Syrian Pastor’s Wife Publicly Beaten and Ask...

Syrian Pastor’s Wife Publicly Beaten and Asked to Deny Jesus Then She Did Something Unexpected

I want to start by telling you something that took me many years to fully understand.

The life I am about to describe to you. The fear, the hiding, the loss, the pain, none of it destroyed my faith.

If anything, everything I went through is the very reason my faith is the only thing I am completely certain of today.

I have lost almost everything a a human being can lose in one lifetime. I have buried a husband.

I have been beaten in public. I have walked away from my country with three children and almost nothing else.

And I am sitting here in a small room in a country that is not mine telling you that Jesus is still Lord.

That is not something I say because it sounds good or because it is what someone in my position is supposed to say.

I say it because I have tested it with my actual life, with my blood, with my grief, and it held.

My name is Sana.

I was born in Syria and this is my story. I need you to sit with me for a moment before we get to the hard parts.

Because the hard parts will not mean anything to you if you do not first understand the world I came from.

People hear the word Syria today and they think of destruction. Bombed buildings, displaced families, news footage of suffering, and all of that is true and all of it is real.

But Syria was not always that image. Before it became what it became, it was a country with history so deep that most of the world does not fully grasp it.

It was a place where civilizations had risen and fallen and left their marks in the stones of cities that are older than most nations on earth.

And it was a place where Christianity had existed quietly and stubbornly for nearly 2,000 years.

I grew up in a small town in the northwestern part of Syria. It was not a place you would find on any international map.

It was a town of ordinary size, ordinary rhythms, ordinary life. The kind of place where the same families had lived on the same streets for so many generations that the town itself felt like an extension of family.

Everyone knew everyone. The baker knew your father. The woman at the end of the street had known your grandmother.

The children played together in the same lanes that their parents had played in as children.

There was a familiarity to the place that was comforting and sometimes suffocating in equal measure the way it is in any small community anywhere in the world.

I was the third of four children. My father was a carpenter and furniture maker.

You a tradesman who worked with his hands and was respected in our town by people of all backgrounds because he did his work honestly and did it well.

My mother managed the home with the kind of quiet efficiency that made everything run without ever making a show of running it.

We were not wealthy. We were not poor either. We were a family that had enough and we knew it and we were grateful for it.

What I want you to understand most about my family though is not our economic situation or our social standing.

What I want you to understand is the faith that sat at the center of everything we were.

My father was a Christian man in the deepest most genuine sense of the word.

Not a man who attended church when it was convenient and kept his faith stored away on a shelf for Sundays.

T he was a man for whom Jesus was as real and present as any person in the room.

Every morning in our house began the same way. Before the breakfast, before school preparations, before anything else, we gathered as a family and we prayed.

My father would lead us and his prayers were not the kind of prayers that feel rehearsed or performative.

They were conversations, real ones. He talked to God the way you talk to someone you have known for many years and trust completely.

As a young child watching this, I absorbed something that I did not have the language to name yet.

I absorbed the idea that faith was not a religious obligation you performed but a living relationship you maintained.

He taught us his children to understand our position in Syria with both clarity and dignity.

He was careful about this. He never made us feel that being a Christian minority in a Muslim majority country was something shameful.

But he also never pretended that it came without complications. He would tell us that we were carrying something precious and that carrying something precious required wisdom about when and how you displayed it.

He drew a clear distinction for us between hiding your faith and being wise about how you lived it.

He said that a man who is wise about his circumstances is not a coward.

He is someone who understands the world he actually lives in, not the world he wishes he lived in.

My father walked that line every day of his life. And he walked it without bitterness, without resentment, and without ever once suggesting that the price of our faith was too high.

My mother’s faith was expressed differently, but was no less deep. She was a woman of very few religious words, but constant religious practice.

She prayed while she cooked, while she cleaned, while she moved through the ordinary tasks of her day.

She sang old hymns softly to herself in the kitchen, never loudly enough for the sound to travel beyond our walls, but present always as a kind of background music to our home.

If you had asked her to explain her theology, she probably would have been uncomfortable.

She was not a woman who talked about her faith so much as she inhabited it.

She loved Jesus the way she loved her children completely practically without needing to explain herself about it.

Watching her as I grew up though I learned something that no Sunday sermon ever fully taught me that faith lives most powerfully not in what you say about it but in how you move through each ordinary day because of it.

Our church was a simple building. If you walked past it without knowing what it was, you might have taken it for any modest structure on that street.

There was no architectural grandeur, no large visible cross above the door, nothing that announced itself dramatically to the neighborhood.

This was not an accident. It was the practical wisdom of a community that understood its environment.

But inside what happened was anything but modest. When I say that our church was the center of our community’s life, I do not mean that as a figure of speech.

It was literally the center. It was the place where people brought their grief and their gratitude.

Where marriages were blessed and children were dedicated and the dead were mourned. Where the rhythms of the Christian year gave shape and meaning to the passage of time.

The Sunday service was long, 2 hours at minimum, often closer to three. As a young child, I was frequently bored during the longer stretches.

I will not pretend otherwise. I would count the tiles on the floor or watch dust moving in the light that came through the windows or fidget until my mother put her hand on my knee without looking at me, which was her signal to be still.

But even as a child who did not always understand what was being said or sung, I was aware that something real happened in that room.

There was a quality to the air in that church during worship that was different from anywhere else I went.

A presence that I could feel but could not explain. I did not have words for it at age seven or 8.

I only knew it was real and that it was the same every week and that it had nothing to do with the building itself and everything to do with the people inside it and what they brought with them.

Easter was the highest point of our year. In Syria, Easter for Christians carries a weight that is difficult to explain to people who have only ever celebrated it in places where Christianity is the majority.

When you are a minority, the resurrection of Jesus is not just a theological event you commemorate.

It is your own story. The story of something that should have been finished by its enemies, but was not.

The story of a power that could not be contained by death. You sing those resurrection hymns differently when your community has lived something of that same experience across many generations.

You sing them as people who have personal and historical reasons to believe that endings are not always what they appear to be.

The friction of being a Christian minority in Syria was something I became aware of gradually.

The way children become aware of complex realities piece by piece, incident by incident until the full picture assembles itself.

The first piece I remember clearly was a friendship that ended when I was 9 or 10 years old.

There was a girl I had played with since we were small children. We had been in and out of each other’s homes.

We had shared food and games and the particular closeness that forms between girls who grow up side by side.

And then one day without explanation ah she stopped. She was still polite when we passed each other at school, but the friendship was gone, switched off as completely as a light.

I eventually understood through the things children overhear and piece together, that her older sister had told her that good Muslim girls did not form close friendships with Christian children.

She was not a bad child. She was a child who had been told something by someone she trusted and she obeyed it.

I did not hate her for it. But I carried the loss of that friendship for a long time and I carried the lesson it came with.

That in our world, the faith you were born into could reach into your most ordinary relationships and change them in ways you had no power over.

There was a teacher I had around the age of 11 who made certain things very clear without ever being openly hostile.

Yet he was a devout man, visibly religious and in his classroom the casual assumption was that his world view was simply the correct one and all others were deficient variations.

He never singled me out directly. He did not need to. The remarks he made in general class discussions were sufficient comments that placed people of other faiths in a category that was clearly lesser, clearly tolerated at best, clearly in need of correction at worst.

He said these things pleasantly, the way you state facts that no reasonable person would dispute.

And in a classroom of children who were almost entirely Muslim, there was nobody to push back.

I would sit with something burning in my chest and say nothing. Not because I had no thoughts, but because I was 11 years old and had already understood in the instinctive way children understand survival.

But that this was not a battle that would go well for me if I picked it.

I told my father about one of those classroom incidents. I remember the evening clearly, sitting at the kitchen table after supper, everyone else having moved on, just my father and me.

I told him what the teacher had said and how it had made me feel.

He listened all the way through without interrupting, which was characteristic of him. He had the patience to hear a thing completely before he responded to it.

And when I finished, he sat quietly for a moment and then he said something I never lost.

He told me that people would say many things about Jesus throughout my life. Things that were wrong and sometimes things that were cruel, and that none of those things would change who Jesus actually was.

He said, “My job was not to outar argue everyone who had a wrong opinion, but to live so honestly and so well that my life itself became an argument that was harder to dismiss than any words.”

He said, “The most powerful thing I could offer as a testimony was the quality of person my faith made me.

I was 11 and I absorbed it more than I understood it. But I never forgot it and I have come back to it hundreds of times in the years since.

