Iranian Imam Dies and Returns With a Message From Jesus About the Next Leader and Future of Iran !!!

I need to start from the very beginning because the beginning matters more than you might think.

If you do not understand who I was before everything changed.

If you do not understand the full weight of the life I was living and the complete certainty I had about the things I believed, then what happened to me later will sound like an interesting story.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our brother Tariq Muhammadi 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, but it is not an interesting story.

It is a true one.

And for it to land with its full truth, you need to understand exactly what kind of man received it.

I was born in Mashad in 1971.

If you are not Iranian, Mashad might just be a name to you.

But for Iranians, Mashad is not simply a city.

It is the holiest city in the country.

It is where the shrine of Imam Resa stands, the eighth imam of Shia Islam.

He and every year tens of millions of pilgrims come from all over Iran and from other countries to visit that shrine.

Growing up there meant growing up inside something.

The religion was not separate from the air or the streets or the daily rhythm of life.

It was the structure of everything.

The call to prayer shaped the hours of the day.

The religious calendar shaped the entire year.

The questions people asked, the way they greeted each other, the way they explained suffering or celebrated joy, all of it came from the same deep well of faith that the city had been built on top of.

You did not choose to be religious in Mashhad.

You were religious the way you were Iranian, the way you breathed without deciding to.

My father was a cleric.

He was not famous or powerful in any national sense.

He was a neighborhood cleric, a man the people around us trusted and came to when they needed guidance.

He ran a small mosque near our home where he led the five daily prayers and gave lessons several times a week.

People brought in their problems, marriage conflicts, inheritance disputes, questions about what Islam said about this situation or that one, questions about death and what comes after.

He was the person people called when they needed someone to stand between them and God and translate.

He was serious about this role, deeply, completely serious.

He did not take it as a job or a social function.

He took it as the most important thing a human being could do with his life.

My father passed this seriousness to me before I was old enough to resist it or even evaluate it.

I was the oldest of four children and from my earliest memories and I was treated differently from my siblings in one specific way.

My father included me.

He took me to the mosque before my brothers were awake.

He sat me next to him during his lessons.

He explained things to me and then asked me to explain them back in my own words to make sure I had understood.

By the time I was 8, I had memorized more of the Quran than most adult men in our community.

I was not a prodigy in the way people sometimes use that word.

I was simply a child in whom a great deal of intentional religious education had been deposited very early and that education had found a home in me.

I had a strong memory, a disciplined mind, and an early need to understand things completely, to find the logic in them and follow it all the way through.

The religious tradition I was being raised in was enormously rich intellectually, and that richness fed something in me that wanted feeding.

My mother was a quiet woman.

What I remember most about her was her prayer.

She was always in some state related to prayer, preparing for it, in the middle of it, recovering from it, holding her prayer beads afterward, and sitting in the particular stillness that people have after they have spent time genuinely in the presence of God.

She never complained, not about money, which was never abundant in our home.

Not about the cold, mashed winters.

Not about the long hours my father spent at the mosque and away from us.

Not about the difficulty of raising four children on a cleric’s modest income.

She had a peace that I noticed very early and that I wanted for myself.

I assumed for many years that the peace came from her practice of Islam, that if I practiced correctly and deeply enough, I would eventually have what she had.

That belief drove a lot of my early religious effort.

The Iran Iraq war was a background presence throughout my childhood.

I was 10 when it began and 17 when it ended.

Growing up during wartime leaves marks that are hard to fully describe.

You do not live in fear exactly the way people in the direct path of fighting do, but you live with a particular awareness of the world being dangerous and serious and consequential.

You live with loss around you.

A classmate’s father does not come back.

An uncle is buried in a field somewhere that the family cannot visit.

The news is always serious.

The government is always calling for sacrifice and commitment.

The religious and the political were completely fused during those years.

And the Islamic Republic presented this fusion as not only natural but divinely mandated.

Kmeni had died in 1989 and Kamina had taken his place and my father approved of this transition.

He spoke of Kamina as a genuine scholar, a true religious leader rather than a politician wearing religious clothes.

That assessment shaped how I understood Kamina for the next two decades.

At 16, I was sent to comm and this is where I was made into what I became.

is where Iran’s clerical classes formed.

The seminaries there are old and serious and deeply self-aware of their own importance.

What you learn in comm is not simply Islamic theology in the way a university student might study religion academically.

You learn to be inside Islam.

You learn to inhabit it, to think from within it, to see the world entirely through its categories.

