I had exactly 30 minutes to leave Saudi Arabia or I was going to lose my head.

My bank accounts were frozen.

The palace guards who used to salute me were now hunting me.

My own family, the people who raised me and loved me, had signed the order for my execution.

And as I stood in the middle of that chaos, stripped of my title, my money, and my safety, I realized something terrifying.

The prince who had everything was about to die with nothing.

But why? Why would a man with billions of dollars, private jets, and the world at his feet throw it all away because of a book, because of a single name that I was forbidden to speak? Or if you are praying for a family member who seems impossible to save, you need to stay and hear what happened in that room.

You need to see the price I paid.

Because what happened to me that night didn’t just break my pride, it broke the laws of physics.

It defied everything I was taught about reality.

And it started with the most arrogant plan of my life.

I opened it to destroy it.

But God had a different plan.

And looking back now, 10 years later, from a place I never thought I would be.

I can tell you the truth about what it really cost to follow the truth.

This is how I lost the world but gained my soul.

My name is Abit and before that night in May 2012, I lived a life that most people only see in movies.

I was 28 years old.

I was born into the highest levels of Saudi royalty.

From the moment I took my first breath, I was told that I was special.

We had power.

The kind of power where you do not ask for things, you just take them.

My mother wore jewelry around her neck that cost more than what an average family earns in 10 lifetimes.

I grew up in a palace where the floors were marble and the ceilings were gold.

I never opened a door for myself.

If I dropped a handkerchief, three servants would dive to the floor to pick it up before I could even look down.

I want you to imagine what that does to a young man’s mind.

When you are never told no, you start to believe you are a god.

I was sitting in my brand new Ferrari.

It was a custom import from Germany painted a specific shade of red that no one else was allowed to have.

The leather seat was soft against my back.

There were about a hundred of them in that wing of the palace alone.

They were washing the cars.

They were trimming the gardens.

And in that moment, sitting in a car that cost half a million dollars, I felt a sensation that I could not explain.

I felt completely and utterly alone.

I looked at the guard standing near my window.

He was smiling at me.

If I lost my title, he would not be saluting.

I realized that not a single person in that palace loved me.

They loved my money.

They feared my father.

They respected my title, but me a bit the person.

I was invisible.

I was sitting in a golden cage.

Had everything the world tells you to want.

I had the women, but inside my chest, there was a vacuum, a silence.

It was a poverty of the spirit that no amount of oil money could fill.

But I was good at hiding it.

I covered that emptiness with arrogance.

I treated people like furniture because I was terrified that if I stopped acting like a prince, I would have to face the miserable man underneath the robes.

I told myself that I was blessed by Allah, that my wealth was proof of his favor.

If God loved me, why would he give me all this? That was my logic.

I was the chosen one.

And everyone else, especially those who did not follow our faith, were beneath me.

They were dirt.

They were fuel for the fire.

Many of them were Christians from the Philippines or Africa.

Why am I the one in a palace and they’re the ones in the dust? This was my mindset.

This was the wall I built around my heart.

It was a wall made of gold bars and religious pride.

And I thought nothing could break it.

I thought I was safe in my tower.

But I was wrong.

I was so wrong.

You have to understand the environment I was raised in to understand what happened next.

It wasn’t just that we were Muslims.

It was that we were taught that Christianity was not just a different religion but an enemy religion.

From the time I was a small boy sitting in the mosque rocking back and forth memorizing the Quran, I was programmed.

I was programmed to view the Bible as a corrupted book.

A book full of lies.

A book that insults God by saying he has a son.

I remember my tutors telling me, “There is only one God, Allah, and he has no partners.

” To say God has a son is the greatest blasphemy.

It is the unforgivable sin.

Christians are polytheists.

They worship three gods.

Aas confused.

They are lost and it is our duty to either convert them or to shame them.

I took this very seriously.

I was not a casual believer.

I was zealous.

I wanted to prove my devotion.

And the way I proved it was by attacking the Christian faith every chance I got.

I viewed myself as an intellectual tearing.

I didn’t want to just hate Christians blindly.

