My name is Grace, but that was not always my name. I was born Sak Sakane, daughter of Imam Muhammad Hassan in a city in Iran that I cannot name for reasons you will understand as my story unfolds.

When I tell people I was declared dead by my own family, they look at me with confusion and disbelief.

How can someone be declared dead when they are still breathing, still walking, still living?

But this is my story. This is what happened when I chose to follow Jesus Christ.

Let me take you back to the beginning to the girl I used to be.

My earliest memories are filled with the sound of the call to prayer.

Five times a day, every day, the adhan would echo through our neighborhood from the speakers of our mosque.

My father’s voice was the one calling the faithful to prayer. Even now, years later, and thousands of miles away, I can still hear it in my mind.

It was a beautiful voice, rich and deep, carrying across the rooftops and narrow streets of our city.

As a little girl, I felt pride when I heard it. That was my father.

That was my baba. Our home was attached to the mosque. We lived in rooms that shared a wall with the place where hundreds came to pray every Friday.

I grew up with the smell of old carpets and rose water, with the sound of men’s voices reciting the Quran, with the sight of shoes lined up at the entrance, dusty from the streets outside.

This was my whole world. My father was not just any imam. He was respected, even feared.

People came to him with their problems, their questions, their disputes. He would sit in his study surrounded by books, his fingers stained with ink, his prayer beads always in his hand.

I remember watching him from the doorway, too afraid to interrupt, waiting for him to notice me.

Sometimes he would smile and call me to sit with him. Other times he would wave me away without looking up.

I learned quickly to read his moods, to know when to approach and when to disappear.

He was a man who lived and breathed Islam. Everything in our home revolved around faith, around rules, around what was halal and what was haram.

My mother covered completely in black whenever she left the house. My older sisters did the same once they reached the age of nine.

I knew that would be my future, too. There was never any question about it.

My mother was gentle and quiet. She moved through our home like a shadow.

Always serving, always cooking, always cleaning. I rarely saw her sit down. I remember her hands most of all, always busy, always working.

She would braid my hair in the mornings before school, her fingers quick and efficient.

She would kiss the top of my head when she was done. A small gesture of affection in a home where open displays of love were rare.

I loved my mother deeply, but I also saw her sadness. It lived in her eyes, in the way her shoulders curved forward, in the silences that stretched between her words.

She had married my father when she was 15. She never told me this directly, but I heard it from my aunts.

She had no choice in the matter. Her father had arranged it and she had obeyed.

This was the way things were done. This was what good Muslim girls did. Our family had privilege in our community.

People respected us or at least they respected my father. But with that respect came pressure, especially for us children.

We were always being watched, always held up as examples. My brothers had to be the most pious, most studious boys in the mosque.

My sisters had to be the most modest, most obedient girls. And I, the youngest daughter, had to be perfect.

I learned to read the Quran before I could fully understand Farsy. My father insisted on it.

I would sit with him in the evenings, struggling over the Arabic words, his hand ready to strike the table when I made a mistake.

He never hit me, but the sound of his hand slamming down was enough. I learned to be afraid of disappointing him.

When I turned nine, everything changed. This was the age when I had to start covering my hair.

When I had to begin praying five times a day, when I was no longer allowed to play freely with boys in the neighborhood.

I remember the day my mother wrapped the hijab around my head for the first time.

She adjusted it carefully, tucking away every strand of hair. She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and I did not understand why she was crying.

Now I think I do. She was watching me enter the cage she had lived in her whole life.

The women’s section of our mosque was separated from the men by a tall wooden partition.

We could hear the prayers, hear my father’s voice leading the men, but we could not see them.

We prayed in our own space, away from the eyes of men, away from the main hall.

I used to peek through the cracks in the wood, watching the men bow and prostrate in neat rows.

I wondered why we had to be separated. I wondered why their prayers seemed more important than ours.

But I never asked these questions aloud. School was my escape. Even though it was a strict Islamic school where we learned more about the Quran than anything else, but I loved learning.

I was good at mathematics and science. I would lose myself in problems and equations, in the logic of numbers that always added up correctly, unlike the confusing rules that governed my life at home.

My teachers noticed. They said I was bright, that I had potential. This pleased my father, but it also made him nervous.

A girl who was too educated might become difficult to marry off. By the time I was a teenager, the questions I had been swallowing my whole life began to push harder against my throat.

I looked around at the women in my life and saw their limited futures. My oldest sister had been married at 17 to a man she barely knew.

She seemed to disappear into his household, her light dimming with each passing year. My second sister was engaged to a cousin.

She cried herself to sleep every night for a month after the arrangement was made.

But by morning, she would put on a smile and say it was Allah’s will.

I began to notice other things, too. A neighbor woman came to our door one evening, her face bruised, her lip bleeding.

She begged my father to intervene with her husband. I watched from behind my mother as my father listened to her story.

Her husband had beaten her because dinner was not ready when he came home. My father told her to be more obedient, to try harder to please her husband.

He quoted verses about wives submitting to their husbands. He sent her back home.

I never forgot the look on her face as she walked away. Another time, I overheard my father and his colleagues discussing a case.

A young woman in our city had been caught with a boyfriend. They were not married, and they had been seen together in public.

The religious council was deciding her punishment. I listened in horror as these men, these supposedly holy men, discussed lashing [music] her in public.

No one mentioned punishing the young man. It was her fault. They said she had tempted him.

She had brought shame on her family. These moments collected inside me like stones, weighing me down.

But I was terrified of my own thoughts. To question Islam was to question everything.

It was to risk not just punishment in this life, but eternal damnation in the next.

I prayed harder, trying to push away my doubts. I memorized more Quran, hoping that submission would bring peace, but the questions would not leave me alone.

My father was not cruel in the way some men were. He did not beat us.

He provided well for our family, but there was a harshness to him, a rigidity that allowed no room for doubt or discussion.

His word was law in our home, and his word was always backed by religion.

If I asked why I could not do something, the answer was always the same.

Because it is not permitted in Islam. Because it is haram. Because Allah has commanded it.

There was no space for my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own desires. I watched my mother serve my father and my brothers first at every meal, eating only after they were satisfied.

I watched her ask permission to visit her own mother. I watched her shrink herself to fit into the small space she was allowed to occupy.

And I knew with a certainty that made me physically sick that this was my future, too.

I would be married off to a man of my father’s choosing. I would spend my life serving him, bearing his children, obeying his commands.

My education, my dreams, my own self would be buried under the weight of duty and religious obligation.

But then something unexpected happened. Something that would change the course of my entire life.

I was 17 years old in my last year of secondary school when my mathematics teacher called me aside one day.

She told me about a scholarship program for international students. Several universities in Europe and America were offering full scholarships to talented students from Iran.

She thought I should apply. She said I was smart enough that I should not waste my potential.

I laughed at her. The idea was absurd. My father would never allow it. Girls from our family did not go abroad to study.

Girls from our family got married and had children. That was our purpose, our path.

But my teacher was persistent. She gave me the application forms. She told me to at least try to at least ask my father.

I carried those papers in my school bag for 2 weeks, terrified to show them to anyone.

But finally, I gathered my courage and brought them to my father. I expected him to dismiss me immediately to be angry that I had even considered such a thing.

But to my shock, he did not. He took the papers from my hand and studied them carefully.

His expression was unreadable. For three days, he said nothing about it. Then one evening after prayers, [music] he called me into his study.

He told me that he had been thinking and praying about this opportunity. He said that it could bring honor to our family to have a daughter educated at a Western university would show that Muslim women could excel in modern fields while maintaining their faith and modesty.

I would be an example, an ambassador for Islam in a foreign land. But there were conditions, many conditions.

I would have to promise to wear proper hijab at all times. I would have to pray five times a day without fail.

I would have to avoid mixing freely with men. I would have to call home regularly and send videos to prove I was upholding my Islamic duties.

I would have to remember that I was representing not just our family but our religion, our community, our way of life.

Any failure would bring unbearable shame. I agreed to everything. I would have agreed to anything.

This was my chance, perhaps my only chance to experience something beyond the narrow walls of the life I had known.

I worked on my application with fierce determination. I studied harder than I had ever studied.

And several months later, when the acceptance letter came, when I learned that I had won a full scholarship to study engineering at a university in America, I felt something I had rarely felt before, hope.

The months before my departure were a blur of preparation and lectures. My father drilled into me constantly the rules I had to follow, the reputation I had to maintain.

He made me memorize additional prayers. He gave me books of Islamic law to take with me.

He reminded me again and again that the West was full of corruption, of temptation, of people who would try to lead me astray from the straight path.

I had to be vigilant. I had to be strong. My mother cried often during those months.

She would hold me tightly when my father was not around, as if she was already grieving my absence.

