Death isn’t darkness.

At least mine wasn’t.

It was the brightest light I’d ever seen.

Brighter than the Saudi sun at noon, brighter than anything that exists in our physical world.

But it didn’t hurt to look at it.

It called to me.

The first sensation was weightlessness.

After the crushing pressure of the sand, the sudden absence of physical constraint was shocking.

I could move again.

I could breathe again.

Except I didn’t need to breathe.

I became aware that I was rising, moving upward without effort or valition.

And as I rose, I could see below me the burial site, the mound of freshly moved sand, rocks placed on top to mark the location.

My father and uncle standing beside it.

My father’s lips still moving in prayer.

My brothers by the truck.

I should have felt something seeing this.

Anger, grief, horror.

But there was only distance, like watching a scene from a movie about someone else’s life.

They were loading the shovels back into the vehicle.

My father looked back once at the grave, his expression unreadable in the truck’s headlights.

Then they climbed in.

The engine started.

The headlights swept across the desert as the vehicle turned.

And then they were driving away.

Tail lights disappearing into the darkness, leaving my body buried in the sand.

But I wasn’t there anymore.

I was above it, moving away, being pulled by something I couldn’t resist and didn’t want to.

The movement accelerated.

The desert shrank below me.

I could see Riad in the distance.

A sprawl of lights against the darkness.

Then even that diminished as I moved higher, faster, though direction and height and speed were becoming meaningless concepts.

There was a tunnel, though calling it a tunnel doesn’t capture it.

More like traveling through light itself, through a space that wasn’t space.

The light surrounded me, permeated me.

I was separate from it and part of it simultaneously.

Sensations flooded in, but not physical sensations.

These were emotional, spiritual peace that went beyond anything I’d ever experienced.

A sense of belonging so profound it made every moment of my earthly life feel like homesickness by comparison.

The feeling of being completely utterly known and simultaneously completely utterly loved.

Music filled the not space around me.

Except it wasn’t just music.

It was also voices and also something beyond both harmonious and overwhelming and beautiful.

If light could sing, this is what it would sound like.

I became aware of others in the light presence.

I couldn’t see them clearly, but I could sense them.

Multitudes, and they were welcoming me, celebrating my arrival.

The movement continued until I arrived somewhere, a threshold, maybe not heaven in the traditional sense of clouds and harps, but a place, a space, a reality that made physical reality seem like a pale shadow.

Colors existed here that don’t have names in human language.

I could see them, experience them, but I can’t describe them any more than you could describe read to someone born blind.

They weren’t just visual.

They were emotional.

They meant something.

And then he appeared.

I knew who he was immediately.

Not because he wore a name tag or announced himself.

I knew him the way you know your own heartbeat, your own breath.

Intimately, completely.

Jesus.

He was walking toward me.

Or maybe I was moving toward him.

Or maybe space worked differently here and we were always both close and approaching.

His appearance was Middle Eastern features, dark hair and beard, brown skin, not the blonde, blue-eyed version from Western paintings.

He looked like he could have warped the streets of ancient Jerusalem without anyone thinking he was foreign.

But it was his eyes that captured me.

They held infinity.

Every emotion, every experience, every moment of existence seemed reflected there.

Sorrow and joy, suffering and triumph, all present simultaneously, and love, such love.

He looked at me, and in that look, I felt seen in a way I’d never been seen.

Not just surface level, not just personality and appearance.

He saw everything.

Every thought I’d ever had, every sin I’d ever committed, every wound I’d carried, every moment of shame.

Six, I expected judgment.

I’d been raised to expect judgment.

Isn’t that what happens when you stand before God accounting for every deed, every word, every intention? But there was no judgment in his eyes, only compassion.

He spoke my name, Leila, just my name.

But the way he said it in it, I heard my entire life, my first cry as a baby, my laughter as a child, my tears as a teenager, every birthday, every disappointment, every moment of joy and pain.

My life wasn’t being judged.

It was being acknowledged, valued, cherished.

Tears came, though I don’t know if I had a physical body to cry them.

Tears of relief, of release, of finally, finally being home.

You saw me.