Wanted to defeat them with logic.

I wanted to humiliate them with arguments.

I spent hours studying their own book.

Not to learn from it, but to find contradictions, to find errors, to find anything I could use as a weapon.

I became a hunter.

And my prey were the weak, the poor Christians who worked in our country.

I would corner my driver.

I would corner the gardeners.

I would ask them impossible questions.

I would say, “Explain the trinity to me.

How can one be three and three be one? It makes no sense.

Are you stupid? Do you have no brain?” And when they couldn’t answer, when they stuttered or looked down in fear, I would laugh.

I would feel a rush of power.

See, I would tell myself, “They have no answers.

Their faith is empty.

I am right.

I am the victor.

” It was a cruel game.

I see that now.

I was a bully.

I was using my power and my education to crush people who had no ability to fight back.

But at the time, I thought I was doing God a favor.

I thought I was a defender of the truth.

My hatred was not hot and angry.

It was cold and calculated.

It was arrogant.

I looked to the cross and I saw foolishness.

A God who dies.

A God who bleeds.

What kind of we God is that? My God is powerful.

My God conquers.

My God does not get nailed to a piece of wood by his own creation.

This hatred grew in me like a cancer.

It became my identity.

I was the defender of the faith.

I was the prince who could not be defeated in a debate.

But there was a problem.

The more I attacked them, the more I noticed something strange, something that bothered me, something that kept me awake at night in my silent palace.

I noticed that these poor workers, these people who had nothing, these people I mocked and ridiculed, they had something I didn’t.

When I mocked them, they didn’t get angry.

They didn’t curse me back.

Sometimes they would look at me with eyes that were not full of fear, but full of pity, full of love.

How could they love me? I was their oppressor.

I was their enemy.

But they had a piece that I couldn’t understand.

Day had a joy that didn’t make sense.

Came.

They lived in cramped quarters.

They ate simple food.

They worked in the heat all day, yet they smiled.

I lived in air conditioning.

I ate the finest food.

I slept on silk, yet I was miserable.

This contradiction drove me crazy.

I wanted to break them.

I wanted to prove that their peace was a lie.

I wanted to prove that their Bible was a fairy tale.

I decided that I needed to do something bigger.

I needed to stage a public humiliation.

I didn’t want to just debate a driver.

K.

I wanted to destroy the foundation of their faith in front of witnesses.

Okay? I wanted to make a mockery of Jesus Christ in my own home.

Okay? And that desire, that burning need to prove myself right is what led me to the library.

Okay? It is what led me to the moment that would end my life as I knew it.

I decided I would find a Bible, a real Bible.

Not just the verses we were taught to attack, but the whole book.

I wanted to read it myself so I could find the ultimate contradiction, the ultimate lie.

I wanted to find the smoking gun that would prove Christianity was a fraud once and for all.

I remember looking for it.

It is not easy to find a Bible in Saudi Arabia.

It is contraband.

A D is illegal.

If you are caught with one, you can be arrested.

You can be deported or worse.

But I was a prince.

The rules did not apply to me.

I could have whatever I wanted.

So I found one.

It was old.

It was worn.

They had been confiscated from a construction worker years ago and thrown in a box of prohibited items.

Remember holding it in my hands.

The cover was black.

The pages were thin.

It felt light, insignificant.

I looked at it and I laughed.

I thought this is it.

This is the book that has deceived billions of people.

This is the enemy.

I am going to tear it apart.

I am going to expose it for the trash that it is.

I didn’t know it then, but I was holding a live wire.

Okay.

I was holding a stick of dynamite and I was about to light the fuse.

I brought it to my room.

I hid it under my bed, not because I was afraid, but because I was planning my attack.

I was preparing for the dinner.

I was preparing to invite my family, my brothers, my cousins to watch me dismantle this book.

I wanted an audience for my victory.

I wanted them to applaud my brilliance.

Okay? I had no idea that I was setting the stage for my own funeral.

I want you to pause for a moment and ask yourself a question.

Have you ever hated something so much that you became obsessed with it? That was me with the Bible.

