MIRACLE IN IRAN: Millions Convert to Christianity in Tehran After Ali Khamenei’s Death

…I want to give her something real, something true.

And the next thought which followed the first one like a shadow.

I am not sure I have anything real to give her.

I am not sure I have found anything true yet.

I filed that thought away too.

I was good at filing things away.

My sister Nasrin, who was 3 years younger than me, began to get sick around 2004.

I will not describe her illness in detail because it would identify our family and that is not a risk I am able to take.

What I will tell you is that it was serious and it was slow and it was the kind of illness that does not kill you quickly but sits with you and diminishes you gradually.

And watching someone you love go through that is one of the most helpless experiences a human being can have.

I prayed for her.

I prayed with genuine desperation.

I was not a man who had lost his faith at this point.

I still believed in God.

Or at least I still performed the rituals of believing in God.

And in Iran, the two things can become so intertwined, you stop noticing the difference.

I prayed the prayers I had been taught.

I asked Allah for her healing.

I asked with everything I had.

What I got back was silence.

I want to be honest about that silence because I think it is important.

It was not a silence I felt once and then moved on from.

It was a silence that accumulated over months and then over years.

Each prayer that went up and came back with nothing attached to it.

Each night I drove to the hospital and sat in a corridor while the doctors did what doctors do and I looked at the ceiling of that corridor and I spoke in my heart to a god I was no longer sure was listening and I asked the same question.

I think every human being eventually asks when they are in enough pain is anyone there? I was 30 years old.

I had a wife, two young children, a good job, a life that looked from the outside like a life that was working.

And inside I was completely hollow.

I do not mean sad.

I mean empty in a way that is deeper than sadness.

Like a room that has had all its furniture removed and the walls stripped bare and the windows sealed.

Just space and silence and nothing to fill it with.

I am telling you all of this because I want you to understand that when God found me, he did not find a man who was ready.

He did not find a man who had been searching.

He found a man who had stopped looking.

A man who had convinced himself there was nothing to find.

He found me in the hollow place.

That is where he tends to find people.

I had a colleague at my engineering firm named Vartan.

He was Armenian.

His family had lived in Iran for generations.

There is a significant Armenian Christian community in Iran, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and they exist within the Islamic Republic in a particular kind of fragile tolerance.

They could practice their faith but quietly and within limits and always with the awareness that the tolerance could be withdrawn at any time.

Vatan was a quiet man.

He was not someone who talked about his faith.

I had worked alongside him for 3 years and we had never once discussed religion.

One afternoon, Vatan left something on my desk before he went home.

Not a book, not a Bible, a small piece of paper folded twice with several verses typed out in Farsy.

That was all.

He left it and he left for the day.

And I sat at my desk for a long time, looking at that folded paper before I picked it up.

I will not pretend that what happened next was dramatic.

It was not.

I read the words on that paper and they were words from the Gospel of John.

I had never read the Gospel of John.

I had been taught that the Christian scriptures were corrupted.

That the original gospel that Jesus received had been altered by his followers into something unrecognizable.

That what Christians had was not the true word of God.

I believed this the way I believed everything else I had been taught without examining it because there had never been any need to examine it.

But here were these words and they were in my hands and I was alone in an office in Thran at the end of a day and I read them.

I am not going to try to manufacture emotion in the retelling of this moment.

I am going to tell you what actually happened.

I read the words.

I read them again.

And the third time I read them, I felt something that I do not have an adequate word for in any language.

Not lightning, not a vision, nothing that would make a compelling scene in a film.

Just a stillness, a sudden, deep, inexplicable stillness.

The way sometimes in the middle of a loud city, everything will briefly go quiet between one moment and the next.

That stillness settled over me, sitting at my desk with that piece of paper in my hands.

And in that stillness, something in me that had been asking a question for 30 years felt for the first time like the question had been heard.

That is the only way I know how to describe it.

The verses were from the Gospel of John.

One of them said that the truth will set you free.

Another said that Jesus came so that people could have life.

Not a reduced version of life.

Not a managed, controlled, permitted version of life, but life in fullness.

I sat with those two sentences for a long time.

I thought about what I had been given by the system I was born into.

The fear, the silence, the performance of faith that had nothing living in it anymore.

The hollow room I was living inside.

And I thought about those two sentences, truth, life, freedom.

I folded the paper back up and put it in the inner pocket of my jacket and I went home.

I did not tell my wife.

I did not tell anyone.

I put the paper inside an engineering textbook on my shelf at home and I went about my life.

But every night after everyone was asleep, I would take that paper out and read those verses again.

And every night the stillness came back.

It was like discovering a door in a wall you had walked past a thousand times without noticing.

I had not opened the door yet.

I was not even sure I was going to.

But I knew the door was there now and I could not unknow it.

Over the weeks that followed, I started finding my way to more.

