By then, Sarah was gone, finally ready to start living again, carrying her father’s memory, not as a burden, but as a blessing.

Flight 227 still operated daily from Chicago to Denver, though with a different flight number.

Now, the airline had quietly retired the designation, a small acknowledgement of the two pilots who never completed their final journey.

But sometimes late at night when the terminal was quiet and only cleaning crews walked the empty corridors, gate agents swore they could see them.

Two men in pilot uniforms standing near gate 17, checking their watches, preparing for a flight that would never take off.

keeping watch, making sure the plane stayed safe, making sure no one else would die trying to tell the truth.

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11 Year Old Muslim Girl Leads Her Whole Family to Christianity !!!

My name is Amamira Hassan.

I am 13 years old.

I was born in Columbus, Ohio, and I have lived here my whole life.

I go to a regular middle school.

I like math.

I love drawing.

And my favorite food is my mom’s chicken and rice, which she makes with this spice mix she brought from Jordan and refuses to share the recipe for even with her closest friends.

I tell you these small things first because I want you to know that I am a normal girl.

I am not a special person.

I did not grow up in a church.

Nobody came to my house with a Bible when I was little.

No missionary knocked on our door.

Nothing dramatic happened to start any of this.

At least not in the way most people would expect dramatic things to happen.

I was just a little girl growing up in a regular house with a regular family.

And then something happened to me that I still cannot fully explain with my own words.

But I am going to try.

I am going to try my best to tell you everything.

But first, I have to tell you about the house I was born into.

Because to understand what happened to me and what happened to my family, you have to understand where we started.

You have to understand what our life looked like before everything changed.

And I think once you hear it, you will understand why what happened to us was not a small thing.

It was not a simple or easy thing.

It cost us something.

And what came out on the other side of that cost is the whole reason I am sitting here telling you this story today.

My father’s name is Tariq Hassan.

>> Hello viewers from around the world.

Before our sister Amamira Hassan continues her 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.

>> He was born in Ammon, Jordan.

He came to America when he was 24 years old with two suitcases, a little bit of money, and a strong belief that if he worked hard enough, he could build a life here.

He had a degree in engineering from a university in Jordan.

But when he first got to America, that degree did not immediately open the doors he thought it would.

So, he worked wherever he could while he figured things out.

He worked in a warehouse.

He drove for a delivery company for a while.

He learned the way America worked from the inside out, from the ground up.

And slowly over time, things got better for him.

He got a job in his actual field.

He started building the life he had imagined.

He met my mother Nadia through family connections.

She was also Jordanian and she had come to America with her parents when she was a teenager.

My mother grew up here in Columbus, went to school here, and by the time she met my father, she was already comfortable moving between two worlds in a way my father was still learning.

She spoke English without any accent.

She knew American culture, but she also knew who she was.

She had not lost that.

Her family had made sure of that.

They got married and then after a few years they had me and then two years later my brother Yousef was born.

The house I grew up in was warm.

I want to make sure I say that clearly.

We were not an unhappy family.

My parents loved each other and they loved us.

There was always food.

There was always noise and movement and life in our home.

My mother was the kind of woman who could have 10 people over for dinner without any warning and somehow there would be enough food for everyone.

My father worked very hard, sometimes very long hours.

But when he was home, he was present.

He would sit with us.

He would ask about school.

He would tell us stories about Jordan, about his childhood, about his parents and his brothers.

He wanted us to know where we came from.

Even though we were growing up somewhere else, but our home was also clearly and without any confusion, a Muslim home, there was a framed Arabic calligraphy on the wall near the front door.

It said bismillah, which means in the name of God, and it was the first thing you saw when you walked in.

There were prayer rugs folded in the corner of my parents’ room.

My father prayed five times a day and when he was home he did not miss those prayers.

He would stop whatever he was doing, go get the rug, face the direction of Mecca and pray.

As a small child, I used to sometimes sit near the door of the room and watch him.

There was something serious about it, something that felt important and heavy.

Even as a four or 5year-old, I could feel that this was not just a routine to him.

This was real.

This mattered to him deeply.

My mother prayed too, though perhaps not always with the same strict regularity as my father.

But her faith was just as real.

She fasted during Ramadan every year without complaint.

She taught me and my brother how to read the Arabic letters from the Quran.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her in the evenings, sounding out the letters, trying to get the pronunciation right, and she would gently correct me without ever making me feel bad for getting it wrong.

