I did what they told me.

I live if I was right.

Now I see the truth.

I cannot stay silent anymore, no matter what it costs me.

I reported my own neighbors to the Revolutionary Guard and watched them disappear.

But the same Jesus they whispered about in secret found me in my darkest prison cell and set me free.

I was 17 years old and I believed I was doing God’s work.

I was wrong about everything.

Stay with me because what happened next will change how you see God forever.

My name is Nadia Husini and I am from Tehran, Iran.

I now live in Houston, Texas.

Every girl who grows up in Tehran learns the rules before she learns anything else.

Cover your hair.

Lower your eyes.

Do not speak too loudly.

Do not laugh in the street.

Do not question the moolas.

Do not question the government.

Do not question Allah.

And above all else, do not ever let anyone see what you are thinking behind your eyes.

Because in Iran, your thoughts are not your own.

They belong to the Islamic Republic.

I learned these rules in my father’s house in the Narmmak district of East Thran.

Narmak was not a wealthy neighborhood.

It was a working district.

Concrete apartment blocks, narrow streets, clothes lines stretched between buildings, the smell of bread baking from the bakery on the corner every morning at 5.

My father, Mahmud Husseini, worked as a mid-level administrator in the Ministry of Education.

He was not a powerful man, but he was a loyal man, loyal to the Islamic Republic, the way some men are loyal to a sports team they were born into.

Not because they chose it, because it is all they have ever known.

My father prayed five times a day without fail.

He kept a framed portrait of Ayatollah Kmeni in the hallway next to the front door so that every time we left the house, yet we walked past the face of the revolution.

He believed genuinely and completely that the Islamic Republic was the closest thing to God’s government on earth.

He raised his three children, my older brother Dario, my younger sister Sabah and me to believe the same thing.

My mother Fatime was quieter about her faith.

She wore her chador in public and prayed when she was supposed to pray.

But sometimes I would catch her staring at the wall with an expression I could not read.

a far away look.

A look that seemed to be searching for something just beyond the edge of everything she could see.

I did not understand that look when I was young.

I understand it completely now.

I was born in 1999, the year that student protests briefly shook Thran and were quickly and violently crushed by the state.

I grew up in the shadow of that crushing.

I grew up in a country that had learned to silence itself.

Where every family had a story they did not tell in front of children.

Where every adult had a memory of someone who had spoken too loudly or stood too visibly and had paid for it with their freedom or their life.

At school, my teachers taught us that America was the great Satan, that Israel was a cancer on the earth, that the Islamic Revolution had liberated us from corruption and Western imperialism.

We were taught that Iran was a beacon of true Islam in a world that had gone astray.

Every morning we recited slogans in the schoolyard.

We raised our fists.

We chanted death to America, death to Israel, the way children in other countries might recite the pledge of allegiance.

It was routine.

It was normal.

It was all I had ever known.

Uh what made me different from most girls in my school was that I was good at it.

I was not just obedient.

I was enthusiastic.

I believed everything they told me.

I was sharp and quick.

And I had a gift for memorizing religious texts and political arguments.

My teachers noticed.

By the time I was 15, I was regularly selected to give speeches at school assemblies about the glory of the Islamic Revolution and the wickedness of Western values.

I loved the attention.

I loved the feeling of standing at a microphone with a room full of students listening to me.

I loved the way my teachers nodded with approval and my father beamed with pride when I came home with certificates and commendations.

I was the perfect product of the Islamic Republic’s education system.

Fully formed, fully convinced, did and fully committed to a system that was using me without my knowing.

When I was 16, a woman named Sister Zara came to my school.

She was from the Basage, the volunteer paramilitary organization connected to the Revolutionary Guard.

She was about 30 years old.

She wore a black chador and had sharp eyes that seemed to measure everything around her.

She spoke to a small group of selected students about serving the revolution.

She talked about young people who had given their lives to protecting the Islamic Republic from its enemies.

She talked about spies and foreign agents who were working to destroy Iran from the inside.

She said the greatest threat to the Islamic Republic was not bombs from outside.

It was betrayal from within.

She told us that the most patriotic thing a young person could do was to pay attention, to notice, uh to report.

I raised my hand first.

Sister Zara met with me three more times over the following month.

She taught me what to look for.

Neighbors who listened to foreign radio stations.

Families who gathered in groups at unusual hours.

Young people who seemed to have contact with foreigners or who expressed doubts about the revolution.

Women who did not properly observe hijab in private spaces.

Anyone who seemed to be practicing a religion other than Islam.

She gave me a phone number to call and told me to use a specific code word when I called.

She told me I was doing God’s work.

She told me Allah would reward me for protecting his republic.

I was 16 years old and I believed every word.