She packed my bags with care, including her own prayer rug, her own copy of the Quran.

She whispered blessings over me in the darkness of our shared room. Part of me wondered if she was crying, not just because I was leaving, but because she knew I was escaping something she never could.

My sisters were married by then, living in their husband’s homes, already heavy with their first pregnancies.

They looked at me with what I can only describe as envy mixed with fear.

I was doing something they could never do, going somewhere they could never go. [music] But they also worried for me.

The world outside was dangerous. They said I might lose my faith, lose my way.

I assured them I would not. [music] I believed it myself. Then the day I left for America.

My father drove me to the airport. The whole family came. My mother, my brothers, my sisters with their new husbands.

At the departure gate, my father placed both hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

He reminded me one final time of my duty, my obligation, the trust he was placing [music] in me.

He told me that the honor of our family rested on my shoulders. He said that if I shamed them, there would be no forgiveness, no return.

I promised him everything he wanted to hear. I kissed his hand in respect, the way I had been taught.

I embraced my mother, feeling her tears wet against my face. And then I walked through those gates, my heart pounding with a mixture of excitement and terror.

I did not look back. I could not. If I had looked back, I might have seen the future in their faces.

I might have known that this departure was the beginning of the end of everything I had ever known.

The flight was long, endless. I sat pressed against the window, my hijab tight around my face, my hands clutching the armrests.

I had never been on a plane before. Every bit of turbulence made me think we would crash, that Allah was punishing me for my pride in leaving.

But we landed safely. And when I stepped out into the American airport, into the chaos and noise and overwhelming foreignness of it all, I felt like I had stepped onto another planet.

Everything was different. The way people dressed, the way they moved, the way they spoke.

Women walked around in clothes that would have gotten them arrested back home. Men and women touched each other freely, holding hands, embracing.

No one seemed to care about modesty, about separation, about the rules that had governed every moment of my life.

I pulled my hijab tighter and kept my eyes down, terrified and fascinated at the same time.

The university arranged for someone to pick me up and take me to my dormatory.

I was assigned a roommate, an American girl with blonde hair and a bright smile.

She tried to be friendly, tried to help me settle in, but I barely spoke to her.

I was afraid of seeing something wrong, of being too friendly with someone who did not share my faith.

That first night, alone in my narrow bed in a room that smelled unfamiliar in a country where I knew no one, [music] I cried.

I called home and heard my mother’s voice and cried harder. My father asked if I had prayed.

I told him yes. He told me to be strong to remember who I was.

I tried. I really tried. I found the other Muslim students on campus. Mostly international students from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt.

[music] We formed our own small community separate from the wider university life. We prayed together in a small room that had been designated for Muslim students.

We ate halal food together. We reminded each other to stay faithful, to not be influenced by the corruption around us.

This felt safe. This felt familiar. But I was lonely, deeply, achingly lonely. The other Muslim students were kind, but they kept to themselves, always watching each other, making sure no one strayed too far from acceptable behavior.

There was no real freedom even in our small group. We were all still living under the same rules, the same fears, just in a different location.

And I was still carrying the weight of my father’s expectations, his warnings, his authority, even from thousands of miles away.

I video called home every week. My father would question me. Was I praying? Was I wearing proper hijab?

Was I avoiding boys? Was I maintaining my studies? Had anyone tried to corrupt me?

I learned to show him exactly what he wanted to see. I would position the camera so he could see my hijab, my Quran open on my desk, my modest clothing.

I would recite my prayers for him. I would assure him that I was being good, being faithful, being the daughter he expected me to be.

But something was happening inside me. Slowly, quietly, like ice beginning to crack under the weight of warming water, I was seeing a different world.

I was meeting people who were kind and generous without being Muslim. I had professors who were brilliant and ethical without following any religion at all.

I saw women who were respected, who led, who spoke their minds without fear. I saw relationships based on love and choice, not arrangement and obligation.

And late at night, when my roommate was asleep and the campus was quiet, the questions I had buried for so many years began to surface again, stronger now, more insistent.

I would lie awake staring at the ceiling, my mind spinning with doubts I could not silence.

Is this really the only truth? Is this really what God wants? Why does faith have to feel like a prison?

Why am I so afraid all the time? I had no answers, only questions. Questions that grew louder with each passing day, each new experience, each moment of seeing life live differently than everything I had been taught.

I did not know it then, but I was standing at the edge of a cliff and I was about to jump.

Winter came to the American campus, bringing with it a cold I had never experienced before.

Where I came from, winters were mild, rainy, but not freezing. Here, the cold bit through my clothes, and turned my breath into white clouds.

I would wrap my hijab tighter, layer sweaters under my coat, and hurry between buildings with my head down against the wind.

The international student office gave me a heavier coat, gloves, and a scarf. I was grateful, but also overwhelmed by how much I did not know about surviving in this place.

My engineering courses were difficult, much harder than I had expected. I spent long hours in the library trying to keep up with classwork, trying to understand lectures given in English that was too fast for me to fully follow.

[music] My professors were patient, but I could see the other students moving ahead while I struggled with both the language and the concepts.

I was determined not to fail. Failure would mean going home, and going home would mean marriage, the end of education, the end of everything I had hoped to become.

The library became my refuge. It was warm, quiet, and open late into the night.

I would find a corner table on the third floor where few people came, spread out my textbooks and notebooks, and work until my eyes burned with exhaustion.

It was during one of these late nights in the middle of my second semester that my life changed forever.

I had been studying for hours and my mind was tired. [music] I needed a break from differential equations and physics problems.

I stood up to stretch, to walk around, to rest my brain for a few minutes.

The third floor of the library had rows and rows of books, most of which I had never explored.

I wandered between the shelves, running my fingers along the spines, reading title without really seeing them.

Then I found myself in a section I had not noticed before. Religious studies. There were books about Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and many about Islam.

I stopped to look at the Islamic books, curious to see what Americans wrote about my religion.

Some of the titles made me uncomfortable. Critical analyses of Islamic history and theology. I moved away quickly, not wanting to read anything that might challenge what I had been [music] taught.

But as I turned to leave that section, something caught my eye. On a lower shelf, tucked between two thick Islamic texts, was a small book with a worn cover.

It was a New Testament, [music] the Bible of Christians. I stared at it for a long moment, my heart suddenly beating faster.

I knew I should not touch it. I had been taught my whole life that the Bible was corrupted, changed, not the true word of God.

Christians were people of the book, yes, but they had strayed from the truth. They had corrupted the message.

They believed in three gods. They worshiped a man. They had lost their way. But my hand reached out anyway.

I looked around to make sure no one was watching. The floor was empty, silent, except for the hum of the heating system.

I pulled the book from the shelf. It was small, pocket-sized, with thin pages like the Quran.

The cover was dark blue and worn at the edges, as if many hands had held it before mine.

I opened it randomly, and my eyes fell on words highlighted in faded yellow. My English was not perfect, but I could read well enough.

The word spoke about loving your enemies, about praying for those who hurt you, about blessing those who curse you.

I read the passage twice, then three times. These words were attributed to Jesus, or as I knew him, Isa, but they were different from what I expected.

They were gentle, radical, strange. I should have put the book back. I should have walked away.

But instead, I looked around once more. And then I slipped the small New Testament into my backpack.

My hands were shaking. I felt like I was stealing, though the book was old and seemed forgotten.

I felt like I was committing a terrible sin. But I could not put it back.

Something in those few lines had hooked to my heart, and I needed to read more.

That night in my dorm room, I waited until my roommate was asleep. Then I took the book out and hid under my blanket with my phone’s flashlight.

I felt ridiculous, like a child sneaking candy, but I was terrified of being seen.

What if another Muslim student came by? What if someone reported me to my father?

But my fear could not stop my curiosity. I started reading from the beginning from the Gospel of Matthew.

The words were simple but powerful. I read about Jesus being born, about wise men following a star, about a king trying to kill him.

I read about Jesus growing up, being baptized, going into the desert. And then I reached the sermon on the mount.

I had to stop reading multiple times because tears were filling my eyes and I could not see the words clearly.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The biatitudes went against everything I understood about strength and power.

They lifted up the weak, the suffering, the gentle. They promised that the last would be first, that the humble would be exalted.

I had never read anything like this. And then came the words about loving your enemies, about turning the other cheek, about going the extra mile, about giving to those who ask, about not judging others, about treating people the way you want to be treated.

I sat there in the darkness under my blanket, tears running down my face, my heart feeling like it was breaking and mending at the same time.

This Jesus was not the prophet I had learned about in Islam. This was someone different.

Someone whose words reached into the deepest parts of me and touched places I did not know existed.

Someone who spoke with an authority that was not harsh or dominating, but gentle and compelling.