She used to say that the words of the Quran were like medicine.

That they were good for the soul.

Even when you did not understand every single word of what you were reading, we were not expected to just recite the words.

We were supposed to feel them.

Ramadan was the biggest part of our year.

Looking back now, I think Ramadan was when our family felt most like itself.

My father would come home early from work during that month.

The house smelled like cooking from the afternoon onwards because my mother would be preparing the food we would eat at sunset when the fast broke.

We would all sit together at the table and my father would make a small prayer and then we would eat.

There was something about that moment breaking the fast together after a whole day of nothing that felt sacred even to me as a child.

I did not have the words for it then.

I just knew that those evenings felt different.

They felt connected.

They felt like we were all holding on to something together.

There was also the community aspect of our faith.

We were not the only Muslim family in Columbus, not by a long way.

There was a mosque about 20 minutes from our house and my father went there for Friday prayers every week.

On aid we would go together as a family all dressed up and there would be hundreds of people there.

Families from Pakistan, from Egypt, from Somalia, from all over all gathered in one place.

As a small child, those aid gatherings were exciting.

There was color and food and people hugging each other and children running around.

I remember feeling proud in those moments.

Proud to belong to something large.

Proud to be part of something that stretched across so many countries and so many faces.

So I want to be honest about something.

I was not unhappy in my faith.

I was not suffering.

I was not secretly miserable and looking for a way out.

I think sometimes when people hear conversion stories, they assume the person must have been in pain or lost or mistreated and that they found something because they needed something to fill a wound.

That was not my story.

My story is different.

And I think that is part of why it is hard to explain and also part of why I believe so strongly that what happened to me was a real and not just emotional.

I was a happy child in a good home.

I had faith.

I had a family.

I had a community.

And still something found me.

Something reached me.

And it was not because I was empty.

It was because I was curious.

And because God, I believe, put that curiosity in me before I was old enough to understand what I was curious about.

I should tell you about school because school is where this whole story really begins to move.

I started kindergarten at a public school near our house.

It was a regular American public school, the kind where the classrooms have alphabet charts on the walls and there are cubbies for your backpack and your teacher is always trying to get you to sit still during carpet time.

I loved school from the very beginning.

I was a social child.

I liked people.

I liked talking.

I liked learning.

I did not experience kindergarten as strange or difficult.

Even though our home life was different from many of my classmates homes, but I noticed things even at 5 years old.

I noticed that some of the things my classmates talked about were things I had no knowledge of.

Christmas was the biggest example.

In December, the whole school changed.

There were decorations.

There was Christmas music playing.

The teachers were excited in a different way.

My classmates talked about what they were going to get for Christmas, what they wanted, what their families did.

I would come home and ask my mother about Christmas, and she would explain to me calmly that we did not celebrate Christmas because we were Muslim, that we had our own holidays, and that our holidays were just as special.

And I accepted that.

It made sense to me as a young child.

I had aid.

My classmates had Christmas.

We had different things.

But even in accepting it, I was curious.

What was the story behind Christmas?

Why did it make people so happy?

I asked my mother about Jesus because I had heard his name in December.

Conversations at school.

She told me in the way that Muslims tell the story that Jesus was a prophet, a good man, an important prophet actually, one of the most important, but a prophet, a human being, not the son of God, the way Christians believed because God, she explained, does not have a son.

That is not how we understood God.

God was one.

God was alone.

God had no partners and no children.

That was the foundation of what we believed.

I accepted that too.

I was a child.

You accept what your parents tell you about these things when you are small.

But I kept wondering.

I kept watching.

I kept noticing the way Christmas made people feel and Easter.

And even just the way some of my classmates talked about going to church with their families on Sundays, there was something in how they talked about it.

Not all of them.

Some of them talked about church the way you talk about something boring you have to do.

But a few of them talked about it differently.

A few of them talked about it like it was something they actually looked forward to, something that was part of the best parts of their week.

I filed that away somewhere in my brain without knowing that I was filing it away.

As I got older and moved through elementary school, the differences became more textured and complex, but also more normal to me.

I was used to being slightly on the outside of certain conversations.

Whenever the school had a holiday concert in December, I would participate because it was a school event, but I was aware that the songs being sung were not my songs.

I was aware that the story being told in December was not my story.

I did not feel bad about that.

I just noticed it.

I also noticed something else as I got older.

I noticed that some people looked at me differently when they found out I was Muslim.