The first time I reported someone, it was a family two floors above us in our apartment building.

The Akmadi family.

Mister Ahmmedi was a retired school teacher.

his wife grew roses on their balcony.

They had a son my age named Farhad who was quiet and kept to himself.

I had noticed on two occasions that people came to their apartment on Thursday evenings in small groups.

They arrived separately, not together.

They kept their voices very low.

The curtains were always drawn.

I did not know what they were doing.

I did not ask.

I just called the number Sister Zara had given me and used the code word and reported what I had seen.

3 weeks later, Mr.

Ahmadi was taken from the building at 6:00 in the morning.

Two men in plain clothes knocked on the door and he went with them quietly, the way people went in Iran, without shouting, without fighting, because fighting made things worse.

His wife stood in the open doorway of their apartment watching him go with the same expression my mother sometimes wore that far away searching look.

I watched from the crack of our front door.

Farha did not come back to school after that.

I heard later that the family had been moved to a smaller apartment in a different district.

I heard that Mr.

Amadi had spent 4 months in Evan prison before being released.

I heard that he came out a different man, thinner, quieter, unable to sleep.

I felt nothing.

That is the most honest thing I can tell you.

I felt nothing.

I had been trained to feel nothing.

Doubt was weakness.

Compassion for enemies of the revolution was betrayal of the revolution.

Mr.

Ahmadi had been suspicious.

I had done my duty.

Allah had been served.

I reported three more families over the following year.

Each time it became slightly easier.

Each time the voice in the back of my mind that whispered something is wrong grew slightly quieter under the weight of praise from sister Zara and the certainty that I was on the right side of history and God.

I was 17 years old and I was a willing instrument of a system that destroyed families for attending private prayer meetings.

The Amadi family I learned years later were Christians.

secret believers who met on Thursday evenings to read the Bible and pray in whispers with the curtains drawn in a country that considered their faith a death sentence.

I had reported them to the people who hunted them.

When I finally understood what I had done, the knowledge did not arrive all at once.

It arrived slowly in pieces over years, like a mirror cracking in slow motion.

Yo, each new piece revealing a reflection I did not want to see.

The crack began in the most unexpected place.

It began with my brother Dario.

Dario was 4 years older than me.

He had always been the rebel of the family.

Not political, not ideological, just restless.

He had a curious mind that could not stop asking questions the Islamic Republic did not want asked.

Why was it illegal for women to sing in public? Why was it a crime to shake hands with someone of the opposite gender? Why did the children of revolutionary guard officers live in mansions while families in South Tyran could not afford medicine? These were dangerous questions in our house.

My father would silence him at the dinner table.

Enough, Dario.

You will get us all killed with your mouth.

But Dario could not stop.

The questions kept coming.

When Dario was 21, he was accepted to study engineering at the University of Tehran.

My father was proud.

My mother cried with happiness.

I remember thinking my brother had finally found the path that would settle him down.

Instead, the university made him worse.

He came home from his first semester different.

He had met students from all over Iran.

He had access to books and ideas that had not been available to him in our neighborhood.

He had discovered that the world was larger and more complicated than the Islamic Republic had told us.

He started leaving the apartment at unusual hours.

He started receiving phone calls he would take in the bathroom with the door locked.

He started bringing home small objects that he hid in his room.

I found one by accident once when I was looking for a phone charger in his desk drawer.

It was a small silver cross on a thin chain.

I stared at it for a long time.

My first instinct was to report him.

I reached for my phone.

I almost called the number.

But something stopped me.

Not love, not yet.

Something smaller and more selfish.

He was my brother.

If they took him, it would destroy my mother.

It would destroy our family.

I told myself I was being strategic.

I told myself I would talk to him first.

I told myself I would give him one chance to explain before I did my duty.

I went to Darush that night and confronted him.

I put the cross on the table between us and asked him what it meant.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked at me and then he did something I did not expect.

He told me the truth.

He said he had been attending a small underground church in the Shahak Egarb district for 6 months.

He said he had encountered something there that he could not explain and could not deny.

He said he had read the entire New Testament in Farsy and that everything in it had rearranged something inside him that he did not know needed rearranging.

He said he believed Jesus was the son of God and had died and risen again and was alive.

He said it quietly and clearly and without apology.

The way people state facts they are completely certain of.

I told him he was insane.

I told him he was going to get himself killed.

I told him he was betraying everything our family stood for and everything our country was built on.

I told him that Jesus was a prophet, nothing more, and that any Muslim who elevated him beyond that was committing the worst kind of blasphemy.

Dario listened to all of it.

get.

And then he said something that stayed with me for 2 years before I understood it.

He said, “Nadia, when was the last time you felt loved? Not proud of yourself, not righteous, not certain, loved.

