Daughter of Iran’s Top Army General Publicly Executed by Her Father for Converting to Christianity

My name is Mariam.

That is not the name I was born with, but it is the name I have chosen for this testimony to protect those who remain.

I am 35 years old now, and I sit here in a small apartment in a country I never imagined I would call home.

Holding a photograph that has traveled with me across continents and through years that sometimes feel like lifetimes.

The woman in this photograph is my sister.

She was everything beautiful that I knew in this world before I understood what beauty truly meant.

Before I understood what love truly cost.

I need to tell you her story.

Our story.

Not because it is easy to tell.

Even now, 22 years later, my hands shake as I begin.

But because silence is a kind of death, too.

and she deserves to live in the telling.

The world needs to know what happened in a dusty city in southwestern Iran.

In a house where prayer mats were laid five times a day, but where the prayers themselves had become empty words repeated without thought, without heart, without the presence of the one we claim to worship.

Before Miriam continues her 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 am speaking to you today from a place of safety.

But that safety came at a price I am still learning to understand.

My sister paid a price too, the highest price.

And in paying it, she gave me something I did not know I needed.

She gave me life, real life, eternal life.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me take you back.

I was born in Avas in Kuzan province in the southwestern corner of Iran.

If you have never been there, let me paint it for you with the memories that still come to me in dreams.

The heat in summer was not just hot.

It was the kind of heat that pressed down on your skull like a heavy hand, that made the air shimmer and dance above the roads, that drove people indoors during the afternoon hours, when even the stray dogs sought shade.

[snorts] In summer, the temperatures could climb past 50° C.

The dust was everywhere, fine and persistent, working its way into your clothes, your hair, your lungs.

Our home was a modest twostory house in a neighborhood where all the houses looked somewhat alike.

Pale concrete walls, flat roofs, small courtyards hidden behind metal gates.

My father was an important man, and we could have lived in a better area, but he preferred to remain among the people he considered faithful, the ones who attended mosque regularly, who kept the rules, who did not question.

Inside our home, everything was ordered.

My mother kept the floors spotless, the carpets beaten and swept.

The smell of our house was a mixture of rose water, cardamom tea, and the particular scent of sunwarmed concrete.

There was also another smell, harder to name, the smell of fear perhaps, or silence, or the weight of unspoken things.

I did not recognize it as a child.

I thought all homes felt like ours with that careful quietness, that sense of walking softly lest you disturb something.

My father’s name I will not give you.

But I will tell you what he was.

General Hassan or decorated commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

a man who had fought in the war with Iraq, who bore scars on his body and deeper scars in his soul.

He was also a volunteer member of the Basie, the auxiliary forces that enforced religious law.

In our region, this meant he was both feared and respected.

When he walked through the market, men greeted him with careful respect.

When he came home, we fell silent.

I do not want you to think he was a monster from the beginning.

That would be too simple.

And the truth is never simple.

He believed he was righteous.

He believed he was serving God.

He prayed faithfully, fasted during Ramadan, gave to the poor.

He provided for our family.

He was by the standards of our community a good Muslim man.

But there was something hard in him.

something that had calcified over years of war and ideology, something that could not bend.

My mother was the opposite.

Soft where he was hard, silent where he was loud.

She moved through our house like a shadow, efficient, and nearly invisible.

I rarely heard her laugh.

I cannot remember a single time she contradicted my father.

She was from a generation and a culture where women learned early that survival meant accommodation, that peace meant submission.

I loved her, but I also felt sorry for her in ways I could not articulate as a child.

She seemed always to be holding her breath.

And then there was Nasarine.

My sister was eight years older than me, which meant that by the time I have my earliest clear memories, she was already 10 or 11, already becoming the young woman she would be.

Where I was plain and awkward, she was lovely, not in the obvious way that draws attention on the street.

That would have been dangerous, but in a gentler way.

She had large, dark eyes that seemed always to be thinking, observing.

Her hands were graceful.

When she moved, there was something peaceful about it, as if she carried calm within her.

Nasrin was the perfect daughter.

[snorts] She prayed when she was supposed to pray.

She wore her hijab properly, even at home sometimes, especially when my father was present.

She studied hard.

My father allowed this because he was proud of her intelligence.

And she never complained.

She helped my mother with cooking and cleaning without being asked.

She was patient with me, her little sister who followed her everywhere, who wanted to be near her always.

I remember the sound of her voice when she read to me.

We did not have many books, but the ones we had, she would read to me at night sometimes in the room we shared.

Her voice was soft and steady.

Sometimes she would tell me stories that were not from books.

Stories she made up about brave girls who went on adventures.

I loved those stories.

I love the way she made me feel like the world was bigger than our house, our neighborhood, our city.

But there were also times when I would catch her staring out the window with an expression I could not read.

times when she seemed far away, even though she was sitting right next to me.

Times when I saw sadness in her eyes that frightened me because I did not understand what could make someone so good, so obedient, so perfect feel sad.

Our father was proud of her.

He would tell his friends about her academic achievements.

He had plans for her, a suitable marriage to a religious man, a life of piety and service.

She was in his eyes proof that he had raised his children correctly.

She was his success story.

I think now about how blind he was, how blind we all were.

Our neighborhood was typical of many in Avas.

The streets were narrow, dusty, lined with walls that hid family courtyards.

You could hear the sounds of life through those walls, children playing, women talking, the clatter of cooking.

Five times a day, the call to prayer echoed from the mosque three streets over.

Everyone knew everyone, which meant everyone watched everyone.

Privacy was an illusion.

In our world, religion was not just belief.

[snorts] It was law.

It was culture.

It was identity.

To be Iranian was to be Muslim.

To be a good person was to follow the rules.

The rules governed everything.

What you wore, what you ate, who you spoke to, how you spoke, where you went, what you thought, or at least what you said you thought.

The religious police were everywhere.

Sometimes they were official, the Gasha Ershod, the guidance patrol with their vans and their authority.

Sometimes they were unofficial, like my father and his colleagues in the besiege who enforced morality in the neighborhoods.

Women could be stopped for showing too much hair.

Young people could be arrested for possessing Western music.

Satellite dishes were illegal but common, hidden on rooftops.

sources of glimpses into another world.

But you had to be careful, always careful.

There were stories whispered about people who had been arrested, about interrogations, about prisons, about things that happened to people who broke the rules, who questioned, who stepped out of line.

These stories were never told loudly.

They floated through the community like smoke, like warnings, like ghosts.

My father was part of this system.

He believed in it.

He would come home and talk about operations, about people they had caught doing immoral things, about the importance of maintaining Islamic values.

My mother would nod and serve him tea.

Nasarin would be quiet.

I too young to fully understand would listen and feel a vague unease that I could not name.

I remember one evening I must have been seven or 8 years old when my father came home angry.

Someone he knew, a man from our mosque had been discovered to have alcohol in his home.

The man had been arrested.

My father was angry not just at the man but at the weakness, the corruption, the betrayal of faith.

He spoke about it all through dinner, his voice rising.

I remember watching Nasarin as he spoke.

She kept her eyes on her plate.

She did not eat much.

After dinner, when we were alone in our room, I asked her why the man having alcohol was so bad.

It was a child’s question.

innocent, curious.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said something I did not understand then, but have never forgotten.

She said that rules were important, but that sometimes people confused rules with God.

She said it very quietly, almost to herself.

Then she looked at me and smiled and changed the subject.

That was Nasrin.

Always thinking, always questioning, but quietly, privately, in ways that no one else could see.

The years of my childhood blend together in memory.

Hot summers, school, family routines, the rhythm of prayer times and meals and seasons.

But there are moments that stand out with clarity, like photographs in an album.

I remember Nasin teaching me to read.

She was patient, encouraging.

She made it seem like a gift, like magic, to be able to look at marks on paper and hear words, stories, ideas.

My father valued education for boys more than for girls.

But he allowed us to attend school because he believed educated women made better mothers.

Nasrin took this permission and ran with it.

She devoured books.

She excelled.

When she was accepted to university in Thran, my father was proud but also worried.

Tehran was far away, less controlled, more dangerous in its freedoms.

But he allowed it.

Nasrin was trustworthy.

She would stay with a religious family, attend classes, come home for breaks.

She would not be corrupted.

She left for Thran when I was 10 years old.

I cried for 3 days.

The house felt empty without her.

My mother moved through the rooms even more quietly, as if Nasrin’s absence had taken something essential from the air itself.

My father seemed satisfied that his daughter was pursuing higher education, that she would return more knowledgeable, more valuable.

She came home for holidays and breaks.

At first, she seemed the same.

Quiet, gentle, obedient.

But over time, over the months and years between 1998 and 2001, I began to notice small changes.

The way she looked at my father when he spoke about religion, a certain sadness in her eyes that seemed deeper than before, and also something else, a kind of peace that I could not explain.

She seemed less afraid somehow, even as she seemed more aware of something.

When she was home, she would spend hours with me.

We would walk together in the evenings when the heat had lessened.

She would ask me about school, about my friends, about my thoughts.

She listened in a way that made me feel important, heard.

She never spoke down to me, even though I was just a child.

I remember one evening, it must have been late 1999 or early 2000, when we were sitting on the roof of our house where it was cooler.

The stars were bright above us.

The city lights glowed orange in the distance.

I asked her if she was happy.

It was a simple question, but she took a long time to answer.

Finally, she said that she was learning about happiness, about what it meant, about where it came from.

She said it came from strange places sometimes, places you did not expect.

I asked her what she meant.

She smiled and touched my cheek and told me that one day I would understand, that she hoped I would understand.

I remember feeling that there was something she wanted to tell me but could not.

Something important, something hidden.

The discovery came in the summer of 2001.

I was 13 years old.

Nasarin was home for a long break and we were sharing our room again.

One afternoon when she was out with my mother at the market, I was in our room bored looking for something to read.

I found the book hidden between her mattress and the bed frame.

At first, I thought it was just a book, and I was excited because Nasarin’s books were always interesting.

But when I pulled it out and looked at the cover, I felt ice in my stomach.

It was worn, the cover dark, and the words on it were in Farsy.

But I recognized what it was immediately.

I had seen pictures of such books in school, in warnings about Christian missionaries, about enemies of Islam.

It was a Bible.

I dropped it as if it had burned me.

My heart was pounding.

[snorts] I looked around our empty room as if someone might be watching.

I knew what this meant.

I knew what happened to people who had these books.

I knew what happened to Muslims who read them.

Why did Nasin have this? Where did she get it? Did she know how dangerous this was? I should have told my father immediately.

That is what a good daughter would do.

That is what I had been taught.

