Thousands Watch LIVE as Omani Royal Prince Publicly Chooses Jesus Over Islam and Royalty

I once searched for God with all my heart in Islam.

But I found peace and assurance in Jesus.

He forgave my sins and gave me a reason to live even in the darkest times.

My brothers and sisters, God’s love is for you, too.

Seek the truth and come to Jesus for life and hope.

Allah cannot save you.

Only Jesus can.

Jesus is God.

I know that sounds simple, almost obvious if you are sitting in a church or reading the Bible at home.

But when you come from where I come from, when you come from what I come from, those seven words cost everything.

The name my family gave me, the name that opened every door in my country, the name that meant I would never wait in line, never be questioned, never be refused.

That name is dead to them now.

They have erased it from family records.

They have forbidden my siblings from speaking it.

My mother, the woman who carry me for 9 months and nursed me at her breast, she has been told to say she has one less son than she actually bore.

But I will tell you who I am.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother for Omen continues his 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 from Oman.

I was born into the extended royal family, not the direct line of succession, but close enough that the word privilege does not even begin to describe what I had.

I wore silk.

I walked on marble floors in palaces that had been built by my ancestors.

I had servants who anticipated my needs before I knew I needed them.

I had money, not just money, but generational wealth.

The kind of wealth that meant I never had to think about survival, about security, about where my next meal would come from.

And I walk away from all of it.

for a person I had only recently met.

For a message that contradicted everything I had been taught since birth.

For the radical, terrifying, liberating claim that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.

I am telling you this story because I believe it matters.

Not because I am special.

I am not.

I am an ordinary person who found an extraordinary truth.

But I paid an extraordinary price for it.

Some days I still do not think the price was worth it.

Those are the days when I wake up at 3:00 in the morning and think about my mother’s voice and I cannot stop the tears from coming.

Other days I know with absolute certainty that Jesus is worth everything I lost.

Those days are becoming more frequent.

This is the story of how I got here.

How a young man raised in Islam in extraordinary privilege in a family that had followed the teachings of Muhammad for 1300 years.

How that young man encountered Jesus Christ and could not deny it and how that moment changed everything.

I need to tell you what it was like to grow up where I grew up because you cannot understand why I left unless you understand what I was leaving behind.

And you cannot understand the cost unless you understand what privilege tastes like.

Yo, Oman is beautiful.

The mountains rise up like they are protecting something sacred.

The light in the morning is golden, almost unreal.

The smell of incense and spices hangs in the air.

It is a land of great beauty and great tradition.

My family had ruled there for generations, not as kings perhaps, but as people of influence, of power, of deep respect.

Our name meant something.

Our work was law in certain circles.

Our wealth was old and secure and nearly infinite.

The palace where I grew up was not a single building, but an entire compound.

The main residence had more rooms than I could count.

There were former prayer rooms, grand on spaces with Persian carpets and marble columns and the sound of water fountains echoing of the walls.

There were reception halls where important visitors came to seek favor or conduct business.

There were private quarters for family members, each one more luxurious than most people’s entire houses.

And there were the servants areas, a whole separate world of people whose entire job was to make sure that we the family never had to inconvenience ourselves with the details of living.

I had my own attendant.

I do not say that to boast.

I say it because you need to understand the level of separation between my words and the real world.

There was a man whose job every single day was to take care of me.

He woke me in the morning.

He laid out my clothes.

He brought me breakfast.

He cleaned my room.

He anticipated my needs.

If I thought of something I wanted, a book, a specific fruit, a pair of shoes, it would appear as if by magic within minutes.

And I never thought about where it came from.

I never thought about who made it possible.

I never had to think.

That was the whole point.

Privilege means never having to think about logistics.

It means the world arranging itself around you.

The rhythm of life in the palace was dictated by Islam.

But it was a particular kind of Islam.

The Islam of the ruling family, the Islam of power and tradition and status.

Every day was structured around prayer times.

The call to prayer, the adhan would echo through the compound five times each day.

And everyone was expected to pray.

But it was not like prayer in a normal mosque.

In a mosque, you might pray among strangers, among equals.

In the palace, we prayed together as a family in a designated prayer room in a particular order of hierarchy.

The senior males would pray in front, the women would pray separately in a back section.

If I would pray with the men in my assigned spot, which was determined not by my piety, but by my position in the family hierarchy, and we would pray perfectly.

The movements had to be precise.

The timing had to be exact.

The appearance had to be impeccable.

Other families might pray at home with flexibility, with authenticity.

But we were the family of importance.

We prayed to be seen.

Not seen by God.

I do not know what we thought God saw, but seen by each other.

Seen by the servants.

seen by the visiting dignitaries, seen by anyone who might judge us.

I remember being seven years old, standing in the prayer room before dawn.

My father had just corrected my posture during the evening prayer.

I had not been standing straight enough.

My form had not been perfect.

He had pulled me aside afterward and told me that a man of our family must be impeccable in his worship.

People were watching.

We could not give them anything to criticize.

And I remember thinking even then that something was wrong.

I did not have the vocabulary to express it.

I could not say this feels like performance not prayer.

But I felt it.

I felt the weight of it.

I felt the eyes on me even though no one was looking at me.

I felt the pressure to be correct, to be perfect, to be what a prince was supposed to be.

The thing about growing up in that kind of environment is that you internalize the performance.

You do not just perform for others, you perform for yourself.

You begin to believe that your worth is determined by how well you execute the role you have been assigned.

You begin to believe that authenticity is dangerous.

You begin to believe that your true self, whoever that is, must be kept hidden.

I had friends among the other children of important families.

We would see each other at functions, at family gatherings, at former events.

We would talk about our studies, our futures, the roles that were already being written for us.

And I noticed something even then.

We never talked about what we actually felt.

We never expressed doubt.

We never asked questions that might challenge the system.

We performed for each other the role of the perfect prince, the perfect child, the perfect Muslim.

and all of us were suffocating.

It is strange what you notice as you grow older.

When you are a child, you accept the world as it is presented to you.

This is how families work.

This is how Islam works.

This is how power works.

But as you get older, you start to see inconsistencies.

You start to notice the gap between what people say and what people do.

I was maybe 12 when I first saw it clearly.

I was walking through a hallway of the palace and I overheard my father on the phone.

He was in his study.

The door was partly open and he did not know I was there.

I heard him speaking to someone.

I heard him laughing about something that had made my stomach turn.

I heard him making a promise that if kept would harm another family, would destroy someone’s business, would leave them in ruin.

And he was laughing.

After he hung up, he washed his hands with ritual precision, three times each hand.

Then he went to the prayer room.

I remember watching from the hallway as he led the evening prayer.

His movements were impeccable.

His voice was reverent.

He was the very picture of piety.

And I was standing there thinking about the conversation I had just heard.

I was thinking about the laugh.

I was thinking about the promise made without care for who it would hurt.

That moment cracked something open in me.

I realized with a clarity that I have never forgotten that the religious performance had nothing to do with actual morality.

You could do evil in the afternoon and pray with perfect devotion in the evening and no one would see a contradiction.

No one would call it out.

No one would say, “How can you make that promise?” And then lead us in prayer.

It was supposed to be Islam.

It was supposed to be about submitting to God, about living morally, about justice and mercy and truth.

But what I was watching was a performance, a mask that people wore in certain spaces and took off in others.

As I got older, I saw this pattern more and more.

I saw uncles whose private lives contradicted everything they claimed to believe.

I saw my grandmother who was extraordinarily pious in public making cruel decisions about surveance when she thought no one was watching.

I saw my mother struggling to maintain an impossible balance, supporting my father in public but grieving privately about things I did not fully understand at the time.

I saw slowly and with growing despair that Islam as it was being lived in my family had nothing to do with God.

It had to do with power.

It had to do with reputation.

It had to do with maintaining the image of righteousness while living however you wanted behind closed doors.

And there was nowhere to talk about this.

There was no space for doubt.

If you question, if you asked why there was this gap between belief and behavior, you were considered disrespectful.

You were seen as someone who did not understand the complexity of power, the necessity of pragmatism.

You were told that religion is one thing and business is another.

You were told that you would understand when you were older, but I never understood.

I just became more isolated in my doubt.

I started to withdraw.

I was still a child, but I was becoming separate.

I would sit in my room, a room that was decorated with every luxury, every comfort, but which felt increasingly like a cage.

And I would wonder if there was something wrong with me.

Was I the only one who saw this? Was I the only one who felt this suffocation? Was I the only one who wanted something real, something authentic, something that was not just a performance? The irony is that my family could not understand why I was becoming quieter, more withdrawn.

They thought I was troubled.

They thought maybe I was sick.

