I learned how the camp worked, where to get food rations, where to find clean water, how to navigate the bureaucracy of the refugee system.

I registered with the UN.

I applied for asylum.

I was told it could take months, maybe years before I was resettled somewhere safe.

Years.

I tried not to think about that.

I tried to focus on one day at a time.

And then about two weeks after I arrived, um, something happened that changed everything.

I was in line for food distribution when I heard someone singing.

The voice was faint coming from somewhere behind the medical tent.

I couldn’t make out the words, but the melody was beautiful, haunting.

I found myself drawn toward it, almost without deciding to move.

Behind the medical tent was a small cleared area where someone had set up a few plastic chairs in a circle.

About a dozen people were sitting there, mostly Ethiopians and Eritrians, and one person was standing, leading them in song.

The language was Amharic.

I learned later, but I didn’t need to understand the words to understand what was happening.

It was a church service.

My heart started pounding.

I stood at a distance, half hidden behind a tent, just watching.

They sang several songs.

And then someone stood and read from a book.

I was close enough to see it was a Bible.

Then someone else prayed, speaking in that same musical Amharic, hands raised.

I felt tears starting to form.

I had never seen Christians worship openly before.

In Yemen, such a gathering would be impossible, dangerous.

But here in this refugee camp, in this place of suffering and loss, these people were praising Jesus.

As the service was ending, one of the women looked up and saw me standing there.

She smiled and waved, gesturing for me to come closer.

I hesitated.

Then I walked over.

She spoke to me in broken Arabic, asking if I was new to the camp.

I nodded.

She asked if I was a believer.

I didn’t know how to answer.

If I said yes, word might spread.

Someone from Yemen might find out.

Might get back to Hassan somehow.

might make it harder for me to get asylum.

But looking at her kind face at the joy in her eyes, despite everything she had probably suffered, I couldn’t lie.

I said, “Yes.

Yes, I believe in Jesus”.

Her face lit up.

She pulled me into an embrace, speaking rapidly in Amharic.

I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the meaning.

Welcome.

You’re home.

Your family.

That’s how I found my church.

It wasn’t a building.

It wasn’t an official organization.

It was just a group of about 20 believers from different countries who met three times a week behind the medical tent to worship together.

Most of them were Ethiopian Orthodox or Eratrian, Catholic.

A few were Protestant.

Their traditions were different.

Their languages were different, but their faith was the same, and they welcomed me like I had always belonged.

I started attending every service.

The songs were in languages I didn’t know, but I hummed along anyway.

The prayers were sometimes in languages I couldn’t understand, but I said, “Amen”.

And when they read from the Bible, someone would translate for me into Arabic, and I would soak up the words like someone dying of thirst.

For the first time in my life, I was worshiping Jesus openly, not hiding, not pretending, not afraid.

It was freedom like I had never imagined.

One of the women in the group, an Ethiopian named Bethl, took me under her wing.

She had been a Christian all her life, raised in the church, and she knew the Bible deeply.

She started teaching me, helping me understand things I had only read about on my own.

And she explained the trinity in a way that finally made sense to me, not as a mathematical formula, but as a relationship of love.

She taught me about the Holy Spirit, this concept I had barely understood, and how the spirit lived in believers, guided them, comforted them.

She taught me about the church, the body of Christ, and how we weren’t meant to follow Jesus alone, but in community.

I had been so isolated for so long.

This community, this family of believers, was like water in a desert.

But there was something I needed to do, something that felt important, necessary.

I needed to be baptized.

Bethl explained that baptism was a public declaration of faith.

It was symbolic, representing death to the old life and resurrection to the new.

It was how Christians had marked their commitment to Jesus for 2,000 years.

I wanted it desperately.

We made arrangements with the pastor of a local Djiboutian church, a small congregation that sometimes helped the refugees.

He agreed to baptize me and several others who had come to faith in the camp.

The baptism was scheduled for May 14th, 2023.

Almost exactly 2 months after I I had fled Yemen, almost exactly 2 months after the night Hassan tried to burn me alive.

We went to the church early in the morning.

It was a simple concrete building with a corrugated metal roof, but to me it looked like a palace.

Inside was a small baptismal pool filled with water.

There were about 30 people there, the camp believers, some members of the local church.

The pastor Bethl stood beside me holding my hand.

I mean, the pastor asked if I confessed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, if I believed he died for my sins and rose from the dead, if I was willing to follow him for the rest of my life, no matter the cost.

I said yes to all of it.

Then he led me down into the water.

It was cool and clean.

I stood there and he placed one hand on my back and one hand on my shoulder.

