It was everywhere and it was directed at me.

If you have ever been in a very large public place and suddenly become aware that a single specific pair of eyes in all that space are looking at you.

And when you find them, they are looking at you with complete recognition.

That experience scaled up infinitely is the closest I can come to describing the quality of this presence.

And then I saw him or he became visible to me.

Though I am not certain the word saw is exactly right either.

It was Jesus.

I am not going to try to describe his appearance in the detailed way that some people do.

Partly because I think description of that kind can become its own kind of obstacle.

giving people an image to accept or reject based on whether it matches their prior picture.

What I will tell you is the thing that mattered most about what I saw.

He was exactly himself.

He was not a concept or a symbol or a theological position.

He was a person, present, specific, real, and unmistakably himself.

and I knew him the way you know your own name, not as a conclusion reached through a process of thought, but as an immediate and complete recognition that was already finished before it began.

I am a man who spent more than 30 years in a tradition that honored Jesus as a prophet and firmly rejected that he was anything more than that.

I had made this argument many times with confidence and with considerable theological sophistication.

And I am telling you that in that moment, in that presence, every argument I had ever made or heard about who Jesus was dissolved.

Not because someone defeated the arguments logically, because the reality in front of me was so plainly and completely itself that the arguments about it became irrelevant.

You do not argue about whether the ocean is real when you are standing in it.

What was communicated to me in that presence?

Nan, I want to be honest that I am giving you the substance of what I understood rather than a verbatim account because what happened was not primarily verbal and I would not trust a verbatim rendering even if I had one.

The first thing I received was simply this.

I was completely known.

Everything in my life was present and visible.

Not selected highlights.

Everything.

Every thought I had managed and hidden and never expressed.

Every action I was ashamed of.

Every moment of cowardice when truth required courage and I chose safety instead.

Every person I had dismissed or failed or hurt in small ways and large ones.

Every good thing I had done and every bad thing I had done and everything in between.

All of it was visible and there was nowhere to put it or manage it or explain it.

I was simply open.

And what I encountered in that complete openness was not what I had always feared complete openness would produce.

All of my life at some level I had been afraid of being fully known.

Afraid that total exposure would result in total rejection.

that if anyone ever saw all of it, they would turn away.

What I found in that place was the exact opposite.

I was completely seen and completely held at the same time.

Not held despite what was seen.

Held with what was seen, the whole of it.

The beautiful and the broken and the shameful and the brave.

All of it gathered and held in a love that was not performing love.

That was not deciding to love despite difficulty, but that simply was love the way the sun simply is light.

It cannot do anything else.

It does not choose to shine.

It shines because it is the sun.

I am still not over this.

In months later, sitting here trying to put it into words, I am still undone by it.

The years I spent hiding and performing and managing what people saw of me.

The years of the double life in Iran, the years after of rebuilding myself from almost nothing.

All of that had been marked by a deep private fear of exposure.

And in one moment complete exposure happened and it was not destruction.

It was the most specific love I have ever known.

Then things changed.

I became aware that I was being taken somewhere different.

Not away from that presence.

I want to be clear about this.

The presence did not leave.

It was more like being walked through a place by someone who is with you throughout.

But the terrain you are moving through changes.

The fullness and warmth and peace did not disappear.

But they began to thin.

The way light thins at the edges of a day when the sun is still up, but you can feel the evening coming.

The further we moved in this direction, the more I became aware of what was absent.

And the absence of goodness, I need you to understand this, is not a neutral experience.

The absence of goodness is its own weight, its own reality.

It presses on you.

It has a texture of wrongness that becomes more concentrated the further you go into it.

Then there was heat.

Real heat oppressing from every direction.

And then sound.

I will not try to reconstruct the sounds for you in detail, not to spare you drama, but because I do not think the details of the description serve anything.

What I want to tell you about the sound is its quality, which was permanence.

The sounds were not the sounds of something happening.

They were the sounds of something that had happened, was established, was fixed.

That quality of settlement, of irrevocability, was the most disturbing thing about them.

I saw people in that place.

I want to be careful here.

I know the weight of claiming to have seen specific individuals in hell.

I know that such claims can be used to score points, to settle grudges, to make theological arguments in ways that become more about human anger than about truth.

I am not making claims about where every person I saw there had come from or what their complete story was.

What I am telling you is what I saw because I was shown it.

And I believe I was shown it for a reason that was not about my personal grievances.

