I changed direction heading toward the lights.

They seemed impossibly far away, but I kept going.

My vision was getting dark around the edges.

I was stumbling more than walking now.

My body was shutting down.

I saw the lights getting closer.

Or maybe I was getting closer to them.

It was hard to tell.

And then I saw a vehicle.

It was parked on the side of a road I hadn’t even realized I had reached.

There was someone next to it, looking at something under the hood.

I tried to call out, but my voice was barely a whisper.

I tried to wave, but I could barely lift my arm.

I took one more step toward the person and the vehicle.

And then my legs gave out completely.

I fell.

I hit the ground hard.

The impact sent shock waves of pain through every burnt nerve.

Sand stuck to my wounds.

I tried to push myself up, but my arms wouldn’t work anymore.

My body had nothing left.

I lay there on the side of the road, looking up at the stars.

They were still beautiful, still bright, still indifferent to human suffering.

I heard footsteps, running.

Someone had seen me fall.

A face appeared above me.

a man young with dark skin and wide shocked eyes.

He said something in a language I didn’t understand, not Arabic, maybe Tagalog or Hindi, one of the foreign workers.

He knelt beside me and I saw his expression change from shock to horror as he saw my burns in the light from his vehicle.

He was talking rapidly, maybe to me, maybe to someone else.

I couldn’t understand him and couldn’t respond.

My throat was too damaged from screaming as smoke.

But I saw him pull out a phone.

I saw him making a call.

I saw genuine concern and compassion on his face as he looked at me.

This stranger, this foreign worker who I would have barely noticed a year ago, was trying to save my life.

He took off his shirt and tried to cover me with it to keep me warm maybe or to protect my burns from the dirt and wind.

The fabric touching my skin hurt, but I couldn’t tell him.

I couldn’t speak.

I heard sirens in the distance, the ambulance was coming, or maybe the police.

I didn’t know which, and part of me didn’t care.

I was just so tired.

The man stayed with me.

He kept talking even though I couldn’t understand.

I think he was praying.

I think maybe he was a Christian.

I don’t know.

But his presence comforted me.

The last thing I remember thinking was, “Jesus, thank you.

You saved me.

You saved me.

Not just from the fire, but you sent this stranger to find me.

You brought the ambulance.

You orchestrated even this.

You haven’t abandoned me and the nothing.

I woke up in a hospital.

I didn’t know where I was at first.

I didn’t know how I had gotten there.

I didn’t know how much time had passed.

Everything was white and bright and clean.

So different from the dark desert, the fire, the sand, and blood.

I tried to move and immediately regretted it.

Pain shot through my entire body.

My skin felt like it was being pulled apart.

I made a sound, something between a gasp and a scream.

A nurse appeared beside my bed.

She was speaking to me, but I couldn’t focus on her words.

The pain was overwhelming everything else.

She did something, adjusted something, and slowly the pain became more manageable.

not gone but bearable.

I realized she had given me medication through the IV in my arm.

As the pain receded enough for me to think, I looked down at myself.

My arms were wrapped in bandages.

My chest was wrapped.

I could feel bandages on my legs, my back.

I was covered in them.

The nurse was explaining something about my burns, about the treatment, about how lucky I was to be alive.

I heard words like second degree and third degree and extensive damage.

I heard miracle, too.

She said it was a miracle I had survived.

She didn’t know how right she was.

I tried to ask questions, but my throat was so damaged I could barely make sounds.

The nurse understood and brought me water with a straw.

Even swallowing hurt, but the water was cool and I was so thirsty.

I managed to whisper, “How long”?

She told me I had been in the hospital for 3 days.

I had been unconscious for most of it.

They had kept me sedated while they treated the worst of the burns.

3 days.

It felt like both a moment and an eternity since I had been in that desert pit.

Over the next few days, as I drifted in and out of consciousness, I learned more about what had happened after I collapsed on the roadside.

The man who found me was a Filipino worker named Carlos.

He had stopped because his truck had overheated.