After a certain age, there was sometimes a pause, a very brief pause.

When I told someone my name or when they found out about my family, nothing anyone ever said to me was cruel, at least not when I was in elementary school.

But I could feel the pause.

I could feel the moment of adjustment and I understood even as a young child that there were ideas about Muslims in the world.

Ideas that were not always kind and that I was going to have to live inside those ideas without having created them.

My father talked to me and my brother about this.

He sat us down at different points in our childhood and explained that we were going to encounter people who did not understand us.

People who had been told wrong things about who we were and what we believed.

He told us that the best thing we could do was live our lives with honesty and integrity and let our character speak for itself.

He was not bitter when he said these things.

He was practical.

He was preparing us and I appreciated that even though at the time I did not fully understand how complicated that navigation was going to become.

Let me tell you about who I was as a child because I think it matters.

I was a uh talker.

I still am.

I have always been the kind of person who wants to understand things.

Who asks questions when something does not make sense, who is not satisfied with a surface answer when I can tell there is more underneath it.

This is part of my personality that I believe God put in me specifically because it was that particular quality and that restlessness about wanting to understand, wanting to go deeper that ended up being the thing that cracked everything open.

I also had a very active interior life.

I know that sounds like a strange thing for a child to say about herself, but it is true.

From a fairly young age, I spent a lot of time inside my own head.

I thought about big questions.

I thought about why things were the way they were.

I thought about God.

Even when I did not have the language for what I was thinking, I used to lie in bed at night as a seven or 8year-old and think about what God was like.

Not the rules, not the prayers, not the fasting, but the actual being of God.

What God actually was.

Whether God knew me specifically, whether God thought about me the way I thought about things that mattered to me.

In the version of God I had grown up with, God was very large, very powerful, very present in the sense that everything came from God and everything returned to God.

but also in some ways very distant.

In the way I had been taught to relate to God, there was always a sense of enormous distance.

God was above everything, separate from everything, incomprehensibly greater than everything.

You prayed to God.

You submitted to God.

You obeyed God’s laws because they were good laws and because obedience was the correct response to someone.

so much greater than you.

I did not doubt that God existed.

I never doubted that.

From the time I was old enough to understand the idea of God, I was certain that God was real.

That certainty never wavered.

But something else was growing in me alongside that certainty, something I could not name.

For a long time, it was like a question that did not have words yet.

It was somewhere in my chest, not in my head.

It was a feeling more than a thought.

A feeling like, is this it?

Is this everything?

Is the whole story of what God is and how God relates to me just this?

Just rules and prayers and submission.

Is there not something more personal than this?

Is there not something that reaches closer?

I feel strange saying that because I know it might sound like I am criticizing the faith I grew up in and I do not mean it as a criticism.

I know there are Muslims who have a very deep and personal relationship with God within Islam.

My own parents, especially my father, had something real and genuine in his faith.

I could see it.

What I am describing is something that was specific to me, specific to how I was wired, specific to the kind of person I was.

I was a child who needed to feel personally known by God.

I was a child who needed relationship more than religion, though I did not know that was what I needed.

I just felt the lack of something without being able to describe the shape of what was missing.

And that lack, that quiet interior hunger was what God was going to use.

Not my suffering, not a crisis, not even a dramatic event.

Just a quiet, persistent question in a little girl’s chest.

Just a heart that was already leaning toward something before it knew what it was leaning toward.

There is one more thing I want to tell you about in this first part of my story and it is something that I have thought about many times since everything happened.

There was a period when I was about 8 years old where I was very sick.

It was nothing lifethreatening but at the time it felt enormous to me.

I had a bad infection in my lungs and I had to stay home from school for almost three weeks.

I was feverish and uncomfortable and I spent most of those weeks in my bed.

My mother took care of me.

She barely left my side during the worst of it.

She would sit next to me and read to me or just be there.

And during the nights when the fever was high and I was scared and unable to sleep, I would call out for her and she would come.

There was one particular night where I remember feeling very frightened.

Not about dying because I did not really think I was dying, but frightened in that formless way that sick children feel frightened in the middle of the night.

frightened of the darkness and the feeling of my body not being right and the distance between me and normal.

And I remember lying there and saying something in my head that I am not sure was a proper prayer.

It was not in Arabic.

It was not in any formal prayer language.

It was just me in my head talking to God the way you talk to someone in the room with you.

I said something like, “Please, I need you to be here right now”.

And something happened.

I cannot prove it.

