If you had met me 20 years ago, if you had sat across from me in Kabul in my father’s house, I would u offer a cup of green tea and you had told me that one day I would be a Christian pastor.

I would have looked at you the way a man looks at someone who has said something deeply offensive.

Not with loud anger, with quiet, serious concern.

The kind of concern you have for a person who has lost their mind.

I was not a violent man.

I never was.

What I believed were the way I believed in the air I breathed and the mountains I could see from a rooftop that Islam was the only truth.

Not because someone forced me to believe it, because it was the water I had grown up swimming in and I had never once been outside the water long enough to know there was anything else.

So before I tell you what happened to me in that prison, before I tell you about the 54 days and the hunger and the cold and the moments when I was not sure I was still alive, I need you to understand who I was before any of that.

Because if I just start with the prison, you will think of me as some kind of special person, some kind of hero.

And I am not.

I am just a man, a very ordinary man from Kabul who God somehow decided to reach and the reaching took a long time.

My name is Ysef Rahimi.

Hello viewers from around the world before our brother Ysef continues his story.

We’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

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

I was born in 1981 in the western part of Kabul in a neighborhood called Cartes.

This was during the Soviet occupation.

So I came into the world already surrounded by war.

Though as a child you do not fully understand what war is.

You just understand that some sounds mean you go inside and some sounds mean you stay inside.

find that your mother’s face has a particular tightness to it that you learn not to ask about.

My father’s name was Abdul Karim.

He was not a mala, not a religious scholar, but he was a deeply devout man.

He prayed his five prayers without fail every single day of his life for as long as I know him.

He fasted through Ramadan not as a cultural obligation but as something he genuinely looked forward to.

He would say that Ramadan was when he felt closest to God, when the noise of the world was quietest and something in his chest was most clear.

I respected that about him even as a child.

There was nothing performative about my father’s faith.

It was simply who he was.

My mother Fatima was a quieter kind of believer.

She prayed.

She covered herself.

She taught us the basics of the faith when we were small.

How to do woo for how to recite the fata, what the bellars meant.

But her faith expressed itself mostly in how she treated people.

She was the woman in our street who always had food for whoever needed it.

She never asked questions about who you were or where you were from before she fed you.

I think about her a lot.

I think about how much of what I understand about God’s generosity.

I actually learned from watching my mother’s hands.

I had three siblings, two older sisters, Sora and Najiba, and one younger brother, Dawood.

Dawood.

I will come back to Dawood.

I have to.

His story is part of mine in a way that I cannot separate.

Growing up in Kabul in the 1980s and 1990s meant growing up inside a series of catastrophes, the Soviets, then the civil war between the Mujahedin factions, then the first Taliban regime.

Each period had its own particular kind of fear.

Each period changed the city a little more, took something from it that did not come back.

By the time the Taliban came to power the first time in 1996, I was 15 years old and Kabul had already been through enough to age everyone in it well beyond their years.

Under the first Taliban regime, our life contracted.

There was no music, no television.

My sisters could not leave the house without male escort.

Education for girls stopped.

The things that had made Kabul feel like a real city.

The markets with their noise and color, the small pleasures, all of it became something that had to be done quietly or not at all.

But I want to be careful here because I do not want to give you the wrong impression.

Even during that first Taliban period and my father did not see them as the enemy of Islam.

He disagreed with some of their methods.

He thought some of them were using religion as a tool for power which is a very different thing from actually having faith.

But he still prayed the same prayers.

faced the same direction, believed in the same God.

His Islam was not their Islam and he knew the difference.

Many Afghans knew the difference.

I finished my basic schooling when I could under whatever circumstances existed at the time.

Then after 2001 when the Taliban were pushed out and the republic was established, there was a period about 15 years when the when Afghanistan breathed differently.

It was not peace.

There was never real peace.

But there was a kind of opening.

Schools reopened.

Women went back to work and to university.

Couple had traffic jams again.

one which sounds like a complaint but was actually a sign of life.

I used that opening.

I studied hard improved my English which I had been quietly learning in pieces throughout my teenage years and I found work as a translator.

first for aid organizations, then for a period for international military units, then later for a variety of NOS and diplomatic bodies.

It was good work.

It paid reasonably well, and more than that, it put me in contact with a world that was larger than the one I had grown up in.

I want to be honest about something.

working with foreigners, with westerners especially, it did not make me question my faith.

That is what some people assume that exposure to western culture is what turns Afghans away from Islam.

That is not what happened to me.

If anything, some of what I saw of Western culture reinforced my sense that Islam had something valuable that the secular west did not.

The loneliness I saw, the way people seemed untethered from anything larger than themselves, the drinking, the restlessness, none of that made me want what they had.

I was proud of who I was.

I was proud of my faith, my family, my language, my country.

I married Mariam in 2007.

She was from a family in Kabul, educated, thoughtful, a woman with strong opinions that she knew when to share and when to keep to herself.

