I watched Dara’s voice deepen.

I watched Sharon lose her baby features.

Birthdays were missed.

Milestones were missed.

Ordinary moments of parenting became impossible.

When this was its own form of torture, being alive, being present, but absent from their lives.

After approximately 8 months in detention, I had my trial.

Revolutionary Court, a special court for political and security crimes.

The judge was a religious cleric, not an impartial arbiter.

The charges were read, “Apostasy from Islam, leading an illegal church organization, evangelizing Muslims, this was a capital crime, acting against national security, propaganda against the state.

In all of these charges carried potential death sentences.

I was allowed a brief statement.

I kept it clear and concise.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ.

I became a Christian because I encountered the living God.

I will not recant this.

I will not provide names of other believers.

Do what you will.

The judge’s response was cold and dismissive.

You have chosen this path.

One week later, the sentence was delivered.

Life imprisonment.

The words landed physically in my chest.

I was 35 years old.

I had a wife and two young children.

And a man in a Theron court had just said, “You will die in Evan prison”.

I returned to my cell.

I lay on the floor again.

But this was different from the night of darkness.

This time I wasn’t in despair.

I was in grief.

I grieve the life I wouldn’t live.

I grieve being a husband in Asin from distance.

I grieve being a father through glass.

I grieve growing old in a 2×3 me cell.

But underneath the grief, the foundation was holding.

The presence was still there.

I will be with you was still true.

Even in a life sentence, I was not alone.

I was sentenced to die in prison.

That was the sentence.

But I was alive.

And the God who met me on the floor of that cell had not promised escape.

He had promised presence.

And somehow, impossibly, that was enough.

I was taken from that courtroom back into the body of the prison.

And and the next chapter of my life began.

Eight years that would teach me more about God’s faithfulness than any theology book ever could.

Eight years in which Jesus would show me the future of Iran.

In my fourth year of imprisonment, the dreams began.

I need to be careful and precise about this because I’ve seen prophetic claims used irresponsibly.

So, let me tell you exactly what I saw without embellishment or added interpretation.

By 2015, and I’d adjusted to prison routine, not comfortable, you never become comfortable in Evan, but adjusted.

My faith was steady, tested daily, holding Nashin and the children visited every 2 to 3 months.

I was permitted to write letters, though they were censored.

News about the underground church filtered in through various channels.

Despite arrests and pressure, the church was still growing.

I was 38 years old, way halfway through what would turn out to be my eighth year, though I didn’t know that yet.

One ordinary night, as ordinary as nights in solitary confinement could be, I fell asleep with difficulty as always.

And the dream began.

It had unusual clarity.

This wasn’t ordinary dream logic where things are fragmented and incoherent.

This had structure, coherence, the kind of clarity that makes you know immediately that something significant is happening.

I saw a structure.

It wasn’t a specific building I recognized, but it embodied the highest authority in Iran.

It represented the power of the Supreme Leader’s office.

The structure was architectural symbol, fortress-like, layered with concentric rings around a central core.

Each ring represented reinforcement, protection, power consolidated inward.

The feeling it gave was impregnable, built to last indefinitely, immovable.

I was observing the structure from outside.

The perspective of someone seeing it whole when understanding symbolically what it represented.

This was the power apparatus of the Islamic Republic centered on the Supreme Leader.

Then something came from above.

The direction was significant.

Vertical, not horizontal.

Not a human direction, not military invasion, not political movement from within, from above meant from God.

Spiritual intervention.

I couldn’t identify exactly what the object or force was, but it descended with purpose, directed, intentional.

It could struck the structure at its center, at the heart of power.

What happened next wasn’t an explosion.

There was no fire, no debris, no violence in the way we normally conceive it.

But there was rupture.

Something broke that had seemed unbreakable.

And then stillness, not death.

Silence, not emptiness, but opening.

Stillness like a sealed jar finally opened.