As I grew into my teenage years and then into early adulthood, I watched Syria itself begin to change in ways that were subtle at first and then less subtle.

There was a period roughly in my late teenage years when the political atmosphere began to carry a different charge.

Conversations that had once happened openly began to shift to private settings. What news traveled through networks of trusted people rather than through official channels.

Families with members in other parts of the country were receiving reports that were alarming.

Accounts of tensions escalating in ways that had not been seen before, of incidents between communities that were more violent than what anyone had previously experienced.

Our own town was not at the center of any of this in those years, but the ripples reached us.

I remember the incident that first made me understand in a visceral and not just intellectual way what we were living in.

A man from our church community, an older man who had run a small shop for decades, well known and generally respected across all communities in our town, had a small wooden cross hanging on the wall inside his shop.

Not displayed aggressively, though not positioned to make a statement to anyone. It was simply there the way a grandfather’s photograph might be there because it was part of who he was.

One night, someone set fire to his shop. The damage was significant, but not total.

The fire was contained before it took the whole building. But the shop was badly hurt and the man who had built it over a lifetime was left standing in the street looking at what remained of it.

There was no serious investigation. No one was charged. The community understood quietly and without needing to say it directly what had happened and why.

The cross on the wall had been the reason. I was 12 years old. My father did not shield us from this event.

He sat the family down and explained it plainly. He was not dramatic about it.

He was a man who believed that the truth delivered with steadiness. It was more useful than either panic or false reassurance.

He told us what had happened, why he believed it had happened, and what it told us about the world we lived in.

He told us that this was not what God wanted for any community, that it was wrong and nothing could make it right, but that it was real and we had to know it was real.

He told us that we could not let fear become the governing principle of our lives.

He told us that fear was natural, but that it could not be allowed to make our decisions for us.

I looked at my father’s hands on the table as he spoke. They were the hands of a man who had spent his life working with wood, strong, calloused, marked by years of honest labor.

And those hands were completely still and steady on the table as he talked about our situation.

That stillness was not the stillness of someone who was not frightened. I think it was the stillness of someone who had already made his peace with what his faith cost and had decided that the cost did not change the decision.

Over the following years, there were other incidents, smaller and larger. They accumulated the way things accumulate in environments like ours, not as dramatic single events, but as a steady, low-level pressure that you learned to carry as a permanent feature of your life.

A Christian family’s vehicle vandalized because of a small fish symbol on it. Young men from the church harassed on the street with slurs.

A pastor from a town nearby briefly detained and questioned about the content of his preaching, then released, but different afterward in a way everyone could see.

Yay. None of these things made any kind of news beyond our community. None of them were remarkable enough by the world’s indifferent standards to merit attention.

They were simply what life looked like for people like us. And through all of it, our church held.

It held in a way that I think only communities that share a cost can hold.

The shared experience of pressure did not fracture us. It solared us together more completely than comfort ever could have.

There was an elderly woman in our congregation, a widow who had lost her husband to illness years before and who had outlived him with tremendous dignity, who had a habit at the close of every Sunday service of saying quietly, almost to herself, but loud enough that people around her could hear, that they had not stopped us yet, and that they would not stop us.

She did not say it with aggression or bravado. She said it with the absolute calm certainty of someone who has been tested over a long time and knows where she stands.

Every time she said it, the people around her would smile. And there was in that smile a resilience and a tenderness that I carry to this day.

By the time I reached my early 20s, I had grown into a faith that was fully my own.

Not inherited on autopilot from my parents, though their example had shaped everything in me, but genuinely claimed, genuinely chosen.

I had looked at what being a Christian in Syria cost. The friction, the exclusions, the incidents, the constant background awareness of being a minority in an environment that did not always regard you well.

And I had said clearly and consciously inside myself, yes, this is mine. I choose this though not because it is easy, because it is true.

Because the presence I had felt in that church since I was a small child was real.

Because the man my father was, the peace my mother carried, the resilience of that elderly woman and all the others like her, all of it pointed to something that was actually there, that was actually holding them, that I wanted to be held by too.

This is the thing I most need you to understand before we go further. Everything that I survived in the years that followed was survived by a woman who had chosen her faith with full knowledge of its cost.

I was not naive. I was not someone who had never seen what the price looked like.

I had been watching the price being paid around me since I was a child.

I chose it anyway because the thing it purchased was worth more than anything giving it up could have preserved.

That is the ground I was standing on when everything came. And then I met IAS.

But that comes next. I did not meet Elias through any remarkable circumstance. There was no dramatic moment, no single instant that I can point to and say everything changed at exactly that second.

Real life, in my experience, rarely delivers the moments that stories promise. What it delivers instead is a slow, quiet accumulation.

Small interactions that seem unremarkable in themselves, but that together add up to something that changes everything.

That is how I came to know Ilas slowly, honestly, in the ordinary way that things that last are usually built.

He came from a town not far from ours. His family had been Christian for as many generations as anyone had bothered to count.

The same deep roots that my own family had are the same kind of faith that had survived long enough in that part of the world to stop being something you debated and become something you simply were.

He had come to our area for work. There was a construction or repair project of some kind that had brought him and a small group from his town.

And the way it tends to go in tightlyworked Christian communities, someone who knew his family connected him to our church before he had been in the area a full week.

He first appeared on a Sunday morning sitting toward the back of the church following the service carefully.

I noticed him in the way you notice any unfamiliar face in a small congregation because you know everyone and a new face stands out automatically.

He was not a physically imposing man. Medium height, medium build, dark hair are the kind of face that did not announce itself immediately, but that revealed itself gradually, detail by detail over time.

He sat with his full attention on the service, not glancing around to assess the room the way a newcomer often does.

He was simply present. That was the first thing I noticed about him, that he was fully present wherever he was.

After the service, the congregation gathered the way it always did, in the yard outside or in the hall attached to the building, eating together, talking, doing the things that Christian communities do when the formal service ends and the real fellowship begins.

My father, who had an instinct for people on the edges of a gathering, went to Elias and drew him in the way my father always did with anyone who seemed to need drawing in.

He introduced him around, including to our family. We exchanged perhaps 20 words that first Sunday.

He was polite, careful with his speech, asked questions about the community in a way that showed he was genuinely curious rather than just making conversation.

He mentioned his own family with warmth. He said something brief about his own faith and background.

Not in a way that performed it or displayed it, but in the simple matterof fact way that a man mentions a fact about himself when it is relevant and true.

And then the gathering moved on as gatherings do, and I thought nothing more of it.

He stayed in our area for months, the work having extended beyond its original scope.

And in those months, he became a consistent presence at church and then a growing presence in the broader community and then a regular guest in our home.

My father had taken a genuine liking to him. Yet they would sit together after meals and talk for long stretches about things that men in that community talked about.

The state of the country, the church, the meaning of things, the way faith operated in practical daily life.

I would be present for some of these conversations and I would listen. And what I heard over those months built my understanding of Elias more slowly and more thoroughly than any deliberate courtship could have.

He was consistent. That was the quality that looking back I think I valued most and noticed most clearly.

He was the same person whether he was in the church service or at our kitchen table or helping with some physical task around the property.

The same tone, the same manner, the same underlying orientation toward the people around him.

He did not perform differently for different audiences. He did not have a public version and a private version of himself that differed significantly.

He was simply steadily himself. In a world of considerable uncertainty, in a country where the ground was beginning to feel less stable by the year, this quality of steadiness and consistency in a person was more attractive than I can adequately put into words.

I became aware of my feelings for him gradually and without drama. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh month of knowing him, I had to acknowledge to myself that what I felt when he was present was different from what I felt with anyone else.

It was not something I acted on. I was not the kind of woman to push at something like this.

I was raised in a community and a culture where these things moved along certain paths and I was content to move along those paths.

I prayed about it. Yo, I told God what I felt honestly because I had learned from my father that honest prayer was the only kind worth offering and I left it there.

I watched to see what would happen. What happened was that Elias went to my father.

He approached my father in the way that the tradition of our community called for, the way it had been done for generations, and the way both of them, being the kind of men they were, naturally observed without it needing to be explained.

He told my father that he had developed deep feelings for me, that he had great respect for our family, that he was serious in his intentions and wanted to pursue the possibility of marriage with my father’s blessing and with my full and willing agreement.

My father told him he would pray about it and speak with my mother and with me.

Uh the conversation my father had with me about it was one of the most careful conversations of my life.