He said the words in French and Bethl translated for me, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Then he lowered me back into the water.

For a moment I was completely submerged.

Everything was quiet and blue and weightless.

And then I was lifted up again, breaking through the surface, gasping and laughing and crying all at once.

The people around the pool were singing, clapping, praising God.

I stood there in the water, undrenched and shaking, feeling more alive than I had ever felt.

This was it.

This was who I really was.

Not Hassan’s wife, not a secret believer hiding in fear.

I was a daughter of God, a follower of Jesus, a Christian, and no one could take that away from me ever again.

The asylum process was slow and frustrating.

I had interviews with UN officials, with representatives from various countries, refugee programs.

I had to tell my story over and over why I left Yemen.

why I couldn’t go back, what would happen to me if I returned.

I was careful about what I said.

I explained about the abuse of marriage, about the danger I was in.

I didn’t emphasize the religious conversion.

I had been warned that could complicate things that some countries were reluctant to take in religious converts because it might cause diplomatic problems.

See, but I didn’t hide it either.

When asked directly about my religion, I said I was a Christian.

It was on my registration forms.

It was part of who I was.

In July, I got news.

A church in Canada had sponsored several refugees from our camp.

I was one of them.

I would be resettled in a city I had never heard of, in a country I knew almost nothing about.

I would have to learn a new language, adapt to a completely foreign culture, start my life over from zero.

I was terrified and grateful in equal measure.

The travel arrangements took another month.

There were medical exams, security checks, orientation sessions, and then in early August 2023, I boarded a plane for the first time in my life.

I left Djibouti, left Africa, left everything familiar.

20 hours later, I landed in Toronto, Canada.

The adjustment was harder than I expected.

When the church that sponsored me was wonderful.

They found me a small apartment, helped me enroll in English classes, connected me with other refugees, but everything was overwhelming.

The language was impossibly difficult.

The culture was so different.

The weather, I had never experienced cold like that.

When winter came, I thought I might die from it.

I was lonely in a new way.

In the camp, I had been surrounded by people who understood displacement, loss, trauma.

Here, people were kind, but they couldn’t really understand.

They had never been refugees.

They had never fled for their lives.

I missed my family with a physical ache.

I knew I could never contact them.

If they knew where I was, they might try to force me to return or worse.

But I missed my mother, my sisters, even my father.

Despite everything, I wondered if they thought about me, you know, if they mourned me, if they hated me.

I had left a note before I fled.

just a few words saying I was sorry, that I had to leave, that they shouldn’t look for me.

I hoped they had found it.

I hoped it gave them some closure, but I would never know.

About 6 months after arriving in Canada in February 2024, I got an email.

It was from my younger sister, Fatima.

Somehow, she had found a way to contact me through a mutual acquaintance.

The email was short.

She said our father had disowned me.

Her son had divorced me.

The family had held a funeral for me, told everyone I had died.

They had mourned and moved on.

She said she wasn’t supposed to contact me.

But she wanted me to know that she didn’t hate me.

She didn’t understand why I had done what I did, but she hoped I was safe.

Then she said she could never write to me again.

And I read that email over and over until I had memorized every word.

Then I cried for hours.

I was dead to them.

Truly officially dead.

It hurt more than I expected.

Even though I had known it would come to this, reading it in black and white made it real.

I was alone in the world.

No family, no history, no past.

Just me and Jesus.

And somehow that had to be enough.

Slowly, painfully, I built a new life.

I made progress in my English classes.

I got a part-time job cleaning offices in the evenings.

It wasn’t much, but it was mine.

Money I earned.

Work I chose to do.

I found a church, a small congregation with a mix of people from different backgrounds.

Some were Canadian-born, some were immigrants, some were refugees like me.

I started attending a women’s Bible study.

The women were kind, patient with my broken English, a eager to help me grow in my faith.

I learned about grace in deeper ways, about how God’s love wasn’t based on my performance, my worthiness, my ability to get everything right.

I learned that I could bring my doubts, my struggles, my grief to God, and he wouldn’t reject me.

I learned that Christianity wasn’t about having all the answers.

It was about relationship, about trust, about daily choosing to follow Jesus.

Even when the path was unclear, I still struggled.

I had nightmares about Hassan, about fire, about being trapped.

I had days where the loneliness was so heavy I could barely get out of bed.

I had moments of doubt.

What if I had made a terrible mistake?

What if Islam was right after all?

What if I had thrown away my family for nothing but always?

When those doubts came, I would remember.

I would remember the peace I felt when I first believed.

