It means grace instead of constant striving.

And yes, sometimes it means losing everything else.

I think about that phrase from the dream constantly.

I have been with you your whole life.

All those years growing up in Riyad, memorizing Quran, praying in Arabic to Allah, Jesus was there.

Through my doubts and questions, through my failures and guilt, through London and university and the empty trying to be good enough, Jesus was there.

He was waiting not to condemn me for being Muslim, not to punish me for my mistakes, but waiting for the moment when I’d finally stopped performing and come to him as I really was, broken, confused, desperate, empty.

And when I finally did in that prayer in my flat 8 months ago, he didn’t reject me or require me to clean myself up first.

He just welcomed me like I’d always been his and he’d been waiting for me to realize it.

That’s the truth that keeps me going when the cost feels too high.

I’m known fully.

Completely known.

every secret thought, every failure, every moment of doubt, and I’m still loved.

Not because I’m good enough or religious enough or pure enough, and just because that’s who Jesus is.

I spoke at a gathering last week, a group that supports people questioning Islam.

About 50 people there, mostly Muslims curious about Christianity.

A few Christians wanting to understand Islam better to reach their Muslim friends.

I told my story similar to what I’ve written here about the dream, the search, the cost.

Afterwards, a young Pakistani man came up to me, maybe 23 years old.

He was shaking.

He said he’d been having dreams, too.

Dreams about a man in white who called him by name.

He didn’t know what to do.

Was terrified to even tell anyone.

He thought he was going crazy.

I told him he wasn’t crazy.

I told him Jesus often reveals himself through dreams, especially to Muslims.

I told him the road ahead would be hard if he chose to follow Jesus.

That I couldn’t promise him it would be easy, but I could promise him it was worth it.

He cried.

We prayed together right there in the back of the room.

He gave his life to Jesus that night, knowing full well what it might cost him.

I gave him my number, connected him with the ex-Muslim group, made sure he wouldn’t have to walk this road alone.

That’s my life now.

Working as an engineer to pay the bills, but really living to help others who are going through what I went through.

To be the support I wish I’d had earlier in my journey.

to tell people that Jesus is real, that he’s pursuing them, that the cost is high, but he’s worth it.

I don’t know what the future holds.

Maybe someday my family will come around.

Maybe they never will.

Maybe I’ll marry Emily and we’ll build a life together.

Maybe that won’t work out and I’ll have to start over again.

Maybe I’ll stay in London.

Maybe I’ll move somewhere else.

Maybe I’ll be safe.

Maybe I’ll face worse persecution than I have so far.

I don’t know any of that.

What I know is this.

I encountered Jesus.

Not a religion, not a theology, not a set of rules.

A person, real, alive.

I am present.

He called me by name in Mecca.

And he’s been with me every day since.

And for the first time in my entire life, I feel known.

Really known, seen, understood, accepted.

Not performing, not pretending, not hiding.

Just me with all my mess and questions and failures.

Loved completely.

That’s what I gave up everything for.

Not a religion, but a relationship.

Not a system, but a person.

not rules but grace.

Was it worth it? You might ask me that question again in five years.

And my emotional answer might be different depending on what I’ve walked through.

But the truthful answer, the deep down answer will always be the same.

Yes.

A thousand times yes.

Because here’s what I’ve learned.

You can have the world’s approval and lose your soul.

You can have your family’s blessing and miss the one thing you were made for.

You can follow all the rules and still be empty inside.

Or you can lose everything and gain the one thing that actually matters.

You can be rejected by everyone else and be accepted by God.

You can walk a hard road and find that Jesus walks it with you.

I chose the second path.

I didn’t choose it lightly.

I didn’t choose it without counting the cost, but I chose it and I’d choose it again.

Not because I’m brave or special or because I have stronger faith than anyone else.

But because I met someone in a dream in Mecca who knew my name, who saw all of me and who loved me anyway.

And once you’ve experienced that, once you’ve tasted that kind of love, you can’t go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.

My name is Omar.

I’m 27 years old.

I grew up Muslim in Saudi Arabia and I’m now a follower of Jesus in London.

My family has disowned me.

My community has rejected me.

I’ve lost almost everything that once defined who I was.

But for the first time in my life, I know who I actually am.

I’m known by God.

I’m loved by Jesus.

I’m held by grace.

And that despite everything, despite all the cost and pain and loss is enough, more than enough.

It’s everything.

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My name is Resa Farhadi.

I was a philosophy professor at a university in Thran.

That sounds simple when I say it now, but back then those words meant everything to me.

They were my identity, my pride, my entire world.

I grew up in Thran in a middle-class family.

My father worked for the government.

My mother stayed home and raised me and my two sisters.

We were Muslim like everyone around us.

We observed Ramadan.

We celebrated aid.

Religion was something in the background of our lives.

It was there like the mountains around Tran, always present but not always noticed.

When I was young, my father made sure I learned to recite portions of the Quran in Arabic.

I spent hours repeating verses after the imam at our local mosque.

I memorized the sounds without fully understanding the meaning.