He was not a man who would decide something like this for his daughter. He sat with me and told me what Elias had said, told me what he himself had observed about the man over the months he had known him and then asked me directly and without ceremony what I felt.

I told him the truth. I told him I had developed strong feelings and that I believed Elias was a genuinely good man.

My father was quiet for a moment after I finished. The way he was always quiet before he said something that mattered and then he told me he thought so too and that he was prepared to give his blessing.

Our engagement lasted several months, but we were not alone together in the way that couples in other contexts might be.

Our culture and our faith both shaped the structure of how this time unfolded. And we both honored that structure without experiencing it as a constraint.

We met in family settings, in church settings, in the gathered spaces of our community.

We talked more and more deeply over time. We prayed together, which was something I had not done with anyone outside my own family.

And the experience of praying with alias told me more about who he was than almost any conversation could have.

The way a person prays tells you what they actually believe about God, not just what they say they believe.

His prayers were direct, honest, and personal in a way that confirmed everything I had already come to see in him.

We were married in our church. It was not a large wedding. The times and the finances and our own preferences conspired to keep it intimate.

What we had was the people who mattered most. Both families, our closest community members, the pastor who had known me since I was a child.

The ceremony itself was everything I needed it to be. Scripture was read, vows were spoken.

We took communion together for the first time as husband and wife, which in our tradition is among the most significant things that happen in a marriage ceremony.

The acknowledgment that this union is built on and sustained by something beyond the two people in it.

There was singing. There was a meal afterward prepared over two days by the women of the church who had arrived with their pots and their love and their unsolicited opinions about quantities of food.

And who turned the preparation itself into a celebration that was as meaningful as the ceremony.

I stood at the front of that small church beside Elas and listened to our pastor talk about the covenant they were witnessing and I felt peace complete inexplicable allencompassing peace.

The kind that tells you not that nothing difficult will ever come, but that you are exactly where you are supposed to be with exactly the person you are supposed to be beside.

Everything in my life had been building toward this moment of standing next to a man who loved Jesus the way I loved Jesus in a community that had cost us all something to belong to.

Making promises before God in a country that did not always make room for people like us.

I was completely fully and deeply happy. Our early years of marriage were the years I return to most often in my memory now.

Not because they were without difficulty. Life in Syria by that point was never entirely without a difficulty, but because they contained a quality of ordinary happiness that I understand now was a gift I did not fully appreciate while I was living inside it.

We built a home together, small but ours. We cooked together in the evenings and talked about the day.

He had a dry, quiet humor that caught you offguard because it appeared so unexpectedly from behind his usual seriousness, and it made me laugh in a way that started deep.

A real laugh, not a polite one. We read scripture together in the mornings the way my parents had prayed together in the mornings.

We argued about small things and resolved them quickly because neither of us was built for sustained conflict.

We were good together. We fit. He had felt even before we married the beginning of what he understood to be a calling.

A calling toward pastoral work, toward leading and shephering a community of believers. He was careful about it in the way he was careful about everything important.

He did not rush toward it or assume it without examination. He spent a long time praying about whether what he was feeling was genuinely a call or simply a desire he was projecting onto God’s will for him.

He wanted to know the difference. That kind of honest self-examination, the willingness to question his own motives and not simply trust them was one of the things I admired most about him.

With he did not want to serve the church out of ambition or the need to feel significant.

He wanted to serve it because he had been called and he wanted to be certain about the difference.

By the time our first child was born a son whose name I will not use here because I will always be protective of my children even in their stories.

Elas had begun to shepherd a small and quiet congregation. I say quiet because everything about the way the church functioned in our context was by necessity quiet.

It was not a congregation with a building and a listed address and a published schedule of services.

It was a group of believers who rotated among homes, who gathered without announcing themselves, who worshiped with awareness that the wrong ears in the wrong moment could create consequences.

This was the reality of church life for many Christian communities in Syria by this point.

Not all churches operated this way. Some were established enough and in areas stable enough to function more openly.

But in our area, in our circumstances, this was how we did it. And the people Aaliyah served were extraordinary.

I use that word carefully because I know it is used loosely, but I mean it precisely.

They were ordinary in every external sense. Trades people, homemakers, elderly people, young people making difficult choices about staying in a country that was becoming increasingly unsafe for them.

But their faith was extraordinary, not performed, actually lived. Families who had held on to their Christian identity through decades of pressure without it becoming smaller or more defensive.

But if anything more essential and more alive. Elderly people who had seen and survived things that most of their country would never know about and whose peace was earned rather than assumed.

Young people who could have left but chose to stay because they believed their presence in their community was itself a form of faithfulness.

Elias moved among these people with a humility and a genuiness that I watched and marveled at.

He was not a dramatic preacher. He did not have the kind of presence that fills a room before he has said a word.

He was quiet and plain and direct. And when he spoke about Jesus, it was the speech of a man who was talking about someone he knew personally, not a historical figure or a theological proposition.

People responded to this. They trusted him. They brought him their real problems and their real doubts and their real fears.

And he met all of it honestly. He did not give easy answers to hard questions.

He sat in the hard questions with people and trusted that Jesus was present in the sitting, watching him be that man, watching him be in his calling.

The same man I knew at home with the same honesty and the same steadiness and the same quality of genuine presence deepened my love for him in a way that I did not know love could still deepen after years of marriage.

There is a particular kind of love that comes from watching the person you married be exactly who they said they were consistently over time under pressure.

It is different from the love of courtship or the love of early marriage. It is quieter and heavier and more certain.

I loved Elas with that love. We had three children. Each birth was its own complete joy.

Arrow. Even as the world outside our home was becoming more complicated and more frightening with each year, Syria had fractured badly.

The civil war that began in 2011 had opened up layers of conflict that went far deeper than the original dispute, revealing fractures and resentments and power struggles that had been present for a long time.

Beneath a surface stability that turned out to be more fragile than anyone had understood.

Different factions were fighting different battles simultaneously. The government, the opposition, foreign interests, regional militias, all of it layered and intersecting in a violence that consumed ordinary people who wanted none of it.

And into that chaos came the group the world would come to call ISIS. The first time I heard the name clearly enough to understand its significance.

I was in our kitchen and Alias was at the other room talking with one of the men from the congregation.

They were speaking in the lowered voices that men use when they are discussing something serious and do not want to alarm the household.

I listened without making myself known. I heard enough to understand that what was being discussed was not another faction in an already complex civil conflict.

What was being discussed was something categorically different in its intentions and its methods. A group that was not simply fighting for political control, but was actively and violently enforcing a particular religious order on every territory it took.

And that for Christians, this group had a very specific and very clear agenda. That evening, after the visitor had gone, I asked Elas directly about what I had heard.

Thus, he did not try to minimize it or spare me from it. He told me what he knew at that point, which was still incomplete, but was already disturbing.

He told me that the reports from areas where this group had taken control, were unlike anything else that had happened in the conflict so far.

He told me that Christians in those areas had been given choices. Convert, pay a punishing tax and submit to secondass status, or face the third option.

He told me that many had been killed, that churches had been destroyed, that communities that had existed for centuries had been driven out within days.

And then he told me that he did not think we should leave. He said it carefully.

He said it as a man who had thought and prayed about it, not as a man making a reckless or unexamined decision.

Yet he said that the people in the congregation had nowhere to go and no one else.

He said that if he left, he was not sure what would hold that community together.

He said he felt as clearly as he had ever felt anything from God that his place was there.

He asked me what I thought. He genuinely asked he was not presenting a decision already made and seeking my agreement.

He was asking his partner, the woman he had made his life with, what she thought.

I held that question a long time in silence. I was a mother of small children.

I was a daughter with an aging mother. I was a woman with every practical reason to want safety.

And I was also a woman who had chosen her faith knowingly and had watched what faith looked like when it was backed by actual conviction.

I looked at my husband across the room and I saw a man who was not asking me to be reckless with our lives.

I saw a man who had counted the cost and made a decision before God.

And I knew that whatever happened, I was beside him in it. We were one.

We had promised that. I told him I was with him. We stayed. The months that followed were some of the most difficult we had lived through.

The news from surrounding areas was consistently terrible. Every week brought reports that were harder to process than the week before.

Whole Christian communities gone. Churches turned to rubble or repurposed under the black flag. Names of people we knew or knew of reported dead or missing.

The circle of safety was shrinking steadily and visibly, and we were watching it shrink from inside it.

And yet the congregation held more than held. It went deeper. There is something that happens to a community when it faces genuine threat together.