I cannot explain it scientifically.

But something in the room changed or something in me changed.

There was a warmth that came that was not from my blankets.

There was a quiet that came into my chest that was not from the medicine.

And I felt very clearly not alone.

I felt heard.

I felt close to something bigger than me in a way that was not frightening, but was actually the most comforting thing I had ever experienced up to that point in my 8 years of life.

I did not tell anyone about that night for a very long time.

Not my mother, not my father.

I kept it inside.

But I thought about it often.

I thought about it because it did not match the version of God I had been taught in a precise way.

In the version I had been taught, God was great and God was merciful.

Yes.

But what I felt that night was something even more intimate than mercy from a great distance.

What I felt that night was presence.

Close, warm, personal presence.

I did not know then what to call that or who that presence was.

I just knew it was real.

I knew it happened and I carried that knowledge with me through the next couple of years as I kept growing.

I kept wondering and kept being the curious, interior, questionfilled little girl that I was.

Looking back now, I believe that night was not random.

I believe something was already at work in my life long before I ever opened a Bible or stepped inside a church or heard a proper sermon about Jesus.

I believe the God who is close was already reaching toward me when I was 8 years old in a sick bed in Columbus, Ohio.

I believe he answered a prayer I prayed to him without even knowing his full name yet.

And I believe that the warmth I felt that night was the same presence that would later show itself to me so clearly and completely that I would not be able to walk away from it.

Not even if I wanted to.

I did not want to.

That is the thing.

When it was finally clear, when everything finally made sense, I did not want to walk away.

I ran toward it.

Even as an 11-year-old girl who understood what it was going to cost her and her family, even knowing the difficulty that was coming, I ran toward it because you do not walk away from something that has been looking for you your whole life.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

That is for later.

For now, I just want you to sit with the picture of who I was and where I came from.

A girl from a good family, a Muslim home, a Middle Eastern heritage, a warm mother and a hard-working, faithful father, a brother who drove me crazy in the way that younger brothers are designed to do.

A school where I was slightly on the outside of some conversations.

A heart full of questions that did not have answers yet.

A memory of one night in a sick bed that I kept folded up inside me like something precious that I did not yet understand.

That is where this story begins.

That is the house I was born into.

And that is the girl who was going to find something or perhaps be found by something that would change not just her own life but the lives of every single person in that house.

I did not know any of that was coming.

I was just a kid.

But God knew.

And I believe with everything in me that he had been repairing the way for a very long time before I ever took the first step.

I want to tell you about a girl named Destiny.

Destiny Williams came into my life in the third grade when I was eight going on nine and she changed everything without either of us understanding that was what was happening.

She sat two seats away from me in our classroom.

And she was the kind of person who was impossible to ignore, not because she was loud or showy, but because she had this quality about her that I can only describe as settled.

Even as a 9-year-old, Destiny seemed settled in herself in a way that most children are not.

She was not the most popular girl in class.

She was not the one who had the most friends or the newest shoes or the loudest personality, but there was something about her that made you want to be near her.

A steadiness, a warmth.

She was just one of those people.

We became friends gradually.

The way children make friends, sitting near each other, working on projects together, talking at recess.

And one of the things I noticed about Destiny early on, one of the first things that made her slightly different from my other friends was that she talked about her family in a way that made them sound like people I wanted to meet.

Not because they were glamorous or unusual, but because the way she described ordinary moments in her house made those moments sound full of something.

She would talk about Sunday mornings at her house and her whole face would change.

She would talk about her grandmother cooking and everyone sitting around the table and her father leading a prayer before they ate.

And the way she talked about it was not like a child reciting something they had been told was important.

It was like she was telling you about something she genuinely loved, something that was one of the best parts of her week.

I paid attention to that.

I paid attention because I had something similar in my own home, those Ramadan evenings I told you about where there was warmth and connection around the table.

And I recognized the quality of what Destiny was describing because I had tasted something like it.

But there was also something in her description that felt slightly different from my own experience.

Something I could not immediately identify.

There was a lightness in how she talked about it.

Not lightness in the sense of it not being serious, but lightness in the sense of joy.

Pure joy.

Like going to church on Sunday was not a duty she performed but a gift she received.

And I remember turning that observation over in my mind because it was interesting to me because duty and gift are not the same thing even when they look the same from the outside.

Destiny was also the first person who ever talked to me about Jesus in a personal way.

Not in a classroom way.