I said, or thought or somehow communicated in that grave.

When I was dying, you were there.

I’ve always been there, he replied.

His voice was like the music I’d heard, like light given sound.

Every time you read those words, every time you reached for truth, every moment of your life, Ila, even when you didn’t know my name, I knew yours.

My father, I started to say, and he raised a hand gently.

Your earthly father acted from fear and pain.

He thought he was defending truth, but he was defending tradition, pride, control.

I know his heart.

I know the wounds that created those fears.

And I love him, too.

That broke something in me.

After what my father had done, after being buried alive by the man who should have protected me, Jesus was telling me he loved him.

The injustice of it, the scandal of that kind of love was overwhelming.

I don’t understand, I said.

You will, he replied.

in time.

Love doesn’t make sense from a position of hurt.

But perfect love casts out fear, casts out revenge, casts out the need for justice as humans understand it.

I am justice and I am mercy both always.

He extended his hand toward me.

I saw the scar in his palm, the wound where nails had pierced flesh.

Proof that he knew suffering.

proof that God understood pain.

“You can stay,” he said.

“Or you can go back.

But if you go back, your life will never be your own again.

It will be my testimony.

” I stared at his scarred hand, trying to process what he was offering.

Go back.

Back to what? My body was buried in the desert, sand filling my lungs.

My heart stopped.

“How could I go back?” You’re asking me to choose, I said.

I’m always asking you to choose, Jesus replied.

I never force.

Even in this, even here, your will matters to me.

I looked around at the space we occupied.

This threshold between life and death.

The peace here was intoxicating.

No more fear, no more pain, no more hiding or shame or persecution.

Just rest.

eternal perfect rest.

Why would anyone choose to go back? I asked.

His smile was gentle knowing.

The same reason I chose to leave heaven and be born in a stable.

The same reason I chose the cross when I could have called down angels.

Love makes you willing to embrace difficulty for the sake of others.

But what others? My family buried me.

Who would I go back for? Not who you think.

He said, “If you return, you won’t reunite with your family.

Not for a long time.

The road I’m offering you is harder than death, Leila.

It’s the road of exile, of testimony, of carrying my light into dark places.

You’ll be lonely.

You’ll be afraid.

You’ll question if you really saw me or if this was just the hallucination of a dying brain.

Then why offer it?” The question came out more confrontational than I intended, but he didn’t seem offended because there are people who need to hear your story.

Muslims who felt my call but are terrified of what it will cost them.

Women buried under the weight of tradition and control.

Who need to know I see them.

Seekers who think Christianity is a western religion.

Who need to see my Middle Eastern face reflected in yours.

You will be my witness in places I cannot otherwise reach.

I thought about Miss Rosa, my economics professor who’d given me the Bible.

Had she known what it would cost me? Had she wrestled with the decision to plant that seed, knowing it might lead to my death? Did Miss Rosa know? I asked.

What would happen? No one knows the full cost of obedience until they pay it, Jesus said.

Rosa knew the risk.

She prayed for months before giving you that Bible.

She wrestled with fear, with doubt, with the question of whether she had the right to potentially endanger you.

But she also knew that without risk, there’s no gospel.

Without someone willing to plant seeds, the harvest never comes.

Is she? I hesitated.

Is she safe? She’s exactly where I want her to be.

as you will be.

Whichever choice you make, the weight of the decision settled on me.

Stay here in peace in the presence of God in rest or return to a body that had been buried alive to a life that would be marked by trauma and exile and difficulty.

If I go back, I said slowly, will you still be with me the way you were in the grave? Always,” he said.

Though you won’t always feel me, there will be dark nights when you’ll cry out and hear only silence.

There will be moments when you’ll wonder if this encounter was real or if you invented it to cope with suffering.

Faith isn’t the absence of doubt.

Ila, it’s choosing to trust despite doubt.

That doesn’t sound very reassuring.

He laughed and the sound was like every good thing I’d ever experienced concentrated into music.

I’m not offering you comfort.

I’m offering you purpose.

Comfort is what you have here.

Purpose requires returning to the struggle.

I thought about my life.

22 years of trying to be perfect, trying to earn love through obedience, living in fear of making mistakes.