The superficial things fall away. The petty conflicts and the small rivalries and the issues that take up space in a community that has never been seriously tested simply dissolve.

What is left is what was real all along. And what was real in our congregation was a love for God and for each other that I had never seen more clearly than in those frightened and faithful months.

People prayed with a desperation and an honesty that I have never since seen equaled in any comfortable setting.

They wept openly and without embarrassment. They held each other. They shared what they had.

They showed up for each other with a consistency and a willingness that required no organization or instruction.

They simply did it because that is what you do when you are really the church and not just attending it.

Ilas preached during those months from the parts of scripture that speak to suffering and perseverance.

He preached from the Psalms those ancient cries of people who were terrified and faithful simultaneously.

He preached from Hebrews that long sustained argument for holding on when everything inside you wants to let go.

He preached from the letters of Paul written by a man who knew exactly what it cost to carry Jesus into a world that did not want him.

And the people received those sermons not as theological instruction but as bread as the specific thing they needed to keep moving.

There was a night close to the end of our life as we knew it.

And when the children were asleep and the house was quiet and Elias and I sat together on the floor of the main room.

We did this sometimes. Sat on the floor with our backs against the wall because there was something about the groundedness of it that felt more real than furniture.

When we needed to talk about real things, we talked about the children, about what we hoped for them and what we feared for them and what we were trying to build in them that would hold regardless of what came.

We talked about faith, about what it meant to trust God not as a comfort but as an actual conviction.

To trust him when the circumstances made trust feel irrational. To believe that he was present and that he was enough when the evidence visible to the human eye was pointing in a different direction.

And at some point in that conversation, Galas went quiet for a moment. And then he said that he had been spending a lot of time examining his own faith, not doubting it, examining it, asking himself whether it was real enough, whether it was the kind of faith that would hold under the worst pressure or whether it was the kind that looked solid until it was actually tested and then crumbled.

He said he believed it was real enough. He said he believed that if the moment came, the moment where holding onto Jesus cost him the most expensive thing he had, he would hold.

He said it quietly and without drama. The way you state a thing you are genuinely certain of rather than a thing you are performing certainty about.

I did not argue with this. I did not pull back from it the way a frightened wife might pull back saying no that will not happen.

We will be fine. I did not do that because I understood what he was saying and because I had been asking myself the same questions and because a part of me already knew in the way you know things that your mind has not yet fully permitted itself to acknowledge that a moment was coming.

I lay awake that night beside him after he fell asleep. I listened to him breathe.

I memorized the sound of it without knowing I was doing it. I thought about everything.

My father, my mother, the elderly woman in the church with her quiet certainty. The shop burned because of a cross on a wall.

The friendship that had simply stopped one day when I was 9 years old. I thought about the accumulation of it, the long slow building of cost and consequence that had been our community’s life for as long as I could remember.

And I prayed, not eloquently, honestly, I prayed that whatever was coming, we would not let go.

I prayed that Jesus would be enough. I prayed the only prayer that felt real, which was simply hold us.

He was about to be asked to honor that prayer in a way I could not have fully imagined.

And so was I. I have told this part of the story in several different places to several different groups of people and I have noticed something consistent.

When I get to this part, people stop moving. They stop shifting in their seats or checking on their children or glancing at their phones.

They go still. I think the stillness is partly grief and partly something else. Some recognition that what they are about to hear is one of those things that once you have heard it, you cannot simply put back where it was.

You carry it differently afterward. So I am going to ask you to be still with me now and let me tell it plainly.

The morning Elias was taken was an ordinary morning. I need you to hold that because it matters.

Because there is something about the ordinariness of it that is its own particular cruelty.

The worst mornings of your life do not announce themselves. They begin the way every other morning begins.

The light comes in through the same windows. The sounds from the street are the same sounds you have heard every morning for years.

The smell of bread and tea and the particular smell of a house that belongs to you is exactly as it always is.

Nothing in the fabric of ordinary morning tells you that this is the last ordinary morning you will have for a very long time, perhaps forever.

I was in the kitchen. The children were getting ready. The oldest preparing for school, the middle one eating, the youngest still slow and sleepy and needing to be managed through the morning routine that every small child requires.

Elas had been up before me, as he always was. He rose early every morning to pray without exception the way his father had and the way he had done for as long as I had known him.

By the time I was in the kitchen, he had finished his morning prayer and was moving through the house in the quiet, purposeful way he moved, getting ready for his day.

He came into the kitchen. We spoke the way married people speak in the mornings.

The brief, warm, practical words that are not remarkable in themselves, but that are the texture of a shared life.

The small verbal gestures that confirm without ever stating it, I am here. You are here.

We are in this together. He ate something. Yo, he looked tired in the way he had been looking tired for weeks.

The tiredness that is not physical but comes from carrying sustained worry and responsibility. But he was calm.

He was always calm. That deeprooted steadiness that had been one of the first things I saw in him.

The sounds from outside changed before anything else. This is how it begins. Not with an announcement, with a change in the sounds.

Vehicles more than one moving with purpose. Voices that were louder and more authoritative than the ordinary voices of the street.

A quality of movement and noise that is instantly instinctively recognizable as threat before your conscious mind has processed it into language.

The body knows. The body knew before I did. They came into our neighborhood very quickly.

There were many of them armed, all dressed in the manner we had seen in reports and heard described by people who had experienced this in other areas.

The black clothing, the weapons, the manner of men who had decided they were operating under an authority that superseded anything that might push back at them.

They moved through the streets and they went into houses and they took the Christian men when they came to our door.

I was standing in the kitchen doorway. Elas was in the main room. The door opened.

I will not reconstruct the mechanics of it because some of those details belong to me and not to anyone else.

And they were there, several of them, inside our home, which was the home where my children’s shoes were lined up by the door and my bread was on the counter, and the ordinary evidence of our ordinary life was everywhere.

They wanted the men. This became clear immediately. They were moving through the neighborhood, taking the Christian men, gathering them for something.

IAS was in the room and there was no question about what was going to happen.

I moved toward him and the soldier put his arm across my path, not striking me but stopping me with a force that told me very clearly that this was not a situation I had any power in.

I will not describe in detail the moments of Ilias being taken because those moments are mine in a way that I do not know how to share without losing something I need to keep.

What I will tell you is the thing that I have never stopped seeing which is the way he looked at me before they moved him out.

He looked back at me from across our room and I saw everything in that look.

15 years of marriage, every conversation, every prayer, every ordinary morning like this one. Every difficult night sitting on the floor talking about whether our faith was real enough.

Everything we had been to each other and everything we had built was in that look compressed into a few seconds because there were no seconds left for words.

That look told me everything he needed me to know. It told me he was not destroyed by what was happening.

It told me he was held and it told me he knew I was held too, even though I did not feel it yet.

And then he was gone. The women and children of the neighborhood were gathered and taken under guard to one of the larger houses in the area.

The men having been marched in a different direction. There were perhaps 20 of us, maybe more.

I did not count. We were compressed into rooms that were not designed to hold that many people.

While with armed guards at the perimeter and no information about what was happening or what was going to happen, children cried.

Some women prayed aloud. Some were completely silent in a way that was somehow more frightening than any noise.

The waiting that followed was some of the most difficult hours of my life. When there is action, when there is something to do, when you are moving or fighting or making decisions, the body and the mind have somewhere to put their energy.

When you are locked in a room waiting with no information, the mind has nowhere to go but the worst possibilities, and it goes there methodically and without mercy.

I held my youngest on my lap and tried to keep my face from telling her what I was feeling inside.

My oldest sat close to me with the careful face of a child who is trying very hard to understand a situation beyond his years.

My middle one was quiet in a way that was not natural for her. Pressed against my side with both hands gripping my clothing, I prayed, not with eloquence, with the raw, simple words of a person who is terrified and has nothing to offer but honesty.

I did not ask God to make it not be what it clearly was. I asked him to be present, to be present in whatever was happening to Elias wherever they had taken him.

To be present in this locked room with 20 frightened women and their children. To be enough, I kept coming back to that be enough.

I knew what was possible. I had known for months what was possible. I was asking not for a miracle that undid the situation, but for the presence of God inside it.

And he was there. I want to say this clearly and without sentimentality. In that locked room in the worst hours of my life to that point, God was present in a way I could feel.

It was not comfort in any ordinary sense. I was not comforted. I was terrified.

But underneath the terror, there was something holding something that the terror could shake but could not reach the bottom of.

I have tried many times to describe this to people and I always feel that words are insufficient.