Not in the way a textbook mentions Jesus as a historical figure.

In a personal way.

the way you talk about someone you actually know.

She mentioned him in normal conversation sometimes, the way you would mention someone who had done something kind for your family.

And it always caught my attention because of how natural it sounded coming from her.

It was not performed.

It was not like she was trying to teach me something.

She was just talking about her life and Jesus was in her life the way a real person is in a life present connected to things that happened connected to how she felt about things.

I did not ask her a lot of questions about it in those early days.

I mostly listened.

I was curious but I was also careful because I already understood by that age that faith was a sensitive topic.

I knew my parents had clear feelings about what our family believed and I was not trying to go somewhere I was not supposed to go.

I was just listening, absorbing, filing things away.

The first time I went to Destiny’s house was sometime in fourth grade.

We had become real friends by then.

The kind of friends who called each other and did homework together and told each other things they did not tell other people.

Her mother had called my mother and they had a proper conversation about it.

And my mother, after meeting Destiny a couple of times at school pickup and deciding she liked her, said yes, I could go for a Saturday afternoon.

Destiny lived about 15 minutes from us in a part of Columbus that was mostly black families, some of whom had been in that neighborhood for generations.

Her house was not a large house, but it was full.

Her mother, her father, her grandmother, who everyone called Grandma May, her older brother, and her younger sister.

The house had things on the walls, pictures, and artwork.

And in the living room, a cross, a wooden one that was not small.

It was probably 30 cm tall, hanging on the main wall.

Below it was a small framed verse.

I could not read it properly from where I was standing because I did not want to stare.

But I saw the cross.

It was not the first time I had seen a cross.

You see crosses everywhere in America on buildings, on jewelry, on cars.

But seeing it in someone’s home like that as the central thing on the main wall of the living room as clearly the most important thing in that space, that was different.

That made an impression on me because in my home, the most important thing on the wall near the front door was the calligraphy in Arabic.

It was also a declaration.

It was also a statement of what the house was and what the family believed and seeing Destiny’s family’s version of that.

Seeing their declaration on their wall, I felt a recognition.

These people are serious about this.

I thought this is not just background noise to them.

This is the center.

Destiny’s mother, Sister Williams, as people called her, was one of the warmest people I had ever met.

She welcomed me into that house as if she had been expecting me.

Not in a strange way, but in the way that genuinely hospitable.

People make you feel like you’re being there was not an imposition, but a pleasure.

She fed me within 30 minutes of my arrival.

She asked me questions about myself and actually listened to my answers.

She talked to me like I was a whole person with thoughts worth hearing even though I was just a kid.

And there was something in how that family moved through their house on that Saturday afternoon that I kept noticing and could not stop noticing.

There was a peace in that house, a specific kind of peace that is hard to explain.

It was not that nothing difficult had ever happened to those people.

Even a child could sense that these were people who had navigated hard things, but there was a groundedness, a settledness that underlay everything.

Even when the grandmother and the older brother had a disagreement about something during lunch and things got briefly tense, it resolved quickly and without lasting damage.

And underneath the brief tension, the peace was still there.

It was structural.

It was in the bones of the house.

I had peace in my home, too.

And I want to be clear about that.

But what I felt in Destiny’s house that day was a specific kind of peace that I had not felt before and could not immediately explain.

I went home that evening thoughtful, not troubled, not confused, just thoughtful, carrying something in my mind that I needed to sit with.

Over the next year or so, I spent more time at Destiny’s house.

Her family became familiar to me.

Grandma May, who had this extraordinary way of speaking that felt like she was always slightly in the middle of a sermon, even when she was just talking about the weather.

Destiny’s father, who was quiet, but who had a presence when he walked into a room.

Not intimidating, more like the feeling of something solid arriving.

and Destiny’s mother who I grew to love in the way you love a person who shows you what genuine goodness looks like when it is not performing for anyone.

I observed things in that family that I had not seen before, not because my family was deficient, but because these things were specific to how their faith expressed itself.

The way Destiny’s father spoke to her mother with a consideration and a tenderness that was not sentimental, but was clearly purposeful, like he was aware that how he treated her mattered, and he had decided it was going to matter to him to get it right.

The way Grandma May prayed, not just before meals, but sometimes in the middle of a conversation if something came up that seemed to call for it just naturally.

No big announcement, just moving into prayer.

The way you move into a different gear.