When he saw me fall, he had immediately called for help.

He had stayed with me until the ambulance arrived.

The medics who responded hadn’t known what to make of my burns.

They were severe, but not severe enough for how fresh they appeared to be.

They asked me what happened, but I was unconscious by then.

At the hospital, they had treated my burns as best they could.

They had cleaned the wounds, applied dressings, given me antibiotics and pain medication.

They had kept me stable while my body tried to heal from the trauma, but they were confused.

The pattern of my burns didn’t make sense.

They looked like fire burns, but they weren’t consistent with being in a building fire or a vehicle fire.

And why had I been out in the desert?

I couldn’t tell them the truth.

If I told them I had been burned for apostasy, for leaving Islam, they would have to report it.

And then the men who tried to kill me might come back to finish the job.

So I said I didn’t remember.

I said I had been attacked but couldn’t remember the details.

I implied I had been robbed maybe and left for dead.

The doctors seemed skeptical, but they didn’t push too hard.

Saudi Arabia is a place where sometimes it’s better not to ask too many questions.

What I didn’t realize yet was that my disappearance had caused problems for the men who had tried to kill me.

My wife had reported me missing when I didn’t come home that first night.

The mosque had to explain where I was.

They couldn’t say they had handed me over to be killed.

So they said I had left, that I had abandoned my family and my faith.

But then I turned up in a hospital, burnt and nearly dead.

Now there were questions.

If I had simply left, how did I end up burnt?

Who had done this to me?

Where had I been?

My wife came to see me on the fourth day.

I saw her before she saw me.

She was standing in the doorway of my hospital room, and the expression on her face was one I had never seen before.

Horror mixed with disgust mixed with grief.

When she finally looked at me, really looked at me, she began to cry.

She came closer, but she didn’t touch me.

She stood at the foot of my bed and asked me why.

Why had I done this?

Why had I thrown everything away?

Why had I become an apostate?

So she knew.

Of course she knew.

The mosque would have told her.

I tried to speak, but my voice was still rough and weak.

I told her I was sorry.

I told her I loved her and the children.

I told her I had found truth and couldn’t deny it.

She shook her head.

She said I had found lies.

She said I had been deceived by Shayan.

She said I had destroyed our family.

I wanted to reach out to her, but I couldn’t move without pain.

And I knew she wouldn’t have accepted my touch anyway.

She told me the children were asking for me.

Khaled kept asking when I was coming home.

Our daughter cried at night.

Even the baby seemed to sense something was wrong.

Then she said the words, “I had been dreading.

They couldn’t come home.

Not to me.

Not while I was in apostate”.

My father had taken them in.

He was caring for them, raising them in a proper Muslim household, protecting them from my influence.

I felt something break inside me, a pain worse than the burns.

my children, my babies.

I would never see them again.

I begged her.

I told her to let me see them just once.

Let me explain to them that I loved them.

Let me say goodbye properly.

She said no.

She said it would only confuse them, only hurt them more.

Better for them to think I had abandoned them than to see me like this.

to know what I had become.

She stayed for a few more minutes, but there was nothing left to say.

She looked at me one last time, and I saw that she was already mourning me.

Already treating me as if I were dead.

Then she left.

I lay in that hospital bed and wept, not quietly, not with dignity.

I sobbed like a child, and the sobs hurt my burned chest and my damaged throat, but I couldn’t stop.

I had known there would be a cost to following Jesus.

I had known I might lose my family, but knowing it intellectually and experiencing it emotionally were completely different things.

My children were gone, my wife was gone, my father had disowned me, my brothers would never speak to me again.

My community had rejected me.

I was alone.

In that moment, I questioned whether it had been worth it.

I had gained Jesus, yes, but I had lost everyone else.

The pain was so deep, I thought it might kill me when the burns couldn’t.

But then in that darkness, I felt Jesus again.

Not a dramatic presence from the fire, just a quiet, steady assurance, a reminder.

You are not alone.