The closest I can get is this. It was like being in a terrible storm.

But knowing that the ground beneath you was solid. That regardless of how violent the storm became, the ground would hold.

The storm was very real. The ground was also very real. There was an older woman in that room.

A woman I had known through the church for years in a woman who had survived things I did not know the full details of before this day who began at some point during those hours to sing very quietly almost below the level of sound one of the old hymns a Syria Christian hymn that is very ancient and that I had grown up hearing in church she started it alone, sitting in her corner with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed and her lips moving.

And it spread through the room the way warmth spreads gradually, quietly, as one woman and then another joined in, each one softly enough that the aggregate was still barely a murmur.

It was not performance. It was not morale building. It was a group of frightened women who had been formed by the same faith and who were in the most desperate way doing the only thing they knew to do.

I joined them and my children looked at me and I nodded at them and I sang with my youngest on my lap and my oldest watching me with eyes that were too old for his face.

A guard shouted at us to stop and we stopped, but we had sung. It was later that afternoon, when the light was changing and the temperature inside the room was dropping slightly, that I received information about what had happened.

A young fighter came into the building for reasons I no longer remember, some administrative matter.

He was young, younger than I expected. And there was something about him that was not the same as the older men.

Something that could not fully close off whatever was moving in him about what he had witnessed or been part of.

He paused near where I was sitting. He did not look directly at me. He said a few words quietly in a way that was clearly intended for me alone.

He told me that the men had been brought to a public area, that they had been given a choice, that they had all refused, that they had died with prayers on their lips.

He said the last part with an expression I could not fully read, not pride, not contempt, something more complicated than either.

As though what he had seen had left a mark he had not anticipated. He left without waiting for me to respond.

I want to tell you honestly what happened inside me when he said those words.

There was no collapse. There was no screaming. What happened was quieter and in some ways more complete than either of those things would have been.

It was a knowing, a confirmation of what I had felt earlier in the most physical part of myself cut at some point during the afternoon that I could not have named precisely.

I had felt Elias leave, not metaphorically. I had felt it in the actual physical way that people who are deeply connected feel things.

And this young soldier’s words were the confirmation of what I already knew. The grief did not rush in all at once.

It arrived in layers over time. What arrived first was something stranger, a profound aching clarity.

Ilas had told me on the floor of our home that his faith was real enough to hold under the worst pressure.

He had not been wrong. He had stood in a public square with armed men around him and been offered his life in exchange for denying Jesus.

And he had refused. He had died with the name of Jesus on his lips.

The man I had watched for 15 years, the man who prayed before meals and read scripture every morning and sat on the floor late at night examining the honesty of his own faith.

That man had been exactly who he said he was when it cost him everything.

I held my children and I let that truth sit in me. The grief and the devastating pride and the love were all present simultaneously, not separable from each other.

All of it one compound feeling that had no clean name, but that was as real as anything I have ever felt.

Who survived the day. What I later pieced together through information that came to me over subsequent days from different sources was that there had been some confusion or miscommunication among the ISIS fighters about what was to be done with the women and children.

A commander had given an order. Yet, that order had not been clearly transmitted or had been countermanded by someone else or had simply been lost in the chaos of a group of men who were simultaneously managing multiple things in multiple locations.

In that confusion, the decision about us was delayed. And then something elsewhere required their urgent attention, some engagement, some development in another part of the area and they left.

The guards took us out of the building, marched us to the edge of the neighborhood and expelled us.

Told us to go and not return. I walked out of that neighborhood with my three children.

I had almost nothing. I had the clothes we were wearing. I had a small amount of money that I had had in my possession that morning and that they had not taken.

I had my children’s hands. I had nothing else. I need you to stay with that image for a moment.

A woman walking out of her neighborhood with three children. The home she built behind her.

The man she loved already gone. The street she had walked every day of her life for years, now occupied by men who had ended everything she had known.

The bread still on the counter, the shoes still by the door, all of it behind her, none of it available to her anymore, none of it retrievable.

She walked because walking was what was available. Because stopping was not an option when you had three children who needed you to keep moving.

Because the road ahead, however unknown and frightening it was, was still a road, and roads can be walked.

I thought about what Elias had said, that a man who has nothing worth dying for has nothing worth living for.

He had proved both sides of that sentence. He had died for something. And what he had died for was the same thing that I was now going to have to find a way to keep living for.

Because if it was worth his death, it was worth my life. I kept walking.

The weeks after Elas was taken were the weeks of simply surviving. I want to describe them honestly because I think there is a version of this kind of story where the person telling it jumps quickly from the tragedy to the spiritual lessons and the triumphant declarations and I do not think that is honest.

What happened in those weeks was not triumphant. It was survival in the most basic and unglamorous sense.

Getting through each day, finding food for my children, finding somewhere safe to sleep, processing a grief so enormous that I could not face it directly, but had to approach it sideways in small pieces, the way you cannot look directly at the sun.

We were taken in by a family from our extended church network. People who lived in a part of the area that was not yet as completely under ISIS control as our own neighborhood had been, or people who had a home and were willing to put us in it despite the risk that this carried.

They were a family of remarkable, quiet courage. They shared what they had without making us feel the weight of what we were costing them.

Their children played with my children. And this, the ordinary sight of children playing, the sound of it, the way children find their way to games and laughter, even in the middle of adult catastrophe, was sometimes the only thing that kept me functional.

I could not leave Syria immediately. This is something I want to explain with some care because I know it seems from the outside that the obvious thing to do was to leave as quickly as possible.

But the obvious thing was not the available thing. We had almost nothing in terms of money or resources.

The journey to any border was not a walk in the park. It was a long and dangerous route through terrain controlled by multiple factions requiring planning and money and connections that take time to assemble.

My children were small. My mother, my father, having died sometime before all of this, was elderly and frightened and in no condition to be abandoned.

And there was something else. There was the community. What remained of the congregation that Elas had shepherded was scattered and shattered.

Most of the men were gone. Families had been displaced. But people were still in the area.

Women, elderly people, families who had nowhere else to go and no resources to get there.

And they were still meeting these remnants still gathering in the quietest possible ways in each other’s homes.

Still reading the Bible together in whispers. I was still praying, still trying to hold some thread of faith alive in conditions that made every meeting a risk.

I could not leave that, not immediately, not until I had done what I could do.

So I moved among them, not as their pastor, I was not that, and I had no title or formal role.

But I had been a pastor’s wife for years and I knew these people and I knew how to be present in the ways that a community in crisis needs presence.

I knew how to sit with someone in their grief without needing to fix it or fill the silence.

I knew how to read a passage of scripture to a room of frightened women and then wait with them in whatever the passage brought up.

I knew how to pray over someone with the kind of prayer that is not a performance but a genuine turning toward God on behalf of another person.

I did these things because Elias had modeled them to me over many years and because the spirit of God I believe fills the gaps that human capacity cannot fill when a person is being used in a place where they are needed.

I knew we were being watched. The consciousness of being observed, of being known to the wrong people, had been present since before Elias was killed, but it had intensified significantly afterward.

I was a widow of a man they had killed for refusing to deny Jesus.

I was continuing to practice my faith. I was continuing to gather with other believers.

I was making no secret within the community of who I was and what I believed.

None of this was invisible to people who were watching. I was as careful as I knew how to be.

I was not reckless. I took precautions. I varied my roots. I did not stay in any one location too long.

I was careful about who I spoke to, about what and in what settings. But I was not willing to stop.

I need to say this plainly. I was not able to make myself stop. Not out of stubbornness or a death wish, but because stopping, going quiet, going underground, behaving as though my faith was something I was ashamed of or willing to pretend I did not have would have been a betrayal of alias that I was not capable of.

He had died rather than deny Jesus. I was not going to hide Jesus while I was still alive.

They came for me on an ordinary morning. That the way these things always seem to happen on ordinary mornings.

I was not at home. I was returning from uh visiting an elderly woman from the community, a woman who was ill and alone and whom I had been going to sit with and pray with every few days.

I was walking back through the streets doing the ordinary thing that I had been doing for weeks when a group of armed men stopped me.

The public nature of what they did next was entirely deliberate. I understood this in the moment and I have thought about it many times since.

They were not interested in dealing with me privately. Private punishment accomplishes only one thing.

Public punishment accomplishes something much larger. It sends a message through a whole community. Every person who witnesses a public punishment is receiving a lesson about what happens to people who behave the way the person being punished has behaved.

Every person who watches becomes a warned person. This is why they do it publicly.

