I need you to believe me when I say this, not because I am trying to make you feel better with a nice phrase, but because it is the truest thing I know from direct experience to Christians in places where faith costs nothing.

where you can put a church sign on a building and drive to it on a Sunday morning and sit in a hated room and sing at full volume and walk back to your car and go get lunch.

I want to say something that I hope you receive in the spirit in which I offer it, which is love and not condemnation.

What you have is precious.

It is more precious than I think many of you know I because you have never had it taken from you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty.

Guilt is not useful.

I am saying it to invite you to treasure it, to take it seriously, to let the fact that your faith costs you very little in terms of safety make you ask whether it is costing you enough in terms of depth.

I say this not from superiority.

I did not choose to be tested the way I was tested.

I would not have chosen it.

I would not recommend it.

But I have something now, a quality of certainty about what I believe, a directness in my relationship with God, an understanding of what matters and what does not.

That I did not have before the cell.

And I know that this thing I have, this particular quality was given to me through suffering.

And I wish there were another way to get it.

And I do not know if there is.

And to Muslims listening to this story, Alis, and I hope some are, I hope you would hear me out.

I want to say this with every bit of respect and genuine regard that I have for you which is substantial.

I am an Afghan man.

I grew up inside Islam.

I know what it is to love that tradition, to have been formed by it, to have prayed toward Mecca since I was a small child.

I am not your enemy.

I am not trying to take something from you or tell you that everything you believe is worthless.

What I want to say to you is simply this.

I found something in the darkest place I have ever been.

I found a presence that held me when I had nothing left to hold onto myself.

I am not asking you to take my word for it.

I am asking you to consider that the question of who Jesus actually is deserves serious attention on not the Jesus of western culture or political Christianity.

The Jesus of the gospels, the one who stopped for the people everyone else had stopped noticing.

I was one of those people in that cell and he stopped.

The last thing I want to tell you is what I pray for every night.

Not for great things, not for my own safety or comfort.

Not even primarily for Afghanistan, though I always pray for Afghanistan.

What I pray for every night is this, that I would remain the man who came out of that cell and not slowly become again the man who went in.

The man who went in had faith.

I do not want to dismiss that.

He had real faith and he loved God in the way he was capable of loving him at that time.

But the man who came out knows something.

The man who went in did not know.

How the man who came out knows exactly what he believes and exactly why and exactly what it costs.

And he is not confused about what is essential and what is decoration.

And he is not able to be satisfied with a faith that lives only on the surface of things.

I do not want to lose that man.

I am afraid in the ordinary comfortable days of exile life, the days with grocery stores and reliable heating and safe streets.

I am afraid of slowly forgetting of the urgency fading of the clarity going soft around the edges.

This is a real fear.

The comfortable life is in its own quiet way a danger.

So I pray every night to remain awake, to remain clear, to keep the essential thing essential and to not let the peripheral things take more space than they deserve.

And then I go to sleep and sometimes I dream of the cell.

F I wake up and I am in a room with a ceiling that is not concrete and the wife who is breathing next to me and two daughters in the next room and outside the window.

If I pull back the curtain.

The sky.

The sky enormous, full of stars if the night is clear or gray and overcast and ordinary if it is not.

It does not matter.

It is the sky.

It is outside.

It is the world big and open and full of the presence of a god who found me in a cell and decided I was worth staying with and who has not in all the days since let go of my hand.

I am Yu Rahimi.

I am a pastor.

I am an Afghan.

I am a man who was starved for 54 days and did not die.

And I’m here to tell you, he is real.

He is present.

He is worth everything it costs to know him.

That is all I have to say.

 

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