They did not understand that I was suffocating under the weight of a faith that had nothing to do with actual faith.

They did not understand that I was dying in the palace, even though I had everything the world told me should make me happy.

I became obsessed with authenticity, though I did not know that word for it at the time.

I would watch people, servants, visiting merchants, people we saw on the street when we went out, and I would try to figure out what was real about them.

Was that merchant smile genuine? Did that servant actually respect us? Or was he just playing the game? Was anyone in this world actually honest? This obsession with authenticity made me sick.

I could not enjoy the privileges I had because I was too busy analyzing them, wondering what was real about them.

The silk I wore, was it supposed to make me feel good? It did not.

It just made me feel like I was wearing a costume.

The money I had access to, was it supposed to make me secure? It did not.

It just made me feel disconnected from the reality that most people lived in.

I started to read, not the books my teachers assigned, though I read those too.

I started to read anything I could get my hands on that might help me understand what was real.

I read some Islamic texts, hoping to find something that resonated with the authentic faith I was searching for.

But the more I read, the more I saw that what my family believed and practiced was a very particular interpretation of Islam.

It was the Islam of power and tradition and culture.

But I didn’t know if it was the true Islam.

I did not know if there was a true Islam.

And I did not know if any religion could be true if it could be twisted so easily into a tool for maintaining power.

I was miserable.

My family could see it.

They tried to help in their own way.

They suggested I was studying too hard.

They suggested I needed better friends.

They suggested I needed to pray more to reconnect with my faith to remember my place and my privilege.

But what I needed was to get out.

What I needed was to escape the suffocation of the palace.

the performance of Islam, the hierarchy that determined every interaction I had.

I did not know at that time what I was escaping to work.

I just knew I needed to leave.

When I was in my early 20ies, my father called me into his study.

I remember being nervous.

Being called into yinka into your father’s study when you are from a traditional family is never casual.

It is usually about something important.

He told me that I would be going abroad for post-graduate studies.

One of the best universities in a western country had accepted me.

The family had connections and they had used them.

This was an honor.

This was an opportunity.

This was a position that many young men in the family would have wanted.

I should have felt grateful.

I should have felt excited and a part of me did I suppose but the dominant emotion was something else.

The dominant emotion was relief.

The dominant emotion was the sense that a door was opening.

For the first time in my life, I could see a way out.

My father gave me clear instructions.

I was to maintain my Islamic practice.

I was to stay connected to the Muslim student association at the university.

I was to make the family proud.

I was to remember that I was a representative of my family, of my country, of my faith.

In other words, I was to continue the performance just in a different location.

I nodded and said yes to all of it.

And internally, I was already leaving.

My mother cried when I packed my bag.

She held me and told me to be careful.

She told me to pray every day.

She told me to remember who I was.

She told me not to forget my family.

And I held her and said all the things I was supposed to say while something inside me was already gone.

The flight was long.

I remember sitting in the airplane looking down at the earth below and feeling something I had never felt before.

It was not happiness exactly.

It was something more primal.

It was the sense that I was moving away from something.

It was the hope that I might finally find something that was real.

The dorm room was small, very small compared to the spaces I had grown up in.

There was a bed, a desk, a small closet, a window that looked out onto the campus.

It was the most beautiful place I had ever been.

I remember the first night I lay in the bed listening to the silence not the silence of the palace which was actually a controlled silence carefully maintained always with a sense that something was happening behind the scenes in the servants areas or in the private rooms.

This was a different kind of silence.

This was the silence of a thousand other people’s lives happening around me, all separated from each other by walls and distance.

I could hear someone’s television through the wall.

I could hear laughter down the hallway.

I could hear the distant sound of cars outside and under all of it, a silence so complete it almost felt like a sound of its own.

I cried not because I was homesick, not because I was lonely exactly, though I was in a way.

I cried because I realized lying in that small dorm room that for the first time in my entire life, I was alone.

Truly alone, without supervision, without someone watching, without anyone knowing where I was or what I was thinking or what I was doing.

It was the most terrifying and most wonderful feeling I had ever experienced.

I got up and called my mother.

It was early morning in Oman.

She had been waiting for me to contact her.

She asked if I was safe.

She asked if I was eating.

She asked if I was praying.

I told her yes to all of it.

Some of those answers were lies.

Though I did not know it yet.

After I hung up, I sat in the silence again and I thought about the future.

I thought about the possibility that I might not go back to being the person I had been.

I thought about the possibility that this freedom, terrifying, uncertain, undefined, might actually be an invitation to become myself.

I did not know what that self would look like.

I did not know what I believed or what I wanted or who I actually was underneath all the performing.

But for the first time, I had space to ask the questions.

For the first time, I had time to look for answers.

For the first time, I was not being told who I was supposed to be.

That was the beginning.

That was the moment when something inside me started to wake up.

I did not know that this waking up would eventually cost me everything.

I just knew that I could not go back to sleep.

The campus was overwhelming.

There were so many people.

There were so many different kinds of people.

There were people from countries I had never heard of.

There were people of different faiths.

There were people who seemed to have no faith at all.

There were women walking around in clothes that would have been scandalous in Oman.

There were men and women holding hands, kissing in public.

There was alcohol being drunk openly without shame.

For the first few days, I was in shock.

My entire frame of reference for how humans were supposed to behave had been established in a very specific cultural and religious context.

And this place was operating by completely different rules.

I was confused.

I was also, if I am honest, curious.

I sought out the Muslim Student Association.

This was what my family expected me to do.

This was how I was supposed to maintain my connection to my faith and my community.

And for a while, I did.

I went to their meetings.

I participated in their discussions.

I attended their Friday prayers which were held in a borrowed prayer room on campus.

But I felt the same suffocation there.

the same sense of performance, the same focus on ritual and appearance and the maintenance of religious identity.

It was a smaller version of the palace, but it had the same dynamics.

Young Muslim men from various countries all trying to maintain their Muslim identity in a place where being Muslim was marked as different was other.

all performing for each other.

And I realized something.

The problem was not Islam specifically.

The problem was that I was performing.

The problem was that I did not know how to be authentic.

The problem was that I was so used to hiding my real thoughts and feelings that I did not even know what they were anymore.

So I started to pull back.

I still attended the Muslim association meetings because I did not want to raise suspicions.

I still prayed though sometimes I skipped it and nothing happened.

God did not strike me down.

The sky did not fall.

I just went to class and studied and lay in my bed at night thinking.

And slowly without really deciding to, I started to explore.

I started to eat food I was not supposed to eat.

I started to talk to people from different backgrounds.

I started to question things I had never been allowed to question.

I started very cautiously to become myself.

I did not know where it would lead.

I just knew that I could not go back.

There is something I need to say about privilege because it shapes the entire story that follows.

Privilege is not just material.

It is not just money and comfort and servants and palaces.

Privilege is a way of seeing yourself in the world.

Privilege is the certainty that your needs matter.

Privilege is the assumption that your life is important.

I had all of those things and they were suffocating me.

The problem with privilege is that you cannot escape it by moving to a different country.

You cannot leave your privilege behind in a palace on the other side of the world.

Privilege travels with you.

It is baked into how you think, how you see yourself, how you assume the world should work.

I had never worked.

I had never struggled.

I had never experienced real want.

Everything I had ever needed had been provided for me.

Everything I had ever questioned had been answered by people who assumed they had the right to define reality for me.

And now I was in a place where none of that applied.

Where my name meant nothing.

Where my family’s power could not reach.

Where my wealth was not exotic or impressive.

There were students from wealthier families all around me.

where I was just another person in a classroom of 30 students and the professor did not care if I was a prince or a popper.

In some ways, it was devastating.

In other ways, it was the most liberating thing that had ever happened to me because for the first time, I had to become myself without the scaffolding of privilege.

For the first time, I had to figure out who I was when no one was impressed by my name.

For the first time, I had to ask myself what I actually believed, what I actually valued, what I actually wanted my life to be about.

And the first step in that process was admitting that I did not know.

I did not know who I was.

I did not know what I believed.

I did not know what I wanted.

And that admission, that terrifying, liberating admission was the beginning of everything that would follow.

As those first weeks and months passed, I felt something changing in me.

It was not dramatic.

There was no sudden moment of clarity.

It was more like a slow awakening like coming out of a deep sleep and gradually becoming aware of the world around me.

I was becoming aware of myself.

I was becoming aware that I had thoughts and feelings that were not just echoes of what I had been taught to think and feel.

I was becoming aware that there might be other ways to live, other ways to believe, other ways to understand what it means to be human.

I did not know where this awareness would lead me.

I did not know that within a few years I would encounter something or someone that would turn my entire world upside down.