The way the whole family treated hard news or difficult situations, not with denial and not with panic, but with this calm confidence that the situation was not outside of something’s control, that there was a framework for it that they were held.

I am telling you about all of this because I want you to understand that what first drew me toward Jesus was not a theological argument.

It was not someone sitting me down and explaining to me why Christianity was correct and Islam was wrong.

It was nothing like that.

What first drew me toward Jesus was seeing what knowing him did to people.

What it made them like, what it built in them.

I saw it in destiny.

I saw it in her family.

And I wanted to understand the source of what I was seeing.

That is an important thing I think because a lot of people assume conversion is about being convinced of facts about one side of an argument winning over another side.

And maybe for some people that is how it happens.

But for me it started with something much simpler and much more human than that.

It started with looking at a family and thinking there is something real in there, something I don’t have a name for yet, something I want to understand.

The first time I heard the story of the crucifixion in real detail, I was at Destiny’s house during Easter.

I was 9 years old.

I had been invited to spend Good Friday afternoon with her family and Grandma May had decided that she was going to tell the Easter story to the children in the living room.

It was not a formal lesson.

It was just Grandma May sitting in her chair with me and Destiny and Destiny’s little sister on the floor in front of her and Grandma May talking.

I had heard about Jesus before.

I knew his name.

I knew from the version I had been taught, that he was a prophet and that Christians believe things about him that Muslims did not believe.

But I had never heard the full story of Good Friday told by someone who loved him.

That is the key thing.

I had heard facts.

I had not heard the story told by someone to whom it was personal.

Grandma May started from the garden from the night Jesus was in prayer.

so intense that the sweat came off him like drops of blood, knowing what was coming and asking if there was any other way and then in the end saying not my will but yours.

She talked about the betrayal.

She talked about the trial where they asked him questions to trap him and he answered with such quiet authority that the people asking the questions did not know what to do with him.

She talked about the walk, carrying the weight of the cross through a crowd that was screaming at him.

Some of them people who had been fed by his hands not long before.

She talked about the nails.

I sat very still.

I was not moving.

I was barely breathing.

She talked about the words he said from the cross.

She talked about the forgiveness he extended from the cross to the people who had put him there while he was still hanging on it.

Not after, not once he was safe, while he was there, while it was still happening.

She talked about how he took care of his mother even while he was dying.

She talked about the moment when he said it was finished and then he was gone.

And then she talked about what the disciples felt in the days after.

The despair of it, the feeling of everything falling apart and nothing making sense and all the hope dying, the heaviness of those three days.

And then she talked about Sunday morning.

I cannot tell you exactly what I felt during that story.

I was 9 years old and did not have the emotional vocabulary to categorize what was happening inside me while Grandma May talked.

But I can tell you that something happened.

Something broke open in the middle of my chest in the way a window breaks open to let in air.

Not violently, just suddenly.

There is air where before there was stuffiness.

Something in me responded to that story in a way that I had not experienced before with any religious story I had been told.

What I kept returning to in my head even after that afternoon was over.

Even after I went home and went through the rest of my day was the forgiveness from the cross.

That detail would not leave me.

The idea of someone being hurt to that degree, killed in that way by people who should have known better and choosing in the middle of it to forgive rather than to curse.

Choosing in the middle of dying to pray for the people who were making him die.

I had been taught about forgiveness.

My own faith tradition spoke about forgiveness.

But there was something in this specific image, something in the particular strangeness and beauty of forgiving from a position of total vulnerability and pain that struck me in a way I could not shake.

It felt like something I had never encountered before.

It felt like a kind of love I did not have a frame for.

A love that did not make natural sense.

A love that went further than love is supposed to be able to go.

I went home that day carrying that image with me, the cross, the words from the cross.

And I went into my room and sat on my bed and thought about it for a long time.

Something shifted after that Good Friday afternoon.

It was not dramatic.

It was not sudden, but something in me started leaning more noticeably in a particular direction.

I started asking destiny questions.

Careful questions at first.

The way you put your foot on ice to test whether it will hold your weight.

Questions about what she believed and why.

About what her family believed.

About what it actually meant to them in their everyday lives to be Christian.

Destiny was a good person to ask these questions to because she was honest without being pushy.

She did not seize on my curiosity as an opportunity to convert me.

She just answered my questions the way a friend answers a friend’s genuine questions straightforwardly, personally, without pressure.

when she did not know the answer to something she said she did not know.

That honesty made me trust her more.

I started noticing Christianity in my environment in a more active way.