But she was my sister, my Nasarin, and I loved her more than I feared anything else.

I hid the book again exactly where I had found it.

My hands shook as I did it.

I left the room and tried to act normal when my mother and Nasarin returned, but I could not stop thinking about it.

That night, lying in my bed across from hers, I watched her in the darkness, wondering who she really was, wondering what I did not know.

Two days passed before I found the courage to confront her.

I waited until we were alone, until my parents were both out.

I closed the door to our room and stood in front of it, blocking it, my heart hammering so hard I thought she must be able to hear it.

I told her I had found the book.

The look on her face.

I will never forget it.

Fear, yes, but also something like a relief.

As if she had been waiting for this moment, as if carrying the secret alone had been exhausting.

She sat down on her bed and was quiet for a long time.

I stood there waiting, terrified, not knowing what to do.

Finally, she looked up at me and her eyes were filled with tears.

She asked me to sit down next to her.

I did, keeping my distance, wary.

Then she told me the truth.

She told me that in Thran she had met people, secret people, people who followed Jesus, Christians, former Muslims who had converted, who met in hidden places, who risked everything to worship in ways that were forbidden.

She told me that at first she had been afraid of them, that she had thought they were deceived, lost, but they had shown her such kindness, such love, such peace.

She told me they had given her the book, that she had started reading it in secret just to understand what made them willing to risk so much.

And then she said something had happened.

She had encountered someone, not a person, but a presence.

She called it Jesus.

She said she had felt love like she had never known, acceptance like she had never experienced, peace that made no sense in the middle of fear.

She said that all her life she had been performing performing prayers, performing obedience, performing faith, but that for the first time she had experienced something real, something that saw into her heart and loved what it saw there.

She told me she had given her life to Jesus, that she believed he was who he said he was, that she could not go back.

I could not process what she was saying.

My mind was spinning.

I felt betrayed, frightened, confused.

This was my sister, the perfect daughter, the obedient one.

This was apostasy.

This was punishable by death.

This was the worst thing a person could do.

But she was also my sister, sitting in front of me with tears running down her face, and I had never seen her look so peaceful and so terrified at the same time.

She begged me not to tell anyone.

She said she knew it was asking too much, that he was putting me in danger too by telling me, but that she could not lie to me anymore.

She said she loved me.

She said she prayed for me every day.

She said she wanted me to know this love she had found, this Jesus who had saved her.

I did not know what to say.

Part of me wanted to scream, to run to my father, to stop this madness before it destroyed our family.

But another part of me, a part I did not understand, was drawn to the light in her eyes, to the certainty in her voice, to the peace that seemed to radiate from her even in her fear.

I told her I would not tell.

I told her she had to be more careful.

I told her I did not understand and I was not sure I wanted to understand but that she was my sister and I loved her.

She hugged me then held me tight and whispered thank you over and over.

I felt her tears on my neck.

I felt my own tears coming too, though I did not fully know why I was crying.

That night marked the beginning of the end, though I did not know it then.

From that moment on, I carried her secret like a stone in my chest.

I watched my father at prayers, knowing what he would do if he knew.

I watched my mother in her silence, wondering if a mother’s heart would choose her daughter or her faith.

I watched Nasarin moving through our home like a ghost, performing her role, hiding her truth, living two lives at once.

And I began without meaning to to watch for myself, to notice things I had never questioned before.

To wonder why we did what we did.

To feel the weight of the rules, the rituals, the fear that governed everything.

There is one more memory from this time that I need to tell you about before we move forward.

Because it was the moment I began to see my sister, not just as my sister, but as someone brave, someone willing to pay a cost I could not yet comprehend.

It was December 2002, a cold evening.

Winter in Avas was nothing like the summer heat.

It could get surprisingly cold.

The damp kind of cold that worked into your bones.

Nasrin was home for winter break from university.

We were in our room.

My father was at a meeting of some kind.

My mother was preparing dinner.

Nasarin was sitting on her bed holding something in her hand.

She called me over.

When I approached, she opened her hand and showed me what she held.

A small silver cross on a thin chain.

It was simple, unadorned, no bigger than my thumbnail.

She told me she wanted me to have it.

Not to wear, that would be too dangerous, but to keep, to hide.

She said that if anything ever happened to her, she wanted me to have it, to remember.

She said the cross was a symbol of love that was willing to die, love that was stronger than death, love that conquered fear.

I stared at that small piece of silver and felt dread wash over me.

I asked her why she was talking like this, why she was talking like something was going to happen.

She smiled, but it was a sad smile.

She said she did not know what would happen, but that she knew she could not keep hiding forever.

That eventually truth came out, that she was not afraid of what that might cost because Jesus had already paid a greater cost for her.

I wanted to refuse it.

I wanted to tell her to stop talking like this, to stop being so reckless, to just be normal again.

But I could not refuse her.

I took the cross.

I hid it in a small tear in my mattress deep where no one would find it.

That night, I lay awake for hours, feeling the shape of that cross beneath me, feeling the weight of what it represented.

My sister had chosen something I did not understand over everything that was supposed to matter.

Family, safety, community, the faith we had been born into.

I did not understand it then, but I felt it.

I felt the magnitude of her choice.

I felt the danger pressing in.

And in the darkness of our room, listening to her quiet breathing from the bed across from mine, I felt something else, too.

The first stirring of a question I had never allowed myself to ask before.

What if she was right? What if everything we had been taught was wrong? What if there was something more, something real, something worth the cost she was preparing to pay? I pushed the thought away, but it had already taken root.

And there, in the house of silence, in a room shared by two sisters who loved each other across an impossible divide, the seeds of my own journey had been planted.

I just did not know yet how much blood would water them before they grew.

Time has a strange quality when I look back on the months between finding that Bible and the moment everything shattered.

In some ways those months feel like years.

So much happened internally.

So many small moments that changed me.

In s other ways they feel like days.

Like I blinked and it was over.

Like there was never enough time to prepare for what was coming.

I was 13 then 14 years old.

An age when you are not quite a child anymore but not yet an adult.

An age when you begin to question things, to see contradictions, to feel the cage of your world, even if you do not yet have words for the feeling.

Nasrin was 21, then 22.

In our culture, this was already late for marriage.

My father had begun making inquiries, talking to families, considering suitable men.

Nasarin was polite about these conversations, but non-committal.

She always had a reason why the timing was not right.

She needed to finish her studies first.

She wanted to wait a little longer.

My father was patient because she was his obedient daughter, his pride.

He did not see the quiet resistance in her delays.

But I saw it.

I saw everything differently now.

After I discovered her secret, I became a spy in my own home.

Not because I wanted to betray her, never that, but because I could not stop watching, noticing, trying to understand.

I watched the way she bowed for prayers with everyone else.

But her lips moved differently during the recitations, as if she were praying to someone else.

I watched the way she lowered her eyes when my father spoke about the enemies of Islam, about apostates, about the righteous duty to defend the faith.

I watched the way she would slip out of the house on errands and return with a lightness in her step that seemed out of proportion to a trip to the market.

She was living a double life.

And now that I knew about it, I could see the seams.

It terrified me.

It fascinated me.

Tran was 500 kilometers away from Avas, about an 8-hour drive, but it might as well have been a different world.

When Nasrin was there, away from our family, away from the surveillance of our neighborhood, she could be someone else.

She could attend her secret church.

She could study her forbidden book.

She could worship her forbidden god.

And then she would come home and slip back into the role of beautiful daughter.

And I marveled at her ability to do this, to carry such weight without breaking, except she was breaking.

I could see it.

The strain was showing in small ways.

She was thinner.

She slept less.

Sometimes I would wake in the night and find her sitting by the window, staring out at nothing, her lips moving in silent prayer.

She was more distant from our parents, responding when spoken to, but volunteering nothing.

[snorts] My mother noticed and worried in her quiet way.

My father attributed it to the stress of university studies and was pleased that she was taking her education so seriously.

I alone knew the truth and carrying that knowledge felt like carrying a bomb.

Every day I woke up expecting it to explode.

It was during her spring break in 2002 that we had the conversation that changed me.

Not all at once.

I was not ready for that yet, but it planted something that would grow.

She had been home for 3 days, and I had been working up the courage to ask her questions.

Real questions.

Not just questions about the danger she was in, but questions about why.

Why risk everything? What had she found that was worth this? We went for a walk one evening.

We often did this.

It was one of the few acceptable activities for young women in our neighborhood as long as we were properly covered and stayed on the main streets.

The sun was setting, casting long shadows.

The air was warm but not yet hot.

We walked without speaking for a while, just being together.

Finally, I asked her.

I asked her to explain it to me what she believed, what was different, why she had converted.

She was quiet for so long that I thought she might not answer.

We passed other families out for evening walks.

We passed shops closing for the day.

We passed the mosque where my father sometimes led prayers.

And then when we had turned onto a quieter street, she began to speak.

She told me that for her entire life she had tried to be good enough, good enough for our parents, good enough for God.

She had followed every rule, performed every ritual, covered herself properly, prayed the prayers, fasted the fasts.

But inside she had always felt empty.

She had always felt that she was failing, that God was distant and displeased, that no matter what she did, it would never be enough.

She said that Islam taught her about a God who was watching, judging, keeping score.

A God who was merciful, yes, but whose mercy had to be earned, deserved.

She said she had lived in fear of the day of judgment, of the scales that would weigh her deeds, of the possibility that she would be found wanting.

And then she said she had met Jesus.

She told me that the Christians she met in Tehran had told her about a God who did not wait for her to be good enough.

A God who came to her while she was still broken, still failing, still lost.

They told her about Jesus dying on a cross, taking the punishment that should have been hers, offering her forgiveness as a gift, not a reward.

They told her that God loved her not because of what she did, but because of who he was.

At first, she said she had rejected this.

It seemed too easy, too good to be true.

It seemed like cheating, like avoiding responsibility.

But they had given her the Bible and she had started reading it in secret and something had happened.

The words had felt alive.

They had spoken to her heart in ways the Quran never had.

She said it was like the difference between reading about water and actually drinking it.

Both might describe the same thing, but only one satisfied your thirst.

She told me about reading the sermon on the mount, about Jesus’s words that had made her cry.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Words that said God’s kingdom belonged to the broken ones, the humble ones, the ones who knew they had nothing to offer.

She said she had never heard anything like that before.

She said it had shattered something in her, some wall she had built up.

And behind that wall had been a desperate thirst for grace.

Then one night, alone in her rented room in Tehran, she had prayed not the ritual prayers she had been taught, but a prayer from her heart.

She had told Jesus that if he was real, if he truly loved her the way the Christians said he did, she needed to know.