You learn juristprudence, the detailed science of Islamic law.

You learn theology, the systematic defense and elaboration of Islamic doctrine.

You learn the traditions, the vast collections of hadith that record what the prophet and the imam said and did.

And you learn how to weigh and apply them.

You learn rhetoric and argumentation.

You learn how to lead prayer, how to give a sermon, how to counsel the grieving and the confused and the sinning.

It is a total formation.

You go in as a young man with a promising mind and a strong memory and a lot of religious background and after years of this you come out as a cleric.

I spent 11 years in comm.

I was there from 16 to 27 with some periods spent back in Mashad or in Tehran for practical training.

I was good at this life.

I need to say that clearly and without false humility because it matters to understand how completely I had become what the system wanted me to be.

I was not reluctantly going through the motions of a life I had not chosen.

I was genuinely excellent at this and genuinely committed to it.

My teachers recognized early that I had unusual analytical ability and they gave me more harder work, deeper questions, greater attention.

I argued in the late night sessions in the common rooms with real passion, defending positions and attacking others and refining my thinking against the sharpest minds around me.

I loved the intellectual work.

I loved the sense of participating in a tradition that stretched back centuries that was larger than me and would outlast me and that I was responsible to preserve and transmit.

I I also loved the sense of purpose in quorm.

You always know why you were there.

You are there to become someone who can carry God’s guidance to people.

You are there to prepare yourself to stand between confused human beings and divine truth and help them find their way.

There is an enormous satisfaction in having a clear calling and being well suited to it.

And I had that for many years.

I was assigned to a mosque in Thran in my late 20s, a midsized mosque in a solidly middle-class neighborhood.

I gave the five daily prayer sermons.

I taught classes on Thursday evenings.

I counseledled families going through difficulty.

I performed marriages and conducted funerals.

I was what I had been trained to be.

And for a long time, I believed in what I was doing with the same completeness I had believed since childhood.

But there was more to my work than the mosque.

The Islamic Republic needed religious men who could do things that went beyond leading prayers.

A cleric has a kind of authority that a security official does not have.

When a cleric speaks, his words carry the weight of God’s endorsement, or at least the appearance of it.

The regime understood this and used it carefully.

I was called on sometimes to speak at gatherings that were as much political as religious, to give sermons that validated specific government positions, to be present at proceedings that needed religious legitimacy.

I did these things.

I framed them to myself as serving God by serving the system God had established.

The logic was airtight from the inside.

There was no window.

You could not stand within that logic and see its flaws because the logic itself was the window through which you saw everything else.

If the Islamic Republic was God’s system, then serving it was serving God and questioning it was questioning God.

And both conclusions led to the same place, obedience.

I married in my early 30s.

My wife was a woman from a religious family, educated, thoughtful, serious about her faith.

We had two children, a son and a daughter.

My son was born in 2002 and my daughter in 2005.

Those years when my children were small, are the years I returned to most often in my memory.

Not because everything was perfect.

I was already beginning to have doubts I had not yet named, but because my children were there, the daily ordinary thing of being their father.

Breakfast in the morning, helping with homework, their voices in the next room.

I did not know then how soon and how completely I was going to lose all of that.

The first crack in the wall came in 2004.

I have described this moment to many people since and I always come back to the same detail which is that what broke through was not an argument.

It was a presence, a quality in a person, something you cannot debate away.

A man had been arrested in the neighborhood around our mosque.

He was a convert.

Not from a historically Christian family, not from one of Iran’s recognized religious minorities, but a former Muslim who had left Islam and become a follower of Jesus.

This was not a minor infraction.

Under the Islamic Republic, apostasy was a serious offense.

The options for handling it included allowing clerics to attempt to reason the person back to Islam before more severe measures were taken.

I was brought in to speak with him, not to interrogate him in the physical sense, to argue with him, to show him the errors of what he had done, to give him the chance to recant.

This was considered an act of mercy.

The man was perhaps 40 years old.

He was thin and he had clearly been through something before I arrived.

But when I sat across from him, the first thing I noticed was that he was not afraid.

In my work, I had sat with frightened people before, people who knew they were in serious trouble.

And fear is something you recognize without effort.

It has a quality to it that you feel in the room.

This man did not have it.

He was calm.

Not the brittle artificial calm of someone suppressing fear, but a genuine settled calm that had its own source somewhere inside him that I could not locate or explain.

We spoke for a long time.

I made my arguments.

I knew them well.