We were introduced through family, the way things are done.

But we had several meetings before the formal arrangements were made.

And I remember thinking clearly that she was someone I could talk to, not just someone to manage a household, someone to actually talk to.

That meant a great deal to me.

We had two daughters together.

Lena born in 2009.

Sana born in 2012.

So if you want to know what happiness looked like for me in those years, it looked like those two girls.

It looked like coming home from a long day of translation work to find them fighting over something small and ridiculous.

And Mariam trying to referee and all of us sitting down for dinner together in our small apartment and the ordinary completeness of that.

I did not know then how rare it was.

You never know how rare the ordinary good things are until they are taken.

Now I need to tell you about Dood.

My younger brother was born in 1985, 4 years after me.

Okay.

He was, how do I describe him to people who never met him? He was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer just by entering it, not in a loud way.

Adawood was not loud.

He was warm and funny in a quiet way.

The kind of funny where something he said would hit you 5 minutes later and you would suddenly laugh at the wrong moment.

He became a mechanic.

He was excellent at it.

He had a small workshop near our parents’ neighborhood and he was always full of grease and always ready to stop what he was doing if you needed to talk.

He married in 2010, had a son in 2012, a boy named Karim, who he loved with the particular intensity of a man he had waited for fatherhood and was not going to waste a single moment of it.

In 2014, Dawood was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb.

He was not a soldier.

He was not political.

He was driving a vehicle to deliver some parts to a client outside the city and the bomb was meant for a military convoy.

And he happened to be on the same road at the wrong moment.

This is how most people die in wars, not in dramatic confrontations in the wrong place on a nor in on an ordinary errand on a Tuesday.

I got the phone call in the middle of a work assignment.

I remember exactly where I was sitting.

I remember the quality of the light through the window.

I remember that I stood up and walked outside and stood in the street for a long time, not knowing what I was supposed to do next.

My brother, my Dawood, the funniest, warmest man I knew, gone just like that in a moment that had nothing to do with who he was or what he deserved.

What followed was the expected things, the washing and the burial done quickly as our faith requires.

The morning period, the relatives coming to the house, the prayers, people said the things you say, God’s mercy, God’s will, God’s plan, he is in paradise now.

These are not bad things to say.

I had said them myself to others.

But sitting in my parents’ house during those days, hearing those words, I noticed something happening inside me that I had not expected.

The words were not reaching me, not because they were wrong words, but because something in me was asking a question underneath all the words, a question I did not know how to ask in any language of faith I had available to me.

The question was not why did this happen.

I knew enough of the world to know that bad things happen without meaning.

The question was something closer to is there a god who is actually near this pain or is there only a god who is far away and will eventually make it all make sense in some afterlife I cannot see or touch right now I did not say this to anyone you do not say this in an Afghan Muslim household during morning but I felt it and once I felt felt it.

I could not unfeill it.

I went back to my prayers.

I kept my fasts.

I did all the external things correctly.

But there was something cracked open in me that the practices could not reach.

A room in my chest that had always been locked.

And now the lock was broken.

And whatever was in that room was cold and asking questions.

This went on for months.

I carried it alone the way Afghan men are expected to carry these things.

Mariam knew something was wrong, but I could not explain it to her because I could barely explain it to myself.

I threw myself into work.

I worked longer hours than I needed to.

I told myself that purpose would fill the space.

It did not.

It was about 8 months after Dawood’s death that I met Daniel.

He was with the European humanitarian organization that was running a food distribution program in one of the poorer districts of Kabul.

I was brought in as their translator for a series of community meetings.

Daniel was in his late 40s from somewhere in Northern Europe with very plain features and very steady eyes.

He was not a dramatic person.

He did not perform his goodness.

He just worked and he was good at his work and he treated the Afghan staff with a straightforward respect.

That was not always common among foreign workers who sometimes had a way of being kind that was also beneath the kindness slightly superior.

Daniel did not have that.

He was just level just there.

We worked together for about 3 weeks.

During that time we had many conversations.

Most of them were practical logistics, cultural context to how to approach particular community leaders.

But Daniel was also curious in a genuine way.

He asked real questions about Afghan life, about the history of the city, about what the various periods of conflict had been like from the inside.

He listened to the answers.

He did not wait for his turn to talk while I was speaking.

He actually listened.

At some point during that 3 weeks, I told him about doubt.

I am not sure why I told him.

Something about the way he listen made it feel possible to say things you would not normally say.

He did not immediately fill the silence with words.

He sat with what I had told him for a moment.

Then he said something simple that he was sorry and that he hoped I had people around me who could carry some of it with me.

That was all.

He did not tell me Dwood was in a better place.

For he did not offer me a theological framework.

He just said he was sorry and that he hoped I was not carrying it alone.

It sounds like a small thing, but something about the simplicity of it reached me in a way that months of correct religious language had not.