She said she could not keep living the way she was living, empty and performing and afraid.

And she told me he had answered.

She struggled to describe it.

She said it was not a voice she heard with her ears, but something deeper, a presence, a peace that had flooded through her, a sense of being known, completely thoroughly known and yet completely thoroughly loved.

She said it was like coming home to a home she had never been to before.

She said in that moment she had known with certainty that Jesus was real, that he was who he claimed to be, that he had died for her and risen again, and that she belonged to him now.

She told me that from that night forward, she could not deny him, even if it cost her everything, even if it cost her life.

I listened to all of this in silence.

We had stopped walking.

We were standing in the shadow of a wall in a quiet part of the street.

The call to prayer for Mcgreb, the evening prayer was echoing from the nearby mosque.

In a few minutes, we would need to head home.

I did not know what to say.

Part of me thought she was deceived that she had fallen for the lies of Christians, that she was going to hell.

That was what I had been taught.

That was what I believed or thought I believed.

But another part of me heard something in her words that I had never heard before.

Truth.

Not the truth of rules and regulations and right answers, but the truth of a person who had encountered something real, something that had changed her from the inside out.

I asked her and my voice shook as I asked if she really believed it was worth it, worth losing our family, worth the danger, worth possibly dying.

She looked at me and her eyes were so full of love and sadness that I felt tears spring to my own eyes.

She said yes.

She said that Jesus was worth everything because he had given everything for her.

She said that once you have tasted real water, you cannot go back to pretending you are not thirsty.

Then she asked me something I have never forgotten.

[clears throat] She asked me if I was happy.

If following Islam, following the rules, performing the rituals made me feel close to God, if I felt loved, if I felt peace, I could not answer her because the answer was no.

And admitting that felt like betrayal.

betrayal of my parents, my community, my entire identity.

We walked home in silence.

That night, lying in my bed, I felt something shifting inside me.

I was not ready to admit it yet.

I was not ready to follow where she had gone.

But I could not unhear what she had said.

I could not unfeill the questions she had awakened.

The summer of 2002 was the hottest I remembered.

The temperatures soared above 50° C and the air conditioning in our house struggled to keep up.

People moved slowly, spoke less, conserved their energy.

Even my father seemed subdued by the heat.

Nasin came home for the summer break and stayed for 2 months.

During that time, I watched her more carefully than ever.

I saw the toll the double life was taking on her.

She was thinner, more withdrawn.

But there was also something in her that seemed unshakable, a kind of quiet joy that persisted even through the stress, even through the fear.

We spent many evenings together on the roof where it was slightly cooler.

We would lie on blankets and look at the stars and talk about small things, memories from childhood, her studies, my school.

But sometimes when we were sure we were alone, she would talk about her faith, not trying to convert me, not pushing, just sharing.

She would tell me about the other believers she had met in Thrron.

There were more than I would have imagined.

former Muslims, secret Christians, people from all backgrounds who had found Jesus and were willing to risk everything to follow him.

She told me about their meetings, how they would gather in different homes, never the same place twice in a row, never announced in advance.

How they would worship quietly, keeping the music low, the voices hushed.

How they would pray for each other, for protection, for courage.

How they would study the Bible together, hungry for truth, for understanding.

She said the love in those gatherings was unlike anything she had experienced before.

Real love, sacrificial love, love that did not demand or control or judge, but that served and encouraged and bore one another’s burdens.

She told me about a woman named Sara who had been disowned by her family for converting.

about a young man named Resa who had been beaten by his father but still would not deny Christ, about an older couple who hosted many of the meetings despite knowing that if they were caught, they would face severe punishment.

She spoke of these people with such admiration, such affection.

She said they were her real family now, her brothers and sisters in Christ.

I asked her once if she was afraid.

It was a stupid question.

Of course, she was afraid.

But I needed to hear her answer.

She said yes, she was afraid.

She was human.

She did not want to suffer.

She did not want to die.

But she said that underneath the fear was something stronger.

A confidence that God held her, that nothing could separate her from his love, that even death was not the end.

She said that Jesus had conquered death and so death had lost its power to terrify.

I did not understand this.

Death seemed very powerful to me.

Death was the end of everything.

How could she be so calm about the possibility of it, but she was calm.

Even as the danger grew closer, even as the net began to tighten around her, she maintained that strange otherworldly peace.

The first sign of trouble came in late August, just before she was supposed to return to Thran for the fall semester.

My father had become more involved with the local religious enforcement activities.

There had been a crackdown on immoral behavior in our province, and he was often out late participating in raids, attending coordination meetings.

He would come home and talk about the work they were doing, about the people they were catching, about the importance of maintaining purity in the community.

One evening, he mentioned something that made my blood run cold.

He said they had received intelligence about a network of Christian converts operating in Tehran and other cities.

He said the authorities were working to identify and arrest these apostates.

He said it was a cancer that needed to be cut out.

I looked at Nasarin across the dinner table.

Her face was calm, expressionless.

She kept eating, but I saw her hand tremble slightly as she reached for her water glass.

That night, I begged her not to go back to Thrron.

I told her it was too dangerous, that they were looking for people like her, that she needed to stop before it was too late.

She listened to me with such tenderness.

She held my hands and told me she appreciated my concern, but that she could not turn back now.

She said that God had called her to this and that she trusted him with the outcome.

I wanted to scream at her.

I wanted to shake her.

I wanted to make her see sense.

But I could also see that nothing I said would change her mind.

She had made her choice and she was at peace with it.

She left for Thyron in early September.

I did not know it then, but it would be the last time she would leave our house as a free person.

The months between September 2002 and January 2003 were agony for me.

Nasarin was in Thrron and I was home carrying the weight of her secret, watching my father become more and more involved in hunting down people exactly like her.

I felt like I was living in a nightmare, waiting for the moment when those two worlds would collide.

She called home occasionally, brief conversations on our family telephone, always with my mother or father listening nearby.

The conversations were meaningless.

Yes, classes were going well.

Yes, she was eating properly.

Yes, she would be home for winter break.

But I listened for the tone underneath the words, and I could hear the strain.

In November, my father came home excited.

They had made arrests in Thran.

Several Christian converts caught in a meeting, Bibles, and other materials confiscated.

He said it was a major success.

I felt sick.

I wanted to ask if Nashin was safe, but of course, I could not.

I could not show any concern about Christians without raising suspicion.

That night, I took out the small cross she had given me hidden in my mattress.

I held it in my hand, and for the first time in my life, I prayed to Jesus.

Not because I believed yet, not because I was ready to convert, but because I was desperate.

I asked him if he was real to protect my sister.

I asked him not to let her be caught.

I asked him to keep her safe.

I did not know if he heard me.

I did not know if he was listening, but I had nowhere else to turn.

When Nostrin came home for winter break in late December, I could see the toll it was taking on her.

She had lost weight.

There were dark circles under her eyes, but that peace was still there.

That inexplicable peace.

She hugged me tight when she arrived and whispered in my ear that God was faithful, that whatever happened, God was faithful.

We had three weeks together.

three weeks that I tried to memorize every moment of as if some part of me knew they would be the last.

We spent as much time together as we could.

We took walks.

We lay on the roof despite the winter cold.

We talked about everything and nothing.

One night she told me more about her life in Thrron.

She said the crackdown had scared many of the believers, but it had also strengthened them.

She said persecution had a way of purifying faith, of burning away everything that was not real.

She said the Christians she knew were the most joyful, most alive people she had ever met, and it was because they had counted the cost and decided Jesus was worth it.

She told me that she had been baptized.

This was deeply significant.

Baptism was a public declaration of faith, a point of no return.

She described being immersed in water, the symbolism of dying to her old life and rising to new life in Christ.

She said it was one of the most powerful moments of her life.

She said she had wept with joy.

I asked her why she was telling me all of this, why she was sharing so much now.

She said she wanted me to understand.

She wanted me to know what she had found, what she believed, why she was willing to pay the price.

She said that she prayed every day that I would find Jesus too, that I would experience the love that had transformed her.

I told her I was not ready, that I was afraid, that I did not know what I believed.

She said that was okay.

She said that God was patient, that he would pursue me in his own time and way.

She said all she asked was that I keep my heart open, that I be willing to question, that I be willing to seek truth wherever it led.

The last night before she was supposed to return to Thran, she gave me her Bible, the same one I had found in her mattress.

She said she had another copy hidden in Tyrron and she wanted me to have this one.

She said that if I ever wanted to understand, to really understand, everything was in this book.

I took it with trembling hands, I hid it in the same place she had hidden it between the mattress and the bed frame.

That night, after she had fallen asleep, I took it out and opened it.

I did not know where to start, so I just opened it randomly.

My eyes fell on words in the book of John 15:13.

Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

I closed the book quickly, as if the words had burned me.

I shoved it back into its hiding place.

But those words stayed with me.

They echoed in my mind as I tried to sleep.

Greater love has no one than this.

I did not know yet that my sister was preparing to live out those words.

I did not know that she was ready to lay down her life, not just for her friends, but for her faith, for her Jesus.

I did not know that in just a few weeks those words would stop being abstract theology and would become terrible, beautiful reality.

Nasarin never made it back to Tehran.

The plan changed at the last moment.

My father received some instructions, something that required her to delay her return by a week.

I do not remember the exact reason, some administrative issue with the university, some paperwork that needed to be sorted.

It seemed insignificant at the time.

But now I wonder if God orchestrated it, if he was bringing everything to its appointed moment.

That extra week was both a gift and a torture.

Another 7 days with my sister.

Another 7 days of watching her prepare.

Though I did not realize then what she was preparing for.

I remember one morning during that week I woke early and found her sitting by the window in our room reading her Bible.

The winter sun was just beginning to rise, casting pale light across her face.

She looked so peaceful, so beautiful.

I watched her for a moment before she noticed I was awake.

When she turned to me, she smiled and I saw such love in her eyes.

She asked me if I wanted her to read to me.

I said yes.

She read from the Psalms, though I did not know which one at the time.

I only remember fragments of the words.

Something about God being a refuge, a fortress, a place of safety, even in the midst of danger.

Her voice was soft and steady.

I felt something stir in my chest as she read, something I did not have words for, something that felt like longing, like homesickness for a home I had never known.

After she finished reading, she looked at me for a long moment.

Then she said something I have carried with me ever since.

She said that no matter what happened, she wanted me to know that choosing Jesus was the best decision she had ever made.

She said that he had given her life, real life, abundant life.

She said that even if following him cost her everything in this world, it was worth it for the treasure she had gained.

I asked her, my voice barely a whisper, what treasure she meant.