I had been making these arguments for years at various levels of sophistication, the theological case for Islam, the critique of Christianity, the standard responses to the claims the gospels make about Jesus.

He listened to everything I said without interrupting, without getting defensive.

And then he began asking me questions.

Not aggressive theological challenges, quiet personal questions, questions that kept arriving at places I was not prepared to respond to quickly or easily.

He spoke about Jesus not as a doctrine or a historical claim or a theological position to be defended.

He spoke about him the way you speak about someone you know.

someone real and present and personally known to you.

I left that room unsettled in a way I did not want to name.

I told myself I was irritated, that he was a deluded man who had absorbed some foreign influence and was refusing to be corrected.

But under the irritation was something that was not irritation at all.

Something small had shifted.

And small shifts are the ones that keep moving after you have convinced yourself they have stopped.

I do not know what happened to that man after I reported back that he was firm in his position.

Whatever the system did next with him, I was not informed.

I have prayed for him many times.

I hope that God’s mercies reached him as I now know they are large enough to reach even the most condemned.

After that encounter, I started noticing things I had been successfully not noticing before.

The regime I served had not become more merciful over time.

It had become more precise and more ruthless.

The people it targeted were increasingly ordinary Iranians whose crimes were not espionage or violence, but simply wanting to believe something different or speak something different or simply live.

I had been trained to understand this as necessary protection of the divine order.

But the man in that room had loosened something in my thinking.

And now when the machinery of the system moved around me, I watched it differently.

I could see the machinery now.

Before I had only seen the justification for it.

I did not act on this internal change immediately.

To understand why, you have to understand what everything in my life was built on.

My identity was that of a cleric of the Islamic Republic.

My relationships were built within that world.

My income came from it.

My standing in the community existed because of it.

My connection to my family and mashed was woven through it.

My marriage existed within that framework.

My children were growing up inside it.

To begin questioning the foundation was not like changing a political opinion.

It was like pulling the ground out from under an entire life.

And I had a wife and small children.

The fear of what questioning would cost them kept me very quiet for a long time.

So the doubts lived inside me and I did not let them out.

I managed them.

I kept performing the role.

I gave the sermons and led the prayers and counseledled the families and validated the regime’s positions when asked to.

And underneath all of it, something was growing that I could not stop.

Sometime in 2006, I obtained a Farsy Bible.

I will not detail how because the route it came through involved people who helped others after me and whose safety I will not risk even now.

I began reading it late at night after my family was asleep in a part of the apartment where no light would be seen under the door.

I read it the way I had been trained to read everything analytically, looking for the weaknesses, looking for the contradictions, building the case for why it could be safely dismissed.

I had been taught that the Bible was a corrupted document, that the original message of Jesus had been distorted beyond recognition by his followers, that what remained was an unreliable and internally inconsistent text that had been manipulated for political purposes.

I expected to confirm this as I read.

I expected to come away more confident in my position.

A what I found instead was something I did not have a category for.

The Jesus of the Gospels was not the figure I had been taught about.

I had been taught about a prophet, a messenger, a man of God who had been misunderstood and whose message had been corrupted.

What I encountered in the Gospels was something entirely different.

The figure who spoke in those pages had an authority and equality that I could not explain away.

The things he said about the kingdom of God, the way he treated the people that every other religious system had given up on.

The directness of his claims, the way he spoke about his own relationship to God, all of it had a weight that did not feel like the weight of a prophet delivering a message.

It felt like the weight of the source speaking.

I kept reading.

I read Paul’s letters.

I read the Psalms.

I read Job.

And Job did something to me that I had not expected.

The book of Job is a book about a man who suffers, who argues honestly and even furiously with God about his suffering, who demands to understand, who refuses the easy answers his friends offer him, and who is not punished for any of this.

God does not strike him down for arguing.

God answers him.

And the answer is not a theological explanation but a presence.

God shows up.

The book is not resolved by Job getting an answer to his question.

It is resolved by Job encountering the one he was asking the question of.

I sat with that for a long time.

In the tradition I had been formed in, you did not argue with God.

You submitted.

Suffering was a test that you passed by accepting it without complaint.

But here was this ancient text saying something different.

I saying that honest wrestling was acceptable.

That the one who demands to see God is not destroyed for the demanding.

Something happened to me slowly across months of this reading.

I found myself praying in a new way.

Not the structured prayers I had been performing all my life, but simple, unformulated, direct conversation.

I spoke to Jesus, not knowing exactly what I was doing, not sure I was doing it right, but something in me had shifted to the point where I could not not do it.