Someone who seemed to see me, understand me, offer me something I did not even know I was looking for.

I read until my phone battery was nearly dead, until my eyes could barely stay open.

Then I hid the book at the bottom of my backpack and tried to sleep.

But sleep would not come. My mind was racing. What was I doing? Why was I reading this book?

Why did these words affect me so deeply? [music] I prayed to Allah, asking for guidance, asking for forgiveness if I was doing something wrong.

But even as I prayed, I knew I would read more. I had to. Over the following weeks, I read the New Testament in secret every chance I got.

In the bathroom stalls between classes, in my bed late at night, in corners of the library where no one would see me, I devoured the words like someone starving.

[music] I read about Jesus healing the sick, touching the untouchables, eating with sinners. I read about how he treated women, actually talked to them, taught them, respected them as equal human beings worthy of God’s attention.

The story of the woman at the well moved me deeply. Jesus spoke to her, a Samaritan woman with a complicated past and offered her living water.

He did not condemn her. He saw her worth. I read about the woman caught in adultery.

The men who brought her to Jesus wanted to stone her, wanted to kill her for her sin.

Jesus simply said, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” They all walked away.

He told her to go and sin no more, but he did not condemn her.

Where was the harshness? Where was the punishment? Where was the public shaming I had seen in my own community?

The more I read, the more confused I became. This Jesus loved people, genuinely loved them.

He touched lepers who were considered unclean. He blessed children. He wept when his friend died.

He forgave people who did not deserve forgiveness. He spoke about God as a loving father, not as a distant judge waiting to punish every mistake.

This was so different from everything I knew. But the confusion came with fear. Deep overwhelming fear.

I was reading a corrupted book. I was allowing Christian ideas into my mind. I was committing apostasy even by being curious about these things.

The punishment for apostasy in Islam was death. I knew this. My father had taught me this.

If anyone found out what I was doing, I would be in terrible danger. Not just from the law back home, but from religious students, even here on campus.

I tried to stop. I would go days without opening the book, praying extra prayers, reading the Quran more intensely, trying to push away the thoughts and questions, but I kept coming back.

The words of Jesus kept calling to me. I could not escape them. They had planted something inside me that was growing despite my best efforts to kill it.

It was during this time that Sarah entered my life. She was in one of my engineering classes, a quiet girl with kind eyes and an easy smile.

She had tried to talk to me a few times before, but I had kept my distance, giving short answers, not encouraging friendship.

Muslims were not supposed to be too close with non-Muslims, especially Christians. We were supposed to be friendly but separate.

But Sarah was persistent in the gentlest way. She would sit near me in class.

She would ask if I understood the homework. She would offer to study together. At first, I always refused.

But eventually, after she had helped explain a particularly difficult concept to me after class one day, I said yes to studying together.

It seemed harmless. It was just schoolwork. We met in the library at one of the group study tables.

Sarah was patient and kind, helping me understand things I had struggled with, never making me feel stupid for asking basic questions.

After a few study sessions, she started asking me about my life, where I came from, what it was like growing up in Iran.

I gave careful answers, revealing little, keeping my guard up, but she listened in a way that made me want to talk more.

She seemed genuinely interested, not in a nosy way, but in a way that made me feel seen.

One day after we had finished studying, she asked me if I would want to come to a campus fellowship meeting with her, a Christian fellowship.

My immediate response was, “No, absolutely not. I could not go to a Christian gathering.

What would people think? What if someone saw me? What if word got back to my family?”

But Sarah did not push. She simply said that if I ever changed my mind, I would be welcome.

She said it was just students gathering to talk, sing, and support each other. She said I did not have to believe anything.

I could just come and see. Then she changed the subject and we talked about other things.

I thought about her invitation constantly. Part of me was horrified that I was even considering it.

But another part of me, the part that had been reading the New Testament in secret, the part that was full of questions and doubts, that part was desperately curious.

What did Christians actually believe? What were their gatherings like? I had been told my whole life that Christians were lost, misguided, maybe even dangerous.

But Sarah did not seem lost. She seemed to have something I did not have.

Peace, maybe, [music] joy, something I could not name, but desperately wanted. It took me 3 weeks to gather the courage.

Sarah had mentioned the fellowship meeting times and location, but she had not brought it up again.

One Thursday evening, instead of going to my dorm after my last class, I found myself walking toward the campus center where the Christian Fellowship met.

My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might explode. I must have walked past the door five times before I finally opened it.

The room was not what I expected. It was just a regular classroom with chairs arranged in a circle.

There were maybe 20 students there talking and laughing. Sarah saw me immediately and her face lit up with the most genuine smile.

She came over and hugged me which made me uncomfortable, but I did not pull away.

She introduced me to a few other students who all welcomed me warmly. No one asked why I was wearing hijab.

No one asked about my religion. They just welcomed me like I belong there. We sat down and someone started playing guitar.

They sang songs, simple songs about God’s love, about Jesus, about grace and mercy. I did not sing.

I just sat there watching, listening, feeling completely out of place, but also strangely drawn to what was happening.

There was something in the atmosphere, something I could not explain. It felt light, free, joyful, so different from the heavy rule focused religious gatherings I was used to.

After the singing, some students shared what was happening in their lives. One girl talked about struggling with anxiety and asked for prayer.

Another talked about his family problems. A guy shared how God had helped him overcome an addiction.

They were so honest, so vulnerable with each other. They talked about their weaknesses and failures without shame.

They talked about God like he was someone close to them, someone who cared about their daily struggles.

This was completely foreign to me. Then there was a short teaching. A student leader talked about a passage from the Bible, something about God’s unfailing love.

He talked about how nothing we do can make God love us more or less.

How God’s love is not based on our performance or our ability to follow rules perfectly.

How Jesus came because we could not save ourselves. How grace means undeserved favor. I sat there feeling like he was speaking directly to me like these words were meant for my ears.

My whole life had been about trying to be good enough, trying to follow enough rules, trying to avoid punishment.

Prayer was obligation. Fasting was duty. Everything was about earning God’s favor, about hoping your good deeds outweighed your bad ones on judgment day.

But this message was different. It said, “God loved me already, not because of what I did or did not do, but simply because he made me.

Because Jesus died for me. Because grace was a gift.” I left that meeting in a days.

I walked back to my dorm, barely seeing where I was going, my mind spinning with everything I had heard.

It was too much, too different, too good to be true, maybe. But I could not stop thinking about it.

About grace, about God as a loving father instead of a stern judge, about Jesus dying on a cross because of love, not because of obligation.

I started going to more meetings. I told no one. I was living a double life now.

During the day, I was the modest Muslim girl studying engineering. I video called my family and showed them my hijab and my prayers.

I avoided anything that would make them suspicious. But in secret, I was reading the Bible.

I was going to Christian fellowship. I was asking questions that terrified me. Sarah and some of the other Christian students began meeting with me separately to answer my questions.

I had so many questions about the Trinity. How could God be three but also one?

About Jesus being God? How was that possible? About salvation by grace instead of works.

About why Christians believe the Bible was true when I had been taught it was corrupted.

They never pressured me. [music] They just shared what they believed and why. And they always did it with gentleness and respect.

They gave me books to read. I hid them at the bottom of my closet.

They invited me to church. I was too afraid at first, but eventually I went, sitting in the very back row, ready to run if needed.

The church was nothing like the mosque. Men and women sat together. People raised their hands while singing.

They clapped. They smiled. [music] And when the pastor preached, he talked about a God who pursued people, who loved them relentlessly, who sent his son to die so they could be forgiven and free.

I wrestled with all of this for months. My mind and my heart were at war.

Everything I had been taught my whole life said this was wrong, dangerous, false. But everything I was experiencing, everything I was reading, everything I was feeling said, “This might be true.”

The most true thing I had ever encountered. Late one night, several months after I had first found that New Testament in the library, I reached a breaking point.

I was alone in my dorm room. My roommate had gone home for the weekend.

[music] I had been reading the book of John, reading about Jesus, saying he was the way, the truth, and the life.

I closed the book and fell to my knees beside my bed. I did not know how to pray anymore.

The ritual prayers I had said five times a day my whole life felt empty now.

So, I just spoke out loud into the darkness. I said that I did not know what was true anymore.

I said that I was confused and scared and tired. I said that if Jesus was real, if he really was who he claimed to be, I needed him to show me.

I needed proof. I needed peace. I needed something to make sense of the chaos in my heart and mind.

And then I said words I never thought I would say. I said that if Jesus was really the son of God, if he really died for me and rose again, if he really loved me the way the Bible said he did, [music] then I wanted to know him.

I wanted to follow him, even if it cost me everything. I did not hear a voice.

I did not see a vision. But something happened in that moment. A piece flooded into me that I cannot adequately describe.