And in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

Perfect obedience hadn’t saved me.

My father’s love had been conditional all along and the condition was complete conformity.

But Jesus was offering something different.

Not conditional love based on performance, but unconditional love that preceded choice.

He loved me while I was still a Muslim.

He loved me when I was buried in sand.

He would love me if I chose to stay in heaven.

and he would love me if I chose to return to Earth for the first time in my life.

I understood grace.

If I go back, I said, I’ll be terrible at it.

I’ll be scared and broken and probably angry for a while.

I’ll question you.

I’ll doubt.

I’ll mess up.

I know, he said simply.

And you still want me.

I’ve always wanted you.

Before you were born, before the earth was formed, before time began, I knew you and wanted you.

This isn’t a job interview where you have to prove your qualifications, Ila.

This is love.

I’m not asking if you’re good enough.

I’m asking if you’re willing.

I looked at his hand again, still extended toward me.

The scar in his palm was a reminder that God understood suffering, that he hadn’t stood at a distance, commanding humans to endure pain while remaining untouched himself.

He’d entered into it.

He’d chosen the nails.

“What happens when I take your hand?” I asked.

“You’ll wake up,” he said.

“In the grave, in darkness, in pain, your body will be damaged.

Your lungs will be full of sand.

It will hurt Ila.

The resurrection always does.

Death is easy.

Coming back to life is agony.

But you’ll be there.

I’ll be there.

I reached out and placed my hand in his.

The moment our skin touched, everything changed.

Pain.

That’s the first thing I remember.

Not light, not relief.

Pain so intense it whited out everything else.

My lungs were on fire.

I tried to inhale and couldn’t.

Something blocked my airways, filling my nose, my throat, my chest.

Sand.

I was still buried, but I was alive.

Panic hit again.

Different from before.

Before I’d been dying.

Now I was alive, but still trapped, and my body screamed for oxygen it couldn’t get.

I tried to move my arms and found I could slightly.

The sand around me had settled during my death, creating tiny pockets of space.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next, except to say I wasn’t alone in that grave.

The presence I’d felt when I died, the warmth, the peace, it was still there.

But now it was active, purposeful.

I felt strength that wasn’t mine flowing into my limbs.

My hands, which should have been weak from oxygen deprivation and death, began to move with power.

I clawed at the sand above me, pushing, scraping, digging.

It was slow work.

For every handful I displaced, more flowed in to fill the gap.

But I kept going.

I had to.

My lungs burned.

The sand I’d inhaled was suffocating me from the inside.

I needed air.

I needed to break through.

Up.

I had to go up.

I pushed with my legs, with my arms, with every ounce of strength.

The sand shifted around me.

I was moving inch by inch through the mass that had killed me.

Time lost meaning again.

Was it minutes, hours? I just kept moving, kept pushing, kept believing that somewhere above me was air and sky and life.

My hand broke through first.

The sensation of my fingers emerging into open air was euphoric.

I pushed harder, widening the gap.

My arm followed, then my head.

I burst through the surface of the grave, gasping, choking, vomiting sand.

My lungs convulsed, trying to expel the grains that filled them.

Each cough brought up more sand, more blood, more evidence of what my body had endured.

The night air hit my face, cool and clean.

I gulped it in desperately.

My damaged lungs protesting every breath, but it was air.

I was breathing.

I pulled myself fully out of the grave, collapsing on the surface beside the hole I’d been buried in.

The desert stretched around me in all directions, silent and vast under a sky full of stars.

I’d been dead.

My heart had stopped.

My lungs had stopped.

I’d left my body and met Jesus and made a choice to return.

And now I was alive.

I don’t know how long I lay there just breathing, just existing.

Minutes, maybe hours.

The shock of resurrection is profound.

Your brain can’t quite accept that you should be dead, but aren’t.

Eventually, survival instincts kicked in.

I was alive, but I was still in the middle of the desert with no water, no shelter, no idea which direction led to civilization.

If I didn’t move, I’d die again.

This time from exposure.

I tried to stand and immediately collapsed.

My legs wouldn’t hold me.