This is why they chose a street and not a back room. I was brought to an open area where people could see, but some had gathered or been brought to watch.

I could see faces at windows. I could see people on the edges of the space who had been doing something else and had stopped, frozen in place by what they were witnessing.

Among those faces, I could see some that I recognized. Women from the community, Christian women who had no power to intervene and who watched with faces that told me they were living through something themselves, their own private agony of witnessing.

A man spoke. He stated the accusations against me in the formal manner that they used for this kind of public proceeding.

A Christian woman who had continued to practice and promote her faith in defiance of what was required.

A woman who had refused to accept the new order. A woman who was therefore being given publicly and in front of witnesses while a final opportunity to correct her error.

The offer was what it always was. Say the shahada. Declare that there is no god but Allah.

That Muhammad is his prophet. Renounce Jesus as Lord. Do it here in public in front of these witnesses and you will be permitted to live.

I want to tell you the truth about what was happening inside me in those moments because I think it matters.

I was not calm. My body knew what was about to happen and it was responding the way bodies respond to mortal threat.

The trembling in my hands that I could not control. The weakness in my legs.

The strange heightened clarity that fear sometimes produces where you see everything very sharply and feel time moving differently.

All of that was present. The fear was completely real. And at the same time underneath it there was something else.

I keep returning to the image of solid ground beneath a storm because it remains the most accurate description I have.

The storm was real. The fear was real and there was something underneath that the fear was unable to reach something that held something that was not being generated by my own will or my own strength because my own will and strength were clearly at their limit.

Something that was being given to me in that moment from outside myself. They asked me to deny Jesus.

I said no. Not dramatically. My voice was quieter than I wanted it to be because my body was frightened even while the deeper part of me was held.

I said that Jesus is my Lord. I said I could not say otherwise. I said it simply because the simple version was the true version and I had no capacity in that moment for anything more elaborate or what followed or that was the flogging.

I will describe it plainly because plain is the only honest way to describe physical pain and I will not dress it up into something it was not.

The instrument was thick and heavy. The blows landed across my back and my shoulders with a force that was immediately and comprehensively agonizing.

Pain like that does not stay in one location. It spreads. It radiates. It fills the body in a way that becomes its own weather system.

The ground was hard and hot beneath me. The sun was overhead and direct. I was aware of the watching faces, aware of the voices around me, aware with a particular sharpness of the faces of the women I knew among the watchers.

The women whose silent agony of watching was written plainly on their faces even from a distance.

Between blows, they asked the question again was, “Would I renounce Jesus? Would I say the words?

Would I accept the offer that was still even now on the table? I did not say the words each time they asked the question.

I had to find the answer again in that moment and it came from the same place and the same thing was there each time.

I cannot call it strength. Strength on its own has a limit that can be reached and I was well past any natural limit of strength I might have had.

What was carrying me through each moment was not my own. I know this sounds like uh the kind of claim that is convenient to make after the fact.

But I can only tell you what was true in my experience. And what was true was that I should have broken and I did not break.

And the reason was not me. At some point during this the situation changed. A disturbance somewhere, a commotion that I could not see clearly from the ground, but that I could hear.

A rapid change in the quality of attention of the men around me. Something was happening elsewhere that was urgent.

Communications between the fighters movement. The focused attention of the men who had been concentrated on me shifted and fractured, pulled by something that required them immediately in another location.

The order to execute me was never given or if it was given at some point earlier, it was never carried out.

In the distraction and the movement that followed, I was simply left on the ground.

The scene dissolved around me. The men moved. The watching crowd dispersed in the uncertain way that crowds disperse when the event they were forced to witness has ended without a definitive conclusion.

And nobody is sure what they are allowed to do. I was on the ground and then there were hands on me, women’s hands, gentle and careful and urgent.

Some of them were women I knew from our community who had watched what happened.

Some of them I did not know. There was one woman, I didn’t know her name.

I still do not know her name, who I believe from her clothing was Muslim.

She came to me and she covered me with her own outer garment and she wept.

She did not say much that I was in a condition to retain clearly but she wept and she covered me and she was there.

I have thought about her many times. I do not know what moved her to do that.

It I do not know what was happening inside her as she watched what happened and then came forward when the danger had passed.

I know only what she did and what she did was an act of such basic human solidarity that I have never been able to think about it without being moved.

I was helped to a nearby home. The injuries from the beating were real and serious.

My back and shoulders badly hurt. Movement painful and limited. The kind of damage that takes weeks rather than days to recover from.

There was no real medical care available in our circumstances. What there was was the community.

The women who came and sat with me, who brought what they had for the pain, who cared for my children while I could not, who maintained a quiet, constant, faithful presence around me.

In those days of recovery and in those days of being forced to be still that my mind went to places it usually moved too quickly to visit.

I was not angry. I have examined this many times because I think it is the thing that surprises people most when I say it not because anger would have been wrong.

Anger would have been completely understandable and nobody who knew what had happened to me could have blamed me for being consumed by it.

But it was not what I found when I looked inside myself during those days.

What I found was something harder to name and I think ultimately more useful. It was a kind of stripped down clarity as though everything that was not essential had been removed by grief, by pain, by the cumulative weight of everything that had been taken.

And what was left was only what was real. And what was real was Jesus.

He had been real in my father’s home when I was a child. I waking up every morning to the sound of prayer.

He had been real in that small church where I had grown up in the singing that was always careful not to be too loud but was always completely genuine.

He had been real in the marriage I had with Elias, in the ministry we had shared.

In the prayers we had prayed together on the floor of our home late at night when the children were sleeping and we were asking God to be enough for whatever came.

He had been real on the day Elias was taken because Elias had stood in a public square and refused to deny him and died with his name on his lips.

He had been real in that locked room with 20 frightened women when an elderly woman began to sing and others joined her.

He had been real on the ground under the blows when I should have broken and did not break.

He had been real in the hands and tears of a woman whose name I would never know who covered me with her own garment.

None of what had been done to me had removed him. They had taken everything else that could be taken.

They had taken Elias. They had taken my home. They had taken my security and my sense of a future I could plan and my confidence that tomorrow would resemble today.

They had beaten my body in public and tried to strip me of my dignity in front of witnesses and the one thing they wanted most.

The one thing all of it was designed to take. They had not been able to touch.

He was still there. He had held. I lay in that borrowed room with my damaged body and my grieving heart and my three children sleeping nearby.

And I felt what the Bible calls the peace that passes understanding. Not happiness, not the absence of pain, the not denial of the reality of everything that had happened, but a peace that was underneath all of it, deeper than all of it, more solid than any of the circumstances that were pressing against it.

The peace of knowing with a certainty that had now been tested in fire that the thing you built your life on was real.

And I thought about alias. I thought about his hands, his laugh, the way he prayed with his forehead sometimes against his folded hands.

I thought about what he had said that a man who has nothing worth dying for has nothing worth living for.

And I thought you showed me my love in the most public and most costly way available to you.

You showed me exactly who you were and who he was. And I am still here and I am still his and they could not take that and they could not take it from you either.

But by this point the preparations to leave Syria had to begin in earnest. The flogging had made one thing absolutely clear.

I would not survive another encounter. The next time they came for me, the distraction that had saved my life would not come again.

I was known. I was on a list. Staying was no longer survivable. But leaving took time and the preparations unfolded over the remaining weeks I was in Syria.

And during that time, I continued to do what I had been doing. I continued to move among the community.

I healed slowly and I prayed constantly and I began to say the quiet, careful, partial goodbyes that cannot be announced as goodbyes because announcing them is dangerous.

I was not finished. They had thought they were finishing me. They had beaten me in public and left me on the ground and assumed that either the beating would break me or the next encounter would end me.

They were wrong on both counts. I was still breathing. I was still his. And I was going to carry this story out of Syria with me to wherever I was going.

And I was going to speak it for the rest of my life. Because this story was never only mine.

I did not leave Syria all at once. That is not how it happens. You do not simply decide and then go.

Leaving is its own long careful frightening process. And it happens in stages that are each their own small act of courage or desperation or both.

There is the stage of deciding. There is the stage of preparing which requires money and information and contacts and time.

All of which are in short supply when you are living in an ISIS controlled area as a recently fgged Christian widow with three children and an elderly mother.

There is the stage of actually moving which is the most dangerous stage and the one that requires you to commit fully because once you begin it you cannot go back and there is the stage after crossing which is its own country entirely.

I want to tell you about all of it, not the specific operational details of how we moved because some of those details involve people who helped us and who are still living in circumstances where those details could endanger them.