I am with you and I will never leave you.

It didn’t take away the pain, but it kept me from drowning in it.

The days that followed were difficult in ways I hadn’t expected.

The physical pain was bad enough.

The burns were healing slowly and every dressing change was agony.

I had to learn to move again, to walk again.

Simple things like eating or using the bathroom became orals.

But the emotional and psychological pain was worse.

I had nightmares every night.

I would wake up screaming, feeling the fire again, smelling the gasoline, hearing the men’s voices.

The nurses would rush in to calm me down, to give me medication.

But the fear remained.

I was afraid to sleep, afraid to close my eyes, afraid the fire would come back.

I was also afraid that the man who had tried to kill me would find me.

Every time someone new came into my room, my heart would race.

Every unexpected sound made me jump.

I was constantly on edge, constantly waiting for them to come finish what they started.

The hospital social worker came to see me.

She wanted to know about my living situation, about my family support, about my plans for when I was discharged.

I had no answers for her.

I had no home to go back to.

My family wanted nothing to do with me.

I had no money, no job, no plan.

I was a man with severe burns who would need ongoing medical care.

I was a known apostate in a country where that could get you killed.

I had nothing and no one.

The social worker looked troubled.

She said she would see what she could do, but I could tell she didn’t know how to help me.

It was Carlos, the man who had found me, who ended up helping.

He came to visit me in the hospital.

He brought fruit and juice and he sat beside my bed and told me he had been praying for me.

That word praying caught my attention.

I asked him carefully what he meant and he smiled and said he was a Christian.

He had been praying for me since the night he found me.

I started to cry again.

Here was another Christian sent by God at exactly the moment I needed him.

Carlos told me about the underground church in Riyad.

There weren’t many Christians who could meet openly, but there were small groups of believers, mostly foreign workers who met in secret to worship together.

He said if I needed help, if I needed a place to stay, if I needed community, he could connect me with them.

I nodded.

Yes, I needed all of those things.

When I was finally discharged from the hospital, I had nowhere to go, but Carlos had arranged for me to stay in a small room in a building where several Filipino workers lived.

It wasn’t much, just a single room with a mattress on the floor, but it was safe and it was shelter.

The workers there knew what I was.

They knew I was a Saudi who had converted to Christianity.

They knew I was in danger, but they welcomed me anyway.

For the first time in my life, I experienced real Christian community.

These men and women, foreigners in Saudi Arabia, working difficult jobs for low pay, far from their families.

They shared what little they had with me.

They brought me food.

They helped me change my bandages.

They prayed with me.

And on Friday evenings, when the Muslim world was at mosque, we would gather quietly in someone’s room and worship Jesus together.

I cannot describe what it meant to finally worship openly, to sing praise songs without fear, to pray aloud in a group of believers.

I had been a Christian for over a year, but I had never experienced corporate worship.

It was beautiful.

It was healing.

These people, my new brothers and sisters in Christ, helped me in ways I didn’t know I needed.

They listened to my story.

They cried with me over my losses.

They prayed for my family.

They reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

One woman, a nurse named Maria, helped me process my trauma.

She had medical training and spiritual wisdom.

She explained to me that what I was experiencing, the nightmares, the fear, the sudden panic were symptoms of trauma.

She said it was normal that my brain and body were trying to process what had happened to me.

She taught me breathing exercises.

She taught me grounding techniques for when the panic came.

She sat with me during the nightmares and reminded me that I was safe, that the fire was in the past, that Jesus had saved me.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to heal.

Not just physically though my burns were improving but emotionally and spiritually too.

I began to understand that God had saved me for a reason.

I was alive when I should be dead.

I had survived when there was no natural explanation for my survival.

God had a purpose for me.

He had a plan.

But understanding that intellectually didn’t make the day-to-day reality easier.

I still struggled.

I still hurt.

I still grieved.

Some days were better than others.

Some days I would wake up and feel grateful to be alive.

Grateful for my new Christian family.