Like pressure released from a suffocated space.

like breath entering lungs that hadn’t breathed in years.

Oh, I had a sense of something entering for the first time.

Something that had been kept out was now free to enter.

I woke sitting upright in the darkness of my cell.

It was 2 or 3 in the morning.

I estimated the specific quality of the dream’s clarity remained.

It didn’t fade the way normal dreams fade.

It stayed with me, residual and real.

I had a conviction.

I was just shown something.

I lay awake the rest of the night processing it, testing it.

Was this wish fulfillment?

And I wanted the regime to fall.

Of course, I did.

But the quality of this was different from wish.

It had the quality of being shown something rather than imagining something.

The dream returned.

Over the following months and then years, the same core vision recurred.

Not exactly identical.

Peripheral details varied.

But the central structure was constant.

The structure representing power.

Something from above striking at the center, rupture and opening.

The frequency was approximately every few weeks at first, then settling into every few months.

Over three years from 2015 to 2018, I experienced this dream between 15 and 20 times.

I noted variations.

Sometimes the structure was taller, sometimes wider.

Sometimes the impact was immediate.

Sometimes there was a delayed moment before the rupture.

But the central pattern never changed.

My conviction grew.

This is prophetic.

This is not psychological phenomenon, but I needed to document it.

And I had no paper, no pen.

These weren’t permitted.

What I had was a prison issued Quran.

Ironic, but it was a permitted religious text.

And the margins of Quran pages had blank space.

I bartered with another prisoner for a pencil stub.

Then I developed a notation system.

Numbers, symbols, abbreviated person, illeible to guards if they search my cell.

I recorded dates, estimated details, variations.

I wrote in handwriting I developed specifically to keep these visions hidden.

If discovered with the consequences could mean punishment, solitary confinement beyond what I already had.

Loss of visit privileges.

But the compulsion to document overrode the risk.

I had an intuition that this would matter in the future.

At the time, this was what I understood.

God was showing me something about Iran’s future.

Not a specific event with a specific date, but a direction.

The power structure centered on the supreme leader and the regime apparatus was not permanent.

Something was coming from God.

Vertical intervention to break it open.

After the breaking, there would be unprecedented opportunity for the gospel.

An opening for the church to emerge from underground.

I held this understanding carefully.

I tested it.

I didn’t broadcast it.

But I couldn’t shake it.

The dreams had the quality of truth.

For eight years, four years of recurring dreams, then four years after my release, I carried those visions in the margins of that Quran in code only I could read.

And sometimes I wondered if isolation had broken my mind.

Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing what I desperately wanted to see rather than what was actually coming.

But I couldn’t dismiss them.

They stayed with me.

Life continued in prison.

The visits from Nasarine were the lifeline that kept me human.

Watching my children grow up through glass was its own form of torture.

But through it all, those dreams stayed with me.

Waiting for the moment when impossible vision would become impossible reality.

When the release didn’t come as one dramatic moment, this is how the Iranian system works.

slowly, bureaucratically with conditions attached to everything.

It took weeks of legal paperwork, property bail posted by family at personal risk, meetings with officials, documents signed.

The background to my release involved international pressure, human rights organizations, foreign governments calling attention to my case.

Onashin’s advocacy was tireless and courageous.

Our lawyer navigated the Iranian legal system with skill and persistence.

And somehow inexplicably, after eight years of a life sentence, I was being released.

On an ordinary morning in February 20120, I was called to an administrative office and told, “You’re being released on conditional terms.

The conditions were explained clearly.

regular reporting to the intelligence ministry.

No religious activity, no church, no evangelizing, no contact with the Christian community, no public speaking about my imprisonment experience, no leaving the country.

My passport was confiscated.

Violation of any condition would result in immediate re-imprisonment.

I was free inside Iran.

I was not free to leave Iran.

I was not free to do the thing I was most convicted about doing, but I was walking out.

February 2020, 8 years and one month after my arrest, I walked through the corridors I’d been led through blindfolded through the gates, yet into daylight.