I didn’t just want to ignore it.

I wanted to dismantle it.

Finding that Bible in the box of confiscated items felt like finding a weapon that I could turn against my enemy.

I took it back to my private quarters.

I remember closing the door and locking it.

In my world, privacy was a luxury, even for a prince.

If a servant had walked in and seen me holding that black book, rumors would have spread.

Not that I had converted, but that I was polluting myself with filth.

That is how we viewed it.

I sat on the edge of my bed.

The room was silent.

I held the book in my hands.

It was lighter than I expected.

The pages were thin, almost like tissue paper.

It smelled old.

It smelled like the sweat of the worker who had owned it before it was taken from him.

I felt a wave of disgust, but also a strange thrill.

I was holding the forbidden fruit.

I opened it to the first page.

I wasn’t looking for truth.

I was looking for ammunition.

I had a notebook next to me and a gold pen.

My plan was simple.

I would read a verse, find the error, write it down, and build a case so strong that no Christian could ever stand against me.

I started reading.

I expected to find anger.

I expected to find a god who was just like the one I feared.

Distant, demanding, ready to punish.

But as I turned the pages, I found something else.

I found stories of ordinary people, broken people.

People who made mistakes, terrible mistakes, and yet God did not destroy them.

He pursued them.

I read about David, a murderer and an adulterer who was called a man after God’s own heart.

That made no sense to me.

In my religion, you had to earn your standing.

It had to be perfect.

Here was a god who worked with imperfection.

I tried to push these thoughts away.

I told myself, “This is just poetry.

It’s just manipulation.

I focused harder on finding the contradictions.

I spent nights reading by the light of my lamp, scribbling furious notes.

I found things that didn’t align with my Quran, and I circled them in red ink.

See, I told myself, “Here is the lie.

Here is the corruption.

But there was a voice in the back of my head, a whisper that I couldn’t silence.

It asked me, Abid, if this book is so weak, why are you so afraid of it? If it is so obviously false, why does it feel like it is reading you instead of you reading it? If you are listening to this right now and you are skeptical about God, or maybe you are angry at religion, I challenge you to do what I did.

Don’t take my word for it.

Read the book yourself, but be warned.

It is dangerous.

It exposes things in your heart that you didn’t know were there.

For me, it was exposing my pride.

But I wasn’t ready to surrender yet.

In fact, the more the book challenged me, the more arrogant I became.

I decided that reading it in private wasn’t enough.

I needed to make a public statement.

I needed to prove my dominance once and for all.

And that is when the idea for the dinner came to me.

T.

It was the most foolish, dangerous idea of my life.

And if I knew then what I know now, I would have run out of that palace and never looked back.

But I didn’t run.

I dug my heels in.

The plan was perfect.

Or so I thought.

I would host a grand dinner for my immediate family, my brothers, my cousins, the inner circle.

These were men who, like me, were raised to believe we were the masters of the universe.

We were young, wealthy, and full of religious eel.

I told the kitchen staff to prepare a feast.

Lamb, rice, the finest delicacies.

I wanted the mood to be celebratory.

I wanted it to feel like a victory party before the battle even began.

I remembered the night vividly.

It was May 1st, 2012.

The dining room was illuminated by crystal chandeliers.

The table was set with silver and porcelain.

The air smelled of saffron and roasted meat.

My family arrived laughing, talking about business, about cars, about politics.

I sat at the head of the table.

I felt powerful.

I had the Bible hidden on a small table next to my chair, covered by a silk cloth.

I was waiting for the right moment to unveil it.

We ate.

We drank tea.

The conversation was loud and boisterous.

I waited until everyone was satisfied, until the servants had cleared the plates.

Then I stood up.

The room went quiet.

They looked at me expecting a toast or a speech about our family success.

Instead, I reached down and pulled the cloth off the Bible.

There was a gasp.

Okay.

In a strict Muslim household, bringing that book to the table is like bringing a snake.

Okay.

It is offensive.

Relax, I told them, smiling.

I haven’t turned into an infidel.

I brought this here tonight to show you something.

