling through people who knew people, the same mechanism that had always been the nervous system of the persecuted church.

A name, a location, a Sunday morning.

I walked into that church for the first time on a Sunday and I was not prepared for what it would do to me.

It was a modest building and a modest congregation.

There was nothing extraordinary about it by any external measure, but the door was open.

Not open in a technical sense only.

Open in the full sense of a place that was not hiding what it was.

That didn’t require you to approach it carefully and quietly and with awareness of who might be watching.

It was simply open and inside people were singing.

They were singing at a normal volume, not at the carefully moderated level that I had absorbed into my very body over years of worshiping in a context where singing too loudly could bring the wrong attention.

They were singing the way people sing when they are allowed to with their actual voices at the level that music requires to be fully music.

And those voices, that sound, the sheer open normality of a group of people singing to God at normal human volume inside a building with an open door, it undid me completely.

I stood at the back of that church and I could not stop crying.

The pastor, an older man, who had clearly seen people arrive at his door in various states over the years, and who had developed the wisdom to know when presence is more useful than words, simply let me stand there and weep.

He came and stood near me after a while, not touching me, not speaking, just present.

That was the right thing.

That quiet company, that presence without demand.

It was the right thing.

The congregation received us with a warmth that I still find difficult to talk about without emotion.

Not the performed warmth of people who are trying to seem welcoming.

the actual warmth of people who understood something about what it meant to need community, who had perhaps their own experiences of displacement and loss, even if not identical to mine, who recognized in us something they knew how to respond to.

There was food.

There were people who sat with my children and played with them while I talked with adults for the first time in months without needing to manage every word for safety.

There was a woman who sat beside me and held my hand for a long time without asking me anything, who seemed to understand that what I needed in that moment was not to be processed through questions, but to be held.

I felt safe for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember.

I felt safe.

Not permanently safe.

Not the kind of safe that means nothing difficult will ever happen again.

I was realistic enough and experienced enough to know that the world does not offer that kind of safe.

But the specific terror of living in a place where armed men could come through your door, but where your faith could get you beaten or killed, where the name of Jesus had to be spoken quietly and only in trusted company.

That specific terror was gone.

I could pray aloud.

I could speak of Jesus by name in conversation.

I could walk into a building on Sunday morning that everyone knew was a church without scanning the surroundings as I approached.

These things sound small.

They are not small.

My mother arrived some weeks after us through a separate arrangement that was its own complicated and frightening process that I will not detail here.

When she walked through the door, when I saw her standing there, smaller than she had seemed in Syria, slower, but herself, entirely herself, I understood in a way I had not let myself fully feel before, just how much I had been carrying the fear of losing her, too.

Oh, the reunion was not dramatic.

We held each other for a long time in the entryway of a small apartment we had been placed in, and neither of us said very much because neither of us needed to.

She was there, I was there, we were both alive.

The rest could be spoken later or not at all.

In this new place with the practical stability that began slowly to accumulate around us, a school for the children, a structure to the days, the growing familiarity with the routines of the city.

I began to do what I have been doing since telling the story.

First to individuals in the church community, then to groups, then in settings outside the original church.

As words spread in the way that word spreads in connected communities.

Each telling costs something.

I have never stood up to tell this story without it costing something.

But each telling also gives something.

and not just to the people listening.

The act of speaking it out loud, of taking these things that happened in the dark and in the violence and in the grief and bringing them into a room full of people who are willing to receive them is its own form of survival, its own form of testimony that what happened did not finish me.

I want to speak to you now directly to whoever you are wherever you are reading this.

If you are a Christian, I want to say something that I hope you will hear in the spirit of love that it is offered in and not as criticism.

Do not take him for granted, please.

I know that sounds simple and perhaps even obvious and maybe you have heard it said before in settings that made it feel like a stock phrase rather than a real plea.

What? But I am asking you to hear it from someone who has stood in the place where taking him for granted is simply no longer possible.

where the question of whether he is real and whether he is worth it is not an academic one but a question your life is requiring you to answer in real time under real pressure with real consequences from that place he is worth it not in a vague or sentimental sense in the most practical tested confirmed by experienced sense I know how to Express.

He was present in the locked room with the frightened women.

He was in the singing that spread through that room before the guard shouted at us to stop.

He was in whatever held me together on the ground while they asked me again and again to deny him and I could not.

He was in the hands of a woman whose name I still do not know who covered me with her own garment and wept.

He was in every checkpoint on the road out of Syria.