I’d been without oxygen for too long.

My muscles were damaged, weak.

I would have to crawl, so I crawled.

I chose a direction at random.

Or maybe not random.

Maybe I was guided.

I crawled across sand that caught at my abaya, over rocks that cut my hands and knees.

I crawled until my arms gave out, then rested, then crawled again.

Dawn was breaking when I saw them.

Lights in the distance.

A settlement of some kind.

With the last of my strength, I crawled toward those lights.

The Bedawin family found me collapsed at the edge of their camp as the sun rose fully over the horizon.

I learned later that they almost didn’t investigate.

The shape they saw in the distance could have been anything.

A dead animal, trash blown by the wind.

But the youngest son, a boy of about 12 named Amir, convinced his father to check.

They thought I was dead when they reached me.

I was covered in sand and blood, my skin gray, barely breathing.

The father, whose name was Ibrahim, later told me he actually checked for a pulse twice because the first time he found nothing.

But I was alive, barely, impossibly, but alive.

They carried me to their tent.

The women, Ibraims wife, Fatima, and their two daughters, stripped my sandcovered clothes and washed me with precious water.

They wrapped me in clean robes and fed me small sips of camel milk.

I drifted in and out of consciousness for 3 days.

When I was aware, I could hear them talking in hushed voices, wondering who I was, what had happened to me, whether I would live.

On the third day, I woke fully.

Fatima was beside me.

And when she saw my eyes openly, focused, she smiled and praised Allah.

You’re awake, little sister, she said gently.

We thought you might not make it.

I tried to speak, but my throat was raw, damaged from the sand.

She gave me water, which I sipped slowly.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“What happened to you?” I couldn’t tell her the truth.

“Not all of it.

These people were Muslims, traditional Bedawins who lived by ancient codes of honor.

If I told them my family had tried to kill me, they would feel obligated to contact authorities or possibly return me to my family.

If I told them I’d converted to Christianity, they might turn me out.

So, I lied.

Or rather, I told a partial truth.

My name is Leila, I said horsely.

I was attacked, robbed.

They left me in the desert to die.

Fatima’s face hardened with anger.

What kind of men attack a woman and leave her for dead? This is haram.

Forbidden by Allah.

They’re gone now.

I said, I just need time to heal.

Then I’ll leave.

I won’t burden your family.

Ibrahim, who had entered the tent, shook his head firmly.

You will stay as long as needed.

The desert code demands hospitality to those in need.

You are under our protection now.

And I was for 3 weeks I stayed with that Bedwin family.

They fed me, sheltered me, and asked no more questions about my past.

They assumed I was a victim of crime.

And in a way, I was.

During those weeks, I healed physically.

The cuts and bruises faded.

My lungs recovered.

Though I still coughed up sand occasionally, which terrified me each time.

My strength returned, but the question loomed.

What next? I couldn’t go home.

My family thought I was dead.

And if they learned I was alive, they would finish what they started.

I couldn’t stay with the Bedwins forever.

Eventually, they would ask questions I couldn’t answer.

I needed a plan.

One evening, as I sat outside the tent, watching the sunset paint the desert golden orange, young Amir sat beside me.

“You’re different,” he said simply.

My heart jumped.

“What do you mean? When you sleep, you talk.

You say a name.

” Yasu, the Arabic pronunciation of Jesus.

I went very still.

What else did I say? Nothing clear.

But my father says that when people nearly die, sometimes they see things, things from the other world.

Did you see something, Sister Ila? I looked at this boy, this innocent child, and made a choice.

Yes, I said quietly.

I saw someone, someone who told me to live, to tell people that there’s hope even in the darkest places.

Amir considered this.

Then you should do it.

Tell people, “My father says that when Allah saves you from death, it’s for a purpose.

Your father is wise.

Will you leave soon?” “I have to.

” I said, “But I’ll never forget your family’s kindness.

” 3 days later, Ibrahim drove me to the outskirts of Riad in his battered pickup truck.

He gave me money, enough for food and transport.

He asked no questions about where I would go or what I would do.

May Allah protect you, sister, he said as I climbed out of the truck.

“And you, brother,” I replied.

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