We always talk about how wrong the Christians are, but tonight I want to show you exactly why.

I want to read to you from their own book and show you how foolish it is.

We are going to have a good laugh.

The tension in the room broke.

My brothers smiled.

They leaned back in their chairs.

Oh, this is a game.

They thought, “Abit is going to entertain us.

” They nodded.

“Go ahead,” they said.

“Read it.

Let us hear the lies.

” I felt a surge of adrenaline.

This was my moment.

I was the intellectual defender of Islam.

I picked up the black book.

I felt the weight of it in my hand.

I had bookmarked a specific passage that I thought was particularly ridiculous.

I opened it.

I cleared my throat.

I looked around the room, making eye contact with each of them, making sure I had their full attention.

I want you to picture this scene.

a Saudi prince standing in a palace surrounded by luxury holding the word of God with the sole intention of mocking it.

I was standing on the edge of a cliff and I was dancing.

I thought I was in control.

Tai was the judge and God was the defendant.

But the trial was about to turn against me.

I looked down at the page.

I opened my mouth to read the first word.

K.

And that is when the world stopped.

That is when the atmosphere in the room changed from a dinner party to something else entirely.

Something ancient, something terrifying.

You have ever felt the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Multiply that by a thousand.

That is what hit me.

Key.

And I want you to listen very closely to what happened next because it defies every law of science I was ever taught.

It started with the wind.

We were indoors.

K.

The windows were heavy, double paneed glass, and they were locked shut to keep the desert heat out and the air conditioning in.

The curtains were heavy velvet.

There was no draft.

There was no breeze.

But suddenly, a wind began to blow inside the dining room.

It wasn’t a gentle breeze.

It was a gale.

It whipped the tablecloths.

It knocked over the crystal glasses.

The chandelier above my head started to sway and chime, creating a discordant music that filled the room.

My family jumped up.

My brothers were shouting, “What is happening? Is it an earthquake? Is it a storm?” But I couldn’t answer them because I was frozen.

And I don’t mean I was scared stiff.

Mean I was physically paralyzed.

I tried to lower my hand, the hand holding the Bible, but it was locked in place.

My muscles were rigid as stone.

I tried to speak to say I don’t know, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

I was a prisoner in my own body.

Then came the heat.

It wasn’t a gradual warming.

It was an instant searing heat that felt like a blast furnace had been opened in front of my face.

Sweat instantly poured down my back.

My skin felt like it was blistering.

But the strange thing was the Bible in my hand.

Didn’t burn.

It felt cool.

It was the only thing in the room that felt safe.

And then the light koi, a light brighter than the desert sun and noon, exploded in the room.

It didn’t come from the chandelier.

It didn’t come from the windows.

It came from everywhere and nowhere at once was blindingly white, pure, and terrifying.

My family fell to the floor.

They were screaming, covering their eyes, huddled under the table.

They thought it was a bomb.

They thought we were under attack.

Go.

But I knew in that split second, stripped of my arrogance, stripped of my arguments, I knew this wasn’t an attack.

This was a presence.

I was standing in the presence of something so holy, so powerful that my human body couldn’t handle it.

I fell to my knees, not because I wanted to, but because my legs gave out, collapsed forward, my face pressing into the expensive carpet.

The Bible was still in my hand.

And then I heard it, a voice.

It wasn’t a soundwave that hit my eardrums.

It was a voice that spoke directly into the center of my being.

It was louder than the wind yet quieter than a whisper.

It said, “Abit, why do you persecute me?” I tried to scream.

“Who are you?” I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t make a sound.

The voice spoke again.

“I am Jesus.

I am the one you are looking for.

Jesus.

” The name hit me like a physical blow.

Not a prophet, not a man.

God.

The realization shattered my entire worldview in a millisecond.

All my arguments, all my notes, all my pride, they evaporated like water on hot pavement.

I wasn’t dealing with a concept.

I was dealing with a person and he was alive.

He was in the room.

The fear I felt was primal.

I thought I was going to die.

I thought this is it.

Continue reading….
Next »