It was like a weight I had been carrying my entire life was suddenly lifted.

It was like I had been drowning and someone had pulled me to the surface and I could finally breathe.

It was like coming home to a place I had never been but had always longed for.

I cried for a long time. I cried with relief and joy and also with grief because I knew even in that moment that this decision would cost me more than I could imagine.

I knew that following Jesus would mean losing my family. I knew it would mean being declared an apostate.

I knew it would mean danger and rejection and pain. But in that moment, none of that mattered because for the first time in my life, I felt truly free.

Several weeks later, after many conversations with Sarah and the pastor of the church, I was baptized.

It was done quietly in a small service with just a few people present. I had asked them not to make it public because I was afraid of who might find out.

As I went under the water and came up again, I felt like I was being born again.

The old Sakin, the Imam’s daughter who lived in fear and obligation. [music] She died in that water and someone new emerged, someone free, someone loved, someone who belonged to Jesus.

I knew I could not hide this forever. I knew that eventually my family would find out.

But for a while, I lived in this secret joy, learning what it meant to follow Jesus, discovering a relationship with God that was based on love rather than fear.

I was reading the Bible openly now, at least when I was alone. I was praying in a new way, talking to God like he was my father who actually wanted to hear from me.

I was learning hymns and worship songs. I was part of a community that felt like family.

But the double life was exhausting. Every video call home felt like a performance. Every time my father asked if I [music] was praying, I would say yes.

But I meant a different kind of prayer now. Every time my mother asked when I was coming home, my heart would sink because I knew I could never go back.

Not really. Not as the person I was becoming. I started having nightmares. Dreams where my father discovered my Bible and burned it.

Dreams where my family held a funeral for me. Dreams where I was back in Iran, trapped, unable to escape.

I would wake up in cold sweats, my heart racing, wondering how long I could keep this secret and what would happen when the truth finally came out.

That time was coming sooner than I knew. The foundation of my old life was cracking and soon it would shatter completely.

But I did not know that yet. For a brief season, I lived between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, carrying a secret that was both my greatest joy and my heaviest burden.

By my third year at university, I had become someone I barely recognized. On the outside, I still looked like the beautiful Muslim daughter my family expected me to be.

I wore my hijab in public. I avoided eating pork. I kept my room clean of any obvious Christian materials when I knew someone might visit.

I maintained the performance. But inside, everything had changed. I was a Christian now, though I could not say it out loud to most people.

I belonged to Jesus, though my family had no idea. [music] The exhaustion of living this double life was taking its toll.

I was constantly anxious, always looking over my shoulder, always worried about making a mistake that would expose my secret.

The Muslim student community on campus had started asking questions. Why did they not see me at Friday prayers anymore?

Why was I always making excuses not to join them for Islamic events? One girl asked me directly if I was still practicing, if America had changed me.

I gave vague answers about being busy with studies, about praying in my room. I could see the suspicion in her eyes.

My faith was growing despite the fear. The small church I attended had become my real family.

There was an older couple, Tom and Linda, who sort of adopted me. They would invite me to their home for dinner on Sundays.

Linda would cook meals that reminded me of home, trying to make me feel less alone.

They never pushed me, never demanded anything from me. They just loved me. It was a pure, uncomplicated love that expected nothing [music] in return.

I had never experienced anything like it. Tom and Linda knew my situation. They knew I was hiding my faith from my family.

They knew the danger I would be in if my secret was discovered. They prayed for me constantly.

They told me they would be there for me no matter what happened. Having them in my life gave me strength during the hardest moments when I felt like I could not carry the weight of my secret anymore.

I was also meeting regularly with a small group of other believers including Sarah and three other students.

We would study the Bible together, pray together, share our struggles. They were the only people in the world who knew the full truth about me.

With them, I could take off the mask. I could be honest about my fears and doubts.

I could ask questions without judgment. I could just be myself. It was during one of these small group meetings that I first learned about other Muslims who had converted to Christianity.

Sarah had found a documentary about believers from Iran and other Middle Eastern countries who had left Islam to follow Jesus.

We watched it together and I cried through the entire thing. These were people like me.

People who had asked the same questions, wrestled with the same doubts, made the same terrifying decision.

People who had lost everything but found it worth it. One man in the documentary said something that I wrote down and kept in my Bible.

He said that Jesus does not promise an easy life, but he promises a meaningful one.

He said that suffering for Christ was still better than comfort without him. Those words became like a anchor for me in the storm that was coming.

The calls home were getting harder. My mother had a way of sensing when something was wrong.

Mothers always do. She would ask me questions that seemed innocent but felt like traps.

Was I happy? Was I lonely? Had I met anyone special? The last question always made my stomach turn because I knew what she meant.

She meant had I met a nice Muslim boy. My family was starting to think about arranging my marriage.

I was getting to that age where I needed to be settled. My father had already mentioned a few potential matches.

Sons of his colleagues, respectable men from good families. He would describe them during our calls.

Their education, their piety, their prospects. He was proud that his educated daughter would bring honor to whichever family she joined.

He did not ask what I wanted. That was not how this worked. The thought of returning to Iran and being forced into marriage made me physically ill.

I could not do it. I would not do it. But how could I refuse without revealing why?

How could I tell my father that I could not marry a Muslim man because I was not Muslim anymore?

The impossibility of my situation pressed down on me like a physical weight. I started looking into options for staying in America after graduation.

Student visas were temporary. I would need either a work visa or some other legal way to remain.

The idea of seeking asylum crossed my mind, but the process was complicated and uncertain, and it felt so final.

Seeking asylum would mean officially breaking from my family, admitting that I could never go home.

I was not ready for that yet, even though I knew it was inevitable. Meanwhile, my faith continued to deepen.

I was reading the Bible every day now, hungrier for it than I had ever been for the Quran.

The words felt alive to me, personal, like God was speaking directly into my situation.

Passages about persecution and suffering took on new meaning. Verses about God being a father to the fatherless comforted me when I felt most alone.

The Psalms became my prayer book, giving me words when I had none of my own.

I was also learning to hear God’s voice in new ways. Not audibly, but in my spirit.

Little prompings, gentle guidance, a sense of peace about certain decisions. This was so different from the rigid rule following I had grown up with.

Christianity was about relationship, not just religion. It was about knowing God personally, not just knowing about him.

This still amazed me. But along with the growing faith came growing conviction about truth.

I could not pretend anymore that Islam and Christianity were just different paths to the same God.

They taught fundamentally different things about who God is, who Jesus is, how salvation works.

I had to choose and I had chosen Jesus. But that choice had consequences I was only beginning to understand.

The first real crack in my secret life came through social media. I had been very careful about my online presence, keeping my Facebook profile private, not posting anything that would reveal my new faith.

But one of my Christian friends posted a photo from a church event and I was in the background just barely visible but there another Muslim student from campus saw the photo and sent me a message.

She asked me directly, “Were you at a church?” My heart stopped when I read her message.

I tried to explain it away. I said a friend had invited me to see what it was like just out of curiosity.

I said I was studying comparative religion for a class. The lies came easily because I was so afraid.

She seemed to accept my explanation, but I could tell she did not fully believe me.

She said she was just concerned about me, that she would pray for me to stay on the straight path.

I deleted all my social media after that. It was too dangerous. But I knew the damage might already be done.

The Muslim student community was small and tightly connected. If she told others about her suspicions, word could travel.

Word could reach someone who knew my family. I started having anxiety attacks. My chest tightening until I could not breathe.

Panic flooding through me at random moments. Tom and Linda encouraged me to seek counseling through the university.

I started seeing a therapist who helped me process the enormous stress I was under.

She told me that living a double life was psychologically damaging, that eventually I would have to choose authenticity or I would break under the pressure.

I knew she was right, but I was not ready. Not yet. Graduation was approaching.

I had to make decisions about my future. My father expected me to return home after finishing my degree.

He had plans for me, a marriage arranged, a life mapped out, but I knew I could not go back.

I knew that returning to Iran as a Christian convert would be dangerous, possibly deadly.

Apostasy from Islam was not just a family matter. It was a legal matter. People had been imprisoned, executed for less.

I applied for job in America hoping to get sponsored for a work visa. I also quietly began gathering documents for an asylum application, though the thought of actually filing it terrified me.

Seeking asylum would mean publicly declaring that I feared persecution in my home country because of my religious conversion.

It would mean officially breaking from my family. It would mean no going back. My father started pressuring me to come home for a visit during the summer before my final year.

He said my grandmother was getting old and wanted to see me. He said the family missed me.

He said I had been gone too long and needed to reconnect with my roots.

Every conversation ended with him asking when I would book my ticket home. I made excuses.