There was a satellite channel, I will not name it, though many Iranians know the channels.

I mean, that broadcast Christian programming into Iran at night.

Christian satellite television had become by the mid 2000s one of the most significant tools for the gospel reaching Iranians precisely because it was invisible.

No missionary had to enter the country.

No pamphlet had to be smuggled across a border.

The signal simply came from the sky into homes across the Islamic Republic.

And people watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched it alone in the dark with the volume low.

I watched a man explain who Jesus was.

Not a Western man in a suit trying to sell me something.

An Iranian man speaking in Farsy talking about Jesus the way someone talks about a person they have actually met.

Not a historical figure behind glass in a museum.

A living person.

Someone this man on the screen had encountered and had not recovered from in the best possible way.

I watched this man speak and something in me could not look away.

I did not understand everything he said, but I understood that whatever he had, whatever was making him speak with that kind of aliveness, I did not have it and I wanted it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely deeply wanted it.

I am going to pause here and say something to anyone listening to this who is not a Christian, who perhaps grew up the way I grew up, who has the same hollow room inside them that I had.

I am not asking you to believe what I believe.

I am not asking you to do anything.

I am only telling you what I experienced as honestly as I can.

A man who was empty found something that filled him.

That is the only claim I am making right now.

Whether you receive that as truth or not is between you and whatever you understand God to be.

But it is what happened.

I found my way to Vartan a few weeks after he left that paper on my desk.

I found a moment when we were alone and I asked him very quietly about the verses.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered.

He was measuring me, I think, measuring whether I was safe.

That measuring look I would learn later after I had been in the underground church for years that every Iranian Christian knows that look.

You give it and you receive it.

It is the look that says, “Can I trust you with my life?” Because that is not a dramatic way of putting it.

That is literally what trust means in that context.

He must have decided I was safe because he began to talk.

What happened over the next several months as Vartan slowly carefully introduced me to more of the Christian faith and then eventually to the small underground community he was connected to.

That is a story I will tell in the next part of this testimony.

But I want to end this first part where the beginning truly was with a man at a desk in Thran in the middle of his hollow life holding a piece of paper.

Not a dramatic beginning, not a vision or a miracle in the conventional sense.

Just words on a page and a stillness that had no explanation.

I did not know sitting at that desk what those words were going to cost me.

I did not know what they were going to require of me.

I did not know that they were going to take me away from everything I had been given.

My community, my family’s approval, my safety, the life I had built inside the permitted walls.

I did not know any of that.

But I also did not know what they were going to give me.

Nasarin was still sick.

The prayers I prayed to the ceiling of hospital corridors were still going unanswered as far as I could tell.

My hollow room was still mostly empty.

The regime was still the regime.

Common was still common.

Tehran was still.

But there was a door in the wall now.

and the light coming from underneath it was the only light in the room.

I did not know it yet sitting at that desk.

But God had already found me.

I was just the last one in the room to find out.

I want to tell you how I came to be baptized because it did not happen quickly and it did not happen easily.

And I think the slowness of it is important to understand.

After those first conversations with Vartan, I spent almost 3 years in what I can only describe as a long, careful, stumbling walk toward faith.

Three years of watching those satellite broadcasts alone at night.

Three years of reading carefully and secretly everything I could get my hands on about Jesus and the Christian faith.

3 years of quiet conversations with Vartan, always in private, always with the lowgrade awareness in the background that this conversation was not a conversation we could be overheard having.

3 years of the question inside me slowly changing shape, moving from is anyone there to who is this Jesus to what do I do with what I am beginning to believe.

I was not raised with patience.

Iranian men of my generation and background were not typically raised to sit with uncertainty.

You knew what you knew and you acted on what you knew.

And the framework of Islamic practice gave you a very clear structure for everything.

There was the permitted and the forbidden.

There was the halal and the haram.

There was a fatwa for every question.

The certainty of that framework was I understand now one of the things that kept me inside it long after the framework had stopped meaning anything to me personally.

Uncertainty is harder to live with than a wrong answer.

A wrong answer at least has the comfort of feeling solid underfoot.

What I was walking into had no solid ground in that sense.

It asked me to trust something I could not fully see or prove.

It asked me to believe not in a set of rules but in a person.

That is a very different thing.

Rules you can examine and debate and apply.

A person you have to choose.

And choosing feels exposed in a way that following rules does not.

But here is what kept pulling me forward through those three years.

It was not arguments.

It was not evidence in the academic sense.

It was the quality of life I saw in the people around this faith.

Vartan was one.

There was a particular steadiness in him.

A kind of peace that was not the peace of someone who had been broken into submission but the peace of someone who had been settled from within.

I had known a lot of religious people in my life.

Iran was full of religious people but this was something different.

This was not the performance of piety.

This was something that came from somewhere deeper than behavior.

