I do not mean he became less serious or less responsible.

He is still the most responsible person I know.

I mean that something that had been held tightly in him released.

Like a fist that had been closed for a very long time finally opened.

He laughs more easily now.

He cries more easily now, too.

And from a man who never cried in front of us, this was initially startling and is now one of my favorite things about him.

He cries at church sometimes.

He cried at my baptism.

He cried at my brother’s school play.

He cries when he prays sometimes.

And his prayers are different now.

Not in form only but in texture.

They are the prayers of someone who believes he is talking to a person who is listening.

Not submitting reports to an authority who may or may not acknowledge receipt.

He reads his Bible the way he used to read engineering documents carefully marking things going back over sections cross referencing.

He has become in the two years since his conversion a deeply serious student of the faith.

He leads our family in devotions on Sunday mornings before church.

He prays over us individually.

He has become the spiritual leader of our house in a way that is new.

Because the spirituality he is leading from is not the spirituality of discipline and distance but of relationship and presence and the kind of love that runs toward you before you have done anything to deserve it.

Watching my father pray now compared to watching him pray as a child when I used to peek through the door of his room is like watching two different things.

Both were real, both were sincere, but one was a man maintaining a discipline and the other is a man talking to his father.

The difference is enormous.

My mother is flourishing in a way that is beautiful.

She found in faith what she had always had in character, warmth and hospitality and generosity, and discovered that these things she had always possessed were not just her personality.

They were her calling.

She has become involved in a ministry at our church that serves families in need.

She cooks for people.

She opens our home.

The same qualities that made people love her before have found a context that feels like their natural home.

She told me once that she had always known she was made for something, that she had always sense a purpose she could not name and that following Jesus had given her the name for it.

I believe her.

I can see it in how she moves through her days.

Let me tell you about my faith now.

at 13 years old.

Not the history of it.

I have told you that in detail, but what it looks like on a regular Tuesday, what it is made of in the ordinary texture of my life.

I wake up in the morning and I talk to Jesus before I do anything else.

Not a long formal prayer, just a conversation.

Sometimes it is short.

Sometimes if I am worried about something, it goes longer.

I tell him what is on my mind.

I tell him what I am nervous about.

Sometimes I just say good morning and thank you.

It is the most natural thing in my day.

More natural than breakfast.

I read my Bible not every single day without exception because I am going to be honest with you.

I am 13 and there are days when I am running late or I am tired or I am distracted and I do not read as I intended.

But most days and when I read, I am still experiencing what I experienced the first time.

That the words are alive.

That they keep giving.

That no matter how many times I have read a passage, there is something in it that I have not seen before.

I do not know how to explain that except to say it is one of the clearest signs to me that this book is not an ordinary book.

I go to church and I genuinely love it.

Not in the way I am supposed to love it or have been told to love it.

I genuinely look forward to Sunday.

The music does something to me that nothing else does.

The community of people around me knowing they are there because of the same thing, the same Jesus, the same encounter with the same grace makes me feel less alone in a way that is hard to describe but very real to me.

I also struggle, I want to say that clearly.

I struggle with impatience.

I struggle with my brother sometimes who can be very annoying in the specific way that 11year-old brothers are designed to be annoying.

I struggle with pressure at school.

I struggle sometimes with the feeling of being in between two worlds.

Not quite fully American in the way some of my classmates are American.

Not quite fully part of the Middle Eastern culture.

my parents came from and now also Christian in a way that does not fit neatly into the category most people put Jordanian girls in when they hear about your family.

I am always slightly between things.

I have made peace with that.

I actually think it is a gift.

Being between things gives you a view that people who only stand in one place do not have.

I want to talk about my classmates and my generation for a moment because I think about this a lot.

I am 13.

Most of the people I know my age are not thinking seriously about God.

And I understand that I was not always thinking seriously about God either.

And I had more early exposure to these questions than most of my classmates did.

I understand that being young in this cultural moment means being surrounded by things that are much louder and more immediately engaging than questions about eternity and meaning and who Jesus is.

I understand that these questions can feel abstract and old and irrelevant to a life that is full of school and friendships and social pressure and all the noise of being 13 in the 21st century.

I want to say something to people my age and I want to say it plainly because I think plain is the only way to say it.

I know what peace feels like.

Not the absence of difficulty, not the temporary relief that comes from a good day or a good song or a moment of feeling liked and included.

I mean the deep structural underneath everything piece that does not move when things get hard.

I know what it feels like to be fully known and fully loved at the same time.

I know what it feels like to have a real relationship with a real god who is not a set of rules or a distant authority, but a person who knows your name and knows your history and knows all the embarrassing details of who you are and loves you anyway.

I found that at 10 years old in a kitchen in Columbus, I did not have to wait until I was grown.

I did not have to earn it.

I did not have to have my life figured out.

I just had to be honest enough to say I believe and to mean it.

And if a Muslim girl from a Muslim home can find that, if a little girl whose first language of faith was Arabic and whose God was presented to her as distant and great and separate could encounter the close God, the running god, the God who says, “Come”.

Then I genuinely do not believe there is anyone who is too far.

I do not believe there is a background that is too different or a history that is too complicated or a sin that is too heavy.

I do not believe there is a category of person to whom Jesus says no actually you are outside the range of what I came for.

He came for everyone.

He died for everyone.

He rose for everyone.

I know that is a large claim.

I know that many people will read it and feel skeptical or challenged or even offended.

I am not asking you to feel nothing about it.

I am asking you to be as honest as I was.

I am asking you to pick up the book and read it.

Not to be converted, but to understand.

And let what is in it do what it does.