I did not know that the freedom I was tasting in that dorm room would eventually demand a price I could not even imagine.

I just knew that I could not go back.

And I was beginning to understand that going forward meant leaving behind everything I had known.

The palace was still there across the world.

My family was still there waiting for me to come home changed for the better, ready to resume my place in their carefully ordered world.

My country was still there with all its beauty and all its traditions and all its expectations.

But I was not the same person they had sent away and I was never going to be again.

This is where my real story begins.

Not in the palace, but in that small dorm room.

In that silence, in that first moment of true freedom.

Everything that follows flows from that moment.

Everything that I am and everything I will become begins there.

And I did not know it yet, but I was about to encounter something that would demand everything of me.

something that would ask me to choose between the life I had always known and the possibility of something real.

I was about to meet Jesus.

It was in a philosophy class of all places where I met him.

The professor had been discussing different worldviews, different ways humans have attempted to answer the fundamental questions about meaning and purpose.

We were covering everything from ancient Greek philosophy to modern existentialism.

And there was this person sitting two seats away from me who seemed to actually think these questions mattered.

I do not remember his name immediately becoming important to me.

I do not remember a moment where I thought this person will change my life.

What I remember is noticing that he was thoughtful, that he raised his hand carefully, considered his words before speaking, and seemed genuinely interested in the truth rather than in winning the conversation.

That was rare.

In my family and in the Muslim student association, conversations were about demonstrating that you already knew the truth.

This was different.

We started talking after class.

Nothing major at first, just comments about what the professor had said, thoughts about whether existentialism made sense.

And slowly over a few weeks, we began to spend time together.

We would sit in the campus cafe and talk for hours.

We would walk across the grounds between classes.

We will study in the library side by side.

and sometimes talk more than we studied.

He came from a western family, a Christian family, though he did not make a big deal of it.

He mentioned it the way someone might mention any other fact about their background.

It was part of who he was, but it was not the totality of who he was.

That was different from how I experienced religion.

In my world, being Muslim was everything.

It was the lens through which every decision was made, every thought was filtered, every interaction was interpreted.

But this person, he was a Christian and he was also a student, also a friend, also a person with doubts and questions and concerns about the world.

He was multifaceted.

He was complex.

He was real in a way that was hard to explain.

The first time he mentioned his faith was when I asked him why he went to church.

I did not ask in a critical way.

I was just curious.

In my experience, going to church was like going to a prayer room in the palace.

It was an obligation, a performance, something you did because you were supposed to.

I wanted to understand why he chose to go.

He paused for a long moment before answering.

And then he said something that I have never forgotten.

He said that church was the only place he found himself surrounded by other people who were thinking about what really mattered.

He said that worship, actual worship, not just ritual, was a way of reminding himself what his life was supposed to be about.

He said that faith for him was not about obligation.

It was about relationship.

I did not understand that at the time.

The word relationship applied to God seemed strange to me.

God was distant.

God was powerful.

God was to be obey and feared and honored.

God was not someone you had a relationship with in the way you might have a relationship with a friend.

But I was intrigued.

I was intrigued enough to ask more questions and he answered them without trying to convince me, without trying to argue, without trying to prove that he was right and I was wrong.

He just shared what faith meant to him.

And he listened, genuinely listened when I talked about my own spiritual confusion.

It took several weeks before he invited me to church.

And when he did, it was casual.

Not you need to accept Jesus.

Not you should experience what real worship is like.

Just there is a church I go to on Sunday.

It is small and quiet and the people are genuine.

Would you want to come sometime? I said no.

The first time I gave some excuse about having to study.

The second time I said no for a different reason.

I was nervous about what the other students in the Muslim association would think if they saw me entering a church.

There would be questions.

There would be explanations expected.

There would be judgment.

But he never pushed.

He did not make me feel like I was making a mistake by declining.

He just said whenever you want to and left it at that.

The third time he asked, something in me shifted.

I realized that I was living according to other people’s expectations again.

I was afraid of what the Muslim association would think.

I was afraid of judgment.

I was afraid of being different.

And I thought, why? Why do I care what they think? I came to this country to be free.

So I said yes.

I spent that entire week anxious.

I researched churches online.

I looked up what a Christian service was like, trying to prepare myself.

I wondered what I would see, what I would experience, what it would mean.

I told myself that I was just going out of curiosity, that I was being intellectually open-minded, that this did not mean anything, that I was not actually considering Christianity, that I was just going to see.

But I knew deep down that I was lying to myself.

The building was not what I expected.

It was small, plain, almost nondescript.

There was no grand dome like the moss I knew.

There were no elaborate decorations.

The architecture was simple.

It was almost humble.

We walked in and there was singing, not call to prayer, which is what I was used to, but singing, voices raised together in what seemed to be joy.

The people in the congregation were standing, some with their eyes closed, some looking at small papers or screens with words written on them.

There was an instrument, a piano, I think, providing the accompaniment.

And the thing that struck me immediately was that no one seemed to be performing.

No one was checking to see if others were watching them.

No one seemed to be worried about whether they were doing it right.

They were just singing singing to God or so it seemed not to convince other people that they were religious.

I felt completely out of place and I felt at the same time like I was seeing something real.

We sat down and the singing continued.

Some of the songs had words about God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace.

Grace was a concept I kept hearing and I did not fully understand it.

In Islam, the closest concept is mercy.

But grace is something different.

Grace is love that you do not deserve.

Grace is forgiveness that you have not earned.

Grace is relationship offered freely with nothing required in exchange.

The pastor, the equivalent of an Imam, I suppose, came to the front and began to speak.

He spoke about a passage from the Bible from the Gospel of John chapter 4.

He talked about a woman at a well who was considered unacceptable by her own society.

She was a Samaritan which was one level of unacceptability.

She was also a divorce say which was another level in her time and culture.

She should have been utterly ashamed.

She should have kept her distance from respectable people.

And Jesus the pastor kept saying this name with a tenderness that was strange to me.

Had asked her for a drink of water.

He had engaged her in conversation.

He had treated her with respect.

He had offered her something called living water, which the pastor explained was a metaphor for relationship with God, for freedom, for life itself.

And the woman had believed.

She had encountered Jesus and something in her had shifted.

She had gone back to a village and told everyone about him.

She had become a witness to him.

I listened to the pastor tell this story and something inside me stirred.

Not understanding.

I did not understand the theology.

Not belief.

I was not ready for belief.

But recognition.

Recognition that what was being described was real.

That someone could encounter another person and be completely changed by that encounter.

that someone could go from being ashamed and hidden and hopeless to being seen and valued and hopeful.

I had been that woman.

I thought I had been ashamed of who I really was.

I had been hiding.

I had been performing.

I had been kept at a distance by a system that said I was not acceptable unless I maintain the right image.

And I was desperate to be seen.

Truly seen, not just observe.

It was after the church service that my friend did something crucial.

He gave me a Bible.

Not a lecture, not a series of arguments about why Christianity was true.

Just a physical book and the suggestion that I read the Gospel of John.

Start with that.

He said, “Just read what Jesus actually said without anyone interpreting it for you and see what you think.

” I took the Bible like it was a bomb that might explode in my hands.

And I did not open it for 3 days.

When I finally did, I was alone in my dorm room late at night.

I locked the door even though there was no one watching me.

I opened to the Gospel of John and I started to read.

The first thing that struck me was how different Jiza’s voice was from anything I had expected.

I had imagined him as stern, as demanding, as focused on obedience and law.

Instead, he was asking questions.

He was in conversation with people.

He was engaging with him as if what they thought and felt actually mattered.

I read the sermon on the mount from Matthew’s gospel which my friend had told me about.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Jesus said, “Blessed in my tradition, poverty of any kind was seen as a failure.

Poverty of spirit meant admitting that you were spiritually lacking, spiritually needful.

” And Jesus said, “That was blessed.

That was good.

Blessed are those who mourn.

” He said, “Mourning was something you did privately.

If you did it at all, you did not celebrate it.

You certainly did not call it blessed.

Blessed are the meek.

Meekness was weakness.

Weakness was unacceptable, especially for a man.

How could weakness be blessed?” And then you have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

” But I tell you, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

” I read that sentence three times, four times.

I read it until my eyes burned, trying to understand what it meant.

Love your enemies.

In my world, you crushed your enemies.

You outsmarted them.

You protected yourself against them.

You certainly did not love them.

But there it was in plain language.

Love your enemies.

Something was opening up in me.

Some space that I did not know was closed was opening.

I kept reading.

I read about Jesus with the woman at the well.

The story the pastor had told about.

I read about another woman who was caught in adultery.

And Jesus had said to her accusers, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

” And when they all left ashamed, Jesus had said to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you.

