Whoever made the decision to give me something must not have known or cared about that particular medical nuance.

But the amounts were small enough that it did not make things worse.

My consciousness became more consistent over the following days.

Uh not normal, not anything close to what I would have called normal 2 months before, but more present, more continuous.

I was aware of where I was.

I was aware of time passing in a more order way.

I was aware that something had shifted in the situation around me.

Though I could not have told you what or why, the guards who interacted with me during the period were noticeably different in their manner from what I remembered of the weeks before.

Not kind, I would not use that word, but less certain of themselves.

the way people act when they are not sure of the rule anymore.

When the situation has moved outside the procedures they understood, there was a weariness in how they approached the cell door that had not been there before.

I was aware of it even in my compromised state.

I heard conversations outside the cell, not clearly then not completely but fragments.

There seemed to be disagreement about what to do with me.

This is consistent with what I learned later, which was that my continued existence had become a complication within the facility.

The intention had been that I would not survive.

That I had survived created a question of what happened next.

And the question was not a simple one because doing anything overt at that point carried risks of attention that the people running the facility did not want.

I need to explain something about how Afghan Christian prisoners have been released in documented cases because how I was released is consistent with patterns that are real.

And I want you to understand it is not a miraculous escape in any cinematic sense.

It is in its own way something on almost more interesting than that.

It is the story of how networks of ordinary people on the outside work quietly to bring someone out.

the diaspora of Afghan Christians, people who had left Afghanistan and were now in various countries in Europe at in North America, in Australia, constituted a community that was small but connected.

They maintained and in the awareness of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan as best they could through family members still inside, through trusted contacts, through organizations that worked specifically on the issue of religious persecution in Afghanistan.

open doors, voice of the martyrs, smaller, less public organizations that worked in ways that required discretion.

These networks operated in the background of the visible world.

When someone was arrested, when a believer disappeared, neither community noticed.

Word traveled through the networks encoded ways.

A message through a family member to someone abroad, a contact who knew a contact.

It was slow and imprecise, but it moved.

Mariam had been in contact through means I will not specify because they involve people who are still inside Afghanistan with someone connected to one of these external networks.

She had communicated what had happened to me.

Not all the details, but enough.

This had set into motion a quiet process on the outside that involved, as best I understand it, two elements.

The first was what might be called documentation and visibility.

people outside knowing what was happening, being aware and in a limited and careful way making sure that certain parties understood that this situation was not invisible.

This is not a loud or dramatic thing.

It is the quiet work of making it known that someone is watching.

The second element involved, as I understand it, a financial transaction that I am not going to moralize about or pretend was anything other than what it was.

In Taliban controlled Afghanistan, as in many environments of this kind, certain outcomes can be facilitated through money.

Someone somewhere in the chain of people connected to my case made an arrangement with someone who had authority in the structure above the facility where I was being held.

The amount involved the the precise mechanism.

I do not know the details and I am not sure I want to know them.

What I know is that it was not my doing was not Mariam’s doing was the doing of people outside the country who had worked and prayed and given their resources to make it possible.

What is the order for my release? Whatever form it took, whatever justification was used to legitimize it within the system came down through the facility.

I was told I was being released.

I was told this by a guard who came to my cell on a morning, slid the panel open and said it simply.

No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment of what had been done to me.

I asked him to repeat it.

He repeated it without apparent impatience.

I asked him again because I was not entirely sure my mind was working correctly.

He said it a third time and then slid the panel close and walked away and then came back a short while later and open the door.

Walking.

This is the part that no one who has not been in a comparable state will fully understand.

I had not walked properly, not stood and moved more than a few shuffling steps within weeks.

Other guards had to help me, not with any care or gentleness, but with the practical necessity of men who needed to move something from one point to another.

They got me upright.

They moved me forward.

My legs understood the concept of walking, but the execution was not reliable.

I held on to the wall when there was a wall.

I held on to the guard when there was nothing else.

the corridors, the compound steps.

Getting down steps was a significant challenge.

And then outside the cold air hit me with a physical force.

I had been inside in that cell breathing that particular recycled air for 54 days.

outside air, even the cold, still air of a cobble winter, hit my lungs in a way that was almost painful in its intensity.

I stopped at the threshold.

The guard pushed me forward.

Not harshly, but firmly.

I went forward and then I was outside.

What? I the sky.

I looked up at the sky.

I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it before the guards moved me again.

It was overcast that morning.

Not blue, not dramatic, just a gray cabbble winter sky.

The kind of sky you would walk under a 100 times without noticing it.

But it was enormous.

It was endlessly, staggeringly enormous in a way I had completely stopped being able to imagine from inside four concrete walls.

I had forgotten how large the sky was.

I had forgotten that there was so much space in the world, that the world was this big.