The first time in 8 years I saw unfiltered sky.

The sensory overload was overwhelming.

Brightness, noise, space, movement, everything hitting me at once.

Nasarine was waiting outside.

Immediate, physical, real.

Our first embrace was 8 years of separation compressed into one moment.

I have tried several times to write about that moment.

I haven’t found words adequate to it.

We cried together.

Relief, grief, joy, loss, all of it mixed and inseparable.

A car was waiting.

Then we drove away from Evan.

I watched it recede in the rear view mirror, trying to believe I was actually leaving.

When we arrived at our apartment, the same apartment I’d been arrested from, everything felt smaller than I remembered.

Or perhaps I’d changed the size of it in my memory.

The table, the chairs, the photos on the wall.

Everything was the same.

Everything was different.

Dar and Sharen were waiting.

Dra was 16 now, tall, his voice deep.

There was careful distance at first, but he was protecting himself.

8 years without a resident father creates natural caution.

Rebuilding would take time.

Sharon came immediately without hesitation.

She still had access to affection, but she’d been five when I was arrested.

Now she was 13.

She’d lived most of her childhood without me.

The grief of lost years hit me immediately and heavily.

The adjustment period was difficult.

Simple things that should have been easy were hard.

Sleeping in a bed, darkness at night, quiet space to move.

I woke in panic multiple times, thinking I was still in the cell, adjusting to family noise, to routine, to normal life.

My body carried eight years of imprisonment.

My mind carried eight years of vigilance.

The trauma work was just beginning.

It would be a long ongoing process.

But the conditions of release created immediate pressure.

I was forbidden to contact the church community, the people who were my spiritual family.

I had regular intelligence check-ins that reminded me I was still being watched.

I couldn’t speak publicly.

I couldn’t leave the country.

I knew the situation was unsustainable.

Meanwhile, news about the underground church was filtering through cautiously and indirectly.

Despite arrests, pressure, and even martyrdoms, the church had grown significantly larger than when I was arrested.

Now estimated at over 100,000 underground believers in Iran.

When people have genuinely encountered the living God, the machinery of state repression is not sufficient to take that from them.

House churches were multiplying.

Leadership was emerging from within the community.

The movement had become unstoppable.

After one year back in Thran, from 2020 to 2021, we made the decision we needed to leave Iran.

The planning was careful.

The details I still won’t share because they could endanger the people who helped us.

One, there was a period of days when my family was separated and we didn’t know where each other was.

Those were the most terrifying days since my arrest.

The fear for Nasarine and the children was worse than any fear I’d experienced for myself.

But we were reunited outside Iran.

The location I won’t disclose for security reasons.

Finally together, finally free, finally safe.

We eventually arrived in Western Europe.

And I began speaking publicly about what I had experienced, what I had seen in prison, what God had shown me about Iran’s future.

But I held the specific details of those prison dreams carefully.

I testified to God’s faithfulness.

I spoke about the underground church.

I advocated for imprisoned believers still inside Iran, but about the visions of the Supreme Leader’s death and what would come after.

I simply waited until February 28th, 2026.

The morning my phone exploded with messages.

In the morning, everything I had seen in Evan prison solitary confinement cells became headline news across the world.

The morning Ayatollah Ali Kam died exactly as Jesus had shown me.

February 28th, 2026.

I was at home early morning.

Nasrin was making tea.

My phone began vibrating continuously.

Every message was saying the same impossible thing.

Kamina is dead.

I checked the news immediately.

It was confirmed.

Ayatollah Ali Kam, who Supreme Leader of Iran, age 86, had been killed in military strikes.

The strikes had targeted him directly from above.

I stood in my kitchen with my phone in my hand, seeing the news coverage, images of the strikes, official confirmations, and I was remembering the dreams.

The structure, something from above, striking at the center, rupture.

The correspondence wasn’t vague.

It was precise.