I said I needed to stay for summer classes, for internship opportunities, for research projects, anything to avoid going back.

My mother started crying on the phone, saying she might not see me again before she died.

The guilt was crushing. These were my parents. They had raised me, provided for me, sent me to university, and I was lying to them, hiding from them, planning a life that would devastate them.

There were moments when I almost told them the truth. When the burden of the secret felt too heavy to carry anymore, but I knew what would happen if I did.

My father would order me to return immediately. He would try to force me to recant.

If I refused, I would be disowned at best, in real danger at worst. >> [music] >> And still I hesitated, hoping for some miracle solution where I could keep both my faith and my family.

That summer, while I was working a part-time job and taking one class, I met another Iranian Christian.

His name was Reza, and he had converted to Christianity 5 years earlier while still living in Iran.

He had escaped to Turkey and eventually made it to America as a refugee. He was part of an underground community of Persian Christians who met secretly to worship in Farsy and support each other.

Raza invited me to one of their gatherings. Walking into that room and hearing worship songs in my own language.

Seeing people like me who had made the same impossible choice, I broke down completely.

I was not alone. There were others who understood exactly what I was going through.

They shared their stories with me. Stories of rejection, persecution, loss, but also of incredible faith and joy.

They had paid the highest price to follow Jesus. And yet, they were the most peaceful, joyful people I had ever met.

One woman named Mariam became like an older sister to me. She had been downed by her family 8 years ago when they discovered her faith.

She had not spoken to them since. She told me that the grief never fully goes away, that she still cried for her mother sometimes, still missed her siblings.

But she also told me that Jesus had been faithful, that he had given her a new family, that she had never regretted her choice, even in the hardest moments.

Mariam prepared me for what was coming. She said that eventually my family would find out and I needed to be ready.

She said that hoping to keep both my faith and my family’s approval was an illusion.

I would have to choose. The only question was whether I would choose on my own terms or wait until the choice was forced upon me.

Her words proved prophetic sooner than I expected. In the fall of my final year, just months before graduation, my carefully constructed double life began to collapse.

It started with my younger brother. He had been accepted to a university in Europe and was asking me for advice about studying abroad.

We had been messaging back and forth and our relationship had grown closer over distance.

He felt like the one family member I might be able to talk to honestly.

One night, [music] in a moment of weakness and desperate loneliness, I let my guard down.

He asked me what had been the best part of my time in America. Without thinking, I told him about the people I had met, the things I had learned, how different my perspective had become.

I said something about finding a different kind of faith, a more personal relationship with God.

I did not say Jesus. I did not say Christianity, but I said too much.

My brother stopped responding to my messages. Two days of silence. Then my father called.

Not a scheduled call. An urgent call in the middle of my night. His voice was cold and hard when I answered.

He asked me directly what I had meant in my conversation with my brother. He asked if I had abandoned Islam.

He asked if I had become a Christian. I froze. This was the moment I had dreaded for years.

I could lie. I could deny everything. I could say it was all a misunderstanding.

But something in me could not do it anymore. I was tired of lying. I was tired of hiding.

And I realized in that moment that I would rather lose my family [music] than deny Jesus.

So I told him the truth. I told him that I had found faith in Jesus Christ.

I told him that I had read the Bible and believed it was true. I told him that I had been baptized.

I told him that I could not come back to Iran and live a lie.

I told him that I was sorry for any pain this caused. But I could not deny what I believed.

The silence on the other end of the phone was worse than yelling would have been.

When my father finally spoke, his voice was shaking with rage and something else. Grief, maybe [music] betrayal.

He said I had brought the worst possible shame on our family. He said I had destroyed his reputation, his honor, everything he had worked for his entire life.

He said I was no longer his daughter. He said I was dead to them.

Then he hung up. I called back immediately, but my number had been blocked. I tried messaging my mother, my siblings, blocked everywhere.

In the space of a single phone call, I had lost my entire family. 21 years of relationship gone.

I sat on the floor of my apartment and cried until I had no tears left.

The next days were a blur of grief. I could not eat, could not sleep, could barely function.

Sarah and Tom and Linda came and stayed with me, making sure I was not alone.

They did not try to fix it or make it better. They just sat with me in the pain, praying over me, reminding me that I was not abandoned, that I was still loved, that God had not left me, but the worst was yet to come.

A week after that devastating phone call, I received a message from my cousin, one of the few who had not completely cut me off.

She sent me a photo. It was a death announcement with my name on it.

My father had declared me legally dead. There had been a funeral, a real funeral with a real grave marker with my name and a date of death.

That was the day of our last phone call. I stared at that photo for hours, unable to process what I was seeing.

They had buried me, not my body, but my identity, my existence in their lives.

To them, [music] I had died. Sakane, the Imam’s daughter, was dead. And in a way, she was.

That girl was gone forever. But I was still here, still breathing, still alive, just dead to them.

The grief was overwhelming, but mixed with it was something else. A strange sense of freedom.

The secret was out. The worst had happened. I had nothing left to hide. I did not have to pretend anymore.

I did not have to live in fear of discovery. The cost had been paid and I was still standing.

Broken but standing. [music] In the following weeks, supported by my church family, I began the process of filing for asylum in the United States.

I gathered evidence of my conversion, testimonies from Tom and Linda and my pastor, documentation of the threats I would face if I returned to Iran.

The immigration lawyer I worked with was experienced with religious persecution cases. She told me I had a strong case that I should be approved, but the process would take time, possibly years.

I also made another decision. I legally changed my name. Sak, the name my father had given me.

The name that connected me to a life I could no longer live. That name died with my old self.

I chose a new name, grace, because grace was what had saved me. Grace was what I did not deserve, but had been given freely.

Grace was the heart of everything I had found in Jesus. I graduated that spring with my engineering degree.

My family was not there. Tom and Linda came. Sarah came. My church family came.

They cheered for me. Took photos with me. Celebrated with me. They were my family now.

Not by blood, but by choice and by the blood of Jesus. It was bittersweet, beautiful, and painful all at once.

As I looked toward the future, I had no idea what it would hold. I had lost everything I had known, everyone I had loved.

But I had gained something more valuable. I had gained freedom. I had gained truth.

I had gained Jesus. And somehow, even in the midst of the deepest grief I had ever known, I had peace.

The peace that Jesus promised, the peace that passes understanding, the peace that the world cannot give and cannot take away.

The photo of my death announcement stayed on my phone for months. I could not delete it.

I would look at it late at night, still unable to fully comprehend what I was seeing.

There was my name in Farsy script, the name I had carried for 21 years.

There were the dates, my birth, and my declared death just days apart from my actual birthday.

Below that was a verse from the Quran about returning to Allah. And at the bottom, my father’s name as the announcer of this death.

My cousin had sent more details in the days after that first message. She was sympathetic, horrified by the family was doing, but too afraid to openly support me.

She told me that my father had called a family meeting the day after our phone call.

He had announced to everyone that I had committed apostasy, that I had become a Christian, that I had brought unbearable shame upon the family name.

In Islamic law and in Iranian culture, I was as good as dead. So, he decided to make it official.

The funeral had been held at our mosque. The same mosque where I had grown up, where I had hidden behind wooden partitions during prayers, where I had learned to recite the Quran.

Now it was the site of my burial. My father had led the prayers himself.

There had been a shroud, empty but wrapped in the traditional way. My mother had collapsed during the ceremony and had to be carried out.

My sisters had wailed as if I had truly died. My brothers had stood stonefaced, their anger palpable even through my cousin’s description.

The community had rallied around my family, offering condolences for their loss. Some knew the truth that I was alive but had converted.

Others genuinely believed I had died in some accident in America. My father let them believe whatever they wanted.

What mattered was that Sakina, his daughter, was gone, erased, buried. They had even purchased a plot in the family section of the cemetery and installed a grave marker.

My cousin sent me a photo of that, too. A simple stone with my name, dates carved into its surface, an empty grave with my name on it.

I existed as a ghost now, mourned by people who had chosen to kill me in every way except physically.

The psychological impact of seeing your own grave is difficult to describe. There is no reference point for it in normal human experience.

I felt like I was haunting my own life. I would look in the mirror and see someone who was supposed to be dead.

I would walk down the street and think about [music] how somewhere on the other side of the world, there was a stone that said I no longer existed.

The grief came in waves. Some days I would be functional, going through the motions of my new life, working at my job, going to church, spending time with friends.

Other days I would be completely undone by the smallest reminder of what I had lost.

A smell that reminded me of my mother’s cooking. A song in Farsy, the sight of a family walking together in the park.

These things would hit me like physical blows, bringing me to my knees with the weight of what I had given up.

I grieved my mother most of all. She had not chosen this. She was a victim of my father’s rigid religious system, just as much as I had been.

