I spoke to brother Ysef about it.

I met with Mahmud several more times before I made any decision.

And what I found over those meetings was not a man performing a conversion for strategic purposes.

I found a man in genuine profound costly crisis.

He had lost his livelihood.

He had lost his standing in his community.

His family did not know what was happening to him and he couldn’t tell them.

He was more alone than I had ever seen a person be.

I baptized Mahmud in the early months of 2013.

The man who had reported people like me to the authorities was lowered into water by my hands and came up a brother.

I have told this story to many people over the years, not to make a point about me, but to make a point about the God who arranged it.

That is the kind of God we are talking about.

That is the scale of what he is willing to do.

Let me tell you now about what these years cost me personally because I do not want this testimony to sound like a series of victories without acknowledging what lay alongside them.

My father found out about my conversion in 2010 about 2 years after my baptism.

He found out through the way information always spreads in the tight networks of Iranian family and community.

Not through a direct conversation, but through a third party who had heard something from someone who had heard something.

When he called me, his voice was not angry in the way I had feared.

It was something harder than angry.

It was like a door closing.

He said what he had to say in a few short sentences and the call ended and that was the last time I heard from him for almost 4 years.

Four years of silence from the man who had taught me to pray, who had sat with me during the Iran Iraq war blackouts, who had been the first authority I had ever known.

that silence was a particular kind of pain.

I do not think there is a word for it in any language that fully covers what it means to lose a parent who is still alive.

My mother called separately some weeks later.

She was weeping.

She was not angry the way my father was.

She was terrified.

She begged me to be careful.

She asked me if I understood what could happen to me.

She said the thing that stays with me still after all these years.

She asked me whether this was worth it, whether whatever I had found was worth the life I was putting at risk.

Worth the family I was fracturing.

Worth the future I was closing off for myself and my children.

I told her yes.

I said it quietly without drama because it was simply the true answer.

And the silence that followed was the longest silence I have ever sat in.

She was still on the line.

I could hear her breathing and there was nothing more to say because the answer was yes and neither of us could argue with it and both of us knew what it meant.

My children grew up knowing that their father’s work was secret.

This was not something I could protect them from.

A child in that household would have had to be completely sealed off from reality not to understand that something unusual was happening.

And children are not sealed off from reality.

They absorb what is around them.

My daughter, who was sharp and perceptive in ways that sometimes startled me, understood by the time she was 8 or nine that she was not to speak about her father’s activities outside the house.

She understood that if certain questions were asked by certain people, the answer was always the same neutral answer.

She understood that some of the people who came and went through our home were not to be mentioned.

I had a conversation with her when she was 9 years old, in which I tried to explain in the most honest terms a 9-year-old could handle, what the risks were, and what she should do if officers came to the house while I was not there.

I watched her listen to me with complete seriousness, the way children do when they understand that they are being trusted with something real.

She did not cry.

She asked two practical questions.

Then she nodded and said she understood.

I held it together during the conversation.

Afterward, alone, I did not hold it together.

The weight of what I was asking my child to carry, the knowledge, the secrecy, the readiness for crisis.

That weight was one of the hardest things about the life I was living.

But she never told me she wished I was different.

Not once in all those years.

If anything, there was a respect in the way she looked at me that I was not sure I deserved.

And that respect was both one of the greatest things I have received from another human being and one of the most humbling.

I want to pause here and say something that I feel strongly must be said.

The Iranian underground church wouldn’t exist without the women.

I am saying this as plainly as I know how to say it because it is the truth and it does not get said enough and I believe it needs to be said loudly and permanently.

I have known men of great courage in the Iranian church.

I have known men who went to prison and came out still standing who lost everything and kept going.

But if I am being completely honest and a pastor has a responsibility to be completely honest, the most consistently, relentlessly, creatively brave people I have encountered in 20 years of underground ministry have been women.

I knew a woman I will call Sister Zahara who was arrested by intelligence agents three separate times over the course of 10 years.

Three times taken in for interrogation.

Three times subjected to the pressure and the questions and the document placed in front of her to sign.

Three times released and three times every single time she came out and went back to the work.

Not recklessly, not as though the danger had not affected her.

The danger had affected her.

She was not someone who was immune to fear, but she had something in her that was larger than the fear.

Something she had decided about who she was and what she was going to do, and three rounds of interrogation had not been enough to dislodge it.

I baptized several of her converts.

I have always considered her one of the genuine heroes of the Iranian church.

And if her name is known in heaven the way I believe it is, then whatever her name is in heaven, it is a very honored name.

Women ran house churches while their husbands were in prison.

Women smuggled Bibles and Christian materials in ways that I will not detail specifically for safety reasons, but that required a particular combination of creativity and nerve.

Women sat with new converts in the middle of the night when the fear came.

