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.

I am very clear that what they did was wrong and that deliberately starving a human being because of his faith is a serious moral evil that cannot be explained away.

But understanding the formation of a person is different from excusing their actions and understanding it makes the practice of forgiveness more possible.

Not by minimizing the wrong but by restoring the humanity of the person who did it.

I pray for them.

I pray for Afghanistan every day.

I love my country.

I want to say this clearly because I think people expect that I would hate it.

That what happened to me would have turned me against the land and the culture and the people.

It has not.

Afghanistan is in my blood.

The language is in my dreams.

The mountains, the specific quality of light.

The people, ordinary people, not soldiers or ideologues, but the ordinary Afghans I grew up alongside.

I love them and I miss them and I pray for them.

What was done to me was done by a regime, not by a people.

This is a distinction I hold on to.

There are things I want to say to different groups of people.

I say this at the end of my public testimony and I want to say it here too to Afghan Christians still inside the country and there are some.

I know there are some more than the world might imagine.

I want you to know that you are not forgotten.

The global church knows you exist.

People are praying for you specifically.

Your faith is not invisible to heaven.

I know how alone it feels.

I know how complete the isolation can seem.

I was in a cell by myself for 54 days and I was not alone.

I need you to believe me when I say this, not because I am trying to make you feel better with a nice phrase, but because it is the truest thing I know from direct experience to Christians in places where faith costs nothing.

where you can put a church sign on a building and drive to it on a Sunday morning and sit in a hated room and sing at full volume and walk back to your car and go get lunch.

I want to say something that I hope you receive in the spirit in which I offer it, which is love and not condemnation.

What you have is precious.

It is more precious than I think many of you know I because you have never had it taken from you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty.

Guilt is not useful.

I am saying it to invite you to treasure it, to take it seriously, to let the fact that your faith costs you very little in terms of safety make you ask whether it is costing you enough in terms of depth.

I say this not from superiority.

I did not choose to be tested the way I was tested.

I would not have chosen it.

I would not recommend it.

But I have something now, a quality of certainty about what I believe, a directness in my relationship with God, an understanding of what matters and what does not.

That I did not have before the cell.

And I know that this thing I have, this particular quality was given to me through suffering.

And I wish there were another way to get it.

And I do not know if there is.

And to Muslims listening to this story, Alis, and I hope some are, I hope you would hear me out.

I want to say this with every bit of respect and genuine regard that I have for you which is substantial.

I am an Afghan man.

I grew up inside Islam.

I know what it is to love that tradition, to have been formed by it, to have prayed toward Mecca since I was a small child.

I am not your enemy.

I am not trying to take something from you or tell you that everything you believe is worthless.

What I want to say to you is simply this.

I found something in the darkest place I have ever been.

I found a presence that held me when I had nothing left to hold onto myself.

I am not asking you to take my word for it.

I am asking you to consider that the question of who Jesus actually is deserves serious attention on not the Jesus of western culture or political Christianity.

The Jesus of the gospels, the one who stopped for the people everyone else had stopped noticing.

I was one of those people in that cell and he stopped.

The last thing I want to tell you is what I pray for every night.

Not for great things, not for my own safety or comfort.

Not even primarily for Afghanistan, though I always pray for Afghanistan.

What I pray for every night is this, that I would remain the man who came out of that cell and not slowly become again the man who went in.

The man who went in had faith.

I do not want to dismiss that.

He had real faith and he loved God in the way he was capable of loving him at that time.

But the man who came out knows something.

The man who went in did not know.

How the man who came out knows exactly what he believes and exactly why and exactly what it costs.

And he is not confused about what is essential and what is decoration.

And he is not able to be satisfied with a faith that lives only on the surface of things.

I do not want to lose that man.

I am afraid in the ordinary comfortable days of exile life, the days with grocery stores and reliable heating and safe streets.

I am afraid of slowly forgetting of the urgency fading of the clarity going soft around the edges.

This is a real fear.

The comfortable life is in its own quiet way a danger.

So I pray every night to remain awake, to remain clear, to keep the essential thing essential and to not let the peripheral things take more space than they deserve.

And then I go to sleep and sometimes I dream of the cell.

F I wake up and I am in a room with a ceiling that is not concrete and the wife who is breathing next to me and two daughters in the next room and outside the window.

If I pull back the curtain.

The sky.

The sky enormous, full of stars if the night is clear or gray and overcast and ordinary if it is not.

It does not matter.

It is the sky.

It is outside.

It is the world big and open and full of the presence of a god who found me in a cell and decided I was worth staying with and who has not in all the days since let go of my hand.

I am Yu Rahimi.

I am a pastor.

I am an Afghan.

I am a man who was starved for 54 days and did not die.

And I’m here to tell you, he is real.

He is present.

He is worth everything it costs to know him.

That is all I have to say.

« Prev