She touched her chest over her heart and said that Jesus himself was the treasure.

That knowing him, being loved by him was worth more than anything this world could offer.

I did not understand, not then.

But I filed her words away in my heart alongside all the other things she had said, all the other seeds she had planted.

I did not know that these seeds would need to be watered with blood before they could grow.

The final day of that week, the last day of my sister’s freedom, was an ordinary day.

We cleaned the house with my mother.

We prepared meals.

We went to the market.

It was January, the days short and cool.

Nothing seemed remarkable.

Nothing seemed different.

That evening, we sat together on her bed, just the two of us.

I remember she took my hand and held it.

Her hand was warm and small in mine.

She told me she loved me.

She told me she was proud of me.

She told me that I was brave and smart and that I would have a good life.

I asked her why she was talking like this, why it sounded like goodbye.

She smiled and said she did not know what tomorrow would bring, but that she wanted me to know these things just in case.

I should have known then.

I should have felt the shadow falling across us.

But I was 14 years old and I still believe that if I ignored the danger, if I did not speak it aloud, it might never come.

That night, I fell asleep listening to her quiet breathing across our room.

I did not know it was the last night we would spend together.

I did not know that by the next evening she would be gone and our family would be shattered and my life would be forever divided into before and after.

If I had known, what would I have said? What would I have done? Would I have begged her to run, to hide, to save herself? But she would not have run.

I know that now.

She had already decided.

She had already surrendered her life to something bigger than survival, bigger than safety, bigger than this world.

She had surrendered to love.

And love, I would learn, was willing to die.

The knock on the door came early, not the call to prayer early, but the dark early.

When the city was still sleeping and the winter cold pressed against the windows, I woke to the sound of it.

Sharp, insistent, authoritative, the kind of knock that meant official business, the kind of knock that meant trouble.

I heard my father moving through the house, heard his voice at the door, heard other men’s voices responding.

I sat up in bed, my heart already racing, already knowing somehow that this was it.

This was the moment everything fell apart.

Nasrin was already awake.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, fully dressed, as if she had been waiting.

In the dim light from the street lamp outside our window, I could see her face.

It was calm, too calm, and I knew then that she had been expecting this.

Perhaps not this exact morning, but she had known it was coming.

The voices grew louder.

My father’s voice raised in surprise or anger, or both.

My mother’s softer voice asking questions.

Other men’s voices, official voices explaining something, and then footsteps on the stairs coming toward our room.

Nasrin looked at me.

Even now, all these years later, I can see that look.

There was love in it.

There was sorrow.

There was also something like peace, like acceptance, like a person who had already made their decision and found rest in it.

She said my name, just my name, soft and clear.

And then she said she was sorry.

Sorry for the pain this would cause me.

Sorry for what I was about to witness, but not sorry for her choice.

Never sorry for Jesus.

The door opened.

My father stood there and behind him were two other men in the uniform of the bassie.

Their faces were hard set.

My father’s face was something I had never seen before.

Confusion and anger and something that might have been fear.

He told Nasarin to come with them.

They needed to ask her some questions.

His voice was controlled, but tight, like a rope stretched too thin.

She stood up.

She did not argue.

She did not run.

She did not even ask what this was about.

She simply stood and walked toward the door.

As she passed me, she touched my shoulder.

Just a brief touch, and then she was gone.

I jumped out of bed and followed them downstairs.

My mother was in the hallway, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with confusion and fear.

[snorts] The men were explaining something to my father about reports they had received about accusations about the need for investigation.

My father’s face was growing darker with each word.

They took Nasarine out into the pre-dawn darkness.

I watched from the doorway as they put her in their vehicle.

She looked back at our house once, and even across the distance, even in the darkness, I felt her eyes find mine.

And then they drove away, and she was gone.

The next hours were chaos.

My father was on the phone making calls, trying to understand what was happening.

My mother moved through the house like a ghost, ringing her hands, starting tasks and forgetting them.

Her face drained of color.

I sat on the bottom stair, frozen, unable to think, unable to process what had just happened.

By midm morning, my father had learned enough to understand the situation.

[snorts] His face when he came into the living room to tell my mother was like stone, hard and cold and dead.

Nasin had been reported by someone in Thrron.

one of the Christian groups she had been meeting with had been infiltrated.

Or perhaps someone had been caught and had given names under interrogation.

She was being accused of apostasy, of converting from Islam to Christianity, of meeting with other apostates, of possessing illegal religious materials.

My mother made a sound like a wounded animal.

She sank into a chair, her hand pressed to her chest.

I felt the room spinning around me.

This was it.

The thing I had feared for so long, the thing I had prayed would never happen.

It was happening.

My father stood in the center of the room, his hands clenched into fists.

I watched him grapple with it.

The shame, the rage, the disbelief.

his daughter, his perfect obedient daughter, an apostate, a traitor to Islam, a betrayer of everything he stood for, everything he had fought for.

He said her name once, like a curse.

Then he walked out of the house, and we did not see him for the rest of the day.

The following days were a nightmare that seemed to have no end.

My father came and went stonefaced, refusing to speak about what was happening.

My mother alternated between silent weeping and desperate prayers.

I moved through the house like a zombie, unable to eat, unable to sleep properly, my mind obsessing over Nasin, over where she was, what was happening to her, what they were doing to her.

On the third day, my father called my mother and me into the living room.

He stood before us with a face I did not recognize.

He told us that Nasarine had confessed.

She had admitted to converting to Christianity.

She had admitted to meeting with other converts.

She had admitted to possessing a Bible and reading it.

But she had not done the one thing that might have saved her.

She had not recanted.

They had given her the opportunity to renounce her faith, to return to Islam, to ask for forgiveness.

She had refused.

More than refused, she had proclaimed her faith in Jesus Christ.

She had said she could not deny him.

She had said she would rather die than betray him.

My mother collapsed.

I caught her before she hit the floor.

My father stood there watching his wife crumble and his face remained hard.

I wondered in that moment if he had any softness left, any love, any room for mercy.

He said there was more.

They had found evidence of other crimes, immorality, improper relationships.

They had witnesses who would testify.

I knew even then that these were lies, fabrications meant to justify what they wanted to do anyway.

Apostasy alone was enough to warrant death.

But by adding accusations of sexual immorality, they made it easier.

They made her less sympathetic.

They made her execution more palatable to those who might have had doubts.

My father said all of this in a flat, dead voice.

Then he said something that made my blood turn to ice.

He said that he had a duty to perform.

He was a member of the religious police.

He was a defender of Islam.

He could not show weakness or mercy, especially not to his own family.

If anything, he had to be even more zealous to prove that his loyalty was to God, not to blood.

I understood then what he was saying.

He would not try to save her.

He might even participate in her punishment.

His honor, his reputation, his position.

All of it required that he sacrifice his daughter to prove his righteousness.

I wanted to scream at him.

I wanted to call him a monster.

But I was 14 years old and I was terrified and I had no power.

So I said nothing.

I helped my mother to her room and stayed with her while she wept.

That night, alone in the room I had shared with Nasin, I lay in her empty bed and tried to smell her scent on the pillow.

I reached between the mattresses and pulled out her Bible.

I held it against my chest and cried until I had no tears left.

And then I did something I had never done before.

I prayed to her Jesus, not the tentative, desperate prayer I had prayed months ago when I had asked for her protection.

This was different.

This was angry.

This was a demand.

I told him that if he was real, he had to do something.

He had to save her.

He had to rescue her.

She [snorts] was his follower, his beloved, his child.

He could not let them kill her.

He had to intervene.

He had to perform a miracle.

I prayed this for hours, begging, pleading, demanding.

I prayed until exhaustion overtook me.

And I fell into a restless sleep.

Still clutching the Bible, still believing that surely God would answer.

Surely he would save his faithful servant.

I did not yet understand that sometimes God’s answer is not rescue.

Sometimes his answer is strength to endure.

Sometimes his answer is the cross before the resurrection.

Three weeks passed.

3 weeks of agony, of waiting, of not knowing.

We were not allowed to see Nasarin.

My father went to the facility where she was being held, but he would not tell us what happened there, what he saw, whether he spoke to her.

My mother aged years in those weeks.

I stopped going to school.

I could not concentrate on anything except the gnawing terror in my gut.

I learned later, much later from sources I cannot name some of what happened to Nasin during those weeks.

She was interrogated repeatedly.

She was pressured to recant.

She was shown what would happen to her if she did not.

She was kept in a small cell with other women, some of them also accused of apostasy, some of them convicted of other crimes.

She was given minimal food and water.

She was not allowed to sleep for long stretches.

Standard interrogation techniques designed to break a person’s will, but they did not break her.

Every time they asked her to deny Jesus, she refused.

Every time they offered her a way out, she declined.

She told them that Jesus Christ was Lord, that he had died for her sins and risen from the dead, that she belonged to him, and nothing they did to her could change that.

They told her she would be executed.

She said she was ready.

They told her she would be executed publicly as a warning to others.

She said she prayed her death would bring glory to God.

They told her she would die in shame, condemned by God and man.

She said Jesus was not ashamed of her and that was all that mattered.

One of the interrogators, frustrated by her stubbornness, asked her how she could throw away her life for a foreign god, for a religion of infidels.

She answered that Jesus was not foreign, that he had created all people, that he loved all people, that he had died for all people.

She said that God’s love knew no borders, no nationalities, no boundaries.

She said that she had finally found the God she had been searching for all her life, and she could not let him go.

When I learned these things years later, I wept.

I wept for her courage.

I wept for her faith.

I wept for the beauty of her witness even in the face of death.

But in those three weeks, I knew none of this.

I only knew fear and helplessness and anger at a god who seemed to be doing nothing.

The announcement came in early February.

There would be a public execution in our region.

Several apostates and criminals would be put to death as a warning and a purification of the community.

Nasrin’s name was on the list.

So were five others, three men and two women, all of them accused of converting to Christianity.

My father came home and told us the date and time.

He said it was our duty to attend.

His voice was hard and empty.

My mother began to wail.

I felt something break inside me, something fundamental, some last hope that this could be avoided.

I asked him if there was anything that could be done, any appeal, any mercy, any last chance.

He looked at me with eyes that seemed already dead and said that the decision was final.

Justice would be carried out.

God’s law would be upheld.

I hated him in that moment.

Hated him with a purity of emotion I had never felt before.

This man who claimed to serve God was allowing his daughter to be murdered.

and he called it righteousness.

This man who spoke of honor had no honor left.

This man who called himself my father was no father at all.

But I said none of this.

I was a child and I had no power and I was drowning in my own fear and grief.