I would remember the night the flames wouldn’t burn.

I would remember coming up out of the baptismal water.

I would remember that Jesus was real, that he had saved me, that he held me even now, and I would keep going.

In the spring of 2024, about a year after my escape, I was contacted by a ministry that worked with former Muslims who had converted to Christianity.

They asked if I would be willing to share my story, not publicly, not using my real name or showing my face, but recorded, translated, shared online to encourage others who were questioning, who were seeking, who were afraid.

I prayed about it for weeks.

It felt risky.

Even in Canada, there were extremists.

If my story was shared widely, someone might recognize details.

might track me down as but I also thought about women like me.

Women in Yemen, in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in Pakistan, women who were reading the Bible in secret, praying to Jesus in hidden moments, wondering if they were crazy for believing in someone they had been taught was merely a prophet.

What if my story could give them courage?

What if it could show them they weren’t alone?

I said yes.

We recorded my testimony in several sessions.

I told everything.

My childhood, my marriage, my secret conversion, the night of fire, my escape.

It was hard reliving those moments, putting them into words, knowing strangers would hear my most painful memories.

But it was also healing, like lancing a wound and letting the poison out.

The ministry edited the recordings, translated them into several languages, and began sharing them online.

And they used a different name for me, not a mirror.

They blurred my face in the thumbnail.

They gave no identifying details about where I was now, but my story was out there.

And then the messages started coming.

women and some men from Muslim backgrounds reaching out through the ministry saying they had heard my story, saying they had the same questions, the same hunger, the same fear, asking how to find Jesus, asking how to survive as a secret believer, asking for prayer.

I responded to everyone I could.

I shared scripture.

I shared encouragement.

I prayed.

And I realized something.

This was why I was still alive.

This was the purpose in my pain.

God had saved me, not just for my own sake, but so I could help others find him, too.

Today, as I sit here in my small apartment in Canada, I am 27 years old.

It has been almost 2 years since the night Hassan tried to kill me.

My life is not what I imagined it would be.

I am not married.

I have no children.

I live alone in a foreign country where I still struggle with the language and the culture.

I work in an office building after hours, emptying trash cans and mopping floors.

I take English classes during the day.

I attend church on Sundays and Bible study on Wednesdays.

I live simply, quietly, carefully.

But I am free.

Free to pray to Jesus whenever I want.

Free to read the Bible openly.

Free to worship without fear.

Free to be who I truly am.

I still miss my family.

I probably always will.

There are days when the grief hits me like a wave and I have to sit down and cry until it passes.

I still have hard days.

Days when I feel the weight of loneliness, the ache of displacement.

I sent the fear that I will never truly belong anywhere.

I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night smelling kerosene, remembering that look in Hassan’s eyes when he realized the fire wouldn’t catch.

But I also have joy, real deep joy that I never had before.

I have peace that doesn’t depend on my circumstances.

I have hope that’s rooted in something eternal, something that can’t be taken away.

I have Jesus, and Jesus has me.

Let me tell you what I’ve learned.

In these two years since my escape, I’ve learned that God doesn’t always rescue us the way we expect.

Sometimes he stops the fire from burning.

Sometimes he doesn’t stop the fire, but he walks through it with us.

Both are miracles.

I’ve learned that following Jesus costs something.

It cost me my family, my country, my culture, everything familiar and comfortable.

But what I gained was worth infinitely more.

I’ve learned that God’s love is not a distant, abstract concept.

It’s personal, intimate, real.

He knows my name.

He sees my tears.

He counts them precious.

I’ve learned that the Christian life is not easy.

It’s not about prosperity or comfort or getting all your prayers answered the way you want.

It’s about surrender, about trust, about believing that God is good even when life is hard.

I have learned that I am weak, so weak.

I have doubted.

I have struggled.

I have had moments where I wanted to give up.

But I’ve also learned that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness.

That when I am at my lowest, he is closest.

I’ve learned that the church is not a building.

It’s people, imperfect, broken people who are learning to love God and love each other.

And that community is essential.

We weren’t meant to follow Jesus alone.

I’ve learned that my story matters.

that God can use even the painful, messy parts for his glory.

That my suffering was not wasted.

I’ve learned that there are so many others like me, secret believers in dangerous places, people hungry for truth, desperate for hope, and that we have a responsibility to reach them, to help them, to show them they’re not alone.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that Jesus is real.

Not just real in some abstract theological sense, but actually tangibly, miraculously real.

I know because I’ve experienced him.

I’ve heard his voice.

I’ve felt his peace.

I’ve seen his hand in my life.