They put me in a vehicle, short drive, stop somewhere, made me get out and Mariam was there.

I have tried many times to describe the moment I saw her and I find that every time I try the words are not right and not because the emotion is too large though it was but but because the moment itself was very simple and very quiet.

She was there.

She looked at me at what I had become in those 54 days and her face did something that I cannot describe in any language.

Then she came to me and put her arms around me and I put my arms around her and we stood on a street in Kabul holding each other and I could feel that she was praying.

Her lips were moving against my shoulder and she was praying barely audible and I could feel the words even if I could not hear them.

I could not stand for long.

She had arranged for somewhere nearby to go, not our apartment which was no longer safe, a relative’s home where we could be for a short time.

She got me there.

She had figured out how to do all of it while I was inside.

She had kept the girls safe and managed our situation and coordinated with the networks outside and somehow remained standing through all of it.

She is a stronger person than I am.

I think I knew this before.

I was very sure of it afterward.

The first day outside I slept.

That is mostly what I remember of it.

Being horizontal somewhere that was not a concrete floor under actual blankets and sleeping in a way I had not been able to sleep for weeks.

Deep and long and without waking to cold or noise in the same way.

The first time I ate real food, Mariam brought me rice and a little broth, the most gentle things she could find.

I could only manage a few spoonfuls.

My body did not know what to do with food anymore and had to be reintroduced to the concept slowly.

This process took days.

The full process of my body learning how to eat again and my system adjusting took several weeks and was not without setbacks.

I was 41 years old when they put me in that cell.

I looked by Mariam’s account closer to 60 when I came out.

We could not stay in Kapul.

This was clear.

Whatever had facilitated my release was not a guarantee of permanent safety.

It was a window and windows closed.

The networks that had helped get me out were also the networks that helped us understand we needed to move and that helped us think about how the process of leaving Afghanistan is not something I will describe in detail.

Partly because it involved people and methods that I do not want to put at risk and partly because that story belongs to others as much as it belongs to me.

What I will say is that it took time.

I it required going through several places before we reached safety and that the moment we finally crossed into a country where we could stop running where we could take a breath and know that the breathe was not a risk.

The girls who were 12 and nine by then and had been through things no child should go through sat together on a floor and cried.

and Miam and I sat with them and we all cried together for a long time.

And then Sana, the younger one, the 9-year-old, stopped crying and looked at me and said that she was hungry.

And I laughed for the first time in I did not know how long.

I laughed just like that because she was right and because hunger this time was something I could do something about.

The sky the day we left Afghanistan for the last time was blue, clear, cold, very blue.

I looked at it before I looked at anything else.

I always look at the sky now every morning.

I do not take it for granted anymore.

The space of it, the simple extraordinary fact of it.

I am going to ask you to sit with me for a little while longer because I want to tell you about the part of the story that does not get told as often as the dramatic part.

People who hear a testimony like mine, people who come to hear about the prison and the starvation and the survival, they come for that part.

And I understand that it is a remarkable part.

I am not going to pretend it is not.

But the part that has actually shaped me the most, the part that I live in every day is not the cell.

It is everything that happened after the cell.

Survival is not the same as recovery.

And recovery, I have learned I is not something that happens on a timeline.

It does not follow the schedule that your hope would assign to it.

The physical recovery took far longer than I expected.

I understood in a general way that the body takes time to restore itself after severe malnutrition.

What I did not understand is how total the disruption is, how many systems are affected, how long they remain affected, how the recovery has its own difficult phases that are in some ways harder than the deprivation itself.

Because the deprivation has a clarity to it, a defined enemy, and the recovery is just slow and uneven and sometimes discouraging.

For the first 3 months after my release, I was not able to walk for more than a short distance without my legs giving in.

My muscles had been so depleted that rebuilding them was a genuine effortful process.

I needed help with things a grown man should not need help with.

I need to be honest about that because I think the public understanding of what these kinds of orals do to a person tends to skip past this part very quickly.

You do not come out of 54 days of deliberate starvation and then stand up the next week and give a sermon.

You come out and you learn to walk again.

Literally, that is what you do.

My digestion was disrupted for months.

There were foods my body could not process normally for a long time after.

I lost significant muscle mass from my heart which is a muscle and this left me with a cardiac situation that I still manage carefully with the help of doctors.

My immune system was compromised in ways that expressed themselves repeatedly through that first year.

Illness after illness, things that a healthy body would have handled easily, landing on me heavily and taking a long time to resolve.

My hair grew back.

My weight came back slowly, unevenly over the course of about a year.

Looking in the mirror during that first year was a strange experience.

Watching the face of the man I used to be gradually reassert itself over the face of the man the cell had made and wondering which one was more true.

