Indonesian Princess Goes Viral for Her Testimony: ...

Indonesian Princess Goes Viral for Her Testimony: “Jesus Kept Coming to Me in My Dream”

I was born into one of the most recognized royal households in Indonesia.

I will not say exactly which branch and I will not give you my full name because there are people in my family who are still living and still navigating the consequences of what I chose and I will not add to their burden by making this a public spectacle with names and family trees attached.

What I will tell you is that theraton the palace was not just a building to me.

It was the entire world. My father was a figure of great dignity. I will not say much about him now except to tell you that he was the kind of man whose presence changed a room when he entered it.

Not because he was loud or demanding, but because he carried something heavy and graceful at the same time.

He had a way of looking at you that made you feel both seen and measured.

I loved him deeply and I was also a little afraid of him. The way you are afraid of something you respect so much you would rather not disappoint it.

My mother was the practical one, the one who managed the household and managed us children and managed my father’s schedule and the family’s social obligations all at once.

And she did it with a kind of effortless precision that I have never seen in anyone else before or since.

She was also the most devout person I knew. Her faith was not something she wore for occasions.

It was her interior architecture. It was how she was built. Islam in our household was not separate from royal identity.

I want you to understand this clearly because it is important to everything else I am going to tell you.

For the royal houses of Java, especially Yoga Carta, Islam and royalty have been woven together for centuries.

The Sultan of Yogyakarta holds a title that includes religious authority. The Satan festival which marks the birth of the prophet Muhammad is one of the most important royal ceremonies of the year.

The gamelan sets reserved for seaten are considered sacred and are only brought out for that occasion.

The royal legitimacy in yoga carta is inseparable from its Islamic identity. So when I say I was Muslim, I do not just mean that my family happened to follow that religion the way some families casually belong to a faith.

I mean that my religion and my identity as a member of the royal house were one and the same thing.

To be who I was in that family in that palace was to be Muslim.

There was no gap between those two things. No daylight between them at all. We prayed five times a day in our household.

This was not a suggestion. The call to prayer was the organizing rhythm of daily life.

Whatever was happening, whatever visitors were present, whatever meeting or meal was underway. When the adhan came, things adjusted to accommodate it.

I learned to pray properly before I learned to write well. I could recite significant portions of the Quran before I could do long division.

During Ramadan, the entire household transformed. The rhythm of waking and sleeping shifted. The kitchen operated on a different schedule.

There was a kind of collective discipline in the air that had its own beauty.

I will admit that honestly. And the end of Ramadan 8 alfar was the most spectacular celebration of the year.

Extended family would arrive from everywhere. Formal dress, a formal ceremony, the careful observance of every protocol.

It was overwhelming and magnificent and I was proud to be part of it. I also had private Islamic education alongside my regular schooling.

A teacher came to the house several times a week and I learned Quranic recitation, basic Islamic Jewish prudence, the stories of the prophets, the history of the faith.

I was a good student, not because I was forced to be, but because I genuinely wanted to do things correctly.

I had a personality that wanted to get things right to understand the rules and follow them well.

So I did. I recited. I memorized. I asked questions. I listened to the answers.

By the time I was a teenager, I had more religious knowledge than many adults outside our circle.

And I knew it. And it gave me a certain quiet confidence. But here is the thing I have to tell you.

The thing I never told anyone for a very long time. The thing I feel I owe you at the beginning of this story because without it nothing else makes sense.

I never felt anything. Not nothing in the sense of boredom or inattention. I was attentive.

I was present. I did everything correctly and I did it sincerely. But when I prayed, I felt like I was speaking into a room with no one in it.

When I recited Quran, the words were beautiful. The Arabic is genuinely architecturally beautiful, but they did not land on me the way I sense they were supposed to land.

I watched my mother pray, and something was happening to her that I could see from across the room.

Some interior activity that showed in her face. A settling, a peace, a communication. I wanted that.

I imitated everything she did. I prayed at the same hours in the same manner a with the same words and I waited for it to happen to me and it did not.

I told myself this was normal. That faith was discipline not feeling. That mature faith was not about sensation but about obedience and consistency.

I heard these things from teachers and I chose to believe them because the alternative was troubling.

The alternative was that something was wrong with me that I was somehow spiritually defective in a way that others in my family were not and I could not accept that.

Not in that household, not with those expectations, not as the person I was supposed to be.

So I kept going. I kept praying. I kept reciting. I kept fasting every Ramadan with full sincerity.