I told him that I did not know everything, that I had a lot of questions still, that I was not even certain I was coming to the right place, but that I believed he was real, that I needed him to be real, and that I was coming to him.

When I prayed that prayer, something changed inside me that I cannot fully put into words.

It was not dramatic in any external way.

Nothing in the room changed, but inside my chest, something lifted.

Not everything, not all at once, and not permanently in the sense that it never got heavy again.

But for the first time in years, I felt something I can only describe as clean, like I had put down something I had been carrying so long, I had forgotten I was carrying it.

I tried to continue the double life.

I knew perfectly well what conversion meant in Iran.

I had seen the machinery from the inside.

I had been part of it.

I knew what was done to people who left Islam.

And I knew that a cleric who left Islam was treated as an especially dangerous kind of traitor because a cleric who converted could influence others.

and the regime had a specific practiced response to that kind of influence.

In 2008, I found the underground church.

I will not give details that could compromise anyone.

a house church in Thran, a small group of mostly young people, many of them former Muslims, meeting in apartments that rotated regularly, sharing the Bible, worshiping Jesus together at great personal risk.

When I walked into that gathering for the first time, I was broken open.

I am not a man who cries easily, or I was not then.

But something about being in a room with other Iranians who had made the same journey, who understood the precise cost and the precise miracle of it, who were doing something so dangerous out of love for someone so real to them that broke through everything.

I attended these gatherings for 2 years while maintaining my mosque position and my public identity.

My wife did not know.

My children did not know.

I told myself I was protecting them by keeping them out of it, which was partly true, but I was also protecting myself and I knew it.

The end came in late 2010.

I do not know precisely who reported me.

In that system, suspicion spreads through quiet observation and quiet reporting, and anyone around you can become the source.

Not necessarily out of malice, but out of fear, or out of a complicated loyalty to the system, or simply because they were themselves under pressure and needed to give a name to survive.

It could have been someone at the mosque who had noticed something different in my sermons over the preceding months.

It could have been someone connected to the house church who was compromised.

It could have been someone in my extended family who had observed changes in me they could not explain and reported out of what they thought was concern.

I genuinely do not know.

What I know is that a trusted friend found a way to reach me with a warning in November of 2010.

The message was simple.

My name had been given to the intelligence services.

I had been identified as a convert.

The response was not going to be a conversation or a chance to recant.

The response was already decided.

I had hours, not days.

I need you to try to understand what it means to have a few hours to leave your life.

Everything you see when you look around your home, your books, your furniture, your photographs, the smell of your children’s rooms, the particular way the light falls in the kitchen in the morning.

All of it is about to be left permanently.

Siren, you know it.

And there is no time to grieve it and no way to explain it to the people you love the most.

My children were asleep.

I stood in the doorway of their room.

My son was 8 years old.

My daughter was five.

I stood there and I looked at them and I could not wake them because if they woke and made noise or if they were frightened and cried, every second of additional time in that apartment was a second closer to the people coming through the door.

I could not explain and I could not say goodbye.

I just looked at them.

I left my wife a note short because there was no time and because the less she knew, the safer she was.

I told her I loved her and the children.

I told her I was in danger and that I had to go.

I told her the less she knew, the better.

I told her I was sorry.

I asked her to take care of our children.

I put the note somewhere she would find it after I was gone and not before.

I took almost nothing.

Some cash I had been quietly accumulating over the preceding months.

A kind of preparation I’d been making without fully admitting to myself what I was preparing for.

my identity documents and my small farsy bible which had started all of this.

The journey out of Iran took several weeks.

It moved through difficult terrain and dangerous conditions and required help from people I will not name and will not describe in any identifying way.

I crossed into Turkey.

I made my way to Istanbul.

From there, through a process of registration with international organizations and through the help of Christian networks that specifically assist people in exactly my situation, I was eventually processed and resettled in Germany.

I arrived in 2012.

I was 41 years old.

I had no German.

I had a small bag of almost nothing.

I had left behind a wife, two children, a career, an identity, a country, a family in Mashhad who did not know what had happened to me, and a life that had taken 41 years to build in less than one night to leave.

What I also had, and what I want to say clearly and without embellishment, because it is the most important fact about this part of the story, was Jesus.

Not as a feeling, not as a comfort I was constructing for myself in the absence of everything else, but as a presence, real, consistent, present in the exhaustion and the grief and the loneliness and the cold.

Present in the small German apartment and the confusion of the language and the months of processing and paperwork and the ache of separation from my children.