I had always been aware of it peripherally.

the Christmas concerts, the Easter break at school, the crosses on buildings.

But now I was looking more intentionally.

When we drove past a church on a Sunday morning, and there were people outside talking, and the doors were open, I looked.

I noticed what church buildings looked like.

I noticed the way people dressed when they came out of them.

I noticed the signs outside churches with their weekly messages.

I started reading those signs.

Some of them were ordinary.

Some of them said something that made me think.

I also started quietly and privately wondering about Jesus in a more personal way.

Not as a historical figure, not as a subject to be studied, but as a person.

Who was he really?

Not what did Christians believe about him in theory, but who was he?

What did he actually do and say?

What was he actually like?

I was curious about him the way you are curious about someone you have heard about from multiple people and you want to meet for yourself instead of relying on secondhand accounts.

I did not act on that curiosity right away.

It lived inside me for a while, growing quietly without my feeding it deliberately.

I was still the same girl I had always been.

I was still going through the Ramadan rituals with my family.

I was still praying in the way I had been taught.

I was still Amira, the daughter of Tariq and Nadia Hassan, the girl who came from a Muslim home and was proud of her heritage.

I was not doing anything about the thing growing in me because I did not know what to do about it and because part of me was afraid of what doing something about it would mean.

But I could feel it.

That is the thing.

I could feel it growing the way you can feel a plant growing even when you cannot see it moving.

Something was coming up from the ground in me.

Something had been planted and it was alive and it was moving upward and I was going to have to deal with it eventually.

I did not know then that it was going to change everything.

I did not know that by the time I was 11 years old, the entirety of my family’s life was going to look different.

I did not know that my father, the man who stopped everything five times a day to face Mecca and pray, was going to one day stand in a church and give his life to Jesus Christ.

I did not know any of that was coming.

But the seed had been planted.

The ground had been prepared.

And something in me had already decided even if my mind had not consciously caught up yet that I was going to follow this wherever it led.

There is one more thing I want to say about this period of my life about these early years of growing curiosity and quiet observation.

Before I move into what actually happened next, I want to say something about the quality of what I was feeling because I think it matters.

I was not feeling rebellious.

I was not trying to reject my parents or my culture or my heritage.

I was not a confused kid trying to fit in with American culture by adopting the religion of my classmates.

That is what some people might assume and I understand why they might assume it but it was not true.

I was not running away from something.

I was being pulled towards something.

And those two things feel completely different from the inside.

Running away comes from pain.

Running away comes from rejection and wanting to escape.

What I was experiencing was not escape.

It was attraction.

It was the way you feel when something you have always been looking for without knowing you were looking for it starts to come into focus.

The closer it gets, the more you recognize it.

And the recognition feels like remembering something you had somehow forgotten even though you are sure you have never known it before.

It feels like home in a place you have never been.

That is what finding Jesus felt like to me.

And it started here in these early years in a classroom in Columbus in a house that smelled like cooking and had a cross on the main wall in the living room of a grandmother who loved him and was not ashamed to say so.

It started with destiny.

It started with her family.

It started with a story about a Friday afternoon 2,000 years ago and a man who forgave from a cross.

That is where it started.

I want to tell you about the first time I held a Bible.

I was 10 years old.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I was at Destiny’s house after school.

We had been doing homework at the kitchen table, and at some point, Destiny had gotten up to get us something to drink, and I was sitting there alone at the table.

And there was a Bible on the counter nearby, not hidden, not displayed dramatically, just sitting there the way a book sits in a house, where it belongs naturally, like it had always been there and would always be there.

It was well used.

The cover was slightly worn at the corners.

There were pages that had things underlined in them.

Someone had loved this book.

You could tell by looking at it that someone had spent real time with it.

I reached over and picked it up.

I did not have a plan.

I was not making a decision.

I just picked it up the way you pick up something that is within reach when your hands are idle.

I held it for a moment.

It was heavier than I expected.

I opened it to a random page somewhere in the middle, and the words I saw were from the book of Psalms, though I did not know at the time that it was called Psalms.

I read a few lines.

They were about God being a shelter, about finding refuge under God’s protection, about not being afraid.

The language was plain and direct and the feeling behind the words was immediate.

The way certain music reaches you before your mind has caught up with the notes.

I read a bit more.

I turned a few pages.

I was not reading carefully or systematically.

I was just grazing moving through it the way you move through something new that you are trying to get a feel for.