I kept doing everything right and I kept feeling nothing. There is a memory that comes back to me now that I think contains the seed of everything that happened later.

I was 12 years old. It was the last night of Ramadan, the night before 8.

In our household, this night was filled with activity, preparations for the following day, the sounds of the kitchen, relatives arriving, a kind of productive, joyful chaos everywhere.

And I had completed my prayers, and I had gone to my room for a moment of quiet.

And I sat on the floor, not on the bed, just on the floor by the window.

And I cried. I did not know why I was crying. I was not unhappy in any way I could point to.

My life was good. I was healthy. I was loved. The following day would be beautiful.

There was nothing wrong. And yet I was sitting on the floor of my room on the last night of Ramadan, 12 years old, or crying in a way that came from somewhere I could not locate.

I wiped my face and went back to the family and no one knew. And I told myself it was tiredness from the fasting month.

And I believed that explanation because I needed to. But I know now what it was.

I know now that I was grieving something I had not yet found. That the longing in me was so deep and so specific that it leaked out that night in tears I could not explain.

I was 12 years old and I was lonely in a way that had nothing to do with the people around me and everything to do with the absence of a presence I had never yet encountered.

I am telling you this not to suggest that there was something deficient in what my family gave me.

They gave me everything they had. My mother’s faith was real and it was hers and it sustained her in ways I could see plainly.

I am not saying Islam could not have reached someone else in my position. I am saying it did not reach me and I spent years trying to understand why.

And now I think I simply understand it differently. Some people are knit in a particular way and they require a particular key and no amount of trying the wrong key will open the door no matter how sincere the trying.

Growing up royal in Java carries a weight that is hard to communicate to people who have not experienced something like it.

There is a concept in Japanese royal culture called wahu. A divine grace or blessing that is understood to flow through certain bloodlines conferring on the bearers of that blood a spiritual authority and a special relationship with the divine.

It is not a concept that is Islamic in origin. It predates Islam in Javanese spiritual culture, but it had been absorbed into the general atmosphere of our household and our understanding of ourselves.

We were not ordinary people. We were not meant to be ordinary people. The blood in our veins carried history and obligation and something that was supposed to be sacred.

I believed this as a child, not in an arrogant way. I was not raised to be arrogant.

Quite the opposite. My mother was strict about humility and proper behavior, but in the way a fish believes in water.

It was simply the reality I swam in. My identity was a container that had been filled before I was born, and I was just growing into it.

But here is what I started to notice as I got older. As I moved from childhood into adolescence, the container was beautiful.

The container was impressive, but it was just a container. And I was supposed to be more than a container.

I was a person with a mind that was becoming more active and more questioning, with a heart that wanted something real to hold on to, something that was not just tradition or bloodline or ceremony, something that was mine in a way that no title could be mine, something personal that no family decision could give or take away.

I do not want to make it sound like I was miserable or rebellious. I was neither.

I was a good daughter. I followed the rules. I excelled in my studies. Because in our family, being educated was taken seriously.

My parents were not people who believed girls should be decorative or domestically confined. They had high expectations of intellectual achievement for all their children.

Now, I had close friendships within our circle. I had a sense of humor. I could laugh easily.

My childhood had real joy in it. And I am grateful for that. But underneath all of it, running like a thread through every year was this unnamed hunger.

This sense that I was looking for something I could not describe. This feeling and I am going to use the most honest word I can of incompleteness like a sentence that ends without a full stop like a note that never resolves.

By the time I was 15 or 16, I had started to read more broadly on my own.

Not religious texts at this point, just literature, history, philosophy in the way that teenagers sometimes stumble into it.

I was curious about everything. I read about different cultures and different belief systems, not because I was looking to leave my own, but because I was a curious person in a household that valued learning.

And some of what I read made me think, not in a destabilizing way, yet just in a way that opened windows in a room I had previously thought had only walls.

I had one close friend outside the palace circle. Her family was middle class, no royal connection, and she was Christian.

She had been my friend since primary school because we were placed in the same class and we discovered we both loved to read and we both thought in similar ways.

My mother knew about the friendship and did not discourage it because my mother was not the kind of person who was threatened by difference.

She was secure enough in her own faith that the existence of other faiths did not feel like a threat to her.

The friendship was not something that was hidden or complicated. Uh she was just my friend.

Her name I will not share. I will just say she was the kind of person whose faith was also visible from the outside the way my mother’s was.

But hers had a different quality where my mother’s faith looked like discipline and order and something that had been built carefully over decades.

My friend’s faith looked like it was just part of her breathing. She didn’t talk about it much.