He was there every morning, every night.

In the prayers I said quietly before I slept.

In the psalms I read when I had no words of my own.

In the faces of the Iranian Christian community I eventually found in the city where I was placed.

People who became my family in the years that followed.

I want to tell you something about exile.

People who have not experienced it.

sometimes romanticize it as freedom, as escape.

It is neither.

It is a specific kind of grief that does not fully resolve.

You carry your country inside you like a wound that heals over but never disappears.

You carry your children in photographs that someone occasionally manages to get to you.

You watch them grow up in small images on a phone screen.

A son who looks more like you every year.

A daughter whose smile you last saw when she was 5 years old.

You dream in Farsy that you wake up in Germany.

Every morning is a small reminder of the distance between where you are and where you belong.

But God was in it.

I want to say that with the same plainness I am saying everything else.

Not every day felt like God was in it because I am a human being and some days just feel like loss.

But when I look back over those 14 years from 2012 to 2026, what I see is a thread, a continuous thread of presence and provision and preparation.

The community that became my family.

The work I found helping other refugees that gave my days structure and meaning.

The prayer life that went deeper in exile than it had ever gone when I was living a comfortable double life.

The slow process of becoming honest, of becoming the same person inside and outside, of having nothing to hide or perform.

There was a grace in the stripping.

A painful, costly, real grace, but grace.

I turned 50 in 2021.

I had been in Germany 9 years.

I had German citizenship by then.

I had a small but real life.

And I prayed every single day for Iran, for my children, for the converts in the house churches, for the country that I loved and that had tried to destroy me.

Every day the same prayer.

God be with Iran.

God do not forget Iran.

God have mercy on Iran.

What I did not know in those years of daily prayer is that the answer was already being prepared.

And that part of it was going to come through me in a way I could never have anticipated.

By February of 2026, I had been in Germany for 14 years, and my life had settled into a shape that I was grateful for, even though gratitude and grief often sat together in my chest without canceling each other out.

Though I was 54 years old, my German was good.

I had built something real from almost nothing, which is something I do not say to congratulate myself, but to acknowledge the mercy in it, because I had arrived in this country with next to nothing, and with a grief so heavy I was not always sure I would survive it.

Survival had come.

And more than survival, I had a small apartment that felt like home in the quiet, accumulated way that places become home when you have lived honestly inside them for long enough.

I had work I found meaningful.

a part-time position with a nonprofit connected to a church, helping newly arrived refugees, mostly Iranians and Afghans, navigate the early chaos of resettlement.

The work put me in the path of people who were where I had been 14 years earlier, frightened and disoriented and carrying enormous loss.

And I could be useful to them in specific ways that came from having been exactly there myself.

I had a community, a group of Iranian Christians, some of them exiles like me, some of them second generation Iranians who had grown up in Germany.

All of them people who carried Iran in a particular way.

We met regularly.

We prayed together.

We ate together.

We sat with each other through the hard things that exile and displacement and longing for home produc in people over time.

These people were my family in the truest functional sense of that word.

Not the family I was born into, most of whom I had been unable to contact safely for years, but the family I had been given.

I was deeply grateful for them.

I stayed in contact with my children through whatever means were possible and safe.

And the channels for this shifted over the years as the situation inside Iran evolved.

Sometimes I had more access, sometimes less.

I had photographs.

I had occasional messages relayed through people I trusted.

My son was 23 years old by 2026.

My daughter was 20.

They had grown up without me.

I had missed all of it.

The graduations, the ordinary dinners, the arguments, the moments that make up the texture of a childhood.

I missed all of it.

And I knew I had missed it.

And that knowledge was a companion I had learned to carry without letting it crush me mostly.

I knew about the broader situation in Iran through the extensive networks of communication that the Iranian diaspora maintains.

We were always talking to each other, always sharing news and analysis side always trying to understand what was happening inside the country through the fragments that got out despite the regime’s efforts to control information.

The year 2025 had been volatile inside Iran.

There had been more protests, more crackdowns, more young people being killed or imprisoned for the crime of wanting a different country.

The economy had continued its long deterioration.

The regime had continued its long pattern of responding to every crisis with more repression and more religious justification for the repression.

The house church movement, by all accounts that reached us, had continued to grow despite everything done to stop it.

The underground Christianity was not small anymore.

It was enormous, a running through Iranian society like a river beneath the surface that no amount of concrete poured on top of it had been able to stop.

Kam himself had appeared increasingly unwell in the months before February 2026.