Go and sin no more.

Not you are evil, nor you are ashamed.

Not.

You must prove yourself worthy.

just I do not condemn you.

I was beginning to understand something.

I was beginning to see that Jesus was offering something that was radically different from what I had been taught.

He was offering unconditional acceptance.

He was offering love that did not depend on performance.

He was offering grace.

I read for hours that night and the more I read, the more I felt like something inside me was waking up.

Something that had been asleep my entire life.

Some part of me that recognized this message as true, even though I did not yet have the intellectual framework to explain why.

Over the following weeks, I developed a secret practice.

I would read the Bible late at night when everyone else in the dorm was asleep.

I would read the gospels trying to encounter Jesus the way people in the stories did.

I would sit with the passages that seemed to speak directly to my soul.

And I would pray not the ritual prayers I had learned but actual conversations with God.

Questions, longings, confessions.

No one knew.

My family certainly did not know.

They thought I was studying hard, maintaining my Islamic practice, remembering my role.

The Muslim Student Association did not know.

They thought I was still one of them, still maintaining my faith, still connected to my heritage.

Only my friend knew.

And he did not push me.

He did not say, “You should become a Christian.

” He did not try to convince me or debate with me.

He would sometimes answer questions I had.

He would sometimes suggest a passage to read, but mostly he just supported me in this journey of discovery that I was on.

I felt like I was living two lives.

In a day, I was the Muslim prince, maintaining appearances, attending the Muslim association meetings, praying at the prescribed times.

In the night I was someone else entirely.

I was someone who was encountering Jesus.

I was someone who was tasting grace for the first time.

It was exhausting.

It was also necessary because I was not yet ready to make the leap.

I was not yet ready to say I believe this is my faith now.

I was still wrestling with the implications.

I was still afraid of what it would mean if I said yes to Jesus.

I was still attached to the life I had always known.

Even though that life was suffocating me, but the Bible was doing something to me.

Every passage I read was like a small explosion of truth.

Every encounter with Jesus in the Gospels was like recognizing myself in a story I had never heard before.

The woman at the well, she had been ashamed and hidden, and Jesus had seen her and loved her.

Zakius, the tax collector, he had been despised and rejected.

And Jesus had invited himself to his house, and that act of radical welcome had changed everything about how Zakius understood himself.

Peter, who had denied Jesus three times, and Jesus had forgiven him anyway, and made him the rock on which the church would be built.

Over and over, I was reading stories about people who were broken, who were failing, who were ashamed, who were cast out, and Jesus met them in that place and loved them and healed them and transformed them.

And I thought that is what I need.

I need to be seen.

I need to be known.

I need to be loved as I am, not as I perform.

By the time I had been in that country for about 6 months, something had shifted in me at a fundamental level.

I was no longer the person who had arrived.

Nervously clutching the expectation that I would maintain my family’s honor.

I was becoming someone new, someone who had tasted freedom, someone who was hungry for truth, someone who was beginning to believe that Jesus might actually be who he claimed to be.

I started attending church more regularly.

I would sleep out on Sunday mornings telling whoever I needed to tell that I was studying at the library.

I would go to the small church and sit in the back and listen to the pastor speak about Jesus.

I would sing along with the congregation and I would feel something that seemed to be coming from a very deep place inside me.

Joy maybe or relief or the sense of being home in a place I had never been before.

The people at the church did not know who I was.

They did not know that I came from a royal family.

They did not know that I was risking everything by being there.

To them, I was just another young man in the congregation.

I could be myself.

I could sing.

I could pray.

I could listen.

I could be genuinely moved by the message without anyone assuming it was performance.

And my friend was there always.

I did not realize it at the time, but he was praying for me.

Years later, he would tell me that he had been interceding for me in prayer, asking God to open my heart to the gospel, asking Jesus to reveal himself to me.

I did not know that people prayed like that, that they interceded for others, that they asked God to move in someone else’s life.

In my tradition, prayer was about personal obedience and personal need.

The idea that you will spend your prayer time asking God to change someone else seemed selfless in a way I had not encountered before.

I was hungry.

I was hungry for truth.

I was hungry for meaning.

I was hungry for a faith that was real, not performed.

I was hungry for a relationship with God that was actual relationship, not just ritual obligation.

And I was beginning to believe that Jesus was the answer to that hunger.

But I was not ready to say it.

I was not ready to commit.

I was still afraid.

It was late at night, maybe 10 weeks into my time at the church.

I was in my dorm room and I had been reading through the Gospel of John again.

I was reading chapter 6 where Jesus feeds 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish.

And then he says something that seems strange.

I am the bread of life.

Whoever comes to me will never go hungry.

And then he says, all that the Father gives me will come to me.

And whoever comes to me, I will not cast out.

I will not cast out.

You will not be rejected.

You will not be turned away.

You will not be judged and found wanting.

You will be received.

I sat with those words for a long time.

And then I did something I had never done before.

I got down on my knees, not in a formal prayer position, but just on my knees, the way someone prays when they are desperate.

And I prayed.

I do not remember the exact words.

I could not repeat them if I tried.

But I remember what I was saying.

I was saying, “Jesus, if you are real and I think you are real, I need you.

I need what you offer.

I cannot keep living like I have been living.

I cannot keep performing.

I need to be known.

I need to be loved.

I need to be acceptable without having to earn it.

I was crying.

I was terrified and relieved and confused and certain all at the same time.

And something happened.

It was not a vision.

It was not a voice.

It was not anything dramatic, but it was real.

It was an overwhelming sense of presence.

It was the sense of not being alone.

It was the sense of being known and loved and accepted exactly as I was in that moment.

broken and confused and terrified and hungry.

I knew in that moment that Jesus was real.

Not just as a historical figure, not just as someone whose teachings were interesting, but as someone alive, someone present, someone who loved me.

I gave myself to him that night.

I said yes.

Not because I understood everything.

Not because I had solved all my doubts.

Not because I knew what it would cost.

I said yes because I could not say no to what I had experienced.

I could not deny the reality of his presence and his love.

Everything that happened after that night and there was much that followed was a result of that commitment.

That moment of surrender changed everything.

For weeks after that night, I felt transformed.

Not in the sense that I suddenly understood everything about Christianity or that all my doubts disappeared, but in the sense that I had found something real, something true, something that was worth every lie I had told my family, every secret I was keeping, every risk I was taking.

I started to research more actively.

I read the entire Bible, searching for passages that confirmed what I had experienced that night.

And everywhere I look, I found confirmation.

God is love.

Jesus came to seek and save the lost.

Grace is free.

Mercy is undeserved.

Forgiveness is complete.

It was like reading the answer to a question I had been asking my entire life without knowing how to articulate it.

I was still living double life and the weight of that was beginning to get heavier.

But for the first time I understood why I was willing to bear it.

I was bearing it because I had encountered something real.

I was bearing it because Jesus was worth it.

I was not yet ready for the cost that would come.

I was not yet aware that saying yes to Jesus would mean saying no to everything else.

I was not yet ready for the severance that was coming.

But I was ready to keep moving forward.

I was ready to see where this faith would lead.

I was ready to belong to Jesus, whatever that meant.

And for the first time in my life, I was at peace.

Once I knew that Jesus was real, once I had experienced that encounter with his presence, there was no way forward except to make a public declaration of faith.

I could not keep living in secret.

I could not keep pretending to be someone I was not.

I had tasted authenticity.

I could not go back to the performance.

For weeks, I wrestled with the implications.

Baptism meant I was saying publicly in front of witnesses that I was a Christian.

Baptism meant I was making a covenant with God.

Baptism meant I was saying goodbye to my family’s faith.

And I knew I knew without anyone telling me explicitly that if I did this, my family would find out and everything would change.

I talked with my friend about it.

Not in an excited, enthusiastic way, in a quiet, terrified way.

I said, “If I do this, I lose everything.

” And he did not deny it.

He did not tell me that everything would work out fine, that my family would accept me, that it would not be that bad.

He just said, “Yes, you know that.

Are you willing to pay that price?” And I had to ask myself the question that Jesus asked in the Gospels.

What good is it for a person to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? What would I be choosing if I did not choose Jesus? I would be choosing the palace.

I would be choosing my family’s love.

I would be choosing security and wealth and a future that was already written for me.

I would be choosing the life I was supposed to live.

But would I be choosing truth? Would I be choosing authenticity? Would I be choosing myself? The answer was no.

I would be choosing to remain in the performance.

I would be choosing to keep suffocating.

I would be choosing to deny the deepest truth of my being.

that I am a person who needed to be loved unconditionally and Jesus offered that love.

And so I decided I decided that I would be baptized.

I decided that I would make the public declaration.