” I did not answer him.

I left the room and I did not speak to him for 3 weeks, but I could not stop thinking about the question.

When was the last time I had felt loved? I searched my memory honestly for the first time in my life.

I thought about the five daily prayers, the fasting during Ramadan, the religious classes and the political speeches and the commendations from sister Zara and the portrait of Kmeni by the door.

I thought about all of it and I realized that not one single moment in my entire life of Islamic devotion had felt like love.

It had felt like performance, like duty, like the constant management of a God who was always watching to see if you were good enough.

A God who required constant proof of your loyalty, a God who could be pleased, but never truly known.

I had never, not once, felt God love me personally.

I had felt fear of God.

I had felt pride in obeying God.

I had felt the social warmth of a community bound together by shared religious identity, but love, actual love, a God who knew my name and chose me specifically and wanted me not for what I could do for him, but simply because I was me.

I had never felt that.

I buried the thought.

I went back to my routines.

I kept my distance from Darush.

I told myself the question he had asked me was a trap, a deception, the kind of emotional manipulation that foreign enemies used to weaken faithful Muslims.

But the crack in the mirror had started.

You are and cracks do not heal on their own.

The event that ended my life as I had known it did not arrive with drama.

It arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in March when I was 17 in the form of a phone call from my aunt.

My aunt Parisa lived in the Akbatan district on the west side of Thran.

She was my mother’s younger sister, a cheerful woman who made the best asht soup in the family and always smuggled small gifts to me and Sabah past my father’s disapproving eye.

She called my mother that Tuesday to say that her neighbor, a woman named Mrs.

Rostami, had been taken the night before by the intelligence services.

My mother made a soft sound on the phone like something had been pressed out of her.

Mrs.

Rostami had three children.

The youngest was 4 years old.

My aunt said it quietly, not dramatically.

Uh, she said it the way Iranians say these things flat, careful, because even phone calls can be listened to.

She said it and then she said she was sure it would be resolved soon and she would keep my mother informed.

Then she ended the call.

My mother sat at the kitchen table for a very long time after that, not moving, her tea getting cold in front of her.

I knew, though she never said it directly, that Mrs.

Rostami had been reported by someone.

That was how these things worked.

Someone had noticed something.

Someone had made a call.

Someone had done their duty the way I had done my duty.

For the first time, I sat with a full weight of what that meant.

Mrs.

Rostami had three children.

The youngest was 4 years old.

Someone’s mother was now in Evan prison because someone had noticed something and reported it.

Someone exactly like me.

I I went to my room and sat on my bed and I stared at the wall for a very long time.

And for the first time in my 17 years of life, I felt something crack open inside me that I could not close again.

Not the strategic calculation I had felt when I found Darius’s cross.

Something deeper and more painful.

Something that felt like the beginning of genuine horror at myself.

I thought about Mr.

Ahmadi and his roses.

I thought about Farad who never came back to school.

I thought about the three other families I had reported.

I thought about Mrs.

Rostami and her four-year-old child.

And I thought about sister Zara’s voice telling me I was doing God’s work, that Allah would reward me, that I was protecting the revolution.

I had believed her completely.

For the next several months, I moved through my life like a person walking underwater.

I still went to school.

I still performed in the schoolyard.

I still gave my speeches.

But something behind my eyes had gone dark and I could not relight it no matter how hard I prayed or how many times I prostrated on my prayer rug facing Mikah.

I prayed more.

I fasted extra days outside of Ramadan.

I asked Allah to take the growing weight from my chest.

I asked him to confirm to me that what I had done was right.

I asked him to speak to me to tell me I was still on the correct side.

that the families I had reported had deserved what happened to them, that I had served him faithfully, and he was pleased with me.

The ceiling of my bedroom stared back at me in silence.

This was when I began to understand what my mother’s far away look had meant all those years.

She had been looking for something she could not find inside the four walls of the religion she had been handed.

Something real, something personal, something that answered back.

I confided in no one in Iran.

You did not confide your doubts about Islam or the Islamic Republic in anyone.

Not your friends, not your parents, not your teachers, because your doubts could be reported just as easily as your neighbors prayer meetings.

I had been the one who reported.

I knew exactly how easy it was.

I knew exactly how little it required.

I was trapped inside my own silence with a guilt that was growing larger and heavier every single day.

Then the arrest came for Dario.

It happened on a Saturday morning in November of my senior year of high school.

6 months after the phone call about Mrs.

Rostami, I I was eating breakfast when four men came to the door.

My father answered it and stood very still when they showed him their identification.

My mother came out of the kitchen and made that sound again, the soft pressed sound when she saw the men’s faces.

They were polite in the way that the intelligence services are sometimes polite when they want to demonstrate control through calm.