Let the stories be what they are.

Let Jesus be who he is in those pages and then make your decision from a place of real encounter, not secondhand information.

I want to speak directly to some people now, different people because I think this story touches different people in different ways and I want to speak to each of them if I can to the Muslim person who is reading this and feeling some form of recognition.

I know this is complicated.

I know the web of identity and family and culture and community that this faith is woven into.

I know that considering Jesus is not a simple intellectual exercise for you.

It is a social and familial and cultural upheaval that carries real cost.

I know that better than most people who have never lived inside that web.

I am not asking you to leave your family.

I am not asking you to abandon your culture or your heritage or your community.

I am asking you to consider that the God you are seeking is perhaps not as far as you have been told.

I am asking you to consider that there might be a bridge between the sincerity of what you believe and the fullness of what you’re looking for.

Jesus does not come to take from you.

He comes to complete.

He comes to fill what is still empty.

He comes to close the distance.

Consider him not from the outside, from the inside.

Read the Gospels.

Read them the way you would want someone to read the Quran with respect and genuine attention and the willingness to let the words be what they are.

And ask God, whatever name you call God by, ask God to show you what is true.

If you ask that sincerely, I believe with everything in me that you will be answered to the Christian person who is reading this and perhaps has been a Christian for so long that some of the aliveness has gone out of it.

I want to say to you with all the gentleness I have, the Jesus in these pages is not a tradition.

He is not a background.

He is not the God of your childhood that you have filed away under familiar.

He is alive.

The same Jesus who found a little Muslim girl in a kitchen in Ohio is the same Jesus who found you wherever he found you.

He has not gone anywhere.

The aliveness that first gripped you is still there.

It did not expire.

If you have drifted, if the piece has gotten buried under the routine.

If you have been going through the motions and trying not to examine too closely the feeling that something important has gone quiet in you.

I want to tell you what I know at 13 years old from the only experience I have which is short but which is real.

He’s still close.

He has not moved.

The door is still open.

You do not have to perform a dramatic return.

You just have to start talking to him again honestly.

Wherever you are with whatever you have, he will meet you there.

He always meets you there.

to the person who does not believe in God at all or who has looked at Christianity specifically and found it wanting who has heard the arguments and weighed the evidence and concluded that there is nothing there.

I want to say something to you too not to argue with you because I am 13 years old and I am not equipped to win a theological argument with a serious skeptic and I know that.

But I want to say this.

I was not argued into faith.

No one sat me down and dismantled my objections and rebuilt my worldview on Christian premises.

I was encountered.

I was touched by something that had no other explanation.

I felt the presence of someone real in ways that I could not manufacture or explain away.

I am not asking you to take my experience as evidence.

I am not asking you to believe because I believe.

I am asking you to consider the possibility that the absence of an encounter is not the same as the absence of someone to encounter.

And I am asking you to be willing, just willing to say the most honest prayer you have ever prayed, which might just be, “If you are real, show me”.

And then to mean it.

I cannot promise you what will happen after that.

I can only tell you what happened to me and what happened to a Muslim girl who asked a question like that and could not stop following the answer wherever it led.

I am almost at the end of my story and there are two more things I want to say.

The first is about my name Amira.

It is an Arabic name.

It means princess.

My father chose it because he wanted his daughter to carry something beautiful from his culture.

Something that meant she was valued, treasured, set apart.

I have never changed my name and I never will.

Not because I am holding on to an identity that conflicts with my faith, but because there is no conflict.

My name is Arabic.

My heritage is Jordanian.

The food I love most is my mother’s cooking.

I know Arabic words that I carry inside me from childhood like small warm stones.

These things are not cancelled by Jesus.

They are not erased by the cross.

God did not find me and then ask me to become a different ethnicity.

He found a mirror.

He called a mirror.

He loved a mirror as she was as she is.

Your background is not a barrier.

Your culture is not a wall.

Your heritage is not a disqualification.

You are not required to become something.

You are not in order to be received.

You are received as you are.

That is the whole point of the gospel.

That is what the running father means.

He ran toward the son who was still wearing the clothes from the pig pen.

He did not make him change first.

The second thing I want to say is to my parents.

Mom and dad, if you ever read this, I want you to know that becoming a Christian was not a rejection of you.

It was never a rejection of you.

It was the most honest thing I knew how to do.

And it led to the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, which is you, both of you, walking into that church that Sunday, standing at that altar coming up out of that water.

I will see those images for the rest of my life.

I will see them and they will never stop making me cry and they will never stop making me grateful.

I did not lead you to Jesus.

Jesus led you to Jesus and I was just the small thing he used to begin the process but I was there.

I got to be there and that is a gift I do not have words big enough to hold.

My name is Amira Hassan.

I am 13 years old.

I was born in Columbus, Ohio to a Muslim family from Jordan.

I found Jesus at a kitchen table when I was 10 in a borrowed Bible in the words of a story that is 2,000 years old and has not stopped being alive for a single day of those 2,000 years.

My mother found him in her kitchen late at night in the story of a father who ran.

My father found him in the pages of a book he had been reading, looking for the place it fell apart and instead found the thing that holds everything together.

We are a family who came from one faith and found in the middle of our ordinary American life.

A God who was not waiting for us to come to him, but who was already coming toward us, who had always been coming toward us.

If you are reading this and you are still on the road, still far away, still in the pig pen or the desert or wherever, your version of far from home feels like, I want you to know something.

There is a figure at the end of the road.

He has been there the whole time.

And when you are still a long way off, he will see you and he will run.

Come home.

Come to Jesus.

He has been looking for you.

« Prev