I saw people whose faces I recognized, religious scholars whose funerals I had watched on state television and whose portraits had hung in the mosques and seminaries I had lived in.

Men whose books were studied as foundational texts in comm.

Men who had been presented as the closest thing to saints.

the modern Islamic world had produced.

I will not name them.

Naming them is not the point and would only distract from the point.

The point is that the certainty with which their righteousness had been declared in life had no bearing on where they were.

And then I saw Kam.

He had died only days before in the world I had come from.

In this place, that temporal gap seemed to mean nothing.

He was there.

I recognized him without any doubt.

He was not the composed authoritative figure from the photographs and the official portraits.

The authority was entirely gone, not suppressed, not contained, gone.

What remained was a man in a state of absolute clarity.

That is the most accurate description I have.

He was not confused about where he was or why.

He understood it perfectly.

And that perfect understanding was itself the primary experience he was having.

Because understanding exactly what you have done and why it has led you here.

And being unable to change any of it and knowing that you cannot change any of it is a particular kind of unbearable knowing.

He became aware of me and this is the part that I have sat with most in the month since.

Out of all the people in that vast and populated place, he became aware of me specifically.

He looked at me and there was recognition.

He knew who I was.

And what came across his face in that recognition was something I had never seen on that face in any footage or photograph from his living years.

Genuine and unprotected anguish.

He was a man who had been defined over decades by certainty and control and authority.

He had moved through the world as someone who knew exactly what God wanted and had the mandate to impose it.

That version of him was completely absent.

What I saw was a man stripped of everything he had used to construct himself in life, stripped of every layer of authority and justification and religious framing.

And what was underneath all of that construction was not the saint he had presented himself as.

It was a man, a human being who had chosen repeatedly at every turn where a different choice was available to him and who now existed in the permanent company of those choices.

He communicated to me not in a long speech, not in the kind of formal address he had given 10,000 times in life.

What came from him was the communication of a man who had no pride left to protect and no audience to perform for.

He knew I had been one of the converts.

He knew I had been someone the system he controlled had hunted.

He knew what had been done to people like me under his authority.

He saw it all completely and clearly without the justifications that had made it feel right to him in life.

He was asking me to go back.

He was asking me to find the Christians who had been persecuted under his authority and to carry to them a plea for forgiveness.

He was not asking because their forgiveness would change his situation.

He seemed to know it would not.

He was asking because the asking was the only truthful thing left to him.

He had spent his life refusing certain truths.

The only thing left was to acknowledge them.

And he wanted the people he had wronged to know that he was acknowledging them.

He also asked me to carry something back to Iran to the Iranian people to tell them that Jesus is real.

That he Kam had known this at some level deeper than he had ever been willing to admit.

that the encounters with Christians, the testimonies of converts, the evidence that had reached him across decades of running a state that persecuted the church, that none of it had left him fully without knowledge.

He had had enough information to choose differently, and he had refused.

He had spent the authority in the years of his life leading people away from the truth he refused to accept.

And he wanted them to know.

He wanted Iranians to know that the path he had put them on led here.

That the answer to Iran suffering was not a reformed version of what he had built.

That the answer was Jesus.

That Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, not as a theological slogan, but as a literal fact, as the most real thing in any universe.

and that the failure to come to him was not a neutral choice.

Standing there receiving all of this, I felt something I had not expected to feel.

Not triumph, not vindication, grief, deep real grief.

Not for what he was experiencing in the sense that I thought he did not deserve consequences because consequences are real and they are woven into the nature of choices.

but grief because what I was seeing was a human being who had been made like all of us in the image of the God who loved me so completely that he had held everything I was without flinching.

And this human being had spent his entire life constructing a wall between himself and that love.

Had used his considerable power and influence to help others build that same wall.

And now the wall was all that remained and it was what he was living inside permanently.

There is nothing triumphant about that.

There is only sorrow.

I was drawn back upward, back toward the fullness and the light and the presence that had not left me even while I was being shown these things.

And in what came next, I was given something to bring back.

not just the witness of what I had seen, but a message, a specific and urgent message about Iran and about the world and about the time we are living in.

And I will try to tell you that as carefully and as plainly as everything else.

When I came back into the fullness of that place, back into the complete light and warmth and presence, I was carrying something I had not arrived with.

The weight of what I had seen below was real.

I want to say that first because some people might assume that returning to that place of goodness and peace would immediately wash away everything I had witnessed.

The way waking from a nightmare dissolves it in the morning light.

It did not work that way.