On March 15th, 2023, I should have died.

by every law of physics and chemistry that kerosene should have ignited.

Hassan had fuel, he had flame, he had intent, but the fire wouldn’t burn.

Uh, I cannot explain it.

I’ve tried.

I’ve thought about it a thousand times looking for some natural explanation.

Maybe the kerosene was old and had evaporated, but I could smell it, see it pulled on the floor.

Maybe the matches were faulty, but they burned fine in his hand.

Maybe there was some chemical reason.

I don’t understand.

Maybe.

Or maybe God intervened.

Maybe Jesus, the same one who walked on water and calmed storms and raised the dead, simply said, “Not yet”.

to death that night.

I believe that’s what happened.

I have to believe it because I experienced it.

And if that’s true, if God is real and powerful and personal enough to stop fire for me, then everything changes.

If God can do that, then he can do anything.

He can reach anyone.

He can save anyone.

Even someone like me, a Yemen woman from a strict Muslim family, married to an imam with no access to Christians or churches or support.

If he can reach me, he can reach anyone.

So this is my message to you.

Whoever you are watching or reading this, if you’re a Christian, be encouraged.

The God we serve is real.

He is active.

He is working in places you cannot see.

in ways you cannot imagine.

There are believers in the most unlikely places following Jesus at enormous cost because his love has captured them.

Pray for them.

Support ministries that help them.

Don’t forget about the secret church, the underground believers, the ones who worship in whispers.

If you’re someone who is questioning, who is curious about Jesus but afraid of what it might cost, I understand.

I’ve been where you are.

All I can tell you is he’s worth it.

Whatever you have to give up, whatever you have to walk away from, whatever price you have to pay, Jesus is worth it.

He won’t promise you an easy life.

He didn’t promise me one, but he promises his presence.

He promises his love.

He promises that nothing, not death, not life, not angels, not demons, not the present, not the future, nothing in all creation can separate you from his love.

And that is enough.

It has to be enough because it’s all we really need.

If you’re a Muslim who has been seeking truth, who has questions, who feels drawn to Jesus, but doesn’t know what to do, please don’t ignore that pull.

That’s God calling you.

He sees you.

He knows you.

He loves you.

I’m not saying it will be easy.

It wasn’t easy for me.

It may cost you everything, but Jesus is real.

He truly is who he claimed to be, the way, the truth, and the life, the son of God, the savior of the world.

And if you ask him with a sincere heart to reveal himself to you, he will.

Maybe not the way we you expect, maybe not immediately, but he will because he is faithful.

He is good.

And he doesn’t turn away anyone who comes to him.

My name is Amamira, though that’s not the name I was born with.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ.

I am a refugee, an exile, a stranger in a foreign land.

But I am also a daughter of the king, a citizen of heaven, an heir to eternal life.

I was lost and I was found.

I was dead and I was made alive.

I was trapped in darkness and I was brought into light.

And I will spend the rest of my life, however long or short it may be, telling people about the one who saved me.

Not just from the fire, though he did that.

Not just from oppression and abuse, though he did that too, but from sin, from death, from separation from God.

Oh, Jesus saved me completely, fully, finally, and he can save you, too.

That’s my story.

That’s my testimony.

And by God’s grace, it will be my message until the day I see him face to face.

If you’ve heard my story and have questions about Jesus, about Christianity, about how to explore faith safely, please reach out to the ministry that shared this testimony.

They can connect you with resources, with other believers, with help.

You don’t have to walk this path alone.

And if you’re a believer who wants to help people like me, people fleeing persecution, people who have given up everything to follow Jesus, there are ways you can help.

Support refugee ministries.

Support organizations that help secret believers.

Pray.

Give.

Use your freedom to help those who don’t have it.

We need you.

The secret church needs you.

Don’t forget about us.

Finally, I want to pray for anyone listening to this.

Father God, I thank you for each person hearing these words.

You know their name.

You know their situation.

You know their heart.

For those who are seeking you.

Dr.aw them close.

Reveal yourself to them in undeniable ways.

Give them courage to follow where you lead.

Even if the path is difficult for those who are already following you in secret, in danger, protect them.

Strengthen them.

Let them know they are not alone.

Send help.

Provide community.

Guard their hearts and minds.

For those who are comfortable and safe, give them eyes to see and hearts to care for their brothers and sisters who suffer for your name.

Make them generous.

Make them bold.

Use them for your glory.

And for all of us, help us to live in the reality that you are real, that you are present, that you are enough.

In Jesus’ name, the name above all names, the name at which every knee will bow.

Amen.

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