She didn’t push it on me at all. But it was present in how she moved through difficulties.

In how she treated people who were unkind to her, in a kind of groundedness she had that I envied without knowing I was envying it.

When I was 17, she told me that a small prayer group met at a family friend’s house.

A casual gathering on Sunday evenings and she mentioned it almost in passing. But the way you mention something you’re doing that week, not as an invitation particularly, just as information.

I don’t know why I said I would come. It was not like me. I was not someone who acted on impulse.

I was careful and considered in most things. The palace had that effect on you.

Everything had a proper procedure. So you learned to think before you moved and going to a Christian prayer meeting was not something that fit any proper procedure in my world.

It was not forbidden exactly. We were not that kind of household and I was not going to be locked in my room for attending something out of curiosity.

But it was unusual. It was stepping outside the container in a small way. And yet something in me said yes before my mind had finished thinking it through.

Is something pulled me in a direction I had not previously considered walking. I did not understand it at the time.

I understand it now, but I did not understand it then. I told my mother I was going to a study group at my friend’s house, which was not entirely untrue.

She did not ask questions. I got in the car and my driver took me and I walked into that house and I sat down in a circle of people and my life began slowly to change in a way I would not have been able to predict or prepare for even if I had tried.

I did not feel anything remarkable that first evening. No lightning, no voice, no dramatic moment.

It was just people, ordinary people sitting in a circle in an ordinary living room with simple furniture and a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.

They sang some songs I did not know. They prayed, taking turns in a way that was unlike anything I had ever heard.

And one woman in the circle, older, maybe in her 60s, prayed in a way that stopped something in me completely.

She was not reciting. She was talking. She was talking to someone as if that someone was right there in the room.

And she was crying, but not the crying of sadness. I know the difference. I have cried both ways.

It was the crying of someone who is flooded by something good, something overwhelming in the best possible way.

She spoke about her weak, about a difficulty she had been through, and she spoke to whatever she was speaking to as if the response was guaranteed, as if being heard was not a question she had any doubt about.

I sat in that circle and I watched her and something in me went very very quiet.

I did not know what I was watching. I did not have a theological framework for it yet.

I just knew that I had prayed five times a day for 17 years. And I had never once looked the way that woman looked.

And I had wanted to look that way without knowing I wanted it. I had wanted exactly that for as long as I could remember.

I went home that night and I sat in my room and I did not cry this time.

I just sat very still and I thought and what I thought was not yet belief, not yet searching, not yet anything I could name.

It was just a question, small and quiet, floating in the middle of everything I thought I knew.

What if there is something I am missing? That was all, just that question, small as a seed.

I did not know then that seeds like that once they land do not stop growing.

I did not know that the question I was sitting with that night in my room was going to follow me for the next several years, growing roots in the dark, in silence beneath everything else in my life.

I was 17 years old, a princess of the palace, properly raised, properly educated, properly Muslim, properly everything I was supposed to be.

And a question had just cracked something open in me that I would never be able to fully close again.

That is where this story really begins. I want to be honest about the months that followed that first prayer meeting.

They were not dramatic. Nothing happened quickly. The crack that had opened in me that evening was real, but it was small and my life was large.

And most of the time my life simply continued without giving that crack much space to widen.

I was in my final years of school. I was preparing for university entrance examinations that carried significant weight in our household.

My parents had expectations about where I would study and what I would study. And those expectations were reasonable and I respected them.

There was family life, social obligations, ceremonies to attend, relatives to receive. The palace did not slow down.

It did not make space for private internal questioning. It simply moved forward the way it always had on its ancient well-worn rhythm, and I moved with it.

But something had shifted in a small way that I noticed. When I prayed the five prayers, I paid attention differently.

Not with more devotion. I am not sure it was that. But I was listening in a different way.

I was noticing the gap more consciously. The gap between the words I was saying and any felt sense of response.

Before I had told myself the gap was normal, that it was the nature of mature faith.

That feeling was not the point. Now I was less sure about that explanation because I had seen something in that living room in the face of that woman praying that suggested the gap did not have to be there.

That it was possible for prayer to feel like a real conversation, a real exchange.

I had seen it with my own eyes and I could not unsee it. My friend did not press me.

I want to make this clear because it is important. She did not follow up with me to ask how I felt or what I thought.

She did not leave Christian books in my bag. She was just my friend as she had always been.

She mentioned the prayer group sometimes in conversation but lightly without weight. She trusted something I think that I did not trust yet of she trusted that whatever had started was going to continue without her having to push it.