But the experience of it, what it was like to leave a country that had held everything you ever were, the money came together slowly from the community.

This is one of the things I want people to understand about what a Christian community does when it is actually functioning as it was designed to.

It pulls what it has for the ones who need it. There was no wealthy donor who wrote a large check.

There were many people, most of them with very little, who gave what they could give and what arrived from that accumulation was enough to make the journey possible.

Some of these people would never leave Syria. Some of them were elderly and had no desire to leave and no ability to leave.

They gave what they had to help me take my children to safety. And I carry that with me in a way I will never be able to fully repay.

The information about roots came through the same networks that the community had always used to share information.

The quiet, careful or person-toperson channels that are the nervous system of any minority community in a hostile environment.

Who knew which routes were currently passable? Which checkpoints were likely to be manageable and which were to be avoided?

What the situation was in the areas between us and the border. These things changed daily in some cases and the information had to be current to be useful.

There were people who tracked this and shared it quietly and at personal risk because they believed that getting families to safety was worth that risk.

My mother. I have not spoken enough about my mother in this telling, and I want to pause here and give her the space she deserves.

She was an elderly woman by this point, small and slower than she had been, had or with the slightly confused quality that age sometimes brings, where the present moment and the past are not always clearly separated.

She had lost her husband. She had just lost a son-in-law she loved. She was living in the middle of a situation that would have broken most people a generation younger than her.

And yet she was my mother. She was the same woman who had stirred pots and sung hymns quietly in her kitchen for as long as I had known her.

The crisis had not emptied her of herself. It had, if anything, compressed her down to the essence of herself, and the essence was unbroken.

Getting her out with us was both the most difficult logistical part of the plan, and the part I was least willing to compromise on.

She could not move quickly. She could not manage terrain that was too difficult. Do.

She needed more care and more patience and more attention than the children in some ways because the children were young enough to be adaptable in the way that children are.

While she was old enough that the disruption of everything familiar was its own kind of damage.

But she was my mother and there was never a version of leaving Syria that did not include her.

The morning we left and it was a morning again because the ordinary mornings of your life keep presenting themselves as the setting for the extraordinary moments within it.

I was up before the first light. The house was quiet and dark, and I moved through it carefully, not turning on lights, waking the children gently, and in the particular order that their temperaments required.

My oldest woke cleanly, and was immediately alert in the way he always was, the boy who had his father’s quality of complete presence upon waking.

My middle one needed a moment of gentle coaxing. Her body reluctant to leave sleep.

My youngest I carried, still mostly asleep, her head on my shoulder and her arms around my neck.

We each had a bag small enough to carry without slowing down. Inside mine was everything practical that we needed and also a small Bible.

Not Elias’s Bible that was still in the home that was no longer our home.

This was a Bible that had been given to me by one of the women of the community in the days after the flogging.

An old copy with a worn cover and some loose pages pressed into my hands by a woman who said simply that I should take it.

I held it against my body throughout the entire journey. The way you hold something you cannot afford to lose.

My mother walked beside me. She did not complain. She did not ask unnecessary questions.

She had understood what was happening and she had made her own internal adjustments to it in the way she always made her adjustments quietly in prayer without making her fear someone else’s problem.

She put her hand in mine at one point during the walk and held it and we walked that way for a while without speaking.

Her hand in mine felt like everything she had ever said to me without words.

The journey took us through multiple kinds of terrain and multiple kinds of danger. There were stretches by vehicle.

People who were moving in the same direction and who let us join them. People who had their own reasons for making the journey and who were not interested in our story only in moving.

There were stretches on foot where the road was not safe for vehicles or where the route required us to move through areas that were of any established road.

There were hours of waiting in locations that felt exposed, waiting for something or someone that had been arranged and that we could only trust would materialize.

The checkpoints were the worst of it, not because they were always the most physically difficult sections, but because they were the sections of most concentrated fear.

When you approach a checkpoint with three children and an elderly mother and documents that may or may not be sufficient and a soldier whose mood and whose instructions you cannot know in advance, the space between you and that checkpoint is the longest space in the world.

I prayed at everyone, not elaborate prayers. The simplest possible request, let us through. Let my children through.

We got through everyone. I do not say this lightly or without weight. I know what getting through every checkpoint meant.

I know people who did not get through. I know stories from the same roads we traveled of families who were turned back or worse.

I have no explanation for why we made it through. That does not involve the direct intervention of a god who was present in that journey.

I do not offer that as an argument for you to accept or reject. I offer it as the most honest account I can give of my own experience.

My youngest fell asleep on my back during the longest walking stretch carried in a way that distributed her weight across my still healing injuries.

The pain was significant but manageable. You manage it because the child needs to be carried and you are the one who has to carry her.

The body finds capacity that you did not know you had when the alternative to finding it is not acceptable.

There was a moment somewhere in the journey that I cannot place precisely on any map.

When we when we came over a rise in the terrain and I could see the border crossing in the distance.

It was still far. There was still ground to cover, but it was visible. And something happened in me that I can only describe as the first exhale of a breath I had been holding for longer than I could calculate.

Not relief. It was too early for relief, but permission. Permission from my own body to acknowledge that this was real, that we were moving, that the ground was changing beneath our feet.

When we crossed, when we were through and the ground under us was no longer Syrian ground, I stood still for a long moment.

My children were around me. My mother was beside me. The road stretched ahead of us into a country we had never lived in and knew almost nothing about.

The sun was at a particular angle in the sky. I stood there and I cried in a way I had not cried since the very earliest days after Elias was taken.

Not the controlled careful grief of a woman who could not afford to be disabled by her emotions in front of her children, but the full unmanaged uncontrolled weeping of a person who has survived something that should not have been survivable.

My children gathered around me. My oldest held my hand. My youngest pressed her face against my stomach.

My mother put her hand on my back, but on the exact spot that still hurt from the flogging and she did not say anything.

She just kept her hand there. We stayed like that for a while and then we moved on because moving on was what was next.

The country we arrived in was not a paradise. I want to be clear about this because I think there is sometimes an expectation in stories of people escaping terrible places that the escape itself resolves everything.

It does not. It ends one category of danger and begins another category of difficulty.

We were refugees now, which meant we existed in a legal liinal space, present in a country that was not ours, dependent on processes and institutions and decisions that were being made about us rather than by us, uncertain about our status and our future in a way that was its own particular anxiety.

What the practical dimensions of being a refugee are things that people who have never experienced it cannot fully imagine.

There is the registration presenting yourself to authorities and being documented as a displaced person which involves surrendering a certain kind of agency over your own story to an institutional process.

There is the waiting which is a permanent feature of refugee life. Waiting for decisions, waiting for approvals, waiting for clarity about what you are allowed to do and where you are allowed to go.

There is the condensed living, small spaces, limited resources, proximity to many other people who are also in difficult circumstances and who carry their own grief and trauma and need.

There is the disorientation of a new place, new sounds, new routines, a city that has its own rhythms that you are not part of.

Uh people who move through their ordinary lives around you while you are trying to figure out how to have a life at all.

My children struggled. I will say this plainly because they were real children in a real situation and their struggle was real and it mattered.

My oldest became more inward and vigilant than a child of his age should need to be.

Waking at small sounds, always tracking exits and entrances, carrying in his small body the learned alertness of a child who has lived in a place where the wrong kind of attention could mean the wrong kind of outcome.

My middle one became attached to me in a way that was different from ordinary childhood attachment, needing to know where I was at all times.

Distressed by any distance between us. Added the insecurity showing up in her sleep and in her eating and in the way she clung when I tried to move, even a few steps away.

My youngest, still small enough that much of what had happened lived in her as atmosphere rather than memory, was more resilient in some ways.

Still capable of being delighted by small things, still able to find her way to play.

Still someone who could laugh with her whole body in the way that small children do when nothing has yet taught them to hold back.

Watching her laugh in the middle of everything. Watching the complete uncomplicated joy of my youngest child finding something funny in our difficult and uncertain circumstances was one of the things that most held me together in those months.

Not because it took the pain away, but because it reminded me that life, actual living, odd continued even in the middle of catastrophe.

That laughter was still possible. That small joys were still real. That the world was not entirely consumed by what had consumed us.

I found the church through connections, Christian network, finding Christian network in the way that these communities have always found each other across borders and distances.

Word traveling through people who knew people, the same mechanism that had always been the nervous system of the persecuted church.