They said they needed Dario to come with them for questioning.

They said it was routine.

They said it would not take long.

Dario came out of his room already dressed as if he had been expecting it.

He looked at my mother and said something quietly in her ear.

She nodded and gripped his arm for just a moment before releasing it.

He looked at me across the hallway.

His expression was not afraid.

It was something stranger than fear.

It was peaceful.

He was taken to Evan prison.

He was held for 11 weeks.

Those 11 weeks were the longest of my life.

My mother aged years in those weeks.

My father became rigid and brittle, praying constantly, making formal complaints through official channels that went nowhere, calling contacts at the ministry who promised to look into it and never did.

My little sister Sabah stopped eating properly and developed dark circles under her eyes.

And I sat in the center of our family’s destruction, knowing with absolute certainty that it was my fault, not directly.

I had not reported Dario.

I had made that choice.

But I had helped build and maintain the exact system that had come for him.

I had been a willing participant in the machinery that ground up families and spit them out.

I had called the number.

I had used the code word.

But I had done it four times.

And now that same machinery was chewing through my own brother and my mother’s hair was going gray overnight.

And my little sister had stopped laughing.

And my father’s hands shook when he tried to pour his tea.

This was God’s work.

This was what I had been doing in God’s name.

I could not hold it anymore.

I stopped praying the night Dario was taken.

Not out of rebellion, out of honest exhaustion.

I simply could not go through the motions of speaking to a god who had never once responded and whose religion had turned me into the person who had done these things.

I lay on my prayer rug and I stared at the ceiling and I said out loud in a whisper, “I do not know who you are.

I do not know if you are there.

I do not know if any of this has ever meant anything.

” Then I turned over and closed my eyes and the silence answered me exactly as it always had, with nothing.

Darush came home 11 weeks later.

He had lost weight.

There was a new seriousness in his face that had not been there before.

He did not talk about what had happened to him inside Evan.

He never talked about it.

But I noticed that he still prayed, not to Allah.

In his room at night, quietly in Farsy.

He still spoke to Jesus.

Even after 11 weeks in Evan prison for believing in Jesus, he still spoke to Jesus with the same quiet certainty he had always had.

as if the 11 weeks had not shaken the foundation of something but had actually deepened it.

I watched this from the hallway through the crack of his door or and something about seeing a man who had just been through Evan prison still talking to God with peace on his face did something to me that all the speeches and commendations and religious classes of my entire life had never done.

It made me want what he had.

Not the suffering, the peace underneath the suffering, the thing that stayed solid when everything else was being torn apart.

I knocked on Dario’s door that night and I asked him one question.

I asked him how.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he opened his desk drawer and handed me a small paperback book, The New Testament in Farsy.

The cover was soft from handling.

The spine cracked.

He said, “Start with the Gospel of John.

Read it like you have never heard of Jesus before.

Read it like a hungry person.

You’re not a scholar.

” I took the book to my room and I read the entire Gospel of John that night.

I did not fully understand everything I read.

But one sentence stopped me completely and would not let me move past it.

It was in the 11th chapter.

Jesus stood at the tomb of his dead friend Lazarus and he wept.

two words in the English translation.

In Farsy, even simpler, God wept, not performing justice, not displaying power, not demonstrating religious law, weeping because his friend was dead and the people who loved his friend were suffering and that suffering moved him to tears.

I had memorized hundreds of verses about Allah’s power and Allah’s judgment and Allah’s requirements for humanity.

I had never read a single verse about Allah weeping at a graveside because someone he loved had died.

Something small and quiet cracked open in my chest.

Not wide open, just a sliver, just enough to let a single thread of light through.

I hid the book under the loose panel beneath my wardrobe.

I read it in pieces over the following two weeks.

By the time I finished the Gospel of John, I had moved on to Matthew and then Mark and then Luke, reading them in the order Dario suggested when I finally told him what I was doing.

I read them with the kind of hunger I had not felt for anything in a very long time.

The hunger of a person who has been told her whole life that a certain food does not exist and has just discovered it is real and she is starving for it.

I told no one except Dario in Iran with my history.

This was not just a religious choice.

This was the most dangerous thing I had ever done.

Thought I had been an informant for the system that hunted people who believed exactly what I was now beginning to believe.

If anyone found out, if Sister Zara found out, there would be no mercy for me.

Not because I was a young girl.

The Islamic Republic did not give discounts on apostasy for age or gender.

But the hunger was stronger than the fear.

Just barely, but stronger.

3 months after Dario came home from Ain, my family left Iran.

It was not a simple decision.

It was not a clean escape.

It was the result of years of quiet fear finally reaching a threshold that my father, for all his loyalty to the Islamic Republic, could no longer ignore.