The days until the execution were unreal.

Time moved both too slowly and too quickly.

My mother could not stop crying.

She barely ate.

She moved through the house like a living ghost.

My father was gone most of the time.

And when he was home, he spoke to no one.

I existed in a state of numb shock, unable to fully process what was coming, unable to accept it, unable to stop it.

The night before the execution, I could not sleep.

I lay in my bed in Nasin’s bed, which I had been sleeping in since they took her, and I pulled out her Bible again.

I opened it randomly, looking for something, anything that would make sense of this.

My eyes fell on words in the book of Matthew, Jesus speaking.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in heaven.

For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

I read those words over and over.

Blessed are you when people persecute you because of me.

Rejoice and be glad.

Great is your reward in heaven.

How could Nasrin rejoice? How could she be glad? How could she see blessing in this horror? I could not understand it.

But even as I could not understand it, I felt something stirring in me.

Some seed that she had planted.

Some truth that was taking root despite my resistance.

My sister was going to die tomorrow.

But she was not being destroyed.

Something in her was untouchable, unreachable by her persecutors.

Something in her already belonged to another world.

I closed the Bible and held it against my heart.

And I made a promise to my sister even though she could not hear me.

I promised that I would remember.

I promised that I would tell her story.

I promised that her death would not be meaningless.

I did not know yet that her death would also become my life.

I did not know yet that I was standing on the edge of my own transformation.

I only knew that tomorrow I would watch my sister die and nothing would ever be the same again.

The sun rose on the day of execution.

I watched it through our window, watch the light spread across the city, and I thought about how wrong it was that the sun could rise on such a day.

How could the world continue as if nothing was happening? How could the birds still sing? The shopkeepers still open their stores.

The children still play in the streets.

But the world did continue.

It always does.

Even when your world is ending, the rest of the world goes on.

My mother had to be helped to dress.

She could barely stand.

My father was already gone, having left before dawn.

When it was time to leave, a car came for us.

We were driven through the city toward the outskirts, toward the place where executions were carried out.

I watched the familiar streets pass by the window.

I had walked these streets my whole life.

I knew every corner, every shop.

Everything looked the same.

But I was different.

Something in me had already begun to die so that something else could be born.

We were going to watch my sister die for Jesus.

And I did not know it yet, but I was also going to see why Jesus was worth dying for.

The cross was coming.

And after the cross would come, though I could not imagine it then, resurrection.

I need to tell you what I saw that day.

I need to tell you because my sister’s voice was silenced, but mine was not.

I need to tell you because the world needs to know what happens to people who choose Jesus in places where that choice means death.

I need to tell you because even now 22 years later there are sisters and brothers facing the same choice and their stories deserve to be told.

But this is hard.

Even after all this time, even after all the healing God has done in my heart, this is the hardest part to speak about.

When I close my eyes, I am 14 years old again, sitting in that car, watching the city fall away behind us, heading toward the place where my sister would die.

The execution site was on the outskirts of Avas in an area of empty land where the city met the desert.

I had never been there before, but I had heard of it.

Everyone had heard of it.

It was where justice was carried out, where criminals were punished, where the community was purified.

That is what they called it, purification.

As if killing people made anything clean.

There were already crowds when we arrived.

The car drove us through a checkpoint where guards verified identities.

And then we were directed to a specific area where families of the condemned were required to sit.

I understood then what this was.

Not just an execution, but a spectacle, a warning, a display of power and righteousness.

The day was bright and cold.

The sky was that deep winter blue, cloudless, endless.

The sun felt wrong, too cheerful, too indifferent.

I wanted the sky to be dark, to match what was happening.

But nature does not care about human suffering.

The light fell on everything equally, on the righteous and the condemned, on the executioners and the mourers.

My mother could barely walk.

She leaned heavily on me.

This woman who had given birth to Nasserin, who had nursed her and raised her and loved her, [snorts] now she was being forced to watch her daughter die.

What kind of God demanded this? What kind of justice was this? These were the questions screaming in my mind, but I had no answers.

We were seated in a roped off section with other families.

I looked at them.

Other mothers, other sisters, other loved ones of the condemned.

Some were weeping openly.

Some sat in stony silence.

Some looked angry.

One woman was praying loudly, begging Allah for mercy.

I wondered if any of them were families of the other Christians who would die today.

I wondered if they too were being torn apart by this.

The area where the executions would take place was a flat open space of packed earth.

At one end was a raised platform where officials sat.

I could see my father there in his uniform sitting with the other religious police and military officials.

His face was like carved stone.

I stared at him and felt nothing but coldness.

Whatever love I had once felt for him had died in the past three weeks.

He had chosen his position, his honor, his version of God over his own daughter.

He was dead to me.

A crowd had gathered beyond the family section.

Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand or more.

Some had come because they were required to, as we were.

Some had come out of curiosity or bloodlust.

Some, I think now, had come because they were afraid not to come.

Afraid that absence would mark them as sympathizers.

Fear governed everything in our world.

Fear of being different.

Fear of questioning.

Fear of being noticed for the wrong reasons.

There was a sound system set up.

Speakers mounted on poles.

Music played.

Religious chanting verses from the Quran.

The irony was bitter in my mouth.

They were playing words about God’s mercy while preparing to kill six people.

The waiting was torture.

We sat there for perhaps 30 minutes, though it felt like hours.

The sun climbed higher.

The cold morning air began to warm.

My mother’s hand gripped mine so tightly that I lost feeling in my fingers, but I did not pull away.

I was all she had left.

My father had abandoned us both.

Then there was a change in the atmosphere, a stirring in the crowd.

A vehicle appeared in the distance, raising dust as it approached.

My heart began to hammer in my chest.

This was it.

They were bringing the condemned.

The vehicle stopped at the edge of the execution area.

Guards got out first, then began leading people out.

Six people.

I was searching for Nasrin, my eyes desperate, terrified of seeing her and terrified of not seeing her.

And then I saw her.

She was thinner than I remembered.

Her face was bruised.

I could see that even from a distance.

She wore a simple gray dress and her hijab was plain and dark.

Her hands were bound in front of her.

But you was walking with her head up, not proud, but not broken either.

There was something in the way she moved that was different from the others.

Different from what I expected.

The six condemned were lined up facing the crowd.

Three men, three women.

I recognized none of the others, but they all wore similar expressions.

Fear, resignation, grief, all except Nasin.

My sister looked peaceful.

Not happy, not joyful, but deeply, impossibly peaceful, as if she knew something the rest of us did not.

An official with a microphone began to speak.

His voice boomed through the speakers, harsh and metallic.

He read out the charges against each of the condemned.

When he got to Nasarin, I heard our family name spoken aloud, heard her accused of apostasy, of converting to Christianity, of corrupting others, of sexual immorality, of betraying Islam and Iran, the lies mixed with truth.

Yes, she had converted.

Yes, she followed Jesus.

But the rest, the accusations of immorality, of corrupting others, these were fabrications designed to make her death more acceptable.

I wanted to stand up and scream that they were lies, but my voice was frozen in my throat.

The officials spoke about the righteousness of Islamic law, about the necessity of protecting the faith, about the mercy of giving these criminals a chance to recant.

He said that each of them had been offered the opportunity to return to Islam to renounce their apostasy to save themselves.

He said that each of them had refused.

Then he asked them again publicly, giving them one final chance.

Would they renounce their false faith and return to Islam? The first man, a young man who looked to be in his 20ies, was asked.

He spoke, but I could not hear his words.

Whatever he said made the official angry.

The official moved to the second person, one of the women.

She shook her head, weeping, but she did not recant.

Then it was Nasrin’s turn.

The official stood in front of her with a microphone.

He asked her if she would renounce Christianity and return to Islam.

She lifted her head and in a voice that was weak from her ordeal but still clear, she said no.

She said she belonged to Jesus Christ.

She said he was her Lord and Savior.

She said she could not deny him.

The microphone picked up her words and carried them across the crowd.

I heard gasps, murmurss.

My mother made a sound like her heart was breaking, which it was.

I sat frozen, unable to breathe.

The official asked her if she understood that she would be executed.

She said yes, she understood.

He asked her if her foreign god was worth dying for.

And I will never forget her answer.

Never.

It is burned into my soul.

She said that Jesus was not foreign, that he loved Iranians as much as anyone, that he had died for her sins and risen from the dead, and that yes, he was worth not just dying for, but living for.

She said that she prayed that even through her death, people would come to know his love.

Then she did something that shocked everyone that I did not understand then, but understand now.

She said she forgave everyone who had hurt her.

[snorts] She said she forgave the interrogators, the judges, the executioners.

And then she looked directly at where we were sitting, at where my father sat on his platform, and she said she forgave him, too.

She said she loved him.

She said Jesus loved him.

My father did not move, did not react.

But I saw something flash across his face.

pain maybe or anger or something else I could not name.

The official moved on to the others.

All six refused to recant.

All six maintained their faith even in the face of death.

I learned later that the three men and the other woman were also Christian converts.

Former Muslims who had found Jesus and could not let him go.

They were all going to die for the same reason my sister was dying.

because they love Jesus more than they love their own lives.

What happened next is something I have relived in nightmares for 22 years.

I will not give you all the graphic details.

Some things are too terrible to speak plainly, but I will tell you what I witnessed because it matters.

Because my sister’s death matters.

Because all of their deaths matter.

The method of execution was hanging.

One by one, the condemned were taken to a construction crane that had been positioned for this purpose.

A noose was placed around each neck, and then they were lifted.

I want to tell you that I was brave, that I watched steadily, that I honored my sister with unflinching witness, but that would be a lie.

When they came for Nasarin, when they placed the noose around her neck, I closed my eyes.

I could not watch.

I could not see it happen.

My mother was screaming.

A sound that was not human, was not even animal, was something beyond sound.

I held her and I closed my eyes and I felt my soul tearing in half.

But even with my eyes closed, I could hear the crowd’s reaction.

I could hear the gasps and the shouts.

And I could hear something else.

Someone singing, a female voice, weak but clear, singing something in Farsy, but with words I did not recognize.

A hymn, a song of praise.

My sister was singing to her Jesus.

As they prepared to kill her, the singing stopped.

I knew what that meant.

I kept my eyes closed.

I could not open them.

I could not see my sister’s body hanging there.

I could not bear it.

Time became strange after that.

I do not know how long we sat there.

I do not know when the other executions happened.

I have no memory of them, though they must have occurred.

My mind had gone somewhere else, somewhere dark and hidden where I could not be reached by the horror.

Eventually, hands were pulling us up, leading us away.

The crowd was dispersing.

It was done.