A few months after that first visit I went back and then I went a third time.

The third time I went, there was a young man there who was studying theology in Yoga Carta, a seminarian, and he spoke briefly that evening about something I had never heard framed in quite that way before.

He spoke about the nature of God as father, not God as sovereign, not God as judge, not God as lawgiver, all of which I understood within my own framework, but God as father in a personal intimate sense.

He spoke about the idea that this God wanted to know individual people, not be woripped by them from a distance, but actually know them.

The way a father knows a child by name, by the specific texture of their particular life.

Oh, I sat with that for a long time afterward. The God I had grown up with was great and powerful and worthy of submission and worship, and I believed all of that sincerely.

But the God I had grown up with was not someone you had a conversation with.

The God I had grown up with received your prayers and you hoped they were accepted.

There was always that question of acceptance of whether you had done enough, been sincere enough, performed the ritual correctly enough for your prayer to reach.

The distance was built into the structure. The distance was part of the theology. The idea of a God who wanted to know me personally, who was in fact already looking for me, who did not need me to perfect my approach before engaging.

This was so different from what I understood that I could not immediately evaluate it.

It was simply something I had not heard before, sitting quietly in my mind next to everything else.

I got a Bible sometime during this period. I want to be careful about how I say this because I do not want to over dramatize it.

Getting a Bible was not a dramatically covert operation. Books were books in our household and I had a lot of them and privacy was generally respected.

But I was careful about it. I bought it on my own from a Christian bookshop on a day I was out without my driver, just me and my friend.

And I carried it home in a regular shopping bag and put it on a lower shelf of my bookcase behind some other books.

I want to tell you what it felt like the first time I sat down to actually read it.

Not as a theological exercise but just as a reader the way I read any book I did not know where to start and so my friend had suggested the gospels I started with Matthew the first several chapters the genealogy the nativity narrative were interesting but did not stop me and then I reached the sermon on the mount I had heard about the sermon on on the mount.

I knew enough about Christianity to know it was considered an important text, but I had never read it in full, slowly with attention.

And when I did, something happened that I am still not entirely able to explain.

Not in the dramatic section about turning the other cheek or loving your enemies, though those things struck me too.

But in the opening sentences, the biatitudes, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

I read that sentence and I stopped. I read it again. I have been writing this story for some time now and I have been trying to decide how to describe what happened when I read that sentence.

And the honest answer is that I cannot fully describe it. I can tell you the physical facts.

I was sitting on my bed, late afternoon light coming through the curtains, no one else in my room.

I read the sentence and something shifted in my chest. A physical sensation that was not quite pain and not quite relief, but contained both.

And I thought about the 12-year-old girl on the floor by her window on the last night of Ramadan crying without knowing why.

I thought about the years of praying into silence and feeling nothing back. I thought about the hunger I had carried for as long as I could remember without having a name for it.

Here was a text that said, “The morning has a purpose.” The morning leads somewhere.

The morning is not a mistake or a deficiency. It is a state that is followed by something.

I did not convert that day. I did not even fully understand what I was feeling that day.

But I kept reading. I read through Matthew, through Mark, through Luke. I read the parables.

I read the healing accounts. I read the way Jesus talked to people, the individual people, the ones nobody else was talking to, the ones at the edges of the crowd, the ones with the wrong profession or the wrong reputation or the wrong history.

He kept noticing the people that the official structures of religion had determined were too compromised to be worth noticing.

I recognize something in those people. I am not saying my life was hard in the way their lives were hard.

My life was by any material measure extraordinarily comfortable and privileged. But I recognize the quality of their situation.

The being outside the circle. The being judged by a standard you had tried to meet and somehow still fallen short of.

The being looked at and found wanting. I had felt that in the spiritual space my whole life.

I had done everything correctly and I still felt like I was outside the circle.

Jesus kept going to those people. That was the thing. He kept walking toward the ones the system had already written off.

I finished school and I began university in Yogy Carta. My life expanded somewhat. More freedom of movement, a broader social world, the beginning of the intellectual independence that university creates.

I was still living within the family framework, still attending family religious observances, and still performing all the practices that were expected of me.

I had not told anyone what I was thinking or reading. It was an entirely interior process and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could.

In my second year of university, I was offered a scholarship to continue part of my studies in the Netherlands.

This was not unusual for people from families like mine. European academic connections have been part of elite Indonesian life for generations.

My family was proud of this. My father in particular saw it as exactly the right kind of achievement.

I was going to Utrect. I want to pause here and say something about what it means to leave a place like the Katen for the first time.