The sorrow I had felt watching Kamaya in that state of irreversible knowing.

The grief of seeing human beings in permanent separation from the love I had just been immersed in that did not dissolve.

It was held by the presence I was back in.

The way a child’s grief is held by a parent who does not try to eliminate it but holds it with them, but it did not go away.

I think it was not supposed to go away.

I think the weight was part of what I was being given to carry back.

If you are going to tell the world something urgent about where human choices ultimately lead, you cannot tell it lightly or casually.

You have to feel the weight of it yourself.

You have to have stood in the reality of it.

Not just heard about it, not just reasoned your way to a theological position about it, but stood there.

I had stood there and the weight of it was now mine to carry back into the world.

What happened next is difficult to describe in terms of sequence because the place I was in does not operate on a timeline the way our world does.

But I will try to lay it out in the order that I received and understood it because that is the most honest approach I have.

There was communication that was specifically about Iran, about what was happening and what was coming.

I want to be careful about the word prophecy here because that word carries a lot of freight, a lot of history of people misusing it and attaching their own agendas to it.

I am not claiming the mantle of a prophet.

I am a man who was shown things and told things and sent back to share them and I will share them as plainly as I can and let you weigh them.

What was communicated to me about Mojaba Kame and the succession was this.

The plan to install him as supreme leader would proceed on paper but it was already broken at the level that ultimately matters.

I need to try to explain what I mean by this.

In the place I was in, the connection between what is decided in the unseen realm and what eventually becomes visible in the physical world was not theoretical.

It was the most obvious fact in the universe.

The physical world is not the primary world.

It is the world where the consequences and outworkings of what is decided in the deeper reality become visible over time.

When I was told that Majaba’s hold on power was already broken, I was not being told that this would be obvious immediately on Earth.

I was being told that in the realm where ultimate outcomes are determined and it was already settled, the visible world would catch up.

What this meant in practical terms, as far as I understood it, was that the revolutionary guard’s plan to use the succession to preserve the structure of the Islamic Republic intact to essentially continue Kam’s project under a new name would not succeed.

The machinery would continue to move.

The title would be assigned.

There would be an official supreme leader.

But the authority, the genuine consent of the governed, the spiritual legitimacy that any system needs at some level to maintain itself.

That was already gone.

The Iranian people had been changed by everything they had lived through.

by the protests of 2009 and 2019 and 2022 and after by the decades of watching the promises of the revolution prove empty.

E by the underground church growing in their midst and producing the kind of faith that went to prison rather than deny itself.

And by the death of Kamina and what it had revealed about the brittleleness of everything he had built.

The person who would carry the title was inheriting a structure that had already been emptied, of what made it hold.

There was also communication about a specific individual and I need to handle this very carefully because I know how easily this kind of thing is misused.

I was not shown a face.

I was not told a name.

I cannot give you identifying information about this person and I would not even if I had received it cuz that is not the point and it would become a distraction that would consume everything else in this testimony.

What I was shown or communicated to about this person is simply this.

There is someone who is already alive, already in the process of becoming who they need to be, who will play a significant role in the process of Iran’s liberation and transformation, not in the sense of a savior figure who replaces Jesus.

I want to be absolutely clear about that.

The liberation of Iran that I was shown is fundamentally and primarily a spiritual liberation.

It is about what happens in Iranian hearts and Iranian homes and Iranian communities as millions of people encounter Jesus.

Political and social transformation will follow from that as it always does when the interior life of a people changes.

But the primary thing is not political.

This person I was told about is an instrument, a tool in the hand of God, and someone whose role in the visible history of Iran will be significant, but whose significance only makes sense in the context of the larger spiritual story that is already underway.

I do not know who it is.

I am not going to speculate.

I am simply reporting that this was communicated to me and that the communication was accompanied by a clarity and certainty that was not my own.

When I have my own certainty about something, I recognize it because it has my particular flavor to it.

My biases and my history and my wishful thinking woven through it.

What was communicated to me about Iran had none of that.

It was not what I would have constructed or predicted or hoped for in the specific form it took.

That is partly how I know it was not coming from me.

And what was communicated most fully and with the greatest weight was about what is already happening in Iran and what is coming.

The house church movement in Iran by the time of the events I am describing was already one of the most remarkable spiritual developments in the modern world.

The researchers and scholars who track Christian growth globally had been noting for years that Iran, an officially Islamic state with severe penalties for conversion, was experiencing one of the fastest growing church movements anywhere on earth.