I decided that I would say yes to Jesus and whatever that cost.

I did not sleep.

I lay in my dorm room and I thought about my mother’s face.

I thought about my father.

I thought about the palace.

I thought about the life that would be close to me forever after tomorrow.

I allowed myself to grieve.

I allowed myself to feel the loss.

I did not try to suppress it or talk myself out of it.

I just felt it.

The weight of what I was choosing, the reality of the cost.

But underneath the grief was something else.

Underneath the grief was a clarity, a certainty, a knowledge that this was the right thing to do.

That you cannot encounter the truth and then turn away from it and expect to be at peace.

That authenticity comes at a price and the price is worth paying.

I prayed that night.

I prayed with my whole being.

I prayed a prayer of surrender.

I prayed, “Jesus, I do not know what comes next.

I am terrified.

I am grieving.

But I know you are real.

I know you are the truth.

And I am ready to follow you wherever that leads.

” And I felt peace.

Not the absence of fear or grief or uncertainty, but the presence of something deeper.

The presence of being held.

The presence of being loved.

the presence of knowing that I was not alone.

The church was small and the pastor asked me to meet with him before the baptism.

We sat in his office, a simple room with bookshelves and a window that looked out onto the street.

He asked me questions about my faith.

He asked me if I understood what baptism meant.

He asked me if I was aware of the implications of what I was doing.

I answered honestly.

I told him that I came from a Muslim family.

I told him that my family did not know I was becoming a Christian.

I told him that the decision would have serious consequences.

I told him that I was doing it anyway because I believed Jesus was the truth.

He listened without interrupting.

And when I was done, he said something that I have never forgotten.

He said, “Your decision is between you and God.

I just want to make sure that you have thought about the cost and that you are willing to bear it.

God does not call us to faith lightly.

But he does call us to faith truthfully.

If you are ready to live truthfully before God and before witnesses, then I am honored to baptize you.

” The simplicity of it struck me.

Not the grand language I was used to, not the formal ritual, just are you willing to live truthfully? That was the question that mattered.

And I said yes.

I remember the weather.

It was not a dramatic day.

It was not raining or storming or sunny in some symbolic way.

It was an ordinary day.

The sky was overcast.

The temperature was cool.

The world was going about its business.

Completely unaware that my entire life was about to change, I put on the white clothing they had provided.

It was simple clothing, nothing fancy.

And as I put it on, I thought about the symbolism.

White for purity, white for a new beginning, white for the washing away of the old life.

I was nervous.

I was calm.

I was grieving.

I was joyful.

I was all of these things at once, and it did not feel contradictory.

It felt true.

The baptismal pool was in the church.

It had been heated for the occasion.

When I saw it, this small pool of water that was about to become the dividing line between my old life and my new life.

I felt my legs almost give out underneath me.

I walked down the steps into the water.

The pastor was already there standing waist deep.

He gestured for me to come to him.

The congregation was gathered around the pool.

I had been coming to this church for several months now.

And these people had become important to me.

Not as intimate friends.

I had not had the time to develop that kind of intimacy.

But as a community, as brothers and sisters in faith, they were watching.

They were witnessing.

The pastor took my hands.

His hands were warm, steady.

And he asked me the traditional question.

He asked, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior?” This was the moment.

This was the point of no return.

Once I said the words, there was no taking them back.

my family would find out.

My future would change.

Everything would be different.

And I said, “I do.

” My voice was shaking, but the words were clear.

I believe.

I believe with my whole heart.

I believed in a way that superseded every other belief I had ever healed.

The pastor nodded and he said, “Then I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

” And he guided me backward.

The water rose up to my shoulders.

It was cooler than I expected.

And then he gently pushed me under.

For a moment, just a moment, I panicked.

There was water all around me.

I could not see.

I could not breathe.

It was like dying.

It was supposed to be like dying.

It was supposed to be like being buried.

Like my old self was being put to death.

And then hands strong, a gentle hands grabbed me and pulled me up.

I gasped.

I broke the surface of the water.

And I was alive in a way I had never been alive before.

I stood there in the water soaking wet, dripping, and I felt it, the reality of it.

I was dead to my old life.

I was alive in Jesus.

Everything I had been, the performance, the pretense, the suffocation, it was gone.

I was new.

The congregation was applauding.

Someone was crying.

My friend in the front row had tears streaming down his face and he was smiling like his heart would burst.

And I stood there in that water and I felt the presence of Jesus like I had felt it that night on my knees in my dorm room.

I felt his love.

I felt his acceptance.

I felt his claim on my life.

I had just burned every bridge behind me.

I had just made a choice that would result in the loss of my family, my inheritance, my country, my identity as I had no need.

And in that moment, rising out of the water of baptism, I knew it was worth it.

For 3 days, I felt like I was floating.

The reality of what I had done had not yet fully sunk in.

I was still living in the glow of the baptism, the clarity of the decision, the presence of Jesus.

On the fourth day, I was walking across campus and I saw someone, another Omani student, someone I had seen at the mosque a few times.

Someone who moved in the same circles that I moved in.

I saw the recognition in his face the moment he saw me.

I saw him calculate.

I saw him think about what it meant that I was coming out of the church building.

I saw his mind put together the pieces.

And I knew in that moment that my secret was no longer a secret.

I waited for 3 days.

I waited to see if rumors would spread.

I waited to see if someone from the Muslim association would approach me with questions.

I waited to see if the news would reach my family on its own.

Nothing happened, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

And I decided that I needed to control the narrative as much as I could.

I needed to tell my family before they heard it from someone else.

So, I called my cousin, not my father, not my mother, my cousin, because I thought he might listen.

I thought he might understand.

I thought that maybe, just maybe, he might help me manage the crisis that was coming.

I waited until late evening when it would be morning in Oman.

I was shaking as I dialed the number.

When he answered, I heard the normaly of his voice and he broke something in me.

I told him, I told him that I had become a Christian.

I told him that I had been baptized.

I told him that I believed in Jesus.

I told him that I was sorry if this would hurt a family, but that I could not deny what I had found to be true.

The silence on the other end was heavy.

And then he said, “You what?” I repeated it.

The words were the same, but they sounded different the second time.

They sounded final.

They sounded like treason.

He said, “I need to tell the family.

” I said, “Please, please let me tell them.

Let me explain it to them.

” He said, “I am sorry.

I cannot keep this secret.

” And the phone went dead.

Within hours, I knew something was wrong.

My phone rang.

My father’s number appeared on the screen.

I answered.

His voice was controlled, which was somehow worse than if he had been angry.

He said that he had heard something that could not possibly be true.

He said that I needed to come home immediately to discuss this with the family.

He said that there must be a misunderstanding.

I told him that there was no misunderstanding.

I told him that I had become a Christian.

I told him that I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

There was a silence so long that I thought the line had dropped.

And then he said, “We will discuss this when you come home.

” He hung up and I knew that everything had changed.

The first days that follow came when I slowly understood my bank account.

My family was not going to accept this.

I called the bank and they were not told that there was discussion on the account come to the account holder on.

They were going to respond with the power they had available to them arrive.

Emails from the family finance office said it was suspended pending family discussions.

Then my phone calls home stopped being answered.

My texts were not returned.

My family was isolating me.

I felt it all at once.

the grief, the panic, the realization that I had really done this, that I really had chosen to leave everything behind, that there was no going back.

But underneath all of that was something else.

It was a deeper conviction.

It was the knowledge that I had made the right choice, that Jesus was worth this, that authenticity was worth this, that I could not have lived any other way without dying spiritually.

My friend became my anchor in those days.

He helped me figure out how to survive without the family stipen.

He helped me understand that I was going to be okay.

He helped me believe that this was not the end but a beginning.

And I started to understand that the cost of following Jesus was not just the loss of my family.

It was the loss of my old identity entirely.

It was the death of the person I had been trained to be.

It was the beginning of a completely new life.

I didn’t know in those early days after my baptism that I would never see my family again.

I did not know that my passport would eventually become useless.

I did not know that I would have to flee my country and seek asylum.

I did not know that I would lose everything material that I had ever known.

Now all I knew was that I had encountered Jesus and that he was real and that he was worth everything.

There is a moment in every person’s life when they cross a line they cannot uncross.

When they make a choice that irrevocably changes their trajectory.

For me that moment was the baptism.

That moment was the commitment to Jesus in front of witnesses.

Before that moment, I could have walked away.

I could have denied it.

I could have said it was a phase, a curiosity, a misunderstanding.

After that moment, there was no walking away.

I had declared publicly that I belonged to Jesus.

I had made a covenant with God.

I had set my face toward a new direction.