I thought about all the times she had showed me small kindnesses, secret moments of tenderness when my father was not watching.

Had she known even then that I was struggling? Had she suspected that one day I might leave, I would never know.

She could not contact me even if she wanted to. My father controlled everything, including her.

I also grieved my siblings. My older sisters who were now trapped in marriages they had not chosen.

Raising children in the same system that had suffocated us. My brothers who had been taught that honor mattered more than love.

That religious duty mattered more than family [music] bonds. My younger brother who I had been growing close to whose innocent question had triggered this entire catastrophe.

Did he blame himself? Did he understand that it was not his fault? And I grieved my father which surprised me.

Despite everything, despite the harshness and the control and the ultimate rejection, he was still my father.

He had provided for me, [music] educated me, sent me to university. In his own limited way, within his understanding of the world, he had wanted good things for me.

He just could not accept that my idea of good had diverged so completely from his.

He was a prisoner of his own beliefs. And that made me sad for him even as I was devastated by what he had done.

The hardest part was knowing they were still alive, still going about their daily lives.

But I was dead to them. If I had actually died, they would have grieved and eventually healed.

But this death was different. They had chosen it. They had acted it out. They had made it real through ritual and declaration.

And they had to maintain it. Every day they woke up and chose to keep me dead.

I learned through my cousin that photos of me had been removed from the walls of our home.

Pictures of family gatherings had been altered. My face crossed out or cut away. [music] My belongings had been given away or burned.

My room had been emptied and repurposed. It was as if I had never existed.

They were erasing every trace of me from their lives. But the eraser was not complete.

My cousin told me that my mother kept one photo of me hidden in her Quran.

A picture of me as a little girl, maybe 7 years old, smiling at the camera with my hair in braids.

My mother would take it out sometimes when she was alone and weep over it.

This detail broke me. My mother was grieving me as if I had died, except worse because she knew I had not.

She knew I was alive somewhere, living a life she could not be part of.

I wanted to reach out to her. I drafted letters I never sent. I recorded voice messages I never delivered.

What could I say? I was sorry for hurting her, but I was not sorry for following [music] Jesus.

I wish things could be different, but I would not take back my decision. How could I offer comfort when my very existence as a Christian was the source of her pain?

The Christian community around me tried to help. Tom and Linda became even more like parents to me.

Linda would call me just to check in, would invite me over for meals, would sit with me when the grief became too much.

Tom would take me on walks, would listen to me process my feelings, would pray with me when I had no words of my own.

They could not replace my family, but they showed me what family could look like when it was based on choice and love rather than obligation.

Sarah and my other friends from church were also constant sources of support. They organized the meal train, making sure I had food when I could not bring myself to cook.

They texted me daily encouragement. They sat with me in silence when that was what I needed.

They reminded me that I was not alone even when loneliness threatened to swallow me whole.

The Persian Christian community became especially important during this time. Miam and Riza and others who had walked the same path understood in ways that my American friends could not.

They had paid the same price. They carried the same scars. When I met with them, I did not have to explain my grief.

They knew they had lived it. There was one gathering I will never forget. We met in someone’s living room, maybe 20 of us, all Iranian believers who had left Islam for Christ.

We sang worship songs in Farsy. Our mother tongue transformed into praise for Jesus. Then people began sharing their stories.

One by one they talked about what they had lost. Families, countries, identities. Some had been disowned.

Some had fled persecution. One man had been imprisoned and tortured in Iran before escaping.

One woman’s family had hired someone to kill her, and she had barely survived. As I listened to these stories, I realized something profound.

We were all dead people. We had all been killed in one way or another by our families, our communities, our former faith.

But we were also all resurrected people. We had died to our old lives and been raised to new life in Christ.

The death was real, but so was the resurrection. That night, one of the older men in the group read from Romans 6.

He read about how we had been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life.

He said that our families thought they were killing us by declaring us dead, but they did not understand that we had already died.

[music] We had died to sin, to the law, to the old covenant, and we had been raised with Christ.

Their pronouncement of death had no power because we were already dead to everything except Jesus.

This perspective shift helped me immensely. I was not just a victim of my family’s rejection.

I was a participant in the death and resurrection of Jesus. My suffering had meaning.

It was connecting me to Christ in his sufferings. It was part of the cost of disciplehip that Jesus himself had warned about.

He had said that following him might cost us our families. He had said that we might have to take up our cross.

He had never promised it would be easy, but he had promised it would be worth it.

Still, knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your heart are two different things. There were dark days.

Days when I questioned everything. Days when the price seemed too high. Days when I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake.

I would think about how easy it would be to recant, to call my father, to say it had all been a phase, to go back and live the life they wanted for me.

But then I would remember Jesus. [music] I would remember reading the sermon on the mount for the first time.

I would remember the peace that had flooded me the night I gave my life to him.

I would remember how he had set me free from fear and obligation and the crushing weight of trying to earn salvation.

And I would know even in my darkest moments that I could not go back.

Not because I was stubborn, but because you cannot unknow truth. You cannot unlove someone you have come to love.

You cannot return to slavery once you have tasted freedom. My asylum application was slowly moving through the system.

The interviews were difficult, requiring me to relive my story over and over to prove that my fear of persecution was real.

I had to show evidence of my conversion. Testimonies from church leaders, documentation of what happened with my family.

The death announcement and grave marker photos actually helped my case. As horrifying as that was, they proved that my family had completely rejected me [music] and that returning to Iran would be dangerous.

The waiting was agonizing. Asylum cases could take years to process. During that time, I was in legal limbo.

I could not travel. I could not visit other countries. I was stuck in America, cut off from my homeland, waiting for a government to decide if my story was believable enough, if my fear was valid enough, if my conversion was real enough.

One year after the funeral, on the anniversary of my declared death, I did something that felt important.

I went to a cemetery near my apartment with Tom and Linda and Sarah and a few other close friends.

We held a service there, but it was not a funeral. It was a resurrection celebration.

We read from the Bible about Jesus rising from the dead. We sang songs about new life.

We prayed thanksgivings for what God had brought me through. And then I spoke a declaration.

I said that one year ago, my family had declared me dead and buried an empty grave.

But I was not dead. I was more alive than I had ever been. The old Sakina was dead.

Yes, the girl who lived in fear and bondage. That girl was gone. But grace had risen in her place.

And Grace was a daughter of the living God, bought by the blood of Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, free and forgiven and forever loved.

My friends prayed over me, speaking life and blessing and hope. We cried together, but they were not tears of grief alone.

They were tears of healing, of victory, of faith that God was not done with my story yet.

As we left that cemetery, I felt something shift inside me. The grief did not disappear.

It would never fully disappear, but it no longer had the power to define me.

I was learning to live in the tension of loss and gain. I had lost my earthly family, but I had gained an eternal family.

I had lost my birthname, but I had gained a new identity in Christ. I had lost my country, but I had gained citizenship in the kingdom of God.

I had lost everything that once defined me, but I had found the one thing that mattered most.

The resurrection life is not a life without pain. Jesus himself told us we would have trouble in this world.

But it is a life with purpose. It is a life with hope. It is a life where even our deepest losses can be redeemed and used for God’s glory.

I was beginning to understand that my story, as painful as it was, might be able to help others.

If I had been willing to pay this price for Jesus, maybe my testimony could encourage others who were wrestling with the same impossible choice.

I started writing my story down, not for publication, just for myself to process everything I had been through.

But as I wrote, I began to see how God had been present in every step.

How he had led me to that New Testament in the library. How he had brought Sarah into my life at exactly the right time.

How he had provided Tom and Linda and Miriam and a whole community to catch me when I fell.

How he had given me the strength to tell the truth even when lying would have been easier.

How he had sustained me through the grief. How he was healing me even when I thought I was too broken to be fixed.

None of this made the pain go away. My mother was still grieving on the other side of the world.

My grave marker was still standing in an Iranian cemetery. My name was still crossed out in family photos.

These realities hurt as much as they ever did. But they no longer had the power to crush me because I knew something that my family did not know.

Something that made all the difference. I knew that death was not the end. I knew that resurrection was real.

I knew that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead was at work in me.

And I knew that one day, maybe not in this life, but certainly in the next, every tear would be wiped away, every wound would be healed, every separation would be overcome.

One day, I would see Jesus face to face. And on that day, everything I had lost would pale in comparison to everything I had gained.

Until then, I would keep walking, keep believing, keep hoping, keep loving Jesus no matter what it cost because he had loved me first.

Loved me enough to die for me. Loved me enough to pursue me across continents and cultures and religions until I finally understood that I was his and he was mine.

They had buried me, but I had risen. And that made all the difference. 3 years have passed since my family held that funeral.