And then Destiny came back into the kitchen and saw me with it.

And she did not make it strange.

She just sat down and said something like, “Do you want to read it properly sometime”?

I can show you where to start.

I said yes.

Before I had fully thought about whether I meant it, she showed me the Gospel of John.

She said her Sunday school teacher had told her that if someone wanted to understand who Jesus was, John was the place to start.

She found the first chapter and handed the Bible back to me.

I read the opening lines right there at the kitchen table.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

I did not fully understand what that meant, but something about those lines arrested me.

There was a weight in them, a density, like they were carrying more than they appeared to be carrying on the surface.

Like if you pressed on them, more would come out.

I asked Destiny if I could borrow the Bible to take home.

She looked at me for a moment and I could see her thinking, not calculating or scheming, just thinking, processing what I was asking in the context of knowing me and knowing my family.

And then she said she thought it might be better if we read it together here at her house.

She was not being unkind.

She was being practical in the way that only a true friend can be practical about your situation without making you feel small for it.

She understood that my home was not a place where a Bible appearing in my bag was going to be a neutral event.

She was protecting me.

So that became our arrangement.

A few times a week when I came to her house after school, we would sit together and read.

She would explain things she knew when neither of us understood something.

Sometimes her mother would explain or Grandma May, who seemed to know the Bible the way she knew her own address with no effort, completely from memory and familiarity.

I read slowly.

I was not rushing.

Every few verses I would have to stop and sit with what I had just read because the reading kept doing something to me and I needed to let it do what it was doing before I move forward.

The Gospel of John was not like anything I had read before.

The way Jesus spoke in it, the way he engaged with people, the woman at the well, the man who had been blind from birth, the way Jesus walked into those stories was not the way a distant authority figure walks into situations.

He was immediate.

He was present.

He noticed people.

He addressed what was actually wrong, not what was ostensibly wrong.

When the woman at the well came to draw water, he did not talk to her about water.

He talked to her about her life, about the specific shape of her particular loneliness.

And he did it without judgment, which was the thing that kept stopping me cold.

without judgment.

Over and over in those stories, he encountered people who by the standards of his own society and his own religion were people you were supposed to avoid or condemn or at minimum keep at a careful distance.

And he did not do any of those things.

He walked straight toward them.

He touched people that the religious rules said you were not supposed to touch.

He ate with people that proper religious society did not eat with.

And in every single case, the people he walked toward were changed by it.

Something happened to them in the encounter with him that did not happen in any other encounter in their lives.

I kept reading.

I could not stop reading.

Even when I was not at Destiny’s house, I was thinking about what I had read last and anticipating what I would read next.

I was thinking about the stories during school.

I was thinking about them at the dinner table with my family.

The stories were alive in my head in a way that was different from how I had experienced religious stories before.

They were not static.

They moved.

They breathed.

They had details in them that made them feel like things that had actually happened to real people in a real place.

The way John remembered the number of water pots at the wedding in Kaa.

The way he remembered that it was cold that night when Peter was warming himself by the fire.

These were the details of someone who was there and could not forget what they saw.

It was during this period of reading that I reached the crucifixion in John’s account.

I had heard it from Grandma May the year before, but reading it for myself was different.

Reading it slowly, following it step by step through John’s eyes, was different.

There was something about the pacing of it, the way it took as long as it took.

The way John did not rush through the hard parts.

The way he recorded what Jesus said from the cross, including the moment when he looked down at his mother standing there watching him die and he made arrangement for someone to take care of her.

He was on the cross and he looked at his mother and he was thinking about who was going to look after her after he was gone.

I had to stop reading at that point.

I sat with that image for a long time and then I read the resurrection.

I do not know how to explain to you what happened when I read the resurrection.

I do not have precise language for it.

I had heard that Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead.

I knew that this was the central claim of the faith.

But knowing it as information and reading it in the account of someone who was there, who walked into that tomb and saw it empty, who touched the folded cloths and processed the confusion of what that meant, and then the encounters, Mary in the garden thinking he was the gardener until he said her name.

The disciples behind locked doors, and suddenly he was there in the room with them.

Thomas, the one who said he would not believe unless he touched the wounds himself.

And then Jesus appearing specifically for Thomas and offering him exactly that.

Touch, see, believe.

Something happened in my chest when I read those resurrection accounts.

Something that I can only describe as a door opening.

Not a metaphorical door.

I mean, I physically felt something open.

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