The numbers being cited were in the millions.

Millions of Iranians had already come to Jesus, meeting in homes, meeting in small groups, worshiping quietly and at great personal risk, building a faith that could not be contained by the laws passed against it.

And this was not speculation or wishful thinking by Christian observers.

It was documented, measurable, remarkable.

What I was shown was that this movement was the beginning of something much larger and that the events of 2026 were about to accelerate it in ways that would surprise even those who had been watching it closely.

Here is why.

A significant portion of the Iranian population had been what you might call cultural Muslims for a long time.

People who practiced the forms of Islam because those forms were required by law and by social pressure but who had no real inner conviction behind the practice.

They had grown up inside the Islamic Republic and had never known anything else.

But they had also watched what the Islamic Republic did to people.

He had experienced the gap between the Islamic order it claimed to be building and the cruel and corrupt reality it produced.

And they had quietly concluded that the religion being used to justify all of this was either false or was being disastrously misrepresented.

Many of them had stopped believing in the Islam of the Islamic Republic without having anywhere else to go.

They had become religiously homeless, carrying an inherited tradition they no longer believed in and not knowing what, if anything, to replace it with.

The events of early 2026 would remove the final layer of coercion that had been keeping many of these people in place.

With Kamee gone and the system in transition and the streets full of a different energy, the space for honest searching would expand.

And millions of Iranians who had been conducting that search privately and quietly would find the courage to ask their questions out loud and to follow them wherever they led.

And what they would find in very large numbers is what I had found.

What the man in the room in 2004 had found.

What the young people in those rotating apartments had found.

What millions of their countrymen and women had already found.

They would find Jesus.

I was shown this not as a prediction but as a direction, a clear and irreversible direction of travel.

The river was already moving.

What 2026 had done was widen the channel.

What was communicated alongside this about the full scope of what Iran would become is something I hold carefully because it is large and because I do not want to reduce it to a slogan.

What I can say is that the word that kept accompanying the communication was transformation.

Not improvement, not reform, transformation.

The kind of change that happens when something is not fixed but remade.

Iran as a nation, as a culture, as a people with one of the oldest and richest civilizational histories on Earth, all of that would not be erased.

It would be given back to itself, freed from what had been imposed on it.

And within that freedom, the gospel would run, not as a foreign import as the thing that answered the deepest questions the Iranian soul had always been asking.

Then the communication became personal and this is where I struggled.

I want to tell you about my resistance to what I was being asked because I think it is important and because I think it might speak to people who are in situations where God is asking something of them that they feel completely unqualified for.

What was being communicated to me was that I was being sent back to tell what I had seen.

Not quietly, not just to my small community in Germany, not just to the circle of Iranian Christians I already knew, to the world, to Iranians, to Christians, to Muslims, to anyone who would listen.

I was being asked to stand up and give my testimony publicly and to deliver the message I’d been given about Iran, about repentance, about the urgency of the time.

My response to this was not obedience.

It was resistance.

And the resistance was specific.

I am not a young man.

I’m not a famous man.

I am a former Iranian cleric who left his religion, was hunted by his country.

I fled in the night, lost his children, and has been living quietly in Germany for 14 years, rebuilding himself from the ground up.

I spent years in a system that taught me what religious authority does to people, when it becomes more important to the person holding it than the truth it is supposed to serve.

I had been that person to some degree.

I did not want to be that person again.

I had worked hard at becoming small.

I had worked hard at being nobody in the way that allows you to be honest because large egos and important platforms are where honesty goes to become complicated.

I told him or communicated to him in the way that communication happened there that I was the wrong person.

That there were more gifted communicators, more credible figures, people with more reach, more following, a more credibility in the relevant communities.

people who hadn’t spent years on the other side of the thing they were now supposed to represent.

People who wouldn’t have to spend half their testimony explaining who they used to be.

What came back to me in response was patient, not dismissive of my objections, not a rebuke.

Patient in the way that complete love is patient, which is a different thing from tolerant or indifferent.

The response was essentially this.

You are not being asked to be qualified.

You are being asked to be a witness.

A witness does not require exceptional gifts or large platforms or an untarnished history.

A witness requires one thing that they tell what they saw.

Everything you have been through is not a disqualification for the task.

It is the task, your story, the fullness of it and the wrong direction and the conversion and the hunting and the escape and the years of rebuilding.

That story is the evidence.

The people you need to reach are not going to be reached by someone whose life has been clean and comfortable and well resourced.