Everything that followed, the loss of my family’s financial support, the isolation, the threats, the eventual exile, all of it flowed from that moment of baptism.

In all of it was the consequence of saying yes to Jesus and no to everything else.

But I would do it again.

Even knowing everything that followed, even knowing the price I would pay, I would do it again.

Because I had tasted authenticity, I had tasted truth.

I had tasted grace.

And nothing in the world could make me go back to the performance, the pretense, the suffocation of the life I had known before.

I was alive.

For the first time in my life, I was truly alive.

and that was worth everything.

The days and weeks that followed my baptism were a slow descent into a reality I was not prepared for.

I had understood intellectually that there would be consequences.

I had even prayed about it and accepted the cost in theory.

But understanding something intellectually and living through it are two very different things.

The phone calls from my family began as attempts at persuasion.

My uncle called first.

He was senior in the family, someone whose voice carried weight.

He spoke to me as if I were confused, as if I had misunderstood something fundamental.

He said that this was a face.

He said that I was young and vulnerable, away from home, susceptible to influence.

He said that the family understood and they would help me get back on the right path.

I tried to explain.

I tried to tell him what I had experienced.

I tried to describe the reality of encountering Jesus, the realness of the grace I had found, the impossibility of denying what I now knew to be true.

But my words seemed to bounce off him without landing.

He was operating from a different framework.

In his framework, Christian conversion was not a spiritual reality.

It was a result of being deceived, of being under the influence of being separated from truth.

He ended the call by saying that my father was very disappointed and that we would resolve this when I came home for the holidays, but I was not going home for the holidays.

The next call was from my mother.

This was harder.

This was much harder.

My mother cried as she spoke to me.

She asked me what she had done wrong.

She asked if she had failed in raising me.

She asked if I had fallen in with bad people who had led me astray.

She told me that she loved me, but that I was breaking her heart.

She told me that my father was furious and that I needed to come home and fix this before it was too late.

I told her that I loved her too.

I told her that nothing she had done was wrong.

I told her that I had made this choice freely and I could not undo it because it was true.

I told her about Jesus.

I told her about the grace I had found.

I told her about how I had never felt more at peace.

She did not understand.

Her voice shifted from grief to something harder.

She said that I was dishonoring my family.

She said that I was betraying my heritage.

She said that what I was doing was incomprehensible to her.

When I hung up the phone, I sat for a long time and just cried because I love my mother and I knew that I was causing her pain and there was nothing I could do to make it okay.

There was no compromise that would satisfy her.

There was no explanation that would help her understand because in her worldview and in my family’s world view, what I was doing was not a valid choice.

It was a betrayal, but it was a betrayal I could not avoid because the only other choice was to deny Jesus and I could not do that.

Other family members called.

My brother called to tell me that I was disgracing the family name.

An aunt called to tell me that the family was discussing my situation and that options were being explored.

Another uncle called to suggest that I meet with a scholar who could help me understand why Christianity was false and Islam was true.

Each call was a wound.

Each call was a reminder that the life I had known was closing its doors to me one by one.

About 2 weeks after my baptism, the financial reality hit.

My stipen, the money that had been deposited into my account every month since I arrived at university, simply stopped.

No warning, no explanation, just gone.

I went to the bank and asked about it.

The woman at the desk told me that the account holder in Oman had put a hold on all transactions.

I could not withdraw money.

I could not access the account.

The money that was supposed to support me through the rest of my degree was frozen.

For a moment, I felt true panic.

I had never had to worry about money before.

I had never had to think about survival in the practical sense.

I had always known that food and shelter and education were available to me.

My family ensured it.

Money was not a scarcity I had to manage.

It was just something that was always there and now it was not.

I went to my friend and told him what had happened.

I was ashamed.

I was terrified.

I did not know how I was going to pay rent, buy food, continue my studies.

I did not know how I was going to survive.

He listened.

And then he told me about the church.

He told me that the church was a community and that communities took care of their members.

He said that I was not alone.

He said that we would figure it out together.

That night, he brought me to a small meeting with some people from the church.

There were four or five of them.

He explained my situation briefly, that I had converted from Islam to Christianity, that my family had cut me off financially, that I needed help figuring out how to survive, and these people, people I barely knew, immediately started problem solving.

One woman said she knew of a job opening at a local business.

A man said I could help with some work at his house in exchange for cash.

Another person said the church had an emergency fund.

A couple said they had a spare room I could rent cheaply.

Within an hour, I had the outline of a survival plan.

Within a week, I had a part-time job.

Within two weeks, I was living in a spare room in someone’s house.

I was working and studying and receiving help from people who barely knew me but who welcomed me as a brother.

The financial loss was devastating.

But it taught me something crucial.

I was not as dependent on my family as I had thought.

I was not as helpless as the system had made me believe.

And there were people in the world who would care for me not because I was a prince or because I had wealth but simply because I was a human being in need.

As the weeks passed, my family strategy shifted.

The emotional appeals were not working.

The financial pressure was not working.

So they tried a different approach.

My mother called and said that she and my father had found a suitable young woman for me to marry.

She was from a good family.

She was pious.

She would be a wonderful wife.

And if I married her and returned to Islam, everything could go back to normal.

The family would forgive me.

I would be restored to my position.

I would come back to the palace.

I felt the temptation of it.

I felt the pull of it.

I felt the weight of my mother’s hope that this solution would work.

But I said no.

I told her that I could not marry someone in order to fix a family crisis.

I told her that I was in love with Jesus and that my life was committed to him and that I could not pretend otherwise for the sake of family harmony.

There was silence on the line.

And then my mother asked if I understood that I was throwing away my entire future.

I told her that I was not throwing it away.

I was choosing a different future, one that was based on truth instead of pretense.

She hung up.

It was the last real conversation I will have with her.

Next came the suggestions about therapy, about counseling, about meeting with an Islamic scholar.

My father arranged for me to speak via video call with a senior religious scholar from Oman.

The scholar was kind.

He was not aggressive or hostile.

He simply tried to explain from his perspective why Islam was true and Christianity was false.

He tried to help me see clearly again.

But I could not unsee what I had seen.

I could not unknow what I knew.

I could not unfill the presence of Jesus that I had encountered.

No amount of theological argument could change that because my conversion was not primarily intellectual.

It was spiritual.

It was based on an encounter with a living God, not just on a set of beliefs that could be debated.

And then came the final call.

It was from my father.

His voice was different this time.

It was harder.

It was the voice of someone who had made a decision.

He told me that I had shamed the family.

He told me that I had betrayed my heritage.

He told me that I had chosen a false god over the truth of Islam.

And he told me that unless I recented publicly, renounced Christianity, and recommitted to Islam, I would be cut off from the family entirely.

He said it not as a threat, but as a statement of facts.

He said it as someone who had made a decision and was informing me of the consequences.

I asked him if that meant I would lose my inheritance.

He said that I had already lost it the moment I chose a false god.

I asked him if that meant I could not come home.

He said that I could come home but only if I came back to Islam otherwise I was no longer welcome.

And that was when the reality of it hit me fully.

This was not a face that the family was waiting out.

This was not a period of estrangement that would heal with time.

This was a severance.

This was my family formally cutting me off.

A few days after that final conversation with my father, a family lawyer reached out to me.

This was not someone who was angry or judgmental.

This was someone who was trying to help in the only way he knew how.

He told me that the family was concerned about my well-being.

He told me that they were worried I was being exploited or manipulated.

He said that they wanted to help me get proper care and support.

And he suggested that I come home so that the family could ensure I was being taken care of properly.

There was something in the way he phrased it that made my stomach tighten.

It was too careful.

It was too gentle.

It was too deliberate.

So I asked him directly, “What happens if I go home?” He paused.

And then he said something that changed everything.

He told me that if I returned to Oman, the government, working in cooperation with my family, would likely place me in what they would call protective custody.

He said that they would frame it as helping me, as ensuring my well-being, as allowing me to receive proper care and counseling.

But what it would actually be was indefinite detention.

He said that the charges would be vague, immorality, security concerns, mental health issues, whatever was necessary to justify keeping me confined.

He told me that I would not be imprisoned in the western sense.

I would not be in a cell with bars.

I would be in a care facility supervised, unable to leave, cut off from the outside world.

He told me that I would not see daylight as a free person again.

And he told me that there was nothing anyone could do about it because my family was powerful enough to make it happen and my government would cooperate with them.

I asked him why he was telling me this.

He said that he was telling me this because he cared about me and he wanted me to understand the reality of the situation.

He said that my family had not explicitly said this was what would happen, but that it was the logical outcome of the power dynamics at play.

And then he said, “Do not go home.

Whatever you do, do not go home.

” After that conversation, the choice became clear.