3 years since I was declared dead. 3 years of learning what it means to live as someone who has died and been raised again.

I am sitting in my apartment as I tell you this story. The same apartment where I have lived through the hardest season of my life.

The afternoon light streams through the window and I can hear children playing outside. There is a cross on my wall and a Bible on my table.

And there is peace in my heart. The peace did not come all at once.

It came slowly, gradually like dawn breaking after a long night. There were many more tears, many more moments of grief, many more days when the loss felt too heavy to bear.

But somehow through it all, Jesus carried me. He kept his promise that he would never leave me or forsake me.

Even when I could not feel his presence, he was there. Even when I was too broken to pray, his spirit was interceding for me.

[music] Even when I doubted everything, his love remained steady and sure. My asylum application was finally approved just over a year ago.

The day I received the letter granting me refugee status in the United States, I cried for hours.

It meant I was safe. It meant I could not be forced to return to Iran.

It meant I could begin to build a real life here, not just exist in legal limbo.

It was a new beginning, official and legal and permanent. I have a good job now, working as an engineer for a tech company.

My degree is being put to use. I am financially independent, supporting myself, building a career.

My co-workers do not know my full story. They know I am from Iran, that I cannot go back.

But they do not know the details of what happened with my family. Some things are too personal, too painful to share with people who would not understand.

But I have found my community, my people, my family. The church that welcomed me when I was still hiding my faith has become my home.

Tom and Linda continue to be like parents to me. They celebrated with me when I got my asylum approval.

They helped me move into a better apartment. They include me in all their family gatherings.

Their children call me their sister. Their grandchildren know me as Auntie Grace. I am woven into the fabric of their lives and they into mine.

Sarah is still one of my closest friends. She is engaged now to a wonderful man who also loves Jesus.

She has asked me to be in her wedding. When she told me this, I cried because I realized that I would never be in my own sisters weddings, never celebrate their children’s births, never share in the normal rhythms of family life with them.

But I would have this. I would have Sarah’s friendship, her trust, her joy. It was not the same, but it was good.

It was real. The Persian Christian community continues to be a vital part of my life.

We meet regularly, sometimes in someone’s home, sometimes at a church that has welcomed us.

We worship in Farsy, pray in Farsy, share our lives in our mother tongue. This community understands my heart in ways that others cannot.

They know what it means to lose everything for Jesus. They know the specific pain of being rejected by an Iranian family.

They know how to celebrate no ruse as Christians. How to maintain our cultural identity while following Christ.

With them, I can be fully Persian and fully Christian. I do not have to choose between the two.

Mariam has become like a spiritual mother to me. She has walked this road longer than I have and her wisdom has been invaluable.

When I struggle with guilt about my family, she reminds me that I am not responsible for their choices, only my own.

When I wonder if I am doing enough, if I am living worthy of the price that was paid, [music] she reminds me that grace is not earned but received.

When I feel alone, she reminds me that I am part of a global family of believers that spans centuries and continents.

I have also started serving in ministry. It began small, just sharing my story with a few people here and there, but word spread.

Other churches started inviting me to speak. [music] Organizations that work with Muslim background believers asked me to share my testimony.

At first, I was terrified. I am not a public speaker. I am just an ordinary person who met Jesus and had her life turned upside down.

But I realized that my story is not really about me. It is about what Jesus does.

It is about his power to transform lives, to set captives free, to bring light into darkness.

Now I speak regularly at churches and conferences. I tell my story to help others understand what converts from Islam go through.

I speak to help western Christians realize that there are brothers and sisters around the world paying enormous prices for their faith.

I speak to encourage Muslims who are questioning, who are curious about Jesus, who are wrestling with doubts.

I want them to know they are not alone. I want them to know that Jesus is worth it.

I want them to know that there is a community ready to embrace them if they choose to follow him.

Every time I speak, I think about my father. The irony is not lost on me that the imam’s daughter is now preaching about Jesus.

The same gift for speaking that might have made him proud if I had used it for Islam, I am now using for the gospel.

Sometimes I wonder if he knows if word has reached him somehow that his dead daughter is alive and telling people about Christ.

I do not know if that would make him angrier or sadder. Perhaps both. Through my ministry, I have met countless other believers from Muslim backgrounds.

Each story is unique, but the themes are similar. The slow awakening of doubt, the fear of questioning, the secret reading of the Bible, the moment of decision, the devastating rejection, the grief and loss, but also the joy, the freedom, the peace, the absolute certainty that Jesus was worth it all.

One young woman I met recently reminded me so much of myself. She was from Saudi Arabia, studying in America, secretly reading the Bible, terrified of what would happen if her family found out.

I sat with her for hours, listening to her questions, sharing my story, praying with her.

When she finally decided to follow Jesus when I had the privilege of baptizing her, I wept.

I wept for joy that another captive had been set free. I wept with grief knowing what she would likely face.

I wept with gratitude that God would use my story to help someone else find him.

This is what resurrection life looks like. [music] I think it is not the absence of pain.

It is not pretending that everything is fine when it is not. It is carrying your scars but not being defined by them.

It is finding purpose in your suffering. It is allowing God to redeem what was meant to destroy you and use it to bring life to others.

I still grieve my family. That has not changed. There are still moments when the loss hits me fresh and hard.

Birthdays are difficult. The Persian New Year, no ruse, is bittersweet. I celebrate it with my Persian Christian friends, but I ache for my mother’s cooking, my sister’s laughter, the familiar rhythms of home.

I see other families together and feel the absence of my own like a physical wound.

The grief lives in me, [music] a constant companion. I have learned to carry it, but it is still there.

I stay updated on their lives through my cousin, the only family member who has maintained any contact with me.

She does this secretly at great risk to herself. Through her, I learn small details.

[music] My mother’s health is declining. My older sister had another baby. My younger brother got married.

These updates bring both comfort and pain. Comfort because I still know something about their lives.

Pain because I am not part of them. My cousin tells me that my mother still keeps that photo of me hidden in her Quran.

That she still cries when she looks at it. That she has aged dramatically in these three years.

The grief wearing her down. This knowledge is almost unbearable. My mother is suffering because of my choice, because of my faith.

How do I hold that? How do I live with knowing that my freedom has cost her so much?

I have had to learn to forgive myself, to accept that I cannot control how others respond to my choices.

I did not choose to hurt my family. I chose to follow Jesus. Their pain is real, but it comes from their inability to accept my decision, not from the decision itself.

This is a subtle but important distinction. I am responsible for my choices, but I am not responsible for their response to my choices.

I pray for my family every single day, every morning, often throughout [music] the day, always at night before I sleep.

I pray that God would open their eyes to see Jesus. I pray that somehow someway they would come to understand that what I found was not rebellion but truth.

I pray especially for my mother and my younger brother. I pray that seeds of doubt might be planted in their hearts that they might begin to question the way I did.

That they might find their way to the same Jesus who saved me. I do not know if I will ever see them again in this life.

The rational part of me says probably not. My father is not a man who changes his mind.

He has declared me dead. And in his worldview that pronouncement is final and absolute.

Even if one of them wanted to reach out to me, the social pressure and religious obligation would make it nearly impossible.

I am apostate, outcast, unclean. Contact with me would contaminate them. But I have learned not to limit God.

I have seen him do impossible things. I have watched him transform my own heart from fearful Muslim girl to free Christian woman.

I have seen him provide for me in ways I never could have imagined. I have experienced his faithfulness through the darkest valley.

[music] So I hold on to hope. Small and fragile as it sometimes feels that God is not done with my family story that somehow in his timing he might reach them too.

In the meantime I live really live not just survive. I am building a life that has meaning and purpose.

I am using my gifts and abilities. I am loving and being loved. I am part of a community.

I am making a difference in ways big and small. This life looks nothing like what I imagined when I was growing up in Iran.

It has cost me more than I could have dreamed, but it is also richer and fuller than anything I could have planned for myself.

There is a verse in the Bible that has become like an anchor for me.

It is from the book of Philippians where Paul writes about knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.

He says that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus.

That whatever was gained to him he counts [music] as loss for the sake of Christ.

That he considers everything rubbish compared to gaining Christ and being found in him. When I first read these verses years ago, they were just words on a page.

Now they are my testimony. I have lost everything that once defined me. My family, my name, my country, my original identity, everything.

And I can say with Paul that it was worth it. Not because the loss did not matter, not because it did not hurt, but because what I gained in Christ is infinitely more valuable than what I lost.

I think about the woman in the Bible who had been bleeding for 12 years.

She spent everything she had on doctors, but only got worse. When she heard about Jesus, she pushed through the crowd and touched his garment, believing that even that small contact would heal her.

And it did. Jesus felt power go out from him, turned and asked who touched him.