They had taken his son.

They might come again.

The next time Dario might not come back at all.

And my father s the man who had hung Kmeni’s portrait by the front door and raised his children to chant Death to America in the schoolyard made the most painful decision of his life.

He applied for a tourist visa to Turkey.

He packed what he could pack without raising attention.

He withdrew money slowly over several weeks in amounts that would not trigger a report.

He told no one outside the immediate family.

He said goodbye to his sisters and his mother with the knowledge that he might never see them again and without being able to explain why he was saying it so carefully.

We flew to Istanbul on a regular morning in February.

We did not look back at the terminal windows.

From Istanbul, we spent 14 months in limbo.

We lived in a small apartment in the Vati district.

My father worked cash jobs.

My mother cleaned houses.

Dario and I enrolled in Turkish language classes.

We applied for resettlement through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

We waited in the specific way that refugees wait, which is a combination of stillness on the outside and constant terror on the inside.

I turned 18 in that apartment in Istanbul.

For Darush, Istanbul was freedom.

He found a small evangelical church in the Boglu district that had a Farsy speaking congregation.

He attended every Sunday.

He came home with a different kind of energy, lighter, more hopeful.

He kept inviting me to come with him.

I kept saying I was not ready.

The truth was I was terrified not of the church, of myself, of what it would mean for me to walk into a church and say I believed after what I had done, to families who had done exactly that in Thran.

But people who had gathered in apartments to pray to Jesus, people I had reported, people whose lives I had helped destroy.

How do you walk into the house of the God you betrayed? I asked Dario this one night when we were washing dishes together in the tiny kitchen of our Istanbul apartment.

I phrased it as a theological question.

He heard the real question underneath it.

He put down the bowl he was washing and he turned to look at me.

He said, “Nadia, that is exactly why Jesus died.

Not for people who never did anything wrong.

for people who did what you did for people who did what all of us have done.

That is the entire point.

I did not go to church that week or the week after, but I kept reading.

My brother had acquired a full Bible in Farsy, thick and [clears throat] solid, and I read it the way you read something that is simultaneously terrifying and irresistible.

I read it late at night when the apartment was quiet and my parents were asleep.

I read with a notebook next to me where I wrote down questions and contradictions and things I could not understand.

The notebook filled up quickly.

I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom in Istanbul reading the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John on a night in October when everything changed.

It was the story of the woman caught in adultery.

The religious authorities dragged her before Jesus publicly and asked him whether she should be stoned according to the law.

They were not asking out of genuine desire for justice.

They were using her as a trap.

If Jesus said stone her, he betrayed his reputation for mercy.

If he said spare her, he violated religious law.

Yay, either way they had him.

Jesus knelt down and wrote in the dirt with his finger.

He said nothing for a long moment.

Then he stood up and said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.

” One by one, starting with the oldest, they all left.

Jesus was alone with the woman.

He looked at her and said, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.

” And he said, “Neither do I condemn you.

Go and sin no more.

” I read those words and something in my chest tore open completely because I was her.

Not in the specifics, but in the thing that mattered.

I had been dragged out and exposed to myself.

Every face I had reported, every family I had helped destroy, every Thursday night prayer meeting I had helped end, it was all right there in front of me.

There was no crowd around me holding stones, just me alone on my bedroom floor with a Bible in my hands and the full knowledge of what I had done.

And the question hanging in the air of that Istanbul apartment was the same question Jesus had asked that woman.

Where are they? Has no one condemned you? And I realized that the one condemning me most viciously was myself.

and that the one who had every right to condemn me, the God whose followers I had betrayed and whose people I had hunted was the only one not throwing stones.

I put the Bible down on the floor.

I pressed my hands flat against the cold tile.

And I started to cry, not quiet tears, real crying, the kind that shakes your whole body and comes from somewhere so deep you did not know it existed until it erupts.

I cried for Mr.

Yet Ahmadi and his roses and his four months in Evan prison.

I cried for Farhad who never came back to school.

I cried for the three other families I had never learned the outcomes of.

I cried for Mrs.

Rostami’s four-year-old child.

I cried for Darush and the 11 weeks I had indirectly helped cause.

I cried for my mother’s gray hair and my sister’s dark circles and my father’s shaking hands.

I cried for myself, for the 17-year-old girl who had been handed a phone number and told it was God’s work, and had believed it so completely that she had never once stopped to look at the faces of the people she was erasing.

I pressed my face against the tiled floor of that Istanbul apartment, and I said out loud, speaking to the god I was not yet sure would answer, but desperately hoped would, “I did terrible things.

Not because someone forced me, because I wanted to, because I was proud of it, because I thought I was righteous.

I am not righteous.

I am the worst kind of person because I used God’s name to hurt people who were only trying to know God.