Toward the end of our working period together, Daniel gave me something.

He did it quietly, almost awkwardly.

He was not a pushy man.

He said he wanted me to have something, that he had been thinking about our conversations, and that this was not meant as pressure or as any kind of statement, and that I should feel completely free to set it aside or throw it away.

And he gave me a small book, a New Testament translated into Dari.

I looked at it.

I looked at him.

I told him honestly that I was a Muslim and was not looking to change.

He nodded and said he understood completely and that it was still just a gift if I wanted it and that was all.

I took it home.

I put it at the bottom of a box of work papers in my study.

I told myself I would decide later whether to get rid of it.

A week later I took it out of the box.

Not because I had decided anything, just because I was curious in the way you are curious about something you have been told your whole life to avoid.

There is a particular pull to the forbidden thing.

Not always out of rebellion.

Sometimes just out of the honest desire to know what is actually in it.

I read it the way I would read any document.

Carefully with a kind of professional distance, alert to what it was saying and what it was not saying.

I read through Matthew.

I read slowly.

I I kept stopping.

I do not want to make this sound like a movie scene.

It was not a movie scene.

And it was a man in a small room reading a book he had been told was dangerous.

trying to hold himself at a scholarly distance and finding that the distance kept collapsing not because of any single verse or passage but because of something in the cumulative weight of it.

This Jesus the way he spoke to people.

The specific people he chose to stop for the particular ones he chose to touch.

The ones everyone else had already given up on or written off.

There was something in the texture of those encounters that kept pressing on the crack in my chest.

I read the whole New Testament over the course of about 6 weeks, hiding it, reading late at night, putting it away if I heard Mariam or the girls, feeling guilty about it and not entirely sure if the guilt was about the content or about the hiding.

Then I read it again.

But by the second time through, I was no longer reading it like a document.

I was reading it like a man looking for something.

Even though I could not have told you clearly what I was looking for.

I will tell you about the first time I prayed in Jesus’ name.

Not because it was dramatic.

In fact, I tell you about it precisely because it was not dramatic.

And I think that is important.

It was a night in late 2013.

It was cold, which Kabul winters always are.

Mariam and the girls were asleep.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I had been sitting there for about an hour just thinking, which I had been doing a lot of in those months.

And without planning to without any kind of buildup or decision, I just started talking very quietly almost in a whisper.

I addressed Jesus directly and which felt strange and also felt completely natural in a way I cannot fully explain.

I told him I did not know if he was real.

I told him I did not know what was happening to me or what I was supposed to do with the things I had been reading.

I told him about Dwood.

I told him about the crack in my chest and I asked when not for a sign, not for anything spectacular.

I just asked if he was there, if any of this was real, if there was actually someone on the other end of this that was something more than my own voice in an empty room.

Then I stopped talking and sat quietly and something happened.

I cannot describe it with theological precision and I’m not going to try.

I will just say that the room felt different.

That the thing in my chest that had been cold for a year felt different.

That something that I can only describe as presence, a warmth and a weight of presence came into that room in a way I had not manufactured and could not explain and did not know what to do with.

I sat there for a long time.

Then I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up and I had no certainty about anything.

That feeling whatever it had been or had not resolved into a clear package of belief.

I was not suddenly a Christian in any organized sense.

I was just a man who had had an experience he did not understand and who was now carrying something new alongside everything else he was already carrying.

But something had shifted and shifts unlike dramatic changes have a way of continuing to move even when you are not paying attention.

Over the following months I found myself praying that way more often quietly privately.

Why in fragments reading the New Testament again, thinking, wrestling, asking questions that I had no community to ask them in.

I could not go to a mosque imam with these questions.

I could not tell my wife.

I could not tell my parents.

If what was happening to me became known, the consequences socially, legally, personally would would be severe.

I knew this with complete clarity.

My faith was costing me nothing yet.

But I could feel in the distance what it might eventually cost.

This was not a season of peace.

I want to be honest about that.

Coming to faith in Jesus for me was not accompanied by immediate lightness or happiness.

It was accompanied by profound fear, deep uncertainty, and the loneliness of carrying something this large entirely alone.

There were weeks when I pulled back completely.

when I did not read the testament and did not pray in Jesus’ name and told myself that whatever had happened was a moment of griefdriven confusion and I should return to the faith I knew but I could not fully return because the room in my chest had changed because something had been in there and I knew it and I could not unknow it by 2014 quietly without any ceremony or formal declaration because there could be no such thing for me in my context in my country.

I understood myself to be a follower of Jesus.

Not because I had everything figured out, not because I was brave, but because I had been reached by something I could not reach myself and I had run out of reasons to keep refusing it.

I became a Christian the way a drowning man grabs a rope.

Not because I was looking for it, because I was already going under.

And in the moment my hand closed around it, I understood for the first time in over a year what it felt like to be held.

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