I could not go home.

Going home meant losing my freedom.

Going home meant indefinite confinement under the guise of care.

Going home meant the end of everything I had become.

But what was the alternative? I was a citizen of Omen.

My passport was still valid, though I knew the government would not renew it.

I was financially cut off from my family.

I was alone in a foreign country.

I had no visa status that would allow me to stay, no legal right to work, no way to continue my education without the family’s financial support.

My only option was to seek asylum, to formally ask the government of the country I was in to protect me from persecution, to formally declare that my own family, my own government was persecuting me for my faith.

It felt like the ultimate betrayal.

It felt like I was attacking my family, attacking my country, attacking everything I came from.

But it was also the only path to freedom.

I wor with legal aid organization to file the asylum application.

The process was brutal in its bureaucracy.

Question after question about what I had suffered.

Question after question about what my family had threatened.

question after question about why I could not return home safely and I had to reduce my experience, my entire life, my entire family, my entire nation to facts on a form.

I had to prove using documents and statements that I had been persecuted.

I had to prove that my government would not protect me.

I had to prove that I was a refugee.

The word refugee felt strange applied to me.

Refugees were people who were fleeing war, fleeing famine, fleeing obvious visible danger.

I was fleeing something less tangible but equally real, the loss of freedom, the demand to deny my faith, the threat of indefinite confinement.

I submitted the application.

And then I waited.

I waited in a kind of limbo.

I was not a citizen of Oman anymore because my government was no longer my protector.

But I was not a citizen of my new country either.

I was stateless.

I was a person without a country.

By the time I filed for asylum, three months had passed since my baptism.

Three months since I had committed my life to Jesus.

Three months since I had lost everything.

The financial support was gone.

The family contact was gone.

The possibility of going home was gone.

The inheritance that had been promised to me since birth was gone.

The identity I had been born into was gone.

I was grieving.

Not the kind of grief that passes with time.

The kind of grief that is constant, that wakes you up in the night, that hits you unexpectedly when you hear a particular song or smell a particular scent that reminds you of home.

I would lie in my in my small rented room and think about my mother’s voice.

I would think about the palace.

I would think about the smell of incense and spices.

I would think about the life I had known and would never know again.

And I would ask myself, was it worth it? Was losing everything worth whatever I had gained.

But even as I asked the question, I knew the answer because I had tasted truth.

I had tasted grace.

I had tasted authenticity.

And I could not go back to a life of pretense, no matter how comfortable it was.

What kept me going in those dark months was my faith.

Not a faith without doubt.

I had plenty of doubt.

Not a faith without questions.

I had plenty of questions.

But a faith that was rooted in something real.

Jesus was real.

I had encountered him.

And that reality was stronger than my grief, stronger than my fear, was stronger than my sense of loss.

The church community surrounded me.

They brought me food.

They helped me find work.

They prayed with me and for me.

They did not try to fix my grief or make me feel better.

They just stood with me in it.

They sat with me in my pain and helped me carry it.

And slowly, very slowly, I began to understand something.

I began to understand that the cost of following Jesus was not the end of the story.

The cost was the middle of the story.

Because if I had not paid the cost, if I had not chosen Jesus over everything else, then I would have remained in the prison of pretense forever.

The loss was real.

The grief was real.

The exile was real.

But so was the freedom.

So was the authenticity.

So was the love of Jesus that sustained me through it all.

I was no longer the person I had been.

The person who lived for statutus and wealth and the approval of others.

That person was dead.

And in his place was someone new.

Someone raw and wounded.

Yes.

But also someone real.

Someone who knew what it meant to follow Jesus.

someone who understood that some things are worth losing everything for.

There came a moment when I stopped waiting for my family to change their minds.

When I stopped hoping that my mother would call with forgiveness, when I stopped wondering if there was some way to reconcile and return home.

In that moment, I accepted exile.

I accepted that I was no longer part of my family.

I accepted that I was no longer going to be part of the life I had been born into.

I accepted that I was building a new life and that new life was in a different country with a different faith with different people.

And in that acceptance was a strange kind of peace.

Not the peace of happiness or comfort, but the peace of truth.

The peace of knowing that I was living authentically.

The peace of knowing that I had chosen rightly even though the cost was devastating.

I had lost my family.

I had lost my country.

I had lost my wealth and my status and my identity.

But I had gained Jesus.

And that was worth everything.

Time has a strange way of moving when you are rebuilding your life from nothing.

The first year after I filed for asylum was a blur of work and study and survival.

I worked part-time at a local business doing whatever job they needed done.

I attended classes when I could afford the tuition or took them online when I could not.

I lived in that small rented room careful about every expense because money was no longer infinite.

The asylum application was still pending.

I was in limbo, neither truly welcome to stay permanently nor required to leave.

It was a strange existence.

The legal status was uncertain.

The future was uncertain.

But I was alive in a way I had never been alive before.

The church became my home in a way that the palace never was.

Not physically, I still lived in that small room.

But spiritually, emotionally, relationally, the church was where I belonged.

The church was where I was known.

The church was where I was loved.

There was an older woman at the church, probably in her 60s, who took special interest in me.

She never said much about my situation, never asked probing questions about my family or my past.

She just showed up.

She invited me over for meals.

She asked about my classes.

She treated me like I was her son.

One day, she took my hand and said something I needed to hear.

She said, “Your family chose the culture and the religion over you.

But you have been chosen by God.

You are a beloved son and no one can take that from you.

” I wept.

Because I had not let myself fully grieve the loss of my family.

I had been so focused on surviving and on maintaining my faith that I had not let myself feel the depth of the abandonment.

But in that moment with her hand in mind, I let myself feel it.

And I let myself feel at the same time the reality of being loved by God.

My days develop a rhythm.

I would wake early and pray.

Not the ritual prayers I had learned as a child, but actual conversation with God.

I would talk to Jesus the way you would talk to someone you love.

I would tell him my fears.

I would ask him questions.

I would thank him for his presence in my life.

I would go to work.

The job was simple.

I worked in a warehouse preparing orders for shipment.

The work was physical and repetitive which suited me.

There was no performance required.

I was just a person doing a job.

My co-workers did not know I was a prince or that I had a complicated past.

I was just one of them.

In the evenings, I would study.

My courses were moving slowly.

I could not take a full load because of work and because of the money situation.

But I was moving forward.

I was building towards something.

A future that was not predetermined by birth but chosen by me.

And I was starting to tell my story.

Not to the whole world, but to people in my life.

To people at church who asked how I came to faith.

To other students I met who seem to have similar struggles with faith and doubt.

to anyone who seemed to need to hear it.

I started to notice something.

Every time I told my story, something shifted in the people who heard it.

Not everyone converted to Christianity.

That would have been naive of me to expect.

But everyone seemed to recognize something real in what I was sharing.

Everyone seemed to understand that I was not making it up, that I was not trying to convince them of something I was not sure about myself.

My faith was no longer tentative or questioning in the way it had been before.

The cost of my faith, the loss of my family, the loss of my country, the loss of everything I had known had forged into something unshakable.

I had chosen Jesus with my whole life.

There was no turning back.

A few months into my asylum application process, the pastor of my church asked if I would be willing to share my testimony with the congregation.

He asked if I would be willing to stand up and tell my story to the church community.

I was terrified, but I also felt called to do it, so I said yes.

That Sunday, I stood in front of the congregation, maybe 200 people, and I told them my story.

I told them about growing up in privilege and suffocation.

I told them about discovering Jesus.

I told them about being baptized.

I told them about losing my family.

I did not preach to them.

I did not try to convince them of anything.

I just told them the truth about my journey.

And when I finished, I sat down and people were crying, not out of pity for my suffering, but out of recognition of the power of Christ’s love.

After the service, people approached me.

Some wanted to know more about my journey.

Some wanted to tell me about their own spiritual struggles.

Some wanted to help in practical ways, offering money, offering support, offering prayer.

And I realized something in that moment.

My pain was not wasted.

My suffering was not meaningless.

My story, a story that involved loss and grief and exile, was a testimony to the reality of Jesus.

My story was a bridge that could lead others to faith.

As word spread about my story, I started getting invitations to speak at different churches, at Bible studies, at prayer meetings, and I said yes to as many as I could, especially when they involve opportunities to reach Muslim background seekers.

I would meet with people who were doubting their faith.

People who were caught between two worlds, people who loved their families but felt imprisoned by the religious system they had been born into.

And I would tell them my story, not to push them toward conversion.

I had learned that the Holy Spirit does that work, not me.

But to show them that it was possible, that you could encounter Jesus and that he was real and that it was worth following him even if the cost was high.

I met with a young woman whose family was from Pakistan.