If you are real, if you are who this book says you are, I need you to tell me right now whether what that woman heard from you is something you would say to me because I cannot live inside what I have done.

I am not asking you to pretend it did not happen.

I am asking you if it can be forgiven because I cannot forgive myself.

I stayed on that floor with my face pressed against the tile and I waited.

What happened next? I have tried to describe many times to many people and I always fall short of the actual experience.

There are no words in Farsy or English that fully hold it.

Warmth.

It started in my chest and moved outward.

Not physical warmth.

Something underneath physical warmth.

Something that carried information.

Something that communicated not in words first but in an experience that translated afterward into something like words.

The information it carried was this.

I know everything you did.

I was there for every single one.

I watched.

I did not stop you because you had the freedom to choose and you chose wrongly.

But I also saw what was underneath your choices.

I saw the girl who had been handed lies and told they were truth.

I saw the girl who had never once been shown what genuine love looks like and so had no framework for recognizing it.

I saw the girl who was hungry for approval and was given weapons instead of bread.

I know all of it.

The guilt and the pride and the fear and the hunger.

I know it all and I am not throwing a stone.

Neither do I condemn you.

Go and live differently.

I do not know how long I was on that floor.

When I finally sat up, my face was wet and my knees achd from the cold tile.

And the apartment was completely silent.

The Bible was still open on the floor in front of me.

The room looked the same.

Istanbul outside the window was the same.

The call to prayer from the nearby mosque was the same distant sound it always was at that hour.

But I was not the same.

I sat cross-legged on the floor and I looked at the open Bible and I said out loud very quietly, “I believe you are real.

I believe you are who this book says you are.

I believe you died for what I did and I believe you rose again.

I give you my life.

All of it.

The parts I am proud of and the parts I can barely look at.

It is all yours.

Uh just please make something out out of it that means something because I cannot do that myself.

I went to church with Darush the following Sunday.

When I walked through the door of that small evangelical church in the Beoglu district of Istanbul, a woman greeted me at the entrance.

She was Iranian, about 50 years old, with kind eyes and a warm handshake.

She said, “Welcome, sister.

We have been praying for you.

” I stared at her.

I had never been to this church.

She had never seen my face.

I had told no one I was coming except Dario, and only that morning.

She laughed gently at my expression and said, “Not specifically you.

We pray every week for the people God is about to bring through that door.

He always sends someone.

I sat in the back row of that church and I wept for the entire service.

Not from sadness.

From something I did not have a word for then.

I have a word for it now.

Relief.

The relief of a person who has been carrying something impossibly heavy for years and has finally finally been allowed to set it down.

We were resettled to Houston, Texas 14 months later.

I remember landing at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on a gray January morning and sitting in the arrivals hall with our two oversized bags and the stack of resettlement documents the UNHCR officer had given us and looking at the American faces moving past me and thinking none of these people have any idea where I have been or what I have done or what happened to me on a tile floor in Istanbul.

I am invisible here.

I could start over as anyone.

The thought was both frightening and the most liberating thing I had ever felt.

The Houston was loud and enormous and disorienting in ways I had not prepared for.

We were placed in an apartment in southwest Houston which has a large Iranian and Middle Eastern population.

There were Persian grocery stores and Farsy speaking neighbors and restaurants that smelled like home.

My mother cried the first time she found gourmet sabzi at a local Persian market.

My father stood very still in the bread aisle for a long time before putting a loaf in the basket and moving on.

The resettlement organization connected us with a church that had an established ministry for Iranian refugees.

The pastor, a man named David Park, had spent 12 years in Iran before the revolution and spoke basic Farsy.

His wife Sarah had organized a network of volunteer families who helped newly arrived refugees with everything from English classes to driver’s licenses to navigating the American health care system.

I had never seen people give their time this freely to strangers, not because the strangers were like them because they believed Jesus had asked them to.

I started attending the church’s English language classes twice a week.

Within 3 months, I was attending Sunday services.

Within 6 months, I was helping translate for new Iranian arrivals.

My English had always been decent from school in Thran, but in Houston, it became fluent fast.

The way languages come quickly when your survival depends on understanding what people around you are saying.

I enrolled in community college the following fall.

I studied communications.

Why? I also started writing at first just for myself.

A journal that I kept on my phone in Farsy.

I wrote down everything.

The childhood in Narmmak, Sister Zara and the phone number, the families I had reported, Dario’s arrest, the Istanbul apartment and the open Bible and the cold tile floor, the warmth that came when I had no more words left.

I wrote it all down with as much honesty as I could manage because I believed that if I softened any of it, if I made myself look less guilty or the system look less effective or the religion look less convincing, I would be wasting the only thing that made my story worth telling the truth.