Grateful for the freedom to worship Jesus openly in our small gatherings.

Other days I would wake up and the first thing I would think about was my children.

I would wonder what they were doing at that exact moment.

Were they eating breakfast, going to school, playing?

Did they miss me?

Did they remember me?

The not knowing was torture.

I wanted to try to see them, to find a way to send them a message, to let them know I still love them.

But Maria and Carlos both counseledled me against it.

They said it would be too dangerous both for me and for them.

My father was surely watching for any attempt I might make to contact them.

And if I did manage to reach them, what would I say?

How could I explain to children so young why their father had chosen a different god?

So I prayed for them instead.

Every morning and every night, I prayed for their safety, their health, their happiness.

I prayed that somehow, someday they would understand, that they would come to know Jesus, too, that we would be reunited, if not in this life, than in the next.

Those prayers were often the only thing that kept me going.

I also had to grieve what I had lost.

I thought about my children constantly.

I wondered what they were being told about me.

I wondered if they hated me.

I wondered if they would grow up thinking their father had abandoned them, not knowing that I had wanted nothing more than to be with them.

I thought about my wife, Ila.

I had loved her as best as I knew how.

I had tried to be a good husband and now she was alone raising three children without me bearing the shame of having an apostate for a husband.

I thought about my father who had devoted his life to Islam and to raising me in that faith.

How betrayed he must feel, how devastated that his eldest son, the one he had trained to follow in his footsteps, had rejected everything he held dear.

The grief came in waves.

Sometimes I would be fine, focusing on my recovery, grateful to be alive.

And then suddenly I would be overwhelmed with sadness, with loss, with the weight of what my faith had cost.

My new Christian friends understood.

They didn’t try to rush me through the grief.

They didn’t tell me to just be happy because I had Jesus.

They let me mourn.

They mourned with me.

And through it all, Jesus was faithful.

In my darkest moments, when I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake, when I wondered if the cost was too high, he would remind me of his presence.

Sometimes through scripture, sometimes through a brother or sister speaking words of encouragement, sometimes just through a quiet sense of peace that I couldn’t explain.

I remembered the voice in the fire.

You are mine and I am with you.

That promise sustained me.

As the months passed, I grew stronger.

My burns healed, leaving scars that would be with me forever.

But I >> could move again.

I could function again.

I could live again.

Carlos helped me find work.

It was simple labor, work that foreign workers usually did, but I was grateful for it.

It gave me purpose and income.

The work was hard.

construction sites, loading and unloading trucks, cleaning, maintenance, physical labor that made my healing burns ache.

The other workers, mostly from South Asia and the Philippines, were kind to me despite my Saudi background.

They knew my story.

They knew I was one of them now, not in nationality, but in faith and in circumstance.

I learned humility through that work.

I who had been a teacher, who had been respected, who had sat in meetings with other religious leaders, was now doing the kind of work I had previously taken for granted.

The kind of work done by people I had barely noticed.

But I learned to find dignity in it.

Honest work is honest work.

and I was providing for myself through my own hands, not through my family’s position or my religious credentials.

The work also kept me busy, which helped with the grief and the trauma.

When I was physically exhausted at the end of the day, I slept better.

The nightmares still came, but less frequently.

I was living a completely different life than the one I had known.

I had gone from being a respected religious teacher to being a laborer.

From having a family and a home to living in a single room.

From being a Saudi with status to being treated almost like a foreign worker.

But I was free.

Free to worship Jesus openly, at least in the privacy of our small group.

Free to read the Bible without hiding.

Free to pray without pretending.

and I was loved.

My Christian community, these brothers and sisters who had barely known me, loved me in a way I had never experienced in all my years as a Muslim.

They loved me not because of what I could do or how righteous I was, but simply because we were family in Christ.

It was during this time that I was baptized.

I had wanted to be baptized since the moment I believed in Jesus, but circumstances had made it impossible.

Now finally, I could take that step.

We gathered one evening in someone’s apartment building.

They had filled a large tub with water.

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