Arabic was not my language.

Persian was my language.

But this was what good Muslim boys did.

So I did it.

I was obedient.

I wanted to make my father proud.

School came easily to me.

I loved reading, loved ideas, loved the feeling of understanding something complex.

When other boys played football in the streets, I was often inside with a book.

My mother worried I spent too much time alone.

My father was pleased I was serious about my studies.

By the time I finished secondary school, I knew I wanted to study philosophy.

Something about the great questions drew me.

What is truth? What is justice? How should we live? In these questions felt important in a way that other things did not.

I attended university in Thran.

The philosophy department was small but well respected.

I studied Plato and Aristotle.

I studied Ibanscina and Algazali.

I learned about Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy.

I wrote papers comparing different systems of thought.

My professors praised my work.

They said I had a sharp mind that I could see connections others missed.

This praise fed something in me.

I wanted more of it.

Uh after completing my doctorate, I was offered a teaching position at the same university.

I was 28 years old.

I felt I had arrived at the life I was meant to live.

I had an office with my name on the door.

I had students who called me Dr.

Farhadi.

I had colleagues who respected my opinions.

I taught three courses each semester and spent my free time writing articles for academic journals.

My classroom was on the third floor of the humanities building.

It had large windows that looked out over the campus.

In spring, I could see the trees blooming.

In winter, I could see snow on the Albor’s mountains in the distance.

I loved that classroom.

I loved standing at the front, asking questions, watching my students think.

I was good at making them see things from different angles.

I would present one philosophical position, then present the opposite, then ask them to defend or criticize each one.

Critical thinking, I called it, the ability to examine ideas without fear.

Most of my students were good young people.

Some were there because they loved ideas like I did.

Others were there because their parents wanted them to have a university degree.

A few were lazy and only wanted to pass exams.

But many of them truly engaged with the material.

They would stay after class to ask questions.

They would come to my office hours to debate points from the lectures.

These were the students who made teaching worthwhile.

And I married when I was 31.

Her name was Mina.

She was a teacher at a primary school.

We met through mutual friends.

She was kind and intelligent, though not particularly interested in philosophy.

She thought my work was too abstract, too removed from real life.

But she supported me.

We had a comfortable apartment not far from the university.

We had dinner with friends on weekends.

We visited our families for holidays.

We talked about having children, though we were not in a hurry.

I continued to pray occasionally, mainly on Fridays at the mosque near our apartment.

I fasted during Ramadan, though I will be honest and say I did not enjoy it.

I gave to charity when the mosque collected funds.

I considered myself a Muslim in the way many educated people in Thran did.

I respected the tradition.

I identified with the culture, but I did not spend much time thinking deeply about what I actually believed.

Islam was part of being Iranian, part of the fabric of society.

You did not question it any more than you questioned the air you breathed.

There were rules of course, unspoken rules about what you could say and what you could not.

In my field, you could discuss almost any western philosopher.

You could critique Kant or Hume or Nietze.

You could debate the existence of objective morality.

But you had to be careful when it came to Islam.

You could discuss Islamic philosophy as an intellectual tradition.

You could compare Al Gazali with Thomas Aquinas, but you could not question whether the Quran was truly from God.

You could not suggest that Muhammad might have been mistaken about anything.

These topics were off limits.

I accepted these boundaries without much thought.

They seemed reasonable to me.

Every society has its sacred things, I told myself.

In Iran, Islam was sacred.

That was simply the reality.

I had plenty of other topics to explore.

Why would I need to challenge the one thing that was forbidden? sometimes late at night and I would have small moments of doubt, not about Islam specifically, but about belief in general.

I would look at the stars from our balcony and wonder if there really was a God watching over everything.

I would think about all the suffering in the world and wonder why God allowed it.

But these thoughts were fleeting.

I would push them away and go to bed.

Doubt was uncomfortable.

It was easier not to dwell on it.

In my seventh year of teaching, the department head asked me to develop a new course.

In the university wanted to expand our offerings in world philosophy and comparative studies.

He suggested I create a course on comparative religion and ethics.

The idea was to examine how different religious traditions approached moral questions.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism.

We would look at what each tradition taught about right and wrong and compare their approaches.

I agreed to develop the course.

It seemed like an interesting challenge.

I had studied Islamic philosophy extensively but I had only basic knowledge of other religious traditions.

I would need to do significant reading and preparation.

I requested a reduced teaching load for one semester so I could focus on developing the curriculum.

I started with Buddhism.

I read about the four noble truths and the eight-fold path.

I found it interesting but foreign.

Then I moved to Hinduism studying the Bhagavad Gita and the concept of dharma.

Again interesting deep but it felt distant from my own experience.

Then I began preparing the section on Christianity.

I ordered a Bible in Persian translation online.

When it arrived I felt slightly nervous having it in my apartment.

This was foolish, I told myself.

I was a university professor doing academic research.

There was nothing wrong with owning a Bible for scholarly purposes.

Still, I put it on my bookshelf between other books where it would not be immediately visible.