I showed the journal to my pastor David one afternoon after a prayer meeting.

He read it quietly.

When he looked up, his eyes were wet.

He said, “Nadia, this needs to be heard.

” I shook my head.

Uh, I told him I was not ready.

I told him what it would cost.

My family’s safety, my own safety, connections back to Iran who could be targeted if my identity was associated with a public Christian testimony.

I told him about the Saudi businessman I had seen online, Khaled, whose testimony had gone viral and how his assets had been frozen within days and his family had disowned him and there was an arrest warrant with his name on it.

I told David I did not have the billions that man had to cushion the fall.

I told him I was a community college student in Southwest Houston with two bags and a resettlement visa and I could not afford to be erased.

David said, “You do not have to decide today, but I want you to pray about who this story is for, not who it costs you, who it could reach.

” I prayed about it for 4 months.

The answer that came back was not comfortable.

It was not the answer I was hoping for.

I was hoping Jesus would say, “Stay quiet.

Stay safe.

I understand.

You have already given enough.

” That would have been easy.

But the answer that came back was the same one.

It seems to always come back as for the people who have been through the worst things.

Tell it.

Not for yourself.

For the girl in Thran right now who is 17 years old and has been given a phone number and told it is God’s work.

For the woman in Mashad who lies awake asking the ceiling why Allah never answers.

For the man in Afas who had a dream of Jesus 6 months ago and has told no one because there is no one safe to tell.

or for every Iranian who has been handed religion as a weapon and used it and hated themselves for it and does not know yet that the god they actually need is not the one they were given.

Tell it for them.

I recorded my testimony on a Thursday evening in my apartment in southwest Houston with my phone propped against a stack of textbooks and my roommate’s ring light borrowed without full explanation.

I sat in front of a plain white wall and I spoke for 40 minutes in a mixture of Farsy and English and I held nothing back.

I told them about Naramak and sister Zahara and the phone number and the code word.

I told them about the Amadi family and Mr.

Amadi and Farhad and the three other families whose outcomes I still do not know.

I told them about Darush and Evan prison and the cross in the desk drawer and the question he asked me about love.

I told them about Istanbul and the cold tile floor and the woman caught in adultery and the warmth that started in my chest and said, “Neither do I condemn you.

” I told them about Houston and the church and the English classes and the journal and the four months of prayer before I found the courage to turn on the camera.

And then I said the part that I knew would either reach people or enrage them or both.

I said I was a servant of a religious system that used me to destroy families who were only trying to know God.

I was rewarded for it.

I was praised for it.

I was told it was holy.

And I believed all of it because I had been given a religion that was full of rules and empty of love, but full of duty and empty of the one thing every human being is starving for, which is to be genuinely known and genuinely loved by the God who made them.

That is not a religion I made up to criticize Islam.

That was my actual experience inside it for 17 years.

emptiness, performing obedience, hoping that someday the performance would be enough.

It never was and it never will be because the thing we are all hungry for cannot be earned.

It can only be received.

And the only place I have ever found it offered freely and completely is in Jesus Christ.

Not in a set of rules, not in a religious system.

In a person, a living, present, speaking, weeping, loving, forgiving person who met me on the floor of an apartment in Istanbul when I had nothing left and said the most important words anyone has ever spoken to me.

Uh, neither do I condemn you.

I paused and then I said one more thing directly into the camera.

I said, “If you are Iranian and you are watching this, I am not your enemy and I am not a western agent and I have not been paid to say any of this.

I am a girl from Narmmak who memorized the Quran and reported her neighbors and lost her brother to Evan prison and found God on a cold floor in a foreign city with nothing but a borrowed Bible and the end of her own strength.

If that is where you are right now, at the end of your own strength, I want you to know there is someone waiting for you there.

His name is Jesus, and he already knows everything you have done, and he is not holding a stone.

The video was uploaded on a Thursday night.

By Saturday morning, it had been shared in 17 countries.

The responses came in languages I did not speak.

My friends helped me translate some of them.

Arabic, Pashto, Kurdish, Turkish, Udu, and Farsy upon Farsy upon Farsy.

Messages from inside Iran sent through VPNs and encrypted apps.

Messages from Iranians in Germany and Sweden and Canada and the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

Messages from people who had been carrying secret faith alone for years.

messages from people who had never believed in anything and found themselves watching a girl from Narmmak on their phone at 2 in the morning and feeling something crack open in their chest that they did not have a name for.

One message came from a young woman in Shiraz who said she was 18 years old and had been recruited by the passage the previous year.

She said she had not yet reported anyone but had been preparing to.

She said watching my video felt like watching her own future and she did not want that future.

She asked me what she should do.

I wrote back to her for 3 hours.