When the woman came forward trembling, expecting rebuke, Jesus called her daughter. He told her that her faith had healed her to go in peace.

I am like that woman. I spent years bleeding, spent years suffering under a religious system that took everything and gave nothing back.

I was desperate for healing, for freedom, for life. And when I finally reached out to Jesus, when I dared to believe that he could save me, he did.

He did not rebuke me for being an outsider, for coming from Islam, for having doubts and questions.

He called me daughter. He healed me. He gave me peace. If I could speak to that scared 17-year-old girl who was getting on a plane to America, I would tell her so many things.

I would tell her that the questions she is afraid to ask are valid. I would tell her that the doubts she is suppressing are the beginning of wisdom.

I would tell her that the journey ahead will be harder than anything she can imagine, but that she will survive it.

I would tell her that losing everything will paradoxically teach her what truly matters. I would tell her that Jesus is real, that he sees her, that he is already pursuing her across continents and cultures and religions.

I would tell her to be brave. But I would also tell her that it is okay to grieve, that choosing Jesus does not mean pretending the cost does not matter.

That it is possible to be absolutely certain of your faith while simultaneously devastated by what it has cost.

That you can have joy and sorrow living together in your heart. That resurrection life still bears the marks of the crucifixion.

To others like me, to those who are watching this and wrestling with similar questions and fears, I want to say this.

I see you. I know the battle raging in your heart and mind. I know the fear that keeps you up at night.

I know the impossible position you find yourself in. Caught between the faith you were born into and the truth you are discovering.

I know the guilt and the shame and the terror of what might happen if anyone finds out.

I cannot tell you that following Jesus will be easy. I cannot promise that you will not lose things that matter deeply to you.

I cannot guarantee that your family will eventually understand and accept your choice. The truth is that the cost of disciplehip is real and high, especially for those of us coming from Islam.

Jesus himself never sugarcoated this. He said that following him might cost us our families, our reputations, our security, even our lives.

But I can tell you that Jesus is worth it. I can testify that the peace he gives is real.

I can promise you that you will never walk alone because he has promised to never leave you or forsake you.

I can assure you that there is a global community of believers ready to embrace you as family.

I can guarantee that nothing you are going through takes God by surprise. That he sees you, that he loves you, that he is calling you to himself.

The question is not whether the cost is high. It is. The question is whether Jesus is worth the cost.

And I am here to tell you that he is. He absolutely is. Not because I am some super spiritual person with extraordinary faith.

I am not. I am just an ordinary woman who encountered an extraordinary savior. I am just someone who was lost and got found.

I am just a dead person who got raised to life. To my brothers and sisters in the west, to those who have always had the freedom to worship openly without persecution, I want to say this.

Please do not take your freedom for granted. Please remember that there are millions of believers around the world who cannot openly worship, who risk everything to follow Jesus, who pay prices you will never have to pay.

Pray for them, support them, learn from them. Let their faith challenge and inspire your own.

Also, please open your hearts to converts from Islam. We need you. We need your churches to be safe places where we can ask questions, process our grief, learn what it means to follow Jesus without fear.

We need spiritual mothers and fathers like Tom and Linda who will welcome us into their families.

We need friends like Sarah who will patiently walk with us through the confusion and fear.

We need communities that will celebrate with us in our joy and weep with us in our sorrow.

Please do not be afraid of us. Yes, [music] we come from a different background.

Yes, we ask different questions than you might ask. Yes, our faith journeys look different from yours, but we are your brothers and sisters.

We have been bought by the same blood, filled with the same spirit, adopted into the same family.

The body of Christ is beautifully diverse, made up of people from every nation and tribe and language.

That includes us. And please, please continue to send missionaries and share the gospel in Muslim majority countries.

I know it is dangerous. I know it is costly. I know that many people question whether it is worth it.

But I am living proof that it is worth it. That Bible I found in a university library was placed there by someone.

The Christians who befriended me and shared their faith were sent by God. The testimonies I heard from other converts gave me hope.

Every single person who had a part in my journey to Jesus was important. Your obedience matters.

Your witness matters. Lives hang in the balance. My story is not unique. There are thousands, maybe millions of others like me.

Former Muslims who have found Jesus. Some have paid an even higher price than I have.

Some have lost their lives, not just their families. Some are in prison right now for their faith.

Some are in hiding, living in constant fear. Some are still keeping their faith secret, desperate for freedom, but trapped by circumstance.

They need our prayers. They need our support. They need to know they are not forgotten.

As I think about the future, I hold it with open hands. I do not know what will come.

I hope to get married one day, to have a family of my own, to experience the love and belonging that I lost.

I hope to continue using my story to point others to Jesus. I hope to keep growing in my faith to know him more deeply, to become more like him.

I hope that maybe, just maybe, God will do a miracle and soften my earthly family’s hearts toward him.

But even if none of those hopes come to pass, I will still have everything that matters.

I will still have Jesus. I will still have eternal life. I will still have forgiveness and freedom and purpose.

I will still be a daughter of the King of Kings, an heir to an eternal kingdom, a carrier of the most important message in human history.

The empty grave in Iran is a symbol of death. Yes, but it is also in a strange way a symbol of resurrection because the grave could not hold Jesus and it cannot hold me either.

Physical death was defeated at the cross and the empty tomb. Spiritual death was defeated the moment I said yes to Jesus.

And one day when this life is over, I will step fully into the resurrection life that I have only tasted here.

[snorts] On that day, I will see Jesus face to face. I will hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

I will be reunited with all the saints who have gone before, including those who paid the ultimate price for their faith.

I will be home in a way I have never been home, even in the house where I grew up.

And every tear will be wiped away. Every wound will be healed. Every loss will be restored 100fold.

Until that day, I keep walking, one foot in front of the other. Some days with confidence and joy, some days with grief and struggle, but always with Jesus.

Always held by his grace. Always carried by his love. Always moving forward into the future he has for me.

My name is Grace. I used to be called Sakin, daughter of Imam Muhammad Hassan.

My family declared me dead and buried an empty grave with my name on it.

But I am [music] not dead. I am more alive than I have ever been because I have been crucified with Christ.

And it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

They tried to kill me by erasing me from their [music] lives. But they did not understand that I had already died.

I died to sin. I died to the law. I died to religion and rules and endless striving to earn God’s favor.

And I was raised with Christ to walk in newness of life. Their declaration of death had no power because I was already dead to everything except Jesus.

So yes, I am dead. Dead to my old life, my old identity, my old way of living.

But I am also alive. Alive in Christ, alive to righteousness, alive to love and freedom and grace, alive with a life that can never be taken away, a life that will continue long after this body returns to dust.

A life that is eternal and unshakable and glorious. This is my testimony. [music] This is my story.

Not a story of what I have done, but of what Jesus has done in me and for me and through me.

A story of death and resurrection. A story of loss and gain. A story of suffering and glory.

A story that is still being written, still unfolding, still revealing the faithfulness of a God who pursues his children across every barrier until they are safely home.

If you are Muslim and you are hearing this, please know that Jesus loves you.

He sees you. He knows everything about you and he loves you still. He is not far from you.

He is as close as a whispered prayer. He is calling you to himself, offering you freedom and life and peace.

The cost of following him might be high, but he is worth it. I promise you, he is worth it.

If you are a Christian who has always had religious freedom, please remember us who have paid a price.

Pray for us, support us, learn from us. Let our stories deepen your gratitude for your freedom and strengthen your resolve to live worthy of the gospel.

And please, please keep sharing Jesus with those who have never heard, no matter how difficult or dangerous it might be.

And if you are like me, if you have lost everything to follow Jesus, if you have been rejected and disowned and declared dead by those who once loved you, please hear this.

You are not alone. You are not forgotten. You are not a mistake. Your faith is real.

Your choice was right. Your suffering has meaning. And Jesus is with you in every moment, through every tear, in every loss.

He will never leave you. He will never forsake you. He will carry you through.

The sun is setting now as I finish sharing my story. The apartment is growing dark, but I do not feel afraid of the darkness anymore.

Because I know that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

I know that Jesus is the light of the world and whoever follows him will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

I am following that light one day at a time, one step at a time, one breath at a time.

From death to life, from bondage to freedom, from fear to faith, from the Imam’s daughter to a G.

This is my story. This is my song. This is my testimony. Not to bring glory to myself, but to glorify the one who saved me, Jesus Christ, the son of God, the Savior of the world, the Lord of my life.

He has turned my mourning into dancing. He has clothed me with joy instead of ashes.

He has given me a crown of beauty instead of despair. He has done immeasurably more than I could have asked or imagined.

And I will spend the rest of my life and all of eternity praising him for it.

They buried me alive, but Jesus raised me from the dead, and that makes all the difference.

Amen.