Justice, they called it.

Purification, defense of the faith.

My sister was dead.

Nasarin, who had braided my hair and read me stories and taught me to read and loved me with a love I did not deserve.

Nasarin, who had been kind and gentle and good.

Nasrin, who had found something worth dying for and had died for it without flinching.

She was gone and the sky had not fallen.

The earth had not opened up.

God had not intervened.

He had let them kill her.

[snorts] He had watched his faithful servant die and had done nothing to stop it.

That was what I thought then.

That was the fury and betrayal and grief that filled me as we drove home in silence.

as we entered our empty house, as I went upstairs to our empty room and lay in her empty bed and screamed into her pillow until my voice was gone.

The days after the execution exist in my memory as fragments, sharp pieces of broken glass that cut when I tried to hold them.

My mother was destroyed.

She could not function.

She lay in her bed and stared at the wall and did not speak.

I had to bring her water, try to make her eat.

She was like a body without a soul.

My father came home that night.

I heard him enter the house, heard his footsteps.

I did not go to see him.

I could not bear to look at his face.

He had stood there on that platform and watched his daughter die and had done nothing.

He had chosen his position, his pride, his version of righteousness over her life.

I hated him.

The next morning, I heard him and my mother talking.

Her voice was a whisper, asking him why.

Why had he let this happen? Why had he not saved her? His voice was hard, defensive.

He had done his duty.

He had upheld the law.

Nasarin had made her choice and had paid the price for it.

He said that he had offered her every chance to save herself.

She had refused.

Her death was her own fault.

I listened from the top of the stairs and felt something crystallize inside me.

In that moment, I understood something about the religion I had been raised in, about the system we lived under, about the God my father served.

It was a God of law without love, of justice without mercy, of rules without relationship.

It was a God who demanded obedience even when obedience meant killing your own child.

It was a God I wanted nothing to do with.

But there was another God.

The God my sister had found.

The God she had died for.

The God whose name she had sung as they killed her.

Jesus.

This Jesus had not demanded that his followers kill for him.

He had died for them.

He had taken the punishment himself.

He had laid down his own life rather than anyone else’s.

I did not understand this fully yet.

I was still too raw, too angry, too broken, but the questions had been planted.

The seeds had been watered, terribly watered, with my sister’s blood, and they were beginning to grow.

On the third day after the execution, I did something I had been afraid to do.

I took out Nasrin’s Bible from its hiding place.

I held it in my shaking hands and I opened it.

I did not know where to start, so I turned to the place where I had seen words that had affected me before.

The Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’s life.

I started reading in Matthew, the first book.

I read about Jesus’s birth, his childhood, his baptism.

I read about his teachings, strange radical teachings that turned everything I knew upside down.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the persecuted.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Turn the other cheek.

Forgive 70* 7.

These were not the teachings of a warrior prophet.

These were not the teachings of someone building an empire or conquering enemies.

These were the teachings of someone who valued people over power, love over law, mercy over judgment.

I kept reading.

I read about Jesus healing the sick, touching the unclean, eating with sinners, defending the woman caught in adultery.

I read about him challenging the religious leaders, calling them hypocrites and whitewash tombs.

I read about him weeping over Jerusalem, loving even those who rejected him.

And then I read about his death, how he was arrested, falsely accused, beaten, mocked, tortured, how he was sentenced to crucifixion, the most shameful death possible.

How he carried his cross through jeering crowds.

How they nailed him to that cross and left him to die.

I stopped reading.

My hands were shaking.

The parallels were too much.

Jesus, innocent, dying on a cross.

Nasarin, innocent, dying at the end of a rope.

Both of them condemned by religious authorities.

Both of them offered chances to save themselves if they would only deny the truth.

Both of them choosing death over betrayal.

But there was something Jesus said on the cross that broke me.

In the middle of his agony, in the middle of being murdered, he prayed for his killers.

Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.

Forgive them.

He forgave the people who were killing him.

Just like Nashin had forgiven the people killing her.

just like she had forgiven my father.

I closed the book and wept.

Not the angry weeping of before, but something different, something softer, something that felt like grief, but also like revelation.

I was beginning to see something, something that terrified me and drew me at the same time.

Over the following weeks, I read that Bible in secret late at night by flashlight.

I could not stop.

The words were alive.

They spoke to something deep inside me, something I had not known was there, something hungry and thirsty and desperate for truth.

I read all four gospels.

I read about Jesus’s resurrection.

How he had died and been buried and then had risen from the dead on the third day.

How he had appeared to his disciples, proven he was alive, given them hope and purpose and a mission.

How he had conquered death itself.

I read the book of Acts about the early Christians, about how they had been persecuted and killed, about how they had suffered and yet had joy, about how the church had grown even through persecution.

I read about Steven, the first martyr who, like Jesus, had prayed for his killers as they stoned him to death.

I read Paul’s letters about grace and faith and love.

About how we are saved not by our works but by God’s mercy, about how nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.

About how to die is gain because to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

Every page seemed to speak directly to me.

Every word seemed chosen for this moment.

I was being pursued by something.

someone and I was running out of places to hide.

I began to understand why Nasarin had been willing to die.

She had found something, someone who loved her, not because she was good enough, but because he was love itself.

She had found forgiveness for all her sins, not earned, but given freely.

She had found peace that made no sense to anyone watching from the outside, but that filled her from the inside out.

She had found life, real life, eternal life, and having found it, she could not let it go, even when letting it go would have saved her earthly life.

Because what profit is there in gaining the whole world, but losing your soul? Jesus had asked that question.

Nasarine had answered it with her life.

She had chosen her soul over her safety.

She had chosen eternity over a few more years on earth.

She had chosen Jesus over everything.

And slowly, painfully, terrifyingly, I was beginning to want to make the same choice.

There was one more thing I needed to understand before I could take that step.

I needed to understand the cross.

Why did Jesus have to die? Why was his death necessary? What did it accomplish? I found my answer in the book of Isaiah in a passage that someone had marked in Nostrin’s Bible, chapter 53.

Words written hundreds of years before Jesus was born, but describing his death with stunning accuracy.

He was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

I read those words over and over, pierced for our transgressions.

The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

By his wounds, we are healed.

The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Jesus had taken the punishment I deserved.

He had absorbed the wrath of God against sin, my sin, every person’s sin, so that I could be forgiven.

He had died in my place.

He had paid the debt I could never pay.

And then he had risen from the dead, proving that his sacrifice was accepted, that death was defeated, that new life was possible.

This was not a God who demanded his followers die for him.

This was a God who died for his followers.

This was not a system of earning favor through good works.

This was a gift freely given that could only be received by faith.

And faith was what Nasarin had had.

Faith that Jesus had done for her what she could never do for herself.

Faith that his love was real and eternal and unshakable.

Faith that even death could not separate her from him.

Sitting in our room, her room, our room, now just my room, I finally understood.

And understanding, I made my choice.

It was late at night, perhaps 2 months after Nasrin’s execution.

I was 15 years old.

I knelt on the floor beside my bed and I prayed to Jesus for the first time with full sincerity, full surrender, full faith.

I told him I was a sinner.

I told him I could not save myself.

I told him I believed he had died for me and risen again.

I told him I wanted the forgiveness he offered, the peace he gave, the life he promised.

I told him I was giving him my life, whatever that meant, whatever it cost.

And I felt it.

Like Nasin had described, a presence, a peace, a sense of being known completely and loved completely, a weight lifting off me that I had not realized I was carrying.

A homecoming to a place I had never been.

I wept, but they were different tears than I had cried before.

These were tears of relief, of joy, of gratitude, of awe.

These were the tears of someone who had been blind and could now see.

Someone who had been dead and was now alive.

My sister had died so that I could live.

She had planted seeds with her words and watered them with her blood.

And now in the darkness of our room, in the quiet of night, those seeds had burst into life.

I was a Christian, a follower of Jesus, born again, saved, a new creation, and I finally understood why it was worth dying for.

Because once you have tasted real life, death loses its power to terrify.

Once you have been loved by perfect love, nothing else matters quite the same way.

Once you have met Jesus, truly met him, you can never be the same.

Nasarin was gone.

But she had not been defeated.

Her death had not been meaningless.

Her witness had not been in vain.

She had led me to Jesus.

And Jesus had given me life.

The sun had risen on the day they killed her.

And now, two months later, in the darkness of my grief, another son was rising.

The son of righteousness with healing in his wings.

Resurrection had come.

I am 35 years old now, sitting in my small apartment in a country where I am free to speak the name of Jesus without fear, free to own a Bible, free to worship, free to tell my story.

The journey from that night when I first gave my life to Christ to this moment of freedom has been long and painful and beautiful and costly.

But I would not trade it for anything.

Let me tell you how I got here.

After my conversion, I lived a double life just as Nasin had.

I was 15 years old, still dependent on my parents, still trapped in a house and a city and a country where my new found faith could get me killed.

I had watched what happened to my sister.

I knew the price of being discovered, so I hid.

I went through the motions.

I wore my hijab.

I performed the Islamic prayers.

Though in my heart I was praying to Jesus.

I attended mosque with my family when required.

I fasted during Ramadan though I used those times to fast and pray in the Christian way seeking God’s face.

I became an actress playing a role just as Nasarin had.

But inside everything had changed.

I devoured Nasarin’s Bible whenever I could do so safely.

I memorized passages, hiding God’s word in my heart where no one could take it from me.

I prayed constantly, silent prayers throughout the day, longer prayers at night when everyone slept.

I talked to Jesus about everything, my fears, my grief, my longing for community, my desperate desire to be baptized, my questions about what would happen to me.

The loneliness was crushing.

I had no one to talk to about my faith.

No other believers, no church, no fellowship.

It was just me and Jesus and the Bible Nashin had left me.

There were times when I wondered if I had imagined it all, if my conversion had been real or just an emotional response to trauma.

But then I would read the word or I would pray and I would feel that presence again, that peace, and I would know it was real.

My mother never recovered from Nasarin’s death.

She became a ghost in our house, barely speaking, barely living.

She had lost weight until she was skeletal.

Her hair turned gray within months.

Sometimes I would find her in Nasarin’s old bed, clutching one of Nasarin’s scarves, weeping silently.

My heart broke for her.

I wanted to tell her about Jesus, about the hope I had found about where Nasarin was now.

But I could not.

She would have told my father, and I would have followed my sister to execution.

My father changed too, but in a different way.

He became harder, more zealous, more involved in religious enforcement.

It was as if he was trying to prove something, to justify what he had done, to convince himself that he had been righteous.

He spent less and less time at home.

When he was there, he barely acknowledged me or my mother.