They are going to be reached by someone who has been exactly where they are, who has believed what they believe, who has been inside the system they are inside, and who has found at great cost something more real.

The logic of this landed in me in a way that I could not argue with.

Not because it overwhelmed my objections, but because it was simply true, and I could feel that it was true.

The person most qualified to tell someone what is on the other side of a door is someone who has been through it, not someone who has read about it or theorized about it.

My life a precisely because of how it had gone was the credential for this particular assignment.

And there was one more thing communicated to me in that place about the broader world.

Not just Iran but all of us.

And I want to handle it with the same care I have tried to bring to everything else.

What I understood, not as a date or a schedule or a set of specific events I can lay out in order, but as a quality of the time we are in was urgency.

Not the urgency of panic, not a message designed to produce fear.

The urgency of a window that is open and will not always be open.

the urgency of an opportunity that exists in the present moment and that the present moment is the time for.

There was a communication about the end of this age that I received not as a threat but as a fact the way the doctor’s words about a timeline and not a threat but a fact that changes the way you spend your remaining time.

What was communicated was simply this.

The world is further along in its history than most people feel.

The sense that most people have that the end of things is theoretical, something for future generations, something too far away to be personally urgent.

That sense is not accurate.

I am not giving you a year or a date because I was not given one.

And if I were, I would be suspicious of my own account of it.

What I was given was a sense, a clear and weighted sense that the decisions being delayed by millions of people around the world, the turnings being put off until later, the honest reckoning with God and with Jesus, and with what is true that people are waiting for a more convenient time to have.

Those delays are more costly than the people making them understand.

The time given to each person is real time, not unlimited time.

And the time given to this age is real time too.

The message I was sent back to carry is not complicated.

Repent.

Turn.

Come to Jesus.

Come to him with whatever you are carrying and however broken it is and however long you have been going the other direction.

Come now, not later.

Because now is given and later is not guaranteed.

And because what waits on the other side of that turning is not what you have been afraid it is.

What waits is what I stood in.

What waits is being completely known and completely held at the same time.

Fully seen and fully loved.

Not because you have made yourself worthy, but because the one doing the knowing and the loving is the source of all goodness and love itself.

And I said yes to this assignment, not from a place of confidence or feeling ready.

I said yes from a place of having no capacity left to say anything else.

When you have stood in that light and been given that love and been shown what the alternative looks like, the choice becomes not easy.

Nothing about this was easy but clear.

And I held the yes in my chest and I felt the return beginning.

Felt the familiar world pulling me back toward it.

The biddy I had left on the couch.

the apartment, the city, the grief and the work and the responsibility I was being handed.

I went back.

I came back into my body the way you come back into a house you left unlocked.

Suddenly there were walls.

Suddenly there was weight.

Suddenly there was the specific physical unmistakable reality of a body that had just been through a medical crisis.

A the heaviness of it, the soreness, the particular exhaustion that is different from tiredness that comes from a system that has been pushed to its limit and is in the slow process of recovery.

There were bright lights above me, fluorescent hospital lights, the specific quality of them, the white blue color, the slight hum.

There was the sound of monitors.

There was the awareness of something attached to my chest and something else attached to my wrist.

There was a nurse at my side speaking German to me.

Her voice careful and measured, the voice people use when they are not certain yet how much of you is back.

I could not speak for several minutes.

Not because my throat would not form words, but because there was too much happening between where I had just been and where I now was, and the gap between the two was so large that trying to span it immediately felt impossible.

I lay there and looked at the ceiling and let the room be real around me.

Let it settle.

Let my body confirm that yes, this is where you are now.

This is the world you came back to.

A doctor came in after some time.

He was a careful, competent man who explained things clearly.

He told me about the cardiac episode, about the neighbor who had found me, about the minutes without a heartbeat, about the defibrillation and the restarting.

He said these things with the measured neutrality of a physician who has delivered difficult news often enough to know how to give it without drama.

I listened and nodded.

Behind his words entirely privately, I was holding the most extraordinary cargo I had ever carried.

uh and the gap between the clinical account he was giving and the fullness of what I had experienced in those same minutes was something I did not even begin to try to bridge in that conversation.

I was in the hospital for 3 days.

They monitored my heart, adjusted my medication, ran tests.

The care was good.

Germany has good hospitals and I was grateful for them.

But what I was primarily doing in those 3 days was not recovering from a cardiac episode.

I was processing what I had been given.