Women led worship in apartments with their voices barely above a whisper.

And still the spirit was present.

The Iranian underground church was built on the faith of its women as much as on anything else.

And any account of it that does not say so clearly is an incomplete account.

Let me tell you about what worship felt like in those years because I think this matters and I think it gets lost in the more dramatic parts of the story.

When you sit in a circle of 12 or 15 people in a living room in Tehran and the curtains are drawn and the phones are in a bag outside the door and you know that every person in that room has paid something to be there, has risked something, has given up something, has carried the weight of secrecy all week to arrive at this particular Thursday evening.

There is a quality to the gathering that I have not experienced anywhere else.

The prayers that come out of that room are not polished.

They are not performed.

They come from the actual undecorated interior of people’s lives and they go up with the particular weight of prayers that know they cannot afford to be casual.

I have been since those years in large churches in other countries, beautiful buildings, excellent music, everything organized and presented with great care.

And I am grateful for those churches and I do not say anything against them.

But I want to tell you honestly that I have never been in any of those buildings and felt what I felt in those living rooms.

I think the presence of God is not absent from the comfortable church.

But I think the presence of God has a particular intensity in places where the people present have literally nothing left but him.

When everything that makes faith convenient has been stripped away and what remains is just a small group of human beings and a god they have chosen at genuine cost.

Something happens in that space that I do not have adequate language for.

I know it when I am in it.

I have been in it hundreds of times.

It is the realest thing I know.

The years moved.

The pressure did not let up.

Farhad, the young man who had been sentenced after our 2009 raid, was released after serving his sentence and left Iran.

I received a message from him years later from a country I will not name.

He was well.

He was still following Jesus.

That message meant more to me than I can explain.

The Masa Amini protests in 2022 marked something.

When a 22year-old woman died in the custody of the morality police and they ran streets filled with her name.

When young women stood on cars and cut their hair in public.

When the generation born after the revolution held it up and looked at it and said openly that they did not want it.

I watched all of this with grief for the blood being spilled and with something else underneath the grief.

Something I had not let myself feel in full for a long time.

It felt like a nation coming to the end of something.

Not the end of itself, the end of a lie it had been told about itself.

the end of a version of God it had been given that was never the real God but only a weapon wearing God’s name.

I did not know watching the Amini protests and their violent suppression what was coming next.

I could not have guessed the specific shape of it.

But I had been praying for decades for God to move in Iran.

And something in me was beginning to feel that the ground was changing under everything.

That the soil that had been hard and closed for so long was beginning slowly, painfully, at great cost to break open.

Seeds do not grow in sealed ground.

They grow in broken ground.

And Iran’s ground in those years was breaking.

I was awake when it began.

This is not something I say to make myself sound more present in the moment than I was.

I was awake because I am often awake in the early hours of the morning.

It is one of the habits of 20 years of underground ministry.

The early hours have a quality of quiet that the rest of the day does not have.

and I have come to use them for prayer, for reading, for the kind of thinking that requires silence.

So I was in a small room on the morning of February 28th, 2026 in the early hours before dawn and I was praying.

The first thing I noticed was a sound.

It was distant enough that my mind did not immediately process it correctly.

It registered as something industrial, perhaps the kind of low percussion you sometimes hear from construction or heavy vehicles on a far road.

I noted it and continued praying.

Then it came again, and this time there was something in the quality of it that made my body react before my mind did.

something that old instinct buried from the air raid sirens of my childhood recognized before I consciously understood what I was hearing.

Then my phone began lighting up.

Messages were arriving faster than I could read them from people in Iran.

From contacts in the diaspora who were watching news channels, from pastors in our network who were awake and receiving the same messages I was.

The fragments came in pieces as they always do in those first hours of something large.

A word here, a location there.

Nothing coherent yet, but all of it pointing towards something that the body understands before the mind assembles it into fact.

Tehran, Isvahan, explosions, military targets, Israel, the United States.

I put my phone down and sat very still for a moment.

I cannot tell you that I was calm because I was not.

But neither was I in the kind of panic the situation might logically have called for.

I was in a state that I have been in before at moments of extreme crisis.

A suspended state where the body is alert and the mind is working very fast.

But something underneath all of that is simply waiting, simply watching with a steadiness that does not belong to me personally, but has been given to me and which I have learned over years to lean on rather than fight against.

I prayed, not with words at first, just with presence, just a turning toward God in the dark of that room, in the sounds of what was beginning.

And then I picked up my phone and began to answer the messages.

The hours that followed were the most overwhelming hours I have experienced since the night of the 2009 raid.

And they were overwhelming in a completely different way.

In 2009, the overwhelm was fear and helplessness.

What I felt on the morning of February 28th was harder to categorize.

It was fear.