When Vartan finally brought me to a house church meeting for the first time, it was a Thursday evening in the spring of 2007.

He drove me there himself, taking a route that involved two unnecessary turns because that is what you do.

You do not drive directly to the place.

You approach it the way you would approach something you are not supposed to approach indirectly checking behind you pausing to make sure.

The apartment was in a quiet part of North Tran.

Seven people were there when we arrived, including the pastor, an older man I will call brother Ysef, though that was not his name.

The apartment looked like an apartment.

There was nothing on the walls that would signal to a visitor what took place there.

No cross, no religious symbols of any kind.

This was deliberate.

If officers came in, the room had to be explainable as an ordinary gathering.

We sat in a circle.

They prayed.

They read from the New Testament.

They talked about what they had read.

And the talking was not like any religious discussion I had ever sat in before.

It was not recitation.

It was not performance.

It was people speaking about Jesus the way you speak about someone who is present in the room.

There was a woman there who talked about something she had been struggling with that week.

and the way she connected it to a passage she had been reading and the honesty of it, the plain undefended honesty of saying here is my weakness and here is where I am finding something to hold on to.

That honesty undid something in me.

I sat in that circle and I did not say very much.

I was not ready to say much.

But by the time I left that evening, I knew with a certainty I had not felt about anything in years that I wanted to come back.

I came back and I kept coming back.

Months passed.

The circle became familiar.

The faces became known to me.

The faith became through all those Thursday evenings and all those secret readings and all those quiet prayers.

I was learning to pray in my own words rather than in the formulas I had been given.

Something that I could no longer honestly call someone else’s faith.

It was becoming mine.

Not because I had reasoned my way into it.

because something had been happening in me slowly and genuinely that I did not have any other explanation for.

The hollow room was not hollow anymore.

That is the simplest way I know to say it.

When I was baptized in the spring of 2008, it was in the bathtub of an apartment belonging to a woman in our group whose husband was away on work.

Brother Yseph performed the baptism.

There were four of us present.

The window was closed.

The bathroom door was closed.

There was no music.

Brother Ysef put his hand on my head and said the words and lowered me into that water and I came back up.

And I am not going to pretend I have the words to fully describe what happened in me in that moment.

I sat on the edge of that bathtub and I wept for a long time.

Not for one reason, but for many reasons at once.

For all the years I had lived in the hollow room and not known there was a door.

For Nasarin, still sick, still in and out of hospitals.

for my children who I was determined now to raise with something true inside them, even if I could not yet see how that would be possible.

For the 30 years of plastic keys and empty ceilings and prayers that bounced off the sky, and also, and this was the strange part, the part I did not expect, for joy, a joy that made no logical sense given the circumstances I was sitting in.

I was wet in a stranger’s bathroom in Thran, having just committed what my country’s laws considered apostasy, a crime that could theoretically be punished by death.

And I was experiencing something that I can only call joy.

Real solid interior joy.

The kind that has nothing to do with what is happening around you and everything.

to do with something that has shifted permanently inside you.

I have thought about that bathtub many times in the years since.

I think about it especially on the days when everything is hard and the cost of this life presses down on you and you wonder whether you have made a catastrophic mistake.

On those days, I go back to that bathtub and the weight of that water and the feeling of coming up from under it and I remember that is the anchor.

That moment is the anchor.

What I stepped into after that baptism was the full reality of what it means to follow Jesus in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I had understood it in my mind before.

But there is a difference between understanding something in your mind and living it in your body every day.

The underground church is not a romantic thing.

It is a practical daily often exhausting exercise in loving people and serving God under conditions specifically designed to make both of those things as difficult as possible.

The rotation of meeting places was constant.

We never met in the same location more than a few weeks in a row.

Phones were left in a bag outside the door of wherever we were meeting because the regime had the capability to activate phone microphones remotely and we knew it.

Bibles were wrapped in newspaper or plain cloth covers or disguised as other books.

The Bibles themselves were scarce and precious.

A single Bible would pass through many hands, be written in and underlined and worn to pieces by the time it finished its journey through a church community.

New converts were introduced to the group slowly over multiple weeks of individual vetting because the IRGC’s intelligence wing V AJA was known to place informants inside house churches, not a paranoid fear, a documented reality.

It had happened to people we knew.

You learned to read a room.

You learn to listen for something slightly off in a new person.

A question that felt designed to prompt a specific answer, an eagerness that was slightly too targeted, an interest in names and locations that went a little beyond natural curiosity.

Most of the time, your instincts were wrong, and the new person was simply a genuinely hungry soul who needed what you had.

But you could not afford to assume the cost of being wrong was not hurt feelings.

The cost of being wrong was Evan prison.

Let me tell you about Evan prison because I think people outside Iran do not fully understand what those two words mean to an Iranian Christian or to any Iranian dissident or minority believer.

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