I was turning it over and over in my mind and in my prayer.

Making sure I had it right.

Making sure I was not adding things that were mine or subtracting things that were not mine.

making sure I had the substance of it accurately and could carry it faithfully.

On the second day, the friend I mentioned earlier, son, the man from our Iranian Christian community who was my emergency contact, he came to the hospital.

He had been called when my phone was accessed and my emergency contact reached.

When he came into the room and saw me, his face told me that the situation had been serious enough that he had not known what he would find.

He sat down in the chair beside the bed and looked at me for a long moment without speaking.

Then he asked me how I was.

I told him something had happened.

Not just the cardiac episode, something else.

He was quiet.

He has known me for many years and he knows when I’m speaking carefully about something important and he gave me the room for it.

I told him everything starting from falling asleep on the couch and going all the way through the movement, the light, the presence, Jesus, the descent.

what I saw below it and I the message the communication about Iran the commission to go back and tell it.

I told it as plainly and as carefully as I could.

I did not reach for effect or embellishment.

I told it the way you tell something true, which is without the extra help that something false needs.

He sat with it for a long time after I finished.

His eyes had filled during the telling and not fully cleared.

He was quiet for several minutes and I let him be quiet.

Then he said something that I have returned to many times.

He said that for 20 years he had been praying for Iran every day and that what I had just told him felt like a confirmation that those prayers had not been going into silence.

that somewhere in a realm he could not see, the thing he was praying toward had been real all along and was moving toward its completion.

He said it not with the triumphalism of someone who has been proved right, but with the humility of someone who has been shown grace they know they did not produce.

I was discharged from the hospital on the third day with new medication and a follow-up appointment and the careful instructions that come with a serious cardiac event.

I went home to my apartment.

It was early March by then.

The world had continued moving while I was in the hospital.

The news about Iran was developing rapidly.

The process of selecting a new supreme leader was underway.

Majaba Kam was being positioned.

The revolutionary guard was moving the pieces.

The international community was watching.

Inside Iran, the streets had not gone entirely quiet.

But the initial surge of public celebration and grief had settled into a tense, watchful uncertainty, of the feeling of a country that did not yet know what it was becoming.

I watched the news and I held what I had been told in that place and I noticed that the two things did not conflict.

The visible world was moving in the direction that was consistent with what I had been shown.

The plan was proceeding.

The title was being arranged.

And somewhere below the visible surface in the reality that the visible world runs on top of, the thing I had been told was already broken continued to be broken, waiting for the visible world to catch up to it.

The first thing I did before I began thinking about my public testimony was find the people I needed to find.

There was a couple from our Iranian Christian community, a man and his wife whom I had known for several years.

The man had been arrested in Iran in the mid 2000s and had spent 2 years in prison for his conversion.

What had been done to him in those two years was not something he talked about in detail, but the marks of it were visible in the way he carried himself, in the way he responded to certain situations, in the nightmares his wife had quietly described to me on separate occasions.

They had eventually gotten out of Iran and come to Germany and had been building a life here with the particular combination of gratitude and unresolved grief that characterizes so many people in our community.

I went to their home.

I sat with them at their kitchen table.

I told them what Kam had asked me to communicate.

his plea for forgiveness, his awareness of what had been done to people like them under his authority, his request that I find those people and carry his asking of forgiveness to them.

Not because it changed anything, not because it was sufficient, but because it was the only truthful thing left to him.

The man was quiet for a very long time after I finished speaking.

I watched him and I did not try to fill the silence.

His wife had her hand over her mouth.

The man was looking at a point somewhere above the table, somewhere in the middle distance of his own memory.

He was in two places at once.

I could see it.

He was in the kitchen and he was somewhere else, too.

Somewhere he had not fully left since his time in prison.

He turned to look at me eventually.

What he said, and I will give this one exchange in something close to its actual substance because I think it matters, was that he had tried to put the unforgiveness down many times, that his pastor had spoken to him about it, that he himself knew theologically and intellectually that carrying it was only harming him, that Kam was beyond his forgiveness or his unforgiveness in any practical sense.

but that knowing something is not the same as being able to do it and his hands had not been able to release what they were holding.

And then he said that hearing what I had just told him had done something that all his own trying had not done.

He said it did not make what happened right.

Nothing made it right.

But he said that for the first time he felt the weight of it shift.

That something in the image of Kam stripped of all his authority, stripped of his certainty, asking for something through a broken down former cleric at a kitchen table in Germany.