The psychological dimension of recovery.

I will speak of this because I think it matters and because I think people of faith sometimes skip over it in testimonies as if the spiritual experience of survival means the the psychological damage does not occur.

It does occur.

The grace of God does not make trauma not happen to you.

It accompanies you through the trauma.

It is with you in the aftermath.

But the aftermath is still the aftermath.

I had dreams for a long time.

The same quality of dreams.

Cold, dark, confined, the sound of the door panel sliding.

I still have them sometimes, less often now than before, but they come.

I developed in the months after release a strong and involuntary response to certain sounds.

A knock on a door in a particular rhythm, the sound of boots on a hard floor, the specific sound of keys.

These are not things I chose to respond to.

They are things my body had learned to treat as signals of danger.

And the body does not unlearn those associations quickly or easily just because the mind knows the context has changed.

There were days in that first year when the weight of everything was very heavy.

Days when I sat somewhere safe in a room and in a country where no one was going to knock on the door and take me away and felt something very close to despair.

Not because I had lost my faith, but because despair is its own kind of weather and it does not always care whether you have faith.

It comes in and sits with you.

And on those days, I did not always feel the presence of God the way I had felt it in the cell.

On those days, I had to choose to believe what I had experienced rather than feel it.

This is a thing I want to say very clearly to anyone who is listening.

Anyone who is walking through their own difficulty.

The felt presence of God that carries you through the crisis is not always the presence you have in the ordinary days after.

The ordinary days require a different kind of faith.

not stronger necessarily, but different more deliberate, more like a choice and less like a gift.

And that choice is its own form of faithfulness.

It does not feel as glorious as the cell moments, but it is real.

I have spoken with the counselor, a Christian counselor connected with one of the organizations that has been supporting our family in exile.

Not because I am ashamed of needing it, but because I am a pastor and I understand that the tools God makes available to us include the wisdom he has given to human beings who understand how suffering affects the mind and body.

I am grateful for this help.

It has been part of the healing.

I need to tell you about the church members who did not make it out.

This is the part of my testimony that I find hardest to speak about publicly.

Not because I do not want to speak about it, but because I am always aware of the gap between what they experienced and what happened to me.

I survived.

Not all of them did.

Tariq, the young man who went silent in the first days after the Taliban returned, the one I mentioned earlier.

We eventually learned what happened to him.

He had been arrested before I was several months before by Taliban authorities in the district where he lived.

He was held.

He did not survive his detention.

I do not know the specific circumstances.

I do not know if he recanted or not.

I do not know exactly what they did to him.

What I know is that he was 26 years old and that he had come to faith with a hunger and a seriousness that I found deeply moving and that he is gone.

There was another member of the community to a woman who had been one of the most spiritually mature people in our small group who I will not name at all for the protection of her family still inside Afghanistan.

She went through her own period of detention.

She survived it but at the cost I will not describe in specifics out of respect for her.

She is still inside the country.

She is still a believer.

I know this because I heard from her through the channels that still exist.

And she sent a message that was simple and short and said that she was still standing.

When I received that message, I sat down and I wept for a long time.

Good tears, the kind that mean something.

Others have made it out.

Some are in Pakistan, some in other countries in the region, some in Europe.

The community is scattered.

It exists now as a diaspora rather than a gathered body.

How connected through prayer and through the networks that keep us in contact across borders and time zones.

It is not what we had in those quiet rooms in Kabul, but it is still something.

We are still the church.

The church does not require a building.

We already knew that.

I want to say something about forgiveness because people always ask about it.

They expect I think that I will tell them I have fully forgiven my capttors that I hold no bitterness that the love of Christ has washed every trace of it away and I am now completely free and clear.

I will tell you the truth instead which is more complicated and which I think a think is more honest and ultimately more useful.

I am in the process of forgiveness.

That is where I am.

It is not complete.

It is not a finished thing.

There are days when I feel what I think is real forgiveness.

A genuine absence of the al desire for harm to come to the people who did what they did.

a genuine hope that they would encounter the same mercy I encountered.

There are other days when something surfaces a memory, a dream, a sound and I feel something much raw and less clean than forgiveness.

What I have come to understand about forgiveness in the specific way I have come to understand it through this experience is that it is not an event.

It is not a decision you make once and then it is and it is settled.

It is a practice.

You have to choose it repeatedly.

The way you choose anything that runs counter to what your instincts are telling you and some days the choice is easy and some days it is very hard and both of those things are true without one cancelelling out the other.

What helps me in this practice of ongoing forgiveness is thinking about who those guards were before they were guards.

They are Afghan men.

Some of them are probably not old young men who grew up in a country of war who were shaped by violence and ideology from childhood who may have known nothing else.

This does not excuse what they did.

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