Yes.

For the people I loved who were inside Iran.

For the new believers who were scattered across the country with no preparation for what was now happening around them.

For the innocent people in the path of strikes that were not designed to care about innocence.

But it was also something else.

something running alongside the fear that I did not know at first what to call.

I was in contact with members of my network throughout that morning.

People were frightened.

Some were in cities where strikes were close enough to feel.

Some had family members in areas that were being hit.

One woman in our network, a young woman barely 20 years old who had come to faith just 8 months before called me from inside Iran and she was not making words, just sounds.

And I stayed on the phone with her for a long time without saying much, just being there, just being a voice that was not afraid in the way she was afraid.

and I prayed over her quietly until the sound she was making gradually became steadier.

There was another member of our network, an older man I had known for over a decade whose apartment was near a government facility that was struck in the early hours.

He was uninjured, but the windows of his apartment were broken by the pressure wave.

And he described sitting on his floor in the glass and the cold air coming through the broken windows.

And it was his description of sitting there that broke through my composure for a moment because I knew that man.

I knew what he had endured over his years of faith.

I knew the particular quality of his patience and his quiet courage and the image of him sitting in glass on his floor in the cold in the broken open morning of what Iran was becoming.

That image found a crack in me.

And then the news came through about kmin.

I do not remember exactly which message carried it.

I do not think it was a single message.

It came in pieces the way all large news comes.

A report here, a confirmation there, a statement from a source, another confirmation, and then it was simply a fact that the world contained.

Ali Kame, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the man who had held that position since 1989, who had been the single most powerful figure in the country I was born in for my entire adult life, was dead.

I did not cheer.

I need you to understand this because I think some people expect that an Iranian Christian pastor would respond to this news with something like triumph.

And I want to be honest about what actually happened in me.

I sat down.

I put my phone face down on the surface beside me.

I was very still for a long time.

What came was not celebration.

What came was 37 years.

That is the only way I can describe it.

37 years of everything this man’s regime had done arrived in me simultaneously.

not as thought but as weight.

I thought about Pastor Hussein Sudant hanging from a rope in 1990.

I thought about Mhmedi Debage in solitary confinement for years writing his defense of his faith on whatever paper he could find in a cell he was not supposed to leave.

I thought about Bishop Hake stabbed in a forest.

I thought about Farad, 24 years old, led out of our prayer meeting in handcuffs on a Thursday evening.

I thought about every person in my network who had been taken, questioned, beaten, sentenced, exiled, silenced.

I thought about my father’s voice closing like a door.

I thought about my mother asking me whether Jesus was worth dying for.

I thought about my daughter at 9 years old listening to me tell her what to do if certain people came to the door and then I put my face in my hands and I wept.

I wept for a long time.

Not for Kame.

I want to be completely honest.

I did not weep for him.

But I also did not weep in victory.

I wept in a way I cannot fully explain even now.

a releasing of something that had been held under pressure for so long that I had stopped feeling the pressure.

The way you stop feeling the weight of something you have been carrying for years until the moment it is lifted and you suddenly feel the absence of it in your body.

Something enormous had been lifted.

something that had been pressing down on the country I loved and the people I served for almost four decades.

And the release of it, even in the middle of war, even in the middle of strikes and burning buildings and broken windows and a young woman crying on a phone in a city I could not reach.

The release of it was real and it moved through me like something physical.

I need to say something carefully here and I need anyone listening to hear it carefully.

I do not celebrate bombs.

I do not celebrate war.

I do not celebrate the deaths of human beings including the death of a man who caused enormous suffering because that man was also a person made in the image of God.

and his death is not a thing to celebrate but a thing to mark with the seriousness it deserves.

And more than that, the strikes on February 28th killed people who were not kame.

They killed people who were not IRGC commanders or regime architects.

They killed people who had been living inside the Islamic Republic as victims.

People who had never had a choice about the government above them.

People who were simply in the wrong location when metal fell from the sky.

I know a Christian family in my network who had been underground believers for over 12 years.

People who had endured everything the regime had to give and had held on.

and their neighbor, a man with three children, a man who had no involvement in the regime and no role in its crimes, was killed in the strikes.

Three children without a father.

Three children who had nothing to do with any of this.

That is not collateral.

That is a man.

That is three children.

And if anyone in the church wants to describe what happened on February 28th with only triumph and no grief, I ask them to sit with those three children first.

I say this not to undermine what I believe God is doing in Iran.

I say it because the gospel requires honesty.

The gospel does not ask us to flatten our grief in order to make our hope look cleaner.

It asks us to hold both.

It always asks us to hold both.

That is one of the things about this faith that I have found consistently true across 20 years.

It does not offer easy comfort.

It offers honest comfort which is harder to receive and infinitely more real.

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