There had been rumors for years about his health, and in the final months, the photographs that were released officially looked different.

He was thinner.

There was something in his appearance that told a story the regime was not interested in telling publicly.

The question of succession had been an open wound in Iranian politics for years.

Kam had never officially designated a successor.

The mechanisms for choosing a new supreme leader were deliberately vague in ways that gave the most powerful factions, primarily the revolutionary guard, enormous latitude to shape the outcome.

None of this prepared me for February 28th.

I was at work that morning.

It was a Thursday.

I was sitting at my desk reviewing paperwork for a family that had arrived from Afghanistan the previous week when my phone began producing the specific pattern of vibrations that tells you something large has happened in the world.

In exile communities, news arrives in a particular sequence.

The first signal is always fragments.

A voice note, a short message without explanation, someone forwarding something without commentary because the thing itself is too big for commentary.

Then the fragments multiply and the picture assembles itself piece by piece in the space of minutes.

I stepped outside the office building into the cold February air of the German morning and I looked at my phone.

Kamina had been killed.

Israeli air strikes.

Thran confirmed dead.

I stood on the pavement and I read the messages and I did not move.

I’m not sure for how long.

long enough that a colleague who passed by on the pavement looked at my face and asked if I was all right.

And I said yes without being certain it was true.

Let me try to tell you what that information did to me because it was not simple and it was not what most people might expect.

People who have not been hunted by a regime, who have not had their lives destroyed by one, who have not lost their children and their country to one, might assume that the death of the man responsible would produce something clean and clear.

Something like justice arrived, something like relief or vindication or even joy.

I want to be honest with you.

None of those things came, at least not in any pure form.

What came instead was something more like a tremor.

Kam was not simply a man I hated, though I had very good reasons to hate him.

He was the defining structure of the entire world I had been formed in.

He had been the supreme authority of the Islamic Republic since I was 18 years old.

Every year of my formation in K had happened under his authority.

Every sermon I gave in the mosque in Thran had been given within the framework of legitimacy his position provided.

Every harsh thing the system did to people including to people like me had been done with his authority and in many cases with his direct sanction.

He was woven into the fabric of my entire history as the man I had served and then as the man who had hunted me.

And the announcement of his death was like a piece of the fabric of the world being removed.

And not a pleasant removal, a disorienting one.

I went back inside, but I was not able to work.

My colleague, a German woman who knew something of my background, looked at my face and told me to go home.

She did not need more information than my face provided.

I went home and I sat down in front of my television and I began watching.

The international news channels were covering the story with the incomplete patchy information that was coming in from multiple sources.

The Iranian state channels were in a visible state of institutional shock.

The anchors doing what state media anchors always do in those situations, reading scripted statements in controlled voices while clearly not knowing what the full picture was.

But social media was something else entirely.

The footage coming out of Iranian cities filmed by ordinary people at great risk to themselves and transmitted out through VPNs and encrypted channels was something I watched for hours and could not stop watching.

People were in the streets and what I saw in those streets was not one thing.

I saw grief.

There were people, particularly in the more religiously conservative areas, who were genuinely and deeply grieving.

This man had been their religious authority for decades.

He had been the person through whom they understood God’s will and God’s order.

His death was not just a political event to them.

It was a rupture in the fabric of how they understood the world.

I did not mock that grief.

I understood it because I had once been a version of that person.

But I also saw something else.

And this is what I watched with tears running down my face for reasons I could not have fully articulated to anyone standing beside me.

I saw people celebrating, young people mostly, the generation that had grown up under Kam and had been beaten in the streets and imprisoned and killed and silenced and watched their friends disappear and their futures shrink to nothing inside the system he built.

These young people were in the streets, not performing celebration for a camera, but actually celebrating.

Music was being played in public.

Women were removing their headscarves in public places in broad daylight.

People were embracing strangers.

Some were crying, but not with grief.

with something else that I recognized from a place so deep in me I did not have immediate access to the word for it.

They were crying with relief uh with the overwhelming recognition that something they had not fully believed they would live to see had happened in front of them.

I cried with them by myself in my apartment in Germany.

I sat and watched the footage and cried.

I cried for the ones who had waited for this and not survived the waiting.

For the woman killed in 2022, whose death set off a movement and whose name had become a rallying cry.

For the people who died in the streets during the protests that followed her.

For the people who were in prison when this news broke and who heard it through the walls from guards who could not fully contain what was happening outside.

For the house church believers who had been meeting in rotating apartments for years with their hearts in their throats.