He was in the open door of a church in a new country on a Sunday morning when people were singing at full volume and I stood at the back and fell apart in the best possible way.

He is real.

He was enough.

He is enough.

If your life has not yet required you to test this the way mine required me to test it, I am not saying that is a failure.

I am saying it is a mercy.

But please do not let the mercy of an untested faith make you casual about the thing you have been given.

The people who stand at that altar every Sunday in your comfortable church in your country where nobody will arrest you for it, they are carrying a gift that I watched men die rather than surrender.

Or do not hold it lightly.

And if you are not a Christian, if you are reading this from a place of different belief or no belief at all, I am not writing this to argue you into anything.

Arguments are not what bring people to faith and I have never believed otherwise.

I am simply asking you one honest question that I ask with full and genuine respect for wherever you are.

What would you not deny? Think about that carefully.

Every person alive has something that is functionally their foundation.

The thing their identity is built on.

The thing their decisions come from, the thing they would not surrender even under the worst pressure.

For some people it is their family.

For some it is a country or a cause.

For some it is a set of convictions about human dignity or justice.

For some it is a god by a different name or a god by no name or a philosophical framework that functions in the place where others put god.

Whatever that thing is, whatever you would not deny if the denying was demanded of you.

That is what you are actually living by.

Regardless of what you call it, I am not asking you to adopt mine.

I am only asking you to know your own.

Because the people who go through the worst things the world can do to a person with any kind of intact core are the people who knew before it happened, what they were made of, and what they stood on.

I had that because my father made sure I had it.

Because I grew up watching people who had it.

Because when the pressure came, I already knew the answer.

And the answer was already deep enough that it could not be reached by what came against it.

Whatever your foundation is, know it.

Would test it in the small quiet moments before the large terrible ones demanded of you.

I want to end with Ilas.

I always want to end with Ilas.

People ask me sometimes how I carry the grief of his loss.

It is a genuine question and it deserves a genuine answer.

The answer is that you do not so much carry grief as you learn to walk while it walks beside you.

It never fully leaves.

I do not expect it to.

What changes is not the presence of it but your relationship to it.

You stop fighting it and it stops fighting you.

And gradually over time you come to an arrangement with it where it can be present without preventing everything else from being present too.

Love and grief are made of same material.

The grief is the shape the love takes when the person is gone.

And because I do not want to stop loving him, I I do not expect to stop grieving him.

What I have is memory.

Memory is not as good as presence.

I want to be honest about that.

I would have Elias’s back in a breath if that were possible.

But memory is what I have, and I have chosen to hold it well rather than push it away.

I remember small things most, not the large moments.

The large moments are important and I carry them too.

But it is the small ones that come to me most often in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day.

The way he smelled like wood shavings and old paper.

The wood from work he did around the house.

And the paper from the Bible he carried everywhere and handled constantly until it was soft with use.

the particular way he laughed when something genuinely caught him offguard.

Not a polite social laugh, but a real one that came from somewhere below his usual composure and that always surprised him slightly as much as it surprised anyone else.

The way he said good night to each child individually, going to each bed and kneeling down and taking their hand and praying over them in a few quiet words, never rushing, never doing one child’s good night while already mentally moving to the next.

The way he looked at me across a room full of people and the look said without any words, “You still you.

That is the man they killed.

That quiet, faithful, fully present man with his worn Bible and his dry humor and his absolute certainty about the one thing he was not willing to be uncertain about.

Jesus is Lord, and that is not negotiable, not even at the cost of everything.

And here I am having paid close to everything myself.

Still here, still his.

The children he prayed over every night are growing into people he would be unspeakably proud of.

The faith he died for is the same faith I woke up with this morning.

The same faith I will take to bed tonight.

The same faith I will carry every remaining day of my life.

They thought they could silence my Jesus.

They did not understand what they were dealing with.

He does not go silent.

He does not retreat.

He does not fold under the weight of what human beings do to each other or to the people who carry his name.

He is not diminished by suffering.

He is in the most confusing and the most real and the most confirmed by everything I have lived.

truth I possess most present in the suffering.

Be most fully himself in the places where nothing else is enough.

Most audible in the rooms where everything else has gone quiet.

I am alive.

My children are alive.

My mother is alive.

The faith for which Elias gave everything is alive in me.

in my children, in the community I left behind, who are still meeting and whispers and still singing carefully and still refusing every single day to let go.

They could not silence my Jesus.

He is speaking

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