The house was heavy with silence and grief and unspoken things.

I finished secondary school.

My grades were good.

Studying gave me something to focus on besides my hidden faith and my broken family.

My father suggested I attend university in Avas, not Tehran.

Thrron was where Nasrin had been corrupted.

He said Avas was safer.

I agreed, not because I wanted to obey him, but because staying in Avaz gave me time to plan.

I was planning my escape.

I knew I could not stay in Iran.

The secret was too big to keep forever.

Eventually, I would slip.

Eventually, someone would notice something.

Eventually, I would face the same choice Nasarine had faced.

And while I had faith, I was not sure I had her courage.

I did not want to be a martyr.

I wanted to live.

I wanted to worship Jesus freely.

I wanted to find other believers to be baptized to grow in my faith.

So I began quietly and carefully to research how to leave Iran.

This was dangerous in itself.

Too many searches about leaving the country could flag you as a flight risk.

Too many questions could draw attention.

I had to be smart.

I learned about the refugee process.

I learned about the countries where Iranian Christians had successfully claimed asylum.

I learned about the routes people took through Turkey mostly then trying to reach Greece or other European countries.

I learned about the smugglers who helped people cross borders illegally.

I learned about the costs, the dangers, the risks.

I needed money.

I began tutoring younger students in English and math, saving every tooman I earned.

I told my parents the money was for university expenses.

I hid the cash in the same place I hid my Bible between my mattress and bedframe.

I needed documents.

I already had a passport.

My father had gotten one for me years ago, thinking I might travel for educational purposes.

But I needed copies of everything hidden away in case of emergency.

Most importantly, I needed courage.

And that came only through prayer, through reading the Bible, through trusting that if God wanted me free, he would make a way.

It took 3 years.

Three years of living two lives, of saving money in secret, of making plans and discarding them and making new ones.

Three years of praying and waiting and watching for the right opportunity.

Three years of grief for my sister, of slow healing, of growing stronger in faith even while isolated.

During those years, I found ways to connect with other believers, though these connections were brief and dangerous.

Once I met a woman in the market who noticed I was reading a book of Persian poetry that was known to be popular among Christians.

She approached me carefully, tested me with careful words, and then invited me to a gathering.

I went once, met with perhaps eight other Iranian believers in a basement, worshiped Jesus openly for the first time, and wept through the entire meeting.

It was beautiful and terrifying.

I did not go back.

It was too risky to establish a pattern.

But that one taste of fellowship sustained me for months.

Another time, I made contact with an underground network that helped Christian converts escape Iran.

They could not help me immediately.

I was too young, had no resources, was too closely watched by my father.

But they gave me information, contacts, advice.

They told me to be patient, to prepare, to wait for the right moment.

The right moment came in 2006.

I was 18 years old, had just started my second year at university.

My father had become less vigilant over time, perhaps assuming that I was the obedient daughter Nashin had pretended to be.

My mother was still lost in her grief, barely aware of what I did.

I had saved enough money for the first leg of the journey, and I had received word through my contacts that a group was leaving soon, heading for Turkey, and there was space for one more.

I made my decision.

I would go.

I left on a Friday night in November.

I told my mother I was going to stay with a friend from university to work on a project.

This was plausible.

I had done this before.

She barely registered what I said, just nodded, and turned back to staring out the window.

My father was not home.

I do not know where he was.

I am glad I did not have to lie to his face.

I packed a small bag with a few clothes, my identification documents, my money, and Nasin’s Bible.

That Bible was the most dangerous thing I carried and the most precious.

If I were caught with it, I would be arrested immediately, but I could not leave it behind.

It was my sister’s gift to me.

It was God’s word.

It was my lifeline.

I walked out of my house for the last time.

I did not look back.

If I had looked back, I might have lost my courage.

I took a taxi to a meeting point across the city.

There I met the smuggler and three other people making the journey.

A young couple who had converted to Christianity and an older man who was Bahigh also fleeing religious persecution.

We did not exchange names.

It was safer not to know.

We traveled in the back of a truck hidden under cargo for the first leg of the journey.

Eight hours of cramped darkness, barely able to breathe.

Every bump in the road sending jolts of pain through my body.

But I prayed through all of it.

I prayed for safety, for strength, for my mother back home who would wake up tomorrow and realize I was gone.

We crossed into Turkey illegally, hiking through mountains at night, guided by smugglers who knew the routes.

It was freezing.

My thin jacket was inadequate.

My feet blistered in my cheap shoes.

I was terrified of being caught, of being sent back, of ending up like Nasarine.

But I kept moving, one foot in front of the other, one step closer to freedom.

It took us three nights to reach a city in eastern Turkey where we could find temporary shelter.

The smugglers left us there with the address of a contact who might be able to help.

We were on our own.

The next two years are a blur of waiting, fear, and bureaucracy.

I claimed asylum in Turkey, identifying myself as a Christian convert fleeing persecution.

The process was slow, uncertain, filled with interviews and paperwork and waiting and more waiting.

I lived in a cramped apartment with other refugees, sharing one room with five other women.

We had little money.

surviving on aid from refugee organizations and churches.

I could not work legally.

I could not go home.

I could not move forward.

I was stuck in limbo.

Neither here nor there, belonging nowhere.

But for the first time in my life, I could worship openly.

I found a church, an underground church made up mostly of other Iranian and Afghan refugees.

We met in secret still because there was always danger.

But it was nothing like the danger back home.

And in that church, I found family.

I was baptized in 2007 in a bathroom in a tub full of cold water by a former Muslim who had himself fled Iran 10 years before.

I went under the water, symbolizing death to my old life, and came up gasping, symbolizing resurrection to new life in Christ.

I wept through the whole thing.

I wished Nazin could have been there to see it.

The church loved me, taught me, discipled me.

I learned theology.

I learned how to pray.

Really pray, not just desperate please, but conversation with God.

I learned about grace.

amazing, undeserved, abundant grace.

I learned that I was not alone, that I was part of a global family of believers, that Christians around the world were praying for people like me.

I also began to process my trauma.

The nightmares about Nasarin’s execution came frequently.

I would wake up screaming, reliving that day, seeing her face, hearing the crowd.

I jumped at loud noises.

I was afraid of authority figures.

I struggled to trust people.

The church connected me with a counselor, another Iranian refugee who had been a psychologist back home.

She helped me understand that what I was experiencing was normal, that trauma did this to people, that healing was possible but would take time.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to heal.

The nightmares became less frequent.

The panic attacks subsided.

I learned to talk about Nasarin without falling apart.

I learned to remember her with joy instead of only with pain.

I learned that grief and hope could coexist, that I could carry both her memory and my faith forward.

And I waited, waited for my asylum claim to be processed, for a country to accept me for resettlement, for permission to begin a new life somewhere safe.

The call came in late 2008, a western country, I will not say which one, for there are still people I love back in Iran who could be endangered if the specifics are known, had approved my resettlement application.

I was going to be free.

truly legally permanently free.

I arrived in my new country in early 2009.

I was 21 years old.

I had left Iran at 18.

In those 3 years, I had aged a lifetime.

Everything was strange.

The language, the culture, the food, the weather, the way people dressed and acted and thought.

I was given a small apartment, some basic furniture, assistance from a refugee resettlement agency.

I enrolled in language classes, learned to navigate the bus system, learned to shop in grocery stores that had more choices in one aisle than my entire neighborhood market in Avaz.

The freedom was overwhelming.

I could wear what I wanted, say what I wanted, believe what I wanted, worship where I wanted.

No one was watching, no one was enforcing, no one was punishing.

It felt too good to be true.

For months, I kept waiting for it to be taken away.

I kept expecting a knock on the door, an arrest, a deportation.

I struggled with anxiety, with feeling that I did not deserve this freedom.

when Nasarin had died for wanting the same thing.

But the church, I had found a church within weeks of arriving, a church with other Iranian believers and Americans who welcomed refugees.

The church kept telling me that this was grace, that I did not have to earn it, that God had brought me here, had kept me safe, had given me this gift of freedom, that the right response was not guilt, but gratitude, not fear, but faith.

I learned to live in that freedom.

I got my driver’s license.

I enrolled in community college.

I got a part-time job.

I made friends, real friends who knew my story and loved me anyway.

I dated cautiously and eventually met the man who would become my husband.

A fellow believer from a different background who understood my trauma and loved me patiently.

I learned to laugh again, to enjoy small things, to wake up without fear, to go to sleep without nightmares, to worship Jesus without looking over my shoulder.

And I learned to tell my story.

It started small.

Someone at church asked me to share my testimony at a women’s meeting.

I was terrified, but I did it.

I told them about Nasarin, about her courage, about her death, about how her witness had led me to Jesus.

I wept through most of it.

So did many of the women listening.

After I finished, women came up to me.

They hugged me.

They thanked me.

They said my story had strengthened their faith, had reminded them of the cost of the gospel, had made them grateful for their freedom.

One woman said she had been taking her faith for granted.

But hearing my story had rekindled something in her heart.

That was when I understood.

My story, our story, mine and Nasrin’s was not just for me.

It was for others.

It was a testimony to the power of Jesus, to the reality of his love, to the truth that he is worth everything.

>> [snorts] >> I began accepting more invitations to speak, church services, conferences, small group meetings.

Each time I told the story of my sister who loved Jesus more than life, and of how her death became my life.

Each time I watched people respond, Christians weeping and renewing their commitment to Christ, non-Christians asking questions about this Jesus who inspired such devotion.

Muslims hearing perhaps for the first time that leaving Islam did not mean leaving God, but rather finding him truly.

The more I shared, the more I healed.

Speaking about Nasrin kept her memory alive.

Telling others about her courage honored her sacrifice.

Sharing how her witness led me to Jesus gave meaning to the suffering.

In 2012, I received news about my family.

It came through indirect channels through people who knew people who knew people.

The news was hard to hear but not surprising.

My mother had died.

She had never recovered from Nasrin’s execution.

She had withered away slowly, dying of what some might call a broken heart, but what I knew was grief and loss and the destruction of hope.

I wept when I heard this news.

I wept for the mother who had loved her daughters but had not been strong enough to save them.

I wept for the woman who had lived in silence and fear and had died the same way.

I prayed that in her final moments she had somehow encountered the Jesus that Nasrin and I had found that she was with her daughter now in paradise.

My father had also died 3 years before my mother in 2015.

The details were unclear.

Some said it was illness.

Some said it was an accident.

I did not know the truth.

When I heard of his death, I felt complicated things.

Not joy.

I had long ago forgiven him or was learning to forgive him daily, which is how forgiveness works for deep wounds.