For the man in the room in 2004 who had shown me a piece I could not explain.

for my own years of hiding and running and losing.

I called a friend of mine in the Netherlands, an Iranian Christian man who had fled several years after me and who had become one of the people I was closest to in the diaspora.

We talked for a long time.

We did not analyze.

We did not make political predictions.

We mostly just stayed on the phone together and let the enormity of the day be what it was.

Two men who had each lost everything to the system that had just lost its head.

Sitting together in the weight of it.

He said to me at one point that he had been praying every day for 20 years and that days like this were why.

I agreed.

The calls and messages continued throughout the day.

Iranians from across Europe, from North America, from Australia, members of our community here in Germany, friends from comm who had found me over the years and with whom I had maintained careful contact, people still inside Iran who were watching their streets transform in real time and who needed to share what they were seeing with someone outside.

One woman called me, someone I had helped resettle 3 years earlier.

A woman who had lost a brother in the crackdowns of 2019.

She was crying so hard when I answered that it took several minutes before she could form a sentence.

She said her brother’s name.

She said he should have been alive to see this.

We stayed on the phone for a long time.

I ate something in the evening.

I could not tell you what.

I sat with the television still on, but the volume turned low.

I read the Psalms for a while, which is always where I go when my own words have run out.

I prayed something simple and direct.

I asked God to be with Iran to protect the people in those streets to cover the young people who were celebrating in public and who were still in a country where the mechanisms of repression had not yet fully collapsed.

I asked him to have mercy on the grieving.

I asked him to do whatever it was he was going to do with this moment in history and to do it with the mercy I had learned to expect from him.

I do not know exactly when I fell asleep sometime after 10:00 in the evening.

I think I had moved from the chair to the couch at some point without intending to.

The television was still going, the images still changing, the world still processing what had happened that day.

I was more tired than I’d realized.

The kind of tiredness that is not simply physical and that comes from a day of emotional weight that the body carries as much as the mind does.

I want to be careful now about how I describe what happened next because I need you to understand something before I go into it.

I am not a man who has visions.

I have not had supernatural experiences scattered through my Christian life the way some people describe.

I have had a faith that was built day by day in prayer and scripture and community and the ordinary unglamorous discipline of showing up for what God asks of you.

14 years of quiet daily faith, not dramatic, not spectacular.

I had never asked for a vision or an encounter or a sign.

I had not spent the day emotionally overwhelmed and looking for a spiritual experience to make sense of my feelings.

I fell asleep on a couch in Germany like a tired 54year-old man who had had an overwhelming day.

What happened next was not something I sought or produced.

What I know medically is this.

I had developed a heart condition in the years after my escape from Iran.

The journey through the mountains, the weeks of exposure to cold and physical hardship, the years of extreme stress that followed.

All of this had taken a toll on my heart that only became fully visible through a diagnosis I received several years after arriving in Germany.

I had been managing it with medication and with regular monitoring.

My doctor knew about it.

A neighbor of mine, a German man of about 60 who lived in the apartment above mine and who checked on me occasionally because he knew I lived alone and knew something of my medical history because he would become important to what happened next.

Sometime in the night, my heart stopped.

I was asleep on the couch and my heart stopped.

my neighbor, for a reason that had nothing to do with concern for me.

He was trying to reach me about something trivial, a piece of mail that had arrived for me at his address by mistake.

He called my phone around midnight and got no answer.

He tried again.

Still no answer.

Something made him come down.

He knocked and there was no response.

He had a spare key I had given him for emergencies and he used it.

He found me on the couch unresponsive.

He called the emergency services immediately.

The paramedics arrived and assessed me and found no heartbeat.

They worked on me.

They used a defibrillator.

After several minutes, my heart restarted.

I did not know any of this while it was happening.

I I did not feel my heart stop.

I did not feel pain.

I did not feel the struggle of the paramedics or the shock of the defibrillator.

I was not in my apartment anymore.

I was not anywhere I’ve ever been before or since except in the experience I’m about to describe to you.

I want to tell you what the transition felt like.

The moment of moving from where I was to where I went, it was not frightening.

I want to say that clearly because I know that most people’s fear of death is at least partly a fear of what the transition will feel like.

The separation, the losing of everything.

What I experienced was not separation and it was not losing.

It was more like the moment when you step out of a very noisy room into a quiet one and realize only in the quiet how loud the noise was.

The apartment, the day, the grief, the television, the news, all of it was the noisy room.

And then I was somewhere else.

I was more awake than I have ever been.

