If Christianity becomes the faith that shapes Iran’s future, and I believe it will, I believe it more certainly today than I have ever believed anything.

It must be because Iranians chose it freely because they encountered something in Jesus that they could not find anywhere else.

Because the church that survived 47 years of persecution earned their trust, not through power, but through love.

Bombs break things.

Love builds them.

And the church’s business has always been building.

Let me speak now to anyone listening to this who does not follow Jesus.

Anyone who is outside the faith, curious or skeptical or simply trying to understand what is happening in Iran and why a pastor is speaking about it this way.

I am not going to shout at you.

I am not going to threaten you with consequences.

I am going to tell you one simple thing.

I was where you are.

I was a man in Tehran who thought Christianity was a foreign religion for people who had been colonized into believing it.

I thought Jesus was a figure from ancient history who had been used by Western powers as a cultural tool.

I thought the people who followed him were at best well-meaning and confused and at worst agents of an agenda I wanted no part of.

I believed all of this with the confidence of someone who had never actually examined any of it because I had been given a version of the world in which examining it was not necessary and not safe.

And then in a hollow room on an ordinary afternoon, I read six sentences on a piece of paper and something happened that I have spent 20 years trying to describe and have never fully managed to.

Not lightning, not a vision, a stillness, a sense of being heard by something that had always been there and that I had never been quiet enough to notice.

I am not standing here at 51 years old, having lost my family’s approval, having been arrested, having spent two decades in hiding, having raised my children inside a secrecy that no child should have to live inside, having paid every price this life has asked me to pay because of a feeling.

Feelings pass.

Feelings are not enough to sustain a person through 11 days in a detention facility or 30 years of quiet questions or a mother’s voice asking you on the phone whether this is worth dying for.

I am here because of a person.

His name is Jesus.

I have never once regretted meeting him.

And if there is anything in your life that resembles the hollow room I described at the beginning of this testimony, if there is an emptiness that the things you have been given to fill it have not filled.

If there are questions that the framework you were raised inside has not answered.

If there is a ceiling you have shouted at and gotten silence back, then I am asking you to do one thing.

Not to believe.

Not yet.

Not to pray a prayer or join a church or make any decision at all.

Just to ask honestly with whatever is left of your honesty in whatever private space you can find.

whether there is a God who knows your name, whether the stillness that I am describing is something that is available to you.

I asked that question in a hospital corridor at 2:00 in the morning.

I asked it with nothing left and something answered that something has not left me since.

Finally, I want to speak directly to my brothers and sisters inside Iran.

I know some of you are listening to this or reading this right now.

In cities whose names I cannot say in rooms with curtains that may or may not still need to be closed.

In a moment that is unlike any moment we have lived through before.

I want to say to you, do not be afraid.

I know that is easy to say from wherever I am and harder to live where you are.

I know the situation is still dangerous.

I know the uncertainty is real.

I know that some of you are leading communities that have tripled in size overnight and you are exhausted and underresourced and sometimes you look at what God is asking you to do and you wonder whether you have enough.

You do not have enough.

None of us ever have enough.

That has never been how this works.

What we have has always been what God gives us as we go.

And he has never once given it in advance.

And he has never once failed to give it when we needed it.

You know this.

You have lived it.

Every Thursday evening for years and years, you went into rooms where you did not have enough and came out having been given enough.

This is the same.

only larger.

The church that met in living rooms with the curtains closed for 40 years is not going back into hiding.

What was planted in the dark is coming up into the light.

What was whispered for decades is now being spoken out loud.

What was held by 12 people in a borrowed apartment is now being held by thousands and soon by more.

Keep going.

Keep gathering.

Keep baptizing.

Keep praying.

Keep being present in the broken places of Iran’s life the way you have always been present.

Because that presence is the only argument for Jesus that has ever actually worked and is the only one that will continue to work.

Not arguments, not strategy, presence, love, the willingness to stay.

God did not bring us through 47 years to abandon us.

Now I have to go.

There are people waiting for me.

New believers who need to be taught.

Conversations that need to be had.

Prayers that need to be prayed.

The work does not pause because I have been telling you about it.

The work is always going.

I want to leave you with one thing.

Early in this testimony, I described a hospital corridor where I asked a ceiling if anyone was there.

I described it as the bottom of something.

The place where the hollow room was at its most hollow, and the silence was at its most silent.

I have been back to that corridor in my memory many times since then.

I have gone back to it in prayer the way you return to a place that changed you.

And what I see now when I return to it is not a man shouting into emptiness.

What I see is a man being listened to.

What I see is a God who was in that corridor the whole time.

Who had been in every corridor before it.

who had been waiting with the patience that only God has for a man to finally run out of his own answers and simply ask.

He was there.

He has always been there in Tehran in Evan prison in the bathtub where I was baptized in the interrogation room in the hollow years and the full ones in the living rooms with the closed curtains in the broken ground of Iran.

right now walking among the millions of people who are asking for the first time whether he is real.

He is real.

He is in Iran.

He has always been in Iran.

He was there before Kmeni and before Kam.

And he will be there after all of this.

When the war is over and the ground has settled and Iran becomes whatever it is going to become, he will be there.

I have staked everything I have on that.

I have no regrets.

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I want to start by telling you something that might surprise you.

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.

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