Not satisfaction, just sadness.

Sadness for a man who had been so zealous for God that he had missed God entirely.

Sadness for a man who had sacrificed his daughter on the altar of religious pride and had gained nothing.

Sadness for a man who had died without ever knowing that Jesus, his daughter, had died proclaiming.

I prayed for him, too.

I prayed that somehow, in ways I could not understand, God’s mercy had reached even him.

I do not know if he repented before he died.

I do not know if he ever regretted what he had done.

I do not know if he is in heaven or hell.

That is not for me to judge.

That is between him and God.

But I prayed for mercy because that is what Jesus taught me to do.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

I had no family left in Iran.

No ties pulling me back.

I was free in every sense of the word.

It should have felt liberating.

Instead, it felt lonely.

I was the only one left who remembered our family as it had been before everything shattered.

The only one who remembered Nasrin as a living, breathing person, not just a martyr or a cautionary tale, the only one carrying these memories forward.

But that loneliness drove me deeper into community with other believers.

They became my family.

My church, my brothers and sisters in Christ, the global body of believers.

These became my people.

I learned that family is not just about blood.

It is about covenant, about shared faith, about loving each other with the love of Christ.

Over the years, I continued to grow in my faith and in my healing.

I graduated from community college and then university studying social work because I wanted to help others who had experienced trauma.

I married my husband in 2014.

He knows my story completely.

I told him everything before we married and he has been patient with my struggles, my nightmares when they occasionally return.

My moments of grief that can strike unexpectedly even years later.

We have children now, two daughters.

When I look at them, I sometimes think of Nasin and me as children.

Before everything changed when life was simple, and our biggest concern was what we would have for dinner.

My daughters are growing up free.

They will never know the fear I knew.

They will never have to hide their faith or risk death for following Jesus.

They are American or Canadian or Australian or wherever I am now.

They are citizens of a free country and they can worship openly.

Sometimes I weep watching them.

Tears of gratitude, tears of joy, tears of sorrow for what Nasin never got to experience.

Marriage, children, freedom, life.

But I tell my daughters about their aunt whom they never met.

I tell them about Nasrin’s courage, about her love for Jesus, about how their very existence is possible because she planted seeds that grew into my faith.

They know that they are named for strong women of faith.

I gave my firstborn daughter a name that means light because Nasrin brought light into my darkness.

I tell them that following Jesus might not cost them their lives, but it will cost them something.

comfort.

Perhaps popularity may be ease certainly because Jesus does not call us to easy lives.

He calls us to faithful lives.

He calls us to take up our cross and follow him.

And crosses are never comfortable.

But I also tell them that Jesus is worth it, worth any cost, worth everything because he is not just a religion or a set of rules.

He is a person who loves them infinitely, who died for them specifically, who rose again to give them hope, who is preparing a place for them in eternity.

I still work with refugees and asylum seekers.

Many of them are from Iran, Afghanistan, other places where Christianity is forbidden.

Many of them are Muslim background believers, converts from Islam to Christianity who fled for their lives.

When I meet them, I see myself at 18, at 21, at 25.

I see the trauma in their eyes, the fear that has not yet faded, the guilt of surviving when others did not, the struggle to believe that this freedom is real and permanent.

I help them navigate the practical things, paperwork, housing, language classes, job searches.

But more than that, I help them know they are not alone.

I share my story.

I introduce them to church communities.

I pray with them.

I cry with them.

I celebrate with them when they are baptized.

When they get their citizenship, when they achieve milestones that seemed impossible just months or years before.

This work is my ministry.

This is how I honor Nasin’s memory.

She died so that I could live.

Now I live so that others can find life too.

I also advocate for persecuted Christians worldwide.

I speak at events, write articles, give interviews.

I tell people in the west what is happening to their brothers and sisters in places like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, North Korea.

I tell them that right now, today, people are being imprisoned for their faith.

People are being tortured.

People are being killed.

Not because they committed crimes, but because they love Jesus.

And I ask them to remember, to pray, to care, to support organizations that help persecuted believers, to not take their freedom for granted because my sister died for this faith that they can practice openly without fear.

My sister paid the ultimate price for the gospel that they hear preached freely every Sunday.

My sister gave everything for the Jesus they sometimes treat casually.

I do not say this to condemn.

I say it to awaken, to remind, to stir up gratitude and passion and commitment.

Now, I sit here 22 years after Nasarin’s death, and I want to speak directly to different people who might be listening to this testimony.

To my Muslim friends, to those who are where I once was.

I know this story is hard to hear.

I know it challenges everything you have been taught.

I know it makes you angry maybe or defensive or uncomfortable.

I understand.

I felt all those things too.

But I want you to know that Jesus loves you not as an enemy but as a beloved child.

He is not asking you to betray your culture or your family or your identity.

He is asking you to know him truly to experience the love and grace and peace that religion any religion cannot give you but that he can.

I am not asking you to convert because I converted.

I am asking you to seek truth wherever it leads to read the Bible for yourself privately and ask God to show you who Jesus really is.

to be willing to question, to be open to the possibility that God is not who you have been told he is, but someone far more wonderful.

And I want you to know that if you do choose to follow Jesus, you will not be alone.

There are millions of us, former Muslims, who found Jesus and found life.

There are churches and communities ready to welcome you, to support you, to love you.

Yes, there may be costs, but Jesus is worth it.

I promise you, he is worth it.

To my Christian brothers and sisters, please do not take your faith for granted.

Please do not treat Jesus casually.

You have freedom that believers in many parts of the world would die for, that they are dying for.

Use that freedom well.

Worship wholeheartedly.

Study the Bible deeply.

Pray fervently.

Live boldly for Christ.

And please remember us.

Remember your brothers and sisters who are suffering for the gospel right now.

Pray for them.

Support [clears throat] them.

Advocate for them.

Use your voice and your freedom to speak up for those who have no voice.

When you are tempted to compromise your faith for comfort or convenience, remember that there are believers who are refusing to compromise.

even when it costs them everything.

Let their courage inspire you.

Let their faithfulness challenge you.

Let their love for Jesus deepen your own.

To those who are seeking, who are not sure what they believe, I want you to know that what you have heard today is true.

Jesus is real.

His love is real.

The transformation he brings is real.

You do not have to be good enough or have all the answers or clean up your life first.

You just have to come to him honestly, openly and he will meet you.

He met Nasarin in a rented room in Thrron when she was broken and searching.

He met me in my grief and anger and confusion.

He will meet you wherever you are.

The gospel is this simple.

You are loved.

You are broken.

Jesus died to fix what is broken.

He rose from the dead to give you new life.

If you believe this and receive him, you are saved.

Not because of anything you do, but because of everything he has done.

It is that simple and that profound and that lifechanging.

I want to end by answering the question that I asked myself so many times in the years after Nasarin’s death.

Was it worth it? Was it worth it for Nasarine to convert? To hide her faith for years? To refuse to recant even when refusal meant death? Was it worth losing her family, her future, her life? Was it worth the pain she caused our mother, the shame she brought on our father, the grief she left me with? Nasarin answered that question herself when she stood before that crowd and proclaimed Jesus even as they prepared to kill her.

When she sang his praise even as they put the noose around her neck.

When she forgave the very people who were murdering her.

She answered with her life and her death.

Yes, Jesus is worth it.

Is it worth it for me? Am I glad I followed Nasrin’s path? Am I glad I converted even though it cost me my family, my country, my culture? Even though it meant leaving everything I knew, becoming a refugee, living in exile, carrying trauma I will never fully be free from in this life.

Every single day I answer, “Yes, Jesus is worth it.

I have lived now with Jesus for longer than I lived without him.

I have known his presence in my darkest moments.

I have experienced his peace that makes no logical sense.

I have felt his love that is steadier than anything this world offers.

I have seen him work in my life, healing wounds that should have destroyed me, bringing beauty from ashes, turning my mourning into dancing.

He has given me a husband who loves me well, children who bring me joy, a community of believers who are my true family, a purpose in life.

To share this testimony, to help others, to make Nasrin’s death count for something, a hope that transcends this world.

the sure knowledge that death is not the end.

That I will see Nasrin again.

That we will be reunited in a place where there are no more tears, no more death, no more persecution, no more pain.

Jesus is worth it.

He is worth everything I have lost and more.

He is worth everything Nasin gave.

He is worth everything.

I said at the beginning of this testimony that I am holding a photograph.

Let me tell you what is in this photograph.

It is Nasarin at age 20 before everything fell apart.

Before the arrest, before the execution, she is smiling, a real smile full of life and hope.

Her eyes are bright.

She looks young and beautiful and joyful.

This is how I choose to remember her.

Not the bruised face I saw that last day.

Not the body I could not bear to look at.

But this, my sister, alive, radiant, full of the light of Jesus.

She is not gone.

She is more alive now than she ever was here.

She is in the presence of the one she loved more than life.

She is worshiping freely, openly, joyfully in a place where no one can stop her or hurt her or kill her.

She is waiting for me there.

And one day, not yet, but one day, I will join her.

And when I do, I will run to her and hold her and thank her.

Thank her for loving me enough to tell me about Jesus, even though it put her in danger.

Thank her for giving me her Bible.

Thank her for living a life so full of Christ that even her death became a testimony.

Thank her for being brave when I was not yet brave.

Thank her for planting seeds that grew into my salvation.

And then together we will worship the one who made it all worthwhile.

Jesus, our savior, our Lord, our life.

My sister’s cross became my crown.

Her death became my life.

Her witness became my faith.

And that is what Jesus does.

He takes the worst thing, death, suffering, persecution, loss, and transforms it into something beautiful.

He turns graves into gardens.

He brings life out of death.

He makes all things new.

This is our story.

This is my testimony.

This is the gospel lived out in blood and tears and courage and faith.

And if you are hearing this, perhaps it is the beginning of your story, too.

Perhaps Nasarin’s death, my life, this testimony you have heard.

Perhaps these are seeds being planted in your heart right now.

Perhaps even now God is calling you, drawing you, pursuing you with a love that will not let you go.

Do not ignore that call.

Do not run from that love.

Do not settle for anything less than the real living Jesus who changes everything.

He is worth it.

I promise you, he is worth everything.

May God bless you.

May he open your eyes to see Jesus clearly.

May he give you courage to follow wherever that leads.

And may he give you the same peace, the same joy, the same unshakable hope that he gave to Nasarin, to me, and to millions of believers throughout history who have counted the cost and decided Jesus is worth it all.

My name is Miriam.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ.

I am a refugee.

I am a survivor.

I am a witness.

And this is my sister’s cross.

The cross that saved my soul.