Another message came from a man in Mashad who said he was a revolutionary guard officer with 20 years of service.

He said he had a dream of Jesus 4 months ago and had not been able to pray to Allah since without feeling like he was talking to an empty room.

He asked me if Jesus really answered, if it was real, if I was sure.

I wrote back and told him the truth.

I said I was sure.

The way you are sure of something you have experienced directly and cannot unveil.

The way you are sure the sun is hot when you are standing in it.

I told him to find a Farsy Bible.

I told him to read the Gospel of John.

I told him to ask Jesus directly and be willing to be answered on Jesus’s terms rather than his own.

I told him to expect warmth.

He wrote back two weeks later.

Three words, he said.

He answered me.

I am 24 years old as I record this.

I am finishing my communications degree.

I volunteer twice a week with a ministry in Houston that serves Iranian and Middle Eastern refugees.

I help them navigate the practical mechanics of American life, English, driver’s licenses, health care, schools for their children.

I sit with them in waiting rooms and translate documents and share meals and listen to their stories.

I hear things in those rooms that most Americans will never hear.

The weight of what people carry across borders, the things they left behind, the things that were taken from them, the the things they did that they cannot forgive themselves for.

I tell them about the woman on the floor in the eighth chapter of John.

I tell them about the warmth on a tile floor in Istanbul.

I tell them that the God who made them is not the God they were handed.

That the God who made them is not silent and distant and watching to see if they are performing correctly.

that the God who made them wept at a graveside because his friend died and that same heart is available to them right now in this waiting room in this country they did not plan to end up in in this life that went nowhere near where they expected.

I tell them his name is Jesus and that he already knows everything about them and is not holding a stone.

I want to close by speaking directly to three groups of people.

first to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

You built me.

You trained me.

You handed me a phone number and a code word and told me it was God’s work and I believed you because I was a child and you were all I had ever known.

You did that to thousands of children like me.

You are still doing it right now.

And I want you to know that the thing you are most afraid of, the thing you have built prisons and surveillance systems and religious police to prevent is happening anyway.

Jesus is moving through Iran the way water moves through rock slowly, persistently through every crack through dreams and visions and smuggled Bibles and conversations in kitchens and videos watched on phones with VPNs at 2:00 in the morning.

You cannot stop him.

[clears throat] Not because he is a political movement you can dismantle.

Because he is the living God and he is coming for your sons and daughters and they are reaching back.

D second to every Iranian and every Muslim anywhere in the world.

Who recognizes the emptiness I described.

Who prays five times a day and feels like they are speaking into a wall.

who fasts and gives charity and makes pilgrimage and still lies awake at 3:00 in the morning wondering if anyone is listening.

I want you to know the answer to that question is yes, someone is listening and his name is not what you were told.

He is not distant.

He is not silent.

He is not waiting for your performance to reach a sufficient level before he decides to respond.

He is right there at the place where your strength runs out.

He has been there the whole time.

Call his name just once with nothing left.

Tell him you are weary and heavy burdened and you cannot carry the weight anymore and then wait.

Stay still and wait because he will answer.

Yet not in the way religion told you.

God answers in a way that is more personal and more specific and more overwhelming than anything a religious system could manufacture.

He will answer you with warmth.

And in that warmth, he will say the words that nothing in this world can say to you, neither do I condemn you.

Third, to anyone watching this who is carrying something they believe is too heavy and too dark and too specific to be forgiven, who has done something real and serious in the name of a god or a cause or a system and cannot forgive themselves for it.

I want you to know that I understand exactly what that feels like.

The self- condemnation that does not sleep.

the face of the person you hurt that appears behind your eyes at random moments in the middle of ordinary days.

God, the knowledge that you cannot undo what you did, no matter how much you wish you could, I know all of it.

And I want you to know that the one who has the greatest right to condemn you, is the one who is most persistently refusing to.

He is asking you the same question he asked the woman on the floor while everyone else had already left.

He is saying, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you? Tell him the truth.

He already knows it.

He just wants to hear you say it and then listen for what he says next because what he says next is the thing that will change everything.

My name is Nadia Husseini.

I am from Thran.

I am from Narmmak and Evans shadow and an Istanbul tile floor and southwest Houston.

I reported my neighbors in the name of a god who was not there and I was found by a god who had been there all along.

And I am telling you his name because someone needs to hear it today in the same way I needed to hear it.

He is real.

He is close.

He is already looking at you and he is not holding a stone.

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[Music] Today’s testimony is shared with us by Zeinab, a young lady whose life has been marked by unimaginable hardship and extraordinary resilience.

Forced into marriage at the tender age of nine, she endured years of brutality as a child bride, condemned to a life of suffering under a cruel Imam who despised her very existence.

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