A name, a location, a Sunday morning. I walked into that church for the first time on a Sunday and I was not prepared for what it would do to me.

It was a modest building and a modest congregation. There was nothing extraordinary about it by any external measure, but the door was open.

Not open in a technical sense only. Open in the full sense of a place that was not hiding what it was.

That didn’t require you to approach it carefully and quietly and with awareness of who might be watching.

It was simply open and inside people were singing. They were singing at a normal volume, not at the carefully moderated level that I had absorbed into my very body over years of worshiping in a context where singing too loudly could bring the wrong attention.

They were singing the way people sing when they are allowed to with their actual voices at the level that music requires to be fully music.

And those voices, that sound, the sheer open normality of a group of people singing to God at normal human volume inside a building with an open door, it undid me completely.

I stood at the back of that church and I could not stop crying. The pastor, an older man, who had clearly seen people arrive at his door in various states over the years, and who had developed the wisdom to know when presence is more useful than words, simply let me stand there and weep.

He came and stood near me after a while, not touching me, not speaking, just present.

That was the right thing. That quiet company, that presence without demand. It was the right thing.

The congregation received us with a warmth that I still find difficult to talk about without emotion.

Not the performed warmth of people who are trying to seem welcoming. The actual warmth of people who understood something about what it meant to need community, who had perhaps their own experiences of displacement and loss, even if not identical to mine, who recognized in us something they knew how to respond to.

There was food. There were people who sat with my children and played with them while I talked with adults for the first time in months without needing to manage every word for safety.

There was a woman who sat beside me and held my hand for a long time without asking me anything, who seemed to understand that what I needed in that moment was not to be processed through questions, but to be held.

I felt safe for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember. I felt safe.

Not permanently safe. Not the kind of safe that means nothing difficult will ever happen again.

I was realistic enough and experienced enough to know that the world does not offer that kind of safe.

But the specific terror of living in a place where armed men could come through your door, but where your faith could get you beaten or killed, where the name of Jesus had to be spoken quietly and only in trusted company.

That specific terror was gone. I could pray aloud. I could speak of Jesus by name in conversation.

I could walk into a building on Sunday morning that everyone knew was a church without scanning the surroundings as I approached.

These things sound small. They are not small. My mother arrived some weeks after us through a separate arrangement that was its own complicated and frightening process that I will not detail here.

When she walked through the door, when I saw her standing there, smaller than she had seemed in Syria, slower, but herself, entirely herself, I understood in a way I had not let myself fully feel before, just how much I had been carrying the fear of losing her, too.

Oh, the reunion was not dramatic. We held each other for a long time in the entryway of a small apartment we had been placed in, and neither of us said very much because neither of us needed to.

She was there, I was there, we were both alive. The rest could be spoken later or not at all.

In this new place with the practical stability that began slowly to accumulate around us, a school for the children, a structure to the days, the growing familiarity with the routines of the city.

I began to do what I have been doing since telling the story. First to individuals in the church community, then to groups, then in settings outside the original church.

As words spread in the way that word spreads in connected communities. Each telling costs something.

I have never stood up to tell this story without it costing something. But each telling also gives something.

And not just to the people listening. The act of speaking it out loud, of taking these things that happened in the dark and in the violence and in the grief and bringing them into a room full of people who are willing to receive them is its own form of survival, its own form of testimony that what happened did not finish me.

I want to speak to you now directly to whoever you are wherever you are reading this.

If you are a Christian, I want to say something that I hope you will hear in the spirit of love that it is offered in and not as criticism.

Do not take him for granted, please. I know that sounds simple and perhaps even obvious and maybe you have heard it said before in settings that made it feel like a stock phrase rather than a real plea.

What? But I am asking you to hear it from someone who has stood in the place where taking him for granted is simply no longer possible.

Where the question of whether he is real and whether he is worth it is not an academic one but a question your life is requiring you to answer in real time under real pressure with real consequences from that place he is worth it not in a vague or sentimental sense in the most practical tested confirmed by experienced sense I know how to Express.

He was present in the locked room with the frightened women. He was in the singing that spread through that room before the guard shouted at us to stop.

He was in whatever held me together on the ground while they asked me again and again to deny him and I could not.

He was in the hands of a woman whose name I still do not know who covered me with her own garment and wept.

He was in every checkpoint on the road out of Syria. He was in the open door of a church in a new country on a Sunday morning when people were singing at full volume and I stood at the back and fell apart in the best possible way.

He is real. He was enough. He is enough. If your life has not yet required you to test this the way mine required me to test it, I am not saying that is a failure.

I am saying it is a mercy. But please do not let the mercy of an untested faith make you casual about the thing you have been given.

The people who stand at that altar every Sunday in your comfortable church in your country where nobody will arrest you for it, they are carrying a gift that I watched men die rather than surrender.

Or do not hold it lightly. And if you are not a Christian, if you are reading this from a place of different belief or no belief at all, I am not writing this to argue you into anything.

Arguments are not what bring people to faith and I have never believed otherwise. I am simply asking you one honest question that I ask with full and genuine respect for wherever you are.

What would you not deny? Think about that carefully. Every person alive has something that is functionally their foundation.

The thing their identity is built on. The thing their decisions come from, the thing they would not surrender even under the worst pressure.

For some people it is their family. For some it is a country or a cause.

For some it is a set of convictions about human dignity or justice. For some it is a god by a different name or a god by no name or a philosophical framework that functions in the place where others put god.

Whatever that thing is, whatever you would not deny if the denying was demanded of you.

That is what you are actually living by. Regardless of what you call it, I am not asking you to adopt mine.

I am only asking you to know your own. Because the people who go through the worst things the world can do to a person with any kind of intact core are the people who knew before it happened, what they were made of, and what they stood on.

I had that because my father made sure I had it. Because I grew up watching people who had it.

Because when the pressure came, I already knew the answer. And the answer was already deep enough that it could not be reached by what came against it.

Whatever your foundation is, know it. Would test it in the small quiet moments before the large terrible ones demanded of you.

I want to end with Ilas. I always want to end with Ilas. People ask me sometimes how I carry the grief of his loss.

It is a genuine question and it deserves a genuine answer. The answer is that you do not so much carry grief as you learn to walk while it walks beside you.

It never fully leaves. I do not expect it to. What changes is not the presence of it but your relationship to it.

You stop fighting it and it stops fighting you. And gradually over time you come to an arrangement with it where it can be present without preventing everything else from being present too.

Love and grief are made of same material. The grief is the shape the love takes when the person is gone.

And because I do not want to stop loving him, I I do not expect to stop grieving him.

What I have is memory. Memory is not as good as presence. I want to be honest about that.

I would have Elias’s back in a breath if that were possible. But memory is what I have, and I have chosen to hold it well rather than push it away.

I remember small things most, not the large moments. The large moments are important and I carry them too.

But it is the small ones that come to me most often in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day.

The way he smelled like wood shavings and old paper. The wood from work he did around the house.

And the paper from the Bible he carried everywhere and handled constantly until it was soft with use.

The particular way he laughed when something genuinely caught him offguard. Not a polite social laugh, but a real one that came from somewhere below his usual composure and that always surprised him slightly as much as it surprised anyone else.

The way he said good night to each child individually, going to each bed and kneeling down and taking their hand and praying over them in a few quiet words, never rushing, never doing one child’s good night while already mentally moving to the next.

The way he looked at me across a room full of people and the look said without any words, “You still you.

That is the man they killed. That quiet, faithful, fully present man with his worn Bible and his dry humor and his absolute certainty about the one thing he was not willing to be uncertain about.

Jesus is Lord, and that is not negotiable, not even at the cost of everything.

And here I am having paid close to everything myself. Still here, still his. The children he prayed over every night are growing into people he would be unspeakably proud of.

The faith he died for is the same faith I woke up with this morning.

The same faith I will take to bed tonight. The same faith I will carry every remaining day of my life.

They thought they could silence my Jesus. They did not understand what they were dealing with.

He does not go silent. He does not retreat. He does not fold under the weight of what human beings do to each other or to the people who carry his name.

He is not diminished by suffering. He is in the most confusing and the most real and the most confirmed by everything I have lived.

Truth I possess most present in the suffering. Be most fully himself in the places where nothing else is enough.

Most audible in the rooms where everything else has gone quiet. I am alive. My children are alive.

My mother is alive. The faith for which Elias gave everything is alive in me.

In my children, in the community I left behind, who are still meeting and whispers and still singing carefully and still refusing every single day to let go.

They could not silence my Jesus. He is speaking