I decided to read the Bible alongside the Quran so I could make proper comparisons.

I wanted to understand what Christians believed and how it differed from what Muslims believed.

I approached it the way I approached any academic project with intellectual curiosity but emotional detachment.

This was research nothing more.

I began with the Gospel of Matthew.

I had certain expectations about what I would find.

I expected to see Jesus portrayed as a prophet as he is in the Quran.

I expected moral teachings similar to what I already knew.

I expected to find some interesting points for comparison and then move on.

What I found surprised me.

The first thing that struck me was how the text presented Jesus not primarily as a teacher of laws but as someone claiming to be the son of God.

This was familiar to me as Islamic criticism of Christianity.

We were taught that Christians had corrupted the original message that they had elevated a prophet to the status of deity.

But reading the text itself, I saw that this claim was there from the beginning.

It was not added later.

The Gospels presented Jesus making claims about himself that were either true or blasphemous.

There was no middle ground.

I read the sermon on the mount.

I read it once, then read it again.

Something about it would not let me go.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

This was not what I expected.

Where was the teaching about political power or military conquest? Where was the instruction about religious law and ritual purity? Instead, there was this focus on the heart, on internal transformation, on a kingdom that was not of this world.

Then I came to the teaching about loving your enemies.

I stopped reading.

I went back and read it again.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

This was completely different from anything in the Quran.

The Quran taught justice.

We taught that you could defend yourself against enemies.

Taught that there were times when fighting was necessary.

But this teaching of Jesus went beyond justice.

It went to something else entirely.

Something that seemed almost impossible.

I thought about my own enemies.

Not that I had many, but there were people I disliked.

a colleague who had criticized my work unfairly.

A neighbor who had complained about noise from our apartment.

Could I love them? Could I pray for them? The idea seemed absurd.

Yet something about it would not leave my mind.

I continued reading over the following weeks.

I read during my lunch breaks in my office.

I read at night after Mina had gone to sleep.

I read in coffee shops on weekends.

I took notes in a separate notebook that I kept in my desk drawer at the university.

I told myself I was being thorough in my research.

I told myself I was simply being a good scholar.

But something was changing and I knew it.

This was no longer purely academic.

The words were reaching someplace inside me that I had not known existed.

I read about Jesus healing the sick.

I read about him eating with tax collectors and sinners.

I read about him touching lepers when everyone else avoided them.

I read about him forgiving a woman caught in adultery when the religious leaders wanted to stone her.

Over and over, I saw the same pattern.

Grace extended to people who did not deserve it.

Love given to those who had no claim to it.

Forgiveness offered before it was even requested.

This was different from the God I had known.

The God I had been taught about was just, and justice meant you received what you earned.

Good deeds were rewarded.

Bad deeds were punished.

There was a scale and your fate depended on which side was heavier.

But this Jesus spoke of a God who was not merely just but extravagantly merciful.

A God who ran to meet the prodigal son.

A God who sought the one lost sheep while 99 were safe.

I found myself comparing passages between the Bible and the Quran.

Both spoke of God’s mercy.

But the nature of that mercy seemed different.

In the Quran, Allah’s mercy was great, but it was conditional.

It was for those who submitted, who followed the straight path, who earned it through obedience.

In the Bible, God’s mercy seemed to overflow boundaries.

It seemed to be given not because people deserved it but simply because God chose to give it.

This troubled me deeply.

If the Christian scriptures were correct, then I had misunderstood the nature of God my entire life.

But if the Quran was correct, then the Bible was teaching something false.

Both could not be fully true.

I had spent years teaching my students to examine claims critically, to follow evidence wherever it led.

Now I was facing a question I had never wanted to ask.

What if I had been wrong? I started having trouble sleeping.

I would lie in bed while Mina slept beside me, staring at the ceiling, my mind racing.

I would think about the passages I had read that day.

I would think about the implications if they were true.

I would think about what it would mean for my life, my work, my family, my country.

I lost my appetite.

Mina noticed and asked if I was feeling unwell.

I told her I was stressed about preparing the new course.

This was true, but not in the way she understood.

I was losing weight.

I was distracted during conversations.

I would be talking to someone and realize I had not heard what they said because my mind was elsewhere.

The course was scheduled to begin the next semester.

I was running out of time to finalize the curriculum, but I could not seem to finish my preparation.

Every time I tried to write lecture notes on Christianity, I would get pulled back into reading more.

I needed to understand.

I needed to know if what I was reading could possibly be true.

I read the Gospel of John.

I read Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Ephesians.

I read the book of Acts.

The early Christians had faced persecution, imprisonment, death.

Yet they had joy.

They had something worth dying for.

What did they have that I did not? The answer kept appearing in the text.

They had Jesus.

Not just knowledge about Jesus, but a relationship with him.

They spoke of him as if he were alive, as if he were present with them.

They prayed to him.

They worshiped him.

They said he had risen from the dead and was seated at the right hand of God.

The resurrection was the claim that challenged everything.

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, then Christianity was false and I could dismiss it.

But if he had risen, then his claims about himself were validated.

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