She was having the same doubts I had had.

She was the same disillusionment I had experienced.

She was hungry for something real.

And when I told her about grace, about a God who loved her unconditionally, I saw something shift in her eyes.

I saw hope.

I saw possibility.

I did not push her.

But I gave her my contact information and told her that when she was ready to take the step of faith that I would walk with her through it.

A few months later, she reached out and asked if I would help her prepare for baptism.

I did.

And I stood at the back of the church on the day she was baptized.

And I wept because I knew what it would cost her.

I knew that her family would likely reject her.

I knew that her life would be difficult, but I also knew that she had encountered something real and that was worth any cost.

My asylum application was finally approved about two years after I filed it.

The day I received the letter, I sat alone in my room and I wept.

Not tears of pure joy.

There was still grief mixed in.

My family still was not speaking to me.

I still could not go home.

My status in society had not fundamentally changed.

I was still a person without a country, still working in a warehouse, still living in a small rented room.

But I was safe.

The government of the country I was in had officially recognized that I was persecuted in my homeland and that I deserve protection.

I was no longer in legal limbo.

I had a status.

I had papers.

I had the right to work, to study, to build a life.

And I used that protection to serve Jesus more fully.

I started to volunteer at a church, helping with outreach to Muslim background seekers.

I started to write my story down to help others understand what grace looks like when it cost everything.

I started to build relationships with other refugees, other people who had lost everything, other people who understood what it meant to be exiled.

I noticed something about my life that would have been unimaginable to the prince I used to be.

I was content.

I was happy.

I was at peace.

Not because my circumstances had dramatically improved.

They had not.

But because I was living truthfully, I was living for something that mattered.

I was living for Jesus.

The money I had lost meant nothing compared to what I had gained.

The status I had lost meant nothing compared to the freedom I had found.

The family I had lost meant nothing compared to the love of God that surrounded me.

But let me be honest about something.

The grief did not go away.

Years passed and my family never reached out.

Years passed and I never saw my mother again.

Years passed and the life I had known became increasingly distant like a dream I had once had.

And there were nights when I would lie in bed and think about her.

And I would cry, not because I had made the wrong choice.

I knew I had made the right choice, but because the cost was real because my mother was grieving even if I could not see her grief.

Because somewhere in the palace there was a woman who had given birth to me and raised me and loved me in the only way she knew how.

And I could never tell her that I understood that I loved her despite everything.

That I was sorry for the pain I had caused her.

That is the part of the story that does not get resolved.

That is the part that I still carry.

The grief of understanding that by choosing truth, by choosing Jesus, I had to hurt the person I love most.

But I also know something else.

I know that my mother is capable of love.

I know that she is capable of understanding.

And I pray every single day that somehow someway she will encounter Jesus.

That she will understand why I did what I did.

That she will know that I did it out of love.

Love for truth.

Love for authenticity.

Love for a God who is real.

And I hold on to the faith that nothing is impossible with God.

That families can be healed.

That the loss can be found.

That reconciliation can happen even across the deepest divides.

Now I am standing here and I am asking you to listen to what I am about to say.

I am asking you to hear it not as judgment or condemnation but as a person who loves you enough to tell you the truth.

If you are a Christian, I want to ask you, do you know what you have? Do you understand the power of what you possess in Jesus? Do you live as though you have truly been forgiven, truly liberated, truly loved? Because if you do, the world should see that your life should be a testimony to the reality of Christ’s love.

Not through grand gestures or public displays, but through the way you live, through the way you treat people, through the way you sacrifice, through the way you love.

And if you are not living like that, if you are living comfortably, safely, keeping your faith quiet and private and uninvested, then I am asking you to consider, is that really what Jesus calls you to.

He called his disciples to take up their cross and follow him.

He called them to be willing to lose everything.

He called them to boldness, to courage, to a faith that was worth the cost.

If you are Muslim, I want to speak to you with tenderness.

I do not hate Islam.

I do not hate Muslims.

Many of the Muslims I have known are good people, kind people, people who genuinely believe they are following God.

But I am asking you to consider this.

Is your faith bringing you peace? Is it bringing you freedom? Is it bringing you the experience of being truly known and truly loved by God? Because I tried to find that in Islam.

I tried to follow the rules.

I tried to perform the faith.

I tried to earn God’s approval and I could not find it.

What I found was suffocation.

What I found was performance.

What I found was a God who was distant and demanding and never satisfied.

And then I found Jesus.

And I found grace.

And I found a God who knows me completely and loves me anyway.

Who does not demand that I perform.

Who offers me relationship not ritual.

Who offers me freedom not bondage.

I’m not trying to convince you that Islam is false.

That is not my role.

My role is to testify to what is true.

And what is true for me is that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

That no one comes to the father except through him.

That he is worth everything.

And if you are a seeker, if you are doubting, if you are between faith or between belief and non-belief, I want to tell you Jesus is real.

He is not a historical figure who lived 2,000 years ago and then disappeared.

He is alive.

He is present.

He is available to you right now.

All you have to do is ask him to reveal himself to you.

All you have to do is open your heart to the possibility that he is real.

I gave up a palace for a person.

I gave up an inheritance for truth.

I gave up a family for freedom.

And every single day I know it was worth it.

But here is the question I want to ask you.

What are you willing to give up for Jesus? What is the cost that you would pay? What is the idol in your life? Comfort, security, the approval of others, your reputation.

What is the idol that is keeping you from fully surrendering to him? Because Jesus does not ask for partial commitment.

He does not ask you to follow him as long as it is convenient.

He asks for everything.

He asks for your whole life.

He asks for your wholehearted devotion.

And I know that sounds demanding.

I know that sounds like he is asking too much.

But I am telling you from my own experience that what he gives in return is infinitely more valuable than what he asks you to give.

He gives you himself.

He gives you truth.

He gives you grace.

He gives you freedom.

He gives you the experience of being known completely and loved unconditionally.

He gives you a new identity that is not based on performance or achievement or the approval of others but on his love for you.

So I am asking you, are you willing? Are you willing to consider that Jesus might be real? Are you willing to read the gospels and see what you find? Are you willing to pray and ask him to reveal himself to you? Are you willing to take the risk of faith? Because if you are, I promise you this, your life will change.

It will not become easier.

In fact, it might become harder in some ways, but it will become real.

It will become true.

It will become authentic.

And you will experience the love of God in a way that will transform you forever.

I am proof of that.

I am a living testimony to the power of Jesus’s love.

I am a man who lost everything and gained everything.

I am a man who was in a palace and in exile.

And I can tell you with absolute certainty that Jesus is worth any cost.

There’s one more thing I need to say.

There is one more hope that I carry.

I pray for my family every single day.

I pray that somehow someway they will encounter Jesus.

I pray that my mother will know that I love her, that I did what I did not to hurt her, but to follow truth.

I pray that my father will understand.

I pray that my family will know Jesus.

And I believe in miracles.

I believe that God can do anything.

I believe that families that have been broken can be healed.

I believe that the lost can be found.

I believe that even in my exile, even in my separation from my family, God can work redemption.

So there is a part of me that holds on to hope.

A part of me that believes that one day there might be reconciliation.

That one day my mother might call me and say, “I understand.

That one day my family might come to faith.

Until that day, if it ever comes, I will continue to follow Jesus.

I will continue to tell my story.

I will continue to reach out to others who are searching just as I was searching.

I will continue to offer them the hope that I have found because that is what Jesus did.

He reached out to the lost.

He called the broken.

He loved the rejected.

He offered grace to everyone who asked for it.

And he is calling you right now.

He is offering you that same grace.

He is offering you that same love.

He is offering you that same freedom.

Will you answer? This is not the end of my story.

This is the middle of it.

My story continues every day.

It continues in the work I do, in the people I meet, in the faith I practice.

It continues in the prayers I pray for my family, in the hopes I hold for reconciliation, in the belief I maintain that God is working all things toward redemption.

My story has cost everything and he has given everything.

My story is a testimony to the power of Jesus’s love to transform a life completely.

My story is a testimony to the fact that he is worth the cost.

I am no longer a prince.

I do not live in a palace.

I do not have the wealth and status I once had.

But I am free.

I am authentic.

I am loved by God and I am at peace.

And if you are listening to this, if you are reading this, I want you to know your life does not have to look like mine.

Your journey does not have to involve exile or loss or separation from family.

But I want you to know that whatever the cost of following Jesus is, it is worth it.

He is real.

He is alive.

He is waiting for you.

And he loves you with a love that will transform everything.

That is my testimony.

That is my story.

That is my gift to you.

Come to Jesus.

Give him your whole life and discover the freedom and the love and the truth that I have discovered.

He is worth everything.