This was exactly what I had seen.

My emotional response was complex.

The first layer was profound grief.

This was the loss of human life.

A man made in God’s image.

A man I had prayed for during my imprisonment.

Prayed for his salvation, for softening, for encounter with Jesus.

I didn’t know what his last moments held.

I didn’t know if he had a final moment of clarity or if he died in darkness.

I would never celebrate any person’s violent death.

But underneath the grief was recognition.

This was what I’d been shown.

The vision was true, not selfdeception and not psychological phenomenon.

God had shown me something before it happened.

And now it had happened.

And I knew that if this part was true, the death, then the other part was true, too.

What comes after?

I was standing at the edge of something I’d been shown years ago, now unfolding in real time.

Within 72 hours, word began filtering through Iranian networks.

The underground church, the diaspora, contacts still inside Iran.

A story was emerging from Thran.

A senior aid to Kam had made a statement to other officials in a closed meeting about me, about my dreams, about prophecies describing this death beforehand, about visions that didn’t end with the death.

The aid’s name I won’t share.

He’s still in Iran and his safety matters.

But his position was very senior.

He’d been close to Kamina for years and he’d had access to interrogation reports from my imprisonment.

Those reports had mentioned my dreams.

The interrogators had documented them as evidence of my delusional state.

The aid had read them and he dismissed them the way everyone had dismissed them as psychological phenomenon produced by isolation.

His statement to the other officials, paraphrased but accurate in essence, was this.

There was a prisoner, a Christian pastor.

He claimed to have visions about this, about the Supreme Leader’s death, about it coming from above, about what would happen after.

But we documented this in interrogation reports.

We dismissed it as psychological phenomenon.

We were wrong.

What he saw has happened and what he said about what comes next.

We should be concerned.

Then he said the phrase that multiple sources have confirmed.

What’s coming is beyond death.

What he saw doesn’t stop with what happened.

It starts there.

Fear was spreading in Thrron.

Not ordinary political fear, a different kind.

Supernatural dread.

When this was the fear that comes when people who controlled everything realize they control nothing.

When prophecy proves true and you realize that if the death was prophesied accurately, then what was prophesied about what comes after the death might also be true.

This was fear that death itself is insufficient to stop what’s coming.

This was not fear of political opposition.

This was fear of God.

What the vision had shown beyond the death was this rupture and then opening.

Stillness that was not death but release like a sealed jar opened like pressure released from a suffocated space.

Something entering that had been kept out.

The interpretation I’d held was this.

An opening for the gospel in Iran.

The power structure that had suppressed the church for over 40 years was broken.

The underground church was positioned for emergence.

The opportunity was unprecedented.

Iranian people had spiritual hunger, openness, readiness.

Tom, what happens when the obstacle is removed?

A flood.

And that’s what’s beginning in Iran right now in March 2026.

Reports from inside the country describe a surge in spiritual seeking.

House churches growing exponentially.

Inquiries about Christianity multiplying.

People finding New Testaments, reading them, encountering Jesus.

The underground church is stepping into visibility cautiously, wisely, but visibly.

Something that death cannot touch is beginning to rise.

Not a political movement, a spiritual awakening.

The vision wasn’t about celebrating anyone’s death.

It was about recognizing that when human power structures that have suppressed the gospel are broken open, God moves in ways those structures can no longer prevent.

And that’s what’s beginning in Iran right now.

Which brings me to why I’m telling you this story.

Not just to testify to God’s faithfulness in my life, though that would be enough.

But because what happens next in Iran, well, the body of Christ needs to be ready for it.

Iranians need to hear it.

And there are specific things I need to say to different groups of people listening right now.

Let me speak first to my fellow Iranians.

Whether you’re inside the country or part of the diaspora scattered across the world, whether you’re a believer or a skeptic or someone who stopped believing in anything long ago to Iranian Muslims, I understand your suspicion of Christianity.

Continue reading….
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