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

Why had I done this?

Why had I thrown everything away?

Why had I become an apostate?

So she knew.

Of course she knew.

The mosque would have told her.

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

I told her I was sorry.

I told her I loved her and the children.

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

She shook her head.

She said I had found lies.

She said I had been deceived by Shayan.

She said I had destroyed our family.

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

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

She told me the children were asking for me.

Khaled kept asking when I was coming home.

Our daughter cried at night.

Even the baby seemed to sense something was wrong.

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

They couldn’t come home.

Not to me.

Not while I was in apostate”.

My father had taken them in.

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

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

my children, my babies.

I would never see them again.

I begged her.

I told her to let me see them just once.

Let me explain to them that I loved them.

Let me say goodbye properly.

She said no.

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

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

to know what I had become.

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

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

Already treating me as if I were dead.

Then she left.

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

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

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

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

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

My community had rejected me.

I was alone.

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

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

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

But then in that darkness, I felt Jesus again.

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

You are not alone.

I am with you and I will never leave you.

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

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

The physical pain was bad enough.

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

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

Simple things like eating or using the bathroom became orals.

But the emotional and psychological pain was worse.

I had nightmares every night.

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

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

But the fear remained.

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

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

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

Every unexpected sound made me jump.

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

The hospital social worker came to see me.

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

I had no answers for her.

I had no home to go back to.

My family wanted nothing to do with me.

I had no money, no job, no plan.

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

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

I had nothing and no one.

The social worker looked troubled.

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

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

He came to visit me in the hospital.

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

That word praying caught my attention.

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

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

I started to cry again.

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

Carlos told me about the underground church in Riyad.

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

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

I nodded.

Yes, I needed all of those things.

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

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

The workers there knew what I was.

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

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

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

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

They shared what little they had with me.

They brought me food.

They helped me change my bandages.

They prayed with me.

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

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

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

It was beautiful.

It was healing.

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

They listened to my story.

They cried with me over my losses.

They prayed for my family.

They reminded me that I wasn’t alone.

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

She had medical training and spiritual wisdom.

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

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

She taught me breathing exercises.

She taught me grounding techniques for when the panic came.

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

Slowly, very slowly, I began to heal.

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

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

I was alive when I should be dead.

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

God had a purpose for me.

He had a plan.

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

I still struggled.

I still hurt.

I still grieved.

Some days were better than others.

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

Grateful for my new Christian family.

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

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

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

Were they eating breakfast, going to school, playing?

Did they miss me?

Did they remember me?

The not knowing was torture.

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

But Maria and Carlos both counseledled me against it.

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

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

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

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

So I prayed for them instead.

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

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

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

I also had to grieve what I had lost.

I thought about my children constantly.

I wondered what they were being told about me.

I wondered if they hated me.

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

I thought about my wife, Ila.

I had loved her as best as I knew how.

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

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

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

The grief came in waves.

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

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

My new Christian friends understood.

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

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

They let me mourn.

They mourned with me.

And through it all, Jesus was faithful.

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

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

I remembered the voice in the fire.

You are mine and I am with you.

That promise sustained me.

As the months passed, I grew stronger.

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

But I >> could move again.

I could function again.

I could live again.

Carlos helped me find work.

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

It gave me purpose and income.

The work was hard.

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

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

They knew my story.

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

I learned humility through that work.

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

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

But I learned to find dignity in it.

Honest work is honest work.

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

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

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

The nightmares still came, but less frequently.

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

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

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

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

But I was free.

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

Free to read the Bible without hiding.

Free to pray without pretending.

and I was loved.

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

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

It was during this time that I was baptized.

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

Now finally, I could take that step.

We gathered one evening in someone’s apartment building.

They had filled a large tub with water.

It wasn’t a river or a baptismal pool in a church.

It was simple and humble, but it was sacred.

Carlos baptized me.

As he lowered me under the water, I thought about dying to my old life.

When he raised me up, I thought about resurrection, about new life in Christ.

My brothers and sisters gathered around sang softly, praising God.

And I wept, overcome with joy and gratitude.

This was my public declaration of faith.

Not in a mosque or in front of my old community, but here among these believers who had become my family.

After my baptism, I felt a new freedom.

I had taken the step I had been afraid to take for so long.

I had publicly identified with Christ.

And the world hadn’t ended.

In fact, I felt more alive than I ever had.

One evening about 6 months after the fire, we were having a Bible study in Carlos’s room.