That is the only way I know how to say it.

Whatever kind of consciousness I had in that place, it was not less than what I have here.

It was more.

Everything was sharper.

Everything was more present.

I was not floating in some vague half-aware state.

I was fully, completely, more than normally conscious.

And I was somewhere real.

What happened next?

What I saw and experienced and was told in that place is what I will try to describe in the next part of this testimony.

I am going to try to do this plainly without embellishment, without reaching for dramatic effect because the thing itself is dramatic enough and does not need my help.

I’m going to tell you what happened as clearly as I can, knowing that some of it is beyond my ability to fully put into words.

And knowing that some of it you will struggle to believe and accepting both of those things.

I was shown things.

I was told things and I was sent back.

I am still here because I was sent back.

And I am telling this because that is why I was sent back.

All of this will make sense as I continue.

Please keep reading.

The first thing I want to do before I describe what I saw is tell you what it was not because I think being clear about what it was not will help you understand what it was.

It was not a dream.

I have had thousands of dreams in my life.

I have had vivid dreams and terrifying nightmares.

Particularly in the years after my escape from Iran, when the nights were often as dangerous as the days had been, I know what the inside of a dream feels like.

There is a texture to dreams, even the most vivid ones, that gives them away.

Things don’t quite add up.

The rules shift.

You accept impossibilities as normal.

The logic holds only as long as you don’t examine it.

None of that was present in what I experienced.

Everything in that place was more logical, more consistent, more coherent than anything in the waking world I had left behind.

The internal consistency was not dream consistency.

It was more like the consistency of mathematics or of natural law.

It held because it was true, not because I was too asleep to notice where it didn’t.

It was also not a hallucination produced by a dying or oxygend deprived brain.

I have read the research on what the brain does during crisis situations in the tunnel visions and the feelings of peace and the memory reviews and the surges of neurochemistry that can produce powerful sensory experiences.

None of what I experienced matches those descriptions.

Hallucinations produced by the brain are drawn from the brain’s own contents.

They are rearrangements of what you already know and have already experienced.

What I was shown in that place contained things I had no interior material to generate.

Things that contradicted my expectations.

Things that corrected assumptions I had been carrying for years.

A hallucination does not correct your assumptions.

It reflects them back at you in distorted form.

What I experienced did the opposite.

What it was is what I was told it was.

And what every cell in my body has continued to confirm in the months since I came back.

It was real to more real than this.

More real than the chair I am sitting in as I tell you this story.

More real than the paper this is written on.

More real than anything I have ever touched or seen or heard in 54 years of physical life.

The physical world is real and I do not want to minimize it cuz God made it and it matters.

But what I experienced on the other side of my brief death was not less real than this world.

It was more.

I came back to a world that feels by comparison like a place where the lights are turned slightly down.

I became aware of movement.

I am not sure the word movement is exactly right because it implies traveling through physical space and I do not know whether what was happening was physical in any sense.

I was being drawn towards something.

The drawing was gentle and without force the way a current in water moves you when you stop swimming against it.

The direction was not a compass direction.

The closest word I have is upward, but upward is a physical word.

And what I mean is something more like toward, toward more, toward fullness, toward a place where the things that are absent from ordinary life, the things you have always felt faintly missing without being able to name them were present.

And then there was light.

I want to spend a moment here because the light is important.

When people describe near-death experiences in books and documentaries, they often talk about a bright light.

And I understand why because there was something that could be called light.

But what I want to tell you is that this light was not primarily a visual phenomenon.

Light in this world is a thing you see.

What I encountered was a thing you were inside of.

It was not shining on anything.

It was the medium I was moving through.

And it had qualities that light in the physical world does not have.

It had warmth, but not physical warmth.

something closer to the warmth you feel when you are deeply known and deeply loved by someone who has no agenda, no need for anything from you, no conditions, the warmth of being fully received.

It had peace, but not the absence of conflict peace we usually mean by that word.

The peace was active and full.

It was not quiet because nothing was happening.

It was the deep settledness of a place where everything is exactly and permanently as it should be.

And it had goodness, the most complete and present goodness I have ever encountered.

Not the goodness of a kind act or a moral choice, but goodness as a quality of being, as a fundamental property of the reality I had entered.

I was not alone.

Before I could orient myself, before I had properly adjusted to where I was, I became aware of a presence.

I used that word carefully, knowing it can sound vague.

It was not vague.

It was the most specific and particular thing I have ever encountered.

It was enormous and it was personal at the same time.

Continue reading….
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