At something in that image had moved the stone he’d been trying to move for years.

He said he was releasing it, not for Kam, for himself and for God.

His wife wept openly.

I held her hand for a while.

We prayed together.

I left their home carrying something different from what I had carried into it.

I had similar conversations with other people over the following weeks.

Not everyone was ready to receive what I brought them.

Some people told me plainly that they were not in a place where they could hear anything connected to Kamaya’s name without shutting down and I accepted that and did not push.

The asking was mine to do.

The receiving was theirs.

Some people needed weeks before they could respond.

Some people I could not find or reach.

I did what I could and I left the rest.

because the rest was not in my hands.

I also asked forgiveness on my own behalf from people I had been part of wronging through my years of service to the regime.

This was harder in some ways because these were wrongs I had a more direct connection to.

I had been the system in specific ways that I could point to.

I had given religious authority to decisions that harmed people.

I had been a face of the institution to people who were later crushed by that institution.

I could not undo any of it.

I could only acknowledge it and ask.

Some of those conversations were among the hardest of my life.

Some of them became among the most healing.

One man who had been in a situation I had been peripherilally part of told me quietly and directly that he had prayed for me for years since he had heard I converted.

He had prayed that I would come to know Jesus and that God would use the very things I had been.

There was a grace in that conversation that I’m still living inside of.

In late March, I began recording my testimony on video.

I sat in my apartment in front of my laptop and I spoke in far.

No studio, no production, no script beyond what I carried in my memory and my chest.

I told the whole story from the beginning of my life in mashed through everything.

I told it in the same plain way I have tried to tell it in this written form.

I stumbled over some parts.

I stopped and started.

I cried at some points and did not try to hide it.

A younger man from our community, someone with practical skills I do not have, helped me put it together into something that could be shared without being unwatchable.

Uh, we shared it in the last days of March 2026.

What happened after that is something I was not prepared for.

Even having been told that I was being sent back to tell this story to more than my small circle.

Within days, the video had traveled through the Iranian diaspora networks with a speed and reach that was startling.

Thousands of messages, then tens of thousands.

Iranians in Germany, in Sweden, in the UK, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia.

Iranians inside Iran who found the video through VPNs and encrypted channels and watched it in private rooms at risk of exactly the kind of trouble that I had once been part of administering.

The messages covered every kind of response.

Many were from people who had already come to Jesus and for whom the testimony confirmed and deepened something they already believed.

The many were from people who were in the process of searching, who had been quietly questioning for months or years and who had not had permission to take the next step and for whom the testimony did something in the space of permission.

Many were from people who had lost family members to the regime and who found in what Kam had asked me to carry some strange and painful form of closure that they had not expected to ever receive.

Many were from people who were angry, who found the testimony offensive or manipulative or false, and who wanted me to know it.

I read those messages, too.

Some of the most affecting messages came from people who described themselves as having been atheists or agnostics.

People who had left Islam and landed in a secular world view rather than a spiritual one.

And these people wrote to tell me that the testimony had unsettled them in a way that surprised them.

Not that it had immediately converted them, but that it had reopened something they thought they had closed, that it had put a question back in them that they had believed they had answered.

Several of them asked to talk.

Some of those conversations went on for weeks.

Some of them are ongoing.

Some of them ended with someone praying a simple prayer of their own.

I also received messages from Christians around the world who had no Iranian connection.

People who had seen the video through various sharing paths and who wrote to tell me something I was not expecting.

Many of them said the testimony had not primarily given them new information about the afterlife or about Iran.

What it had done, they said, was make their own faith feel alive again.

They spoke of a faith that had become habitual and comfortable, that occupied its designated space in their life without demanding anything of them, that had become furniture rather than fire.

And they said that hearing a man described standing in the presence of Jesus and being sent back with an urgent message had reminded them that what they believed was not a collection of comforting ideas.

It was a claim about the most real thing in the universe.

It was a matter of life and death and of something larger than life and death.

And that reminder had shifted something in how they were living.

I began doing more interviews and conversations.

As the months passed, Iranian media in exile, Christian organizations, individual gatherings online and in person.

I have not sought a platform in any ambitious sense.

I have said yes when I felt the yes was right and declined when it was not.

I’m still the same man I was before this happened.

Same small apartment, same community, same daily prayers, same homesickness for my children and for my country and for the place I briefly visited and will return to one day.

The testimony has not made me famous in any sense that changes my life in its daily texture.