We were reading from Romans chapter 8.

Someone read aloud, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

As I heard those words, I felt something settle in my spirit.

Nothing could separate me from God’s love.

Not fire, not persecution, not loss, not even death.

The men who had tried to kill me thought they could separate me from Jesus by burning me alive.

But they couldn’t.

Even in the fire, he was with me.

My family had separated themselves from me because of my faith.

But God’s love remained.

I had lost everything I thought defined me.

But I had gained something far more valuable.

I looked around at the faces of my brothers and sisters gathered in that small room.

We came from different countries, spoke different languages as our first tongue, had different backgrounds, but we were one in Christ.

This was the church.

This was what Jesus had died to create.

This was the family that would last forever.

I realized that God had not just saved me from the fire.

He had saved me for this.

To be part of his family, to know his love, to share his gospel.

And I understood that my story wasn’t over.

It was just beginning.

The burns on my body were healed enough that I could show them to people.

The scars remained deep and visible.

But instead of being ashamed of them, I began to see them as a testimony.

These scars were proof of what had happened to me.

Proof that I had been set on fire for my faith.

Proof that Jesus had saved me when I should have died.

Every time someone asked about my scars, I had an opportunity to tell them about Jesus, to explain what he had done for me, to share the gospel.

I began to understand that God had allowed me to survive, not just for my own sake, but so I could tell others what he had done.

Maria told me one day that the best way to overcome trauma is to find meaning in it, to transform suffering into purpose.

My suffering had meaning.

It wasn’t meaningless pain.

It was a testimony to God’s faithfulness.

It was proof that he saves those who call on him.

It was evidence that following Jesus is worth any cost.

I started to feel a growing conviction that I needed to tell my story more widely, not just to the small group of believers I worshiped with, but to the world.

I knew it would be dangerous.

I knew that speaking openly about my conversion and persecution would put me at even more risk.

But I also knew that there were others out there like me.

Secret believers in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world living in fear, hiding their faith, wondering if anyone else understood what they were going through.

I wanted them to know they weren’t alone.

I wanted them to know that Jesus is real, that he saves, that he is worth following, even when it costs everything.

I also wanted Christians in the free world to know what their brothers and sisters in restricted countries are facing.

To know that persecution isn’t ancient history, it’s happening right now.

to know that people are dying for their faith even today.

And I wanted non-Christians, especially Muslims, to hear my story.

Not to mock Islam or to be disrespectful, but to share what I had found in Jesus.

To explain why I believed he was worth losing everything for.

This growing conviction became a calling.

I felt God asking me to step out of safety and into purpose, to use my story to glorify him and to help others.

It terrified me, but it also excited me.

I was alive for a reason, and that reason was becoming clear.

I needed to tell the world what Jesus had done for me.

I needed to testify to his faithfulness.

I needed to be a voice for those who couldn’t speak.

My life would never be normal again.

My family was gone.

My old life was gone.

My safety was always at risk.

But I had a purpose.

I had a mission.

I had been through the fire and Jesus had brought me through it.

Now I would spend the rest of my life telling people why.

The scars on my body would fade over time, but they would never completely disappear.

And I was glad.

They were reminders of what God had done.

They were marks of his faithfulness.

Every morning when I woke up and saw those scars, I remembered.

I should be dead, but I’m alive.

And that’s a miracle.

A miracle that I would spend the rest of my life sharing with anyone who would listen.

I’m telling you this story today because it needs to be told, not for my glory.

I’m not a hero.

I’m just a man who found truth and was willing to lose everything to keep it.

A man who was terrified when they set me on fire.

Who screamed in agony.

Who didn’t face death with courage but with fear.

But Jesus saved me anyway.

And that’s the point.

This isn’t my story.

It’s his story.

It’s about what he did, not what I did.

And I’m telling it because there are people who need to hear it.

To those who are being persecuted for your faith right now, wherever you are in the world, I want you to know something.

You are not alone.

I know what it’s like to be afraid every single day.

I know what it’s like to hide your faith, to pretend to be something you’re not, to live in constant fear of discovery.

I know what it’s like to lose your family because of Jesus.

I know the pain of being rejected by the people you love most.

I know what it feels like when your own father says you’re no longer his son.

I know what it’s like to face violence for your faith.

I know what fire feels like.

I know what it’s like to think you’re going to die.

And I want to tell you, Jesus is with you.

He was with me in the fire.

Not figuratively, actually with me.

I felt his presence.

I heard his voice.

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