What it has given me is a clarity about what I am here to do that I did not have before and a willingness to do it that is not my own strength but something I am given daily.

I want to speak now directly to the people who may be reading or hearing this because this is ultimately what I was sent back for.

To Iranians first wherever you are, I know your life.

I have lived it.

I I know what it costs to be Iranian and to ask the questions you are asking.

I know the weight of a religion that has been used to oppress you.

A god who has been invoked to justify your suffering.

A faith you were born into that became the instrument of your persecution.

I know the anger and the exhaustion and the spiritual emptiness that comes from all of that.

I am not asking you to adopt a different political system or a different cultural identity or a western religion.

I am asking you to meet the person that I met, Jesus.

The one who is the same whether he is encountered in Germany or Iran or anywhere else on earth.

The one who speaks far and knows the specific contours of Iranian suffering and Iranian longing.

the one who has been present in the house churches in Thran and in the prison cells of Evan and in the apartments where young Iranians have been meeting quietly in the night to worship him at great personal risk.

He is real.

He is for you.

He has always been for you.

And Iran, I believe with everything in me, belongs to him.

To Muslims reading this from any country, from any background, I was you.

I do not mean that as a condescension.

I mean it as a statement of fact and solidarity.

I was a cleric.

I had studied Islam for decades.

I believed completely.

And I am telling you that what I found on the other side of that journey did not make me hate Islam or hate Muslims or dismiss the genuine spiritual seeking that has always existed within the Muslim tradition.

What I found was Jesus who was always larger than the theological boxes I had been putting him in.

I am simply asking you to bring your honest questions to him directly, not to a denomination, not to a western cultural form of Christianity, to Jesus himself.

Ask him to reveal himself to you if he is real.

Pursue that question to its conclusion.

I cannot make that journey for you.

I can only tell you where mine led.

To Christians who have become comfortable, the message I was sent back with is partly directed at you.

And I say this with love and not with accusation.

Comfort is not a sin, but it can be a form of sleep.

The faith you carry is not a collection of comforting ideas.

It is the claim that the most real thing in the universe came into this world and died and came back and is alive and is present and is coming back again.

And that every human being you encounter is someone for whom that fact is either known and accepted or not.

And that the difference between those two things is the difference between everything and everything else.

Live awake inside that.

Let it be fire and not furniture.

The people around you who are searching need you to be someone who is genuinely in contact with what you claim to believe in.

To everyone in any tradition and in none.

I did not ask for this experience.

I did not seek it.

I am not a spiritual celebrity or a religious entrepreneur building a brand.

I am a 54year-old former Iranian cleric with a heart condition living in a small apartment in Germany who died briefly on his couch and was shown things that he cannot in good conscience keep to himself.

I have told them as plainly as I know how.

You will receive them or you will not.

And that is a choice I cannot make for you.

What I can tell you is that the choice is real and it matters and the time for it is now.

I want to close with my children if they ever read or hear this and I pray that they do.

My son, my daughter, I’ve not held you since you were 8 and 5 years old.

I have watched you grow up in photographs and in the fragments of information that have reached me over 14 years of distance.

I have prayed for you every single day.

Every single day without exception.

You are the people I love most in this world.

And the loss of your daily presence has been the sharpest pain of my life.

Sharper than the running, sharper than the exile, sharper than anything else.

I want you to know that what I saw is real.

Jesus is real.

The love I stood in is real.

And it is available to you.

Not through your father’s version of it or through anyone else’s.

Through your own encounter with him, your own honest searching, your own turning.

Iran is changing.

The country you are growing up in is not the country it will always be.

God has not forgotten Iran, God has not forgotten you.

And whatever walls have been between us, whatever you have been told about why your father left and what he became, I am asking you through these words to seek Jesus for yourselves, not for my sake, for your own, for my country.

Every day for 14 years.

Every day I have prayed for you.

Every single day your suffering is known.

Your dead are not forgotten.

The blood that has been poured into the ground of Iran for the sake of freedom and dignity and truth.

God has counted every drop of it.

The dawn that is coming is real.

I have been shown enough to know that it is real.

Hold on for the whole world reading this from wherever you are.

Repent.

Turn.

Come home to the one who made you and knows you and loves you with a love that sees everything and remains.

Come now.

The window is open.

Walk through it.

This is my testimony.

I have done what I was sent back to do.

To Jesus who held me when I had nothing and sent me back when I wanted to stay.

Here is the work you gave me.

It is done.

The rest is yours.

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