I had traveled before, of course, family trips, regional visits, but living elsewhere, living independently for the first time in my life, a in a country where nobody knew my name, where my title meant absolutely nothing, where I was just a foreign student with a good academic record.

This was a kind of freedom I had not previously experienced. And it was both exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

I arrived in Utrect in September when the city is still warm enough to be pleasant but you can feel the northern winter beginning to gather at the edges.

The light there is different from Yogyakarta, lower in the sky, more angled, turning everything gold in the afternoon in a way that is beautiful but also has a kind of melancholy in it.

I found a small apartment. I began my classes. I learned how to navigate the city, how to cook for myself, how to be alone in a way I never had been before.

And without the constant structure of the palace, without the five prayers being the rhythm of an entire household around me, without the social weight of being watched and known and placed within a hierarchy that had specific expectations of me every hour of every day, I was free to think in a way I had not previously been free to think.

Not free because anyone had previously prevented me. Free because the space around me had changed and the space inside me responded by opening up.

I found the Indonesian Christian congregation in Utrect almost by accident. A notice in a community newsletter that several Indonesian students received mentioning a Sunday service in Indonesian.

I went out of curiosity more than anything. The community was small, maybe 30 people on a good Sunday, mostly students, some older Indonesians who had been in the Netherlands for many years.

It was warm in the way that Indonesian community gatherings abroad always are. The food, the easy noise, the switching between Indonesian and Dutch, the automatic friendliness toward a new face.

The pastor was a quiet, thoughtful man from Manado. And I will say that because Mina Hassan Indonesians have been predominantly Christian for generations and it was natural that he would lead this congregation.

He had a kind of intellectual gentleness that I responded to immediately. He did not preach aggressively.

He did not perform emotion. He simply opened texts and thought through them out loud and invited the congregation to think with him.

I sat in the back the first Sunday. I observed. I listened. I was not ready to participate, but I was paying very careful attention.

After the service, there was coffee and food, and the pastor spoke to everyone individually, briefly, the way good pastors do.

When he reached me, he asked my name and where I was from and what I was studying.

I told him. He said that was interesting and asked if I had been a Christian for long.

I told him no, I was just visiting. He said that was fine. He said he was glad I had come and that I was welcome anytime.

He did not press. I went back the following Sunday and the Sunday after that.

Within a month I was attending regularly. Within 2 months, I was having occasional conversations with the pastor after the service.

I began asking him the questions I had been carrying for years about Jesus, about the trinity, about salvation, about how this religion understood the relationship between God and human beings.

I had many questions. Some of them were skeptical questions. The kind you ask when you are testing whether something holds up under examination.

Some of them were hungry questions, the kind you ask when you already believe the answer is going to be yes, but you need to hear it out loud.

He was a patient man. He answered what he could answer and acknowledge what was genuinely uncertain or theologically complex.

He never made me feel that questions were unwelcome or dangerous. He treated them as signs of a genuine searching mind, which they were.

But I want to be honest about something important. The intellectual side, the theological questions, the comparative study, the reading I was doing, that was all significant.

It mattered. It helped build the structure of my understanding. But it was not what was converting me.

What was converting me was something else entirely, something less articulable. It was the quality of the presence I felt when I was in that small congregation singing songs in Indonesian in a gray Dutch city far from home.

It was the way the pastor prayed, not elaborately, not performatively, but with a specificity about his own life and the lives of the people in the room that indicated clearly he believed he was being heard.

It was the sense in the room every Sunday that whatever we were doing here was not a performance of faith, but an actual activity.

That we were not firing words into a ceiling, that the ceiling, so to speak, was not there.

I began to pray differently during this period, not five times a day in the formal structure I had grown up with.

I had already in the privacy of my apartment let that practice go with more grief than relief actually because it was the loss of something that had been my entire framework for understanding my relationship with God.

But I began to talk, just talk at night, mostly before sleep in my apartment in Indonesian in the most simple and direct language I could find.

I told whatever I was talking to about my day, about what I was afraid of, about what I missed from home, about the questions I was still carrying.

And something was different. Something was different from every prayer I had ever prayed in 17 years of praying the right way at the right times with the right words.

Something was listening. I know how that sounds. I know that someone reading this from outside that experience could explain it several ways.

As the psychological effect of being alone for the first time and as the relief of free expression as the normal human experience of talking to oneself in a new way.

I have considered all those explanations. I considered them at the time. I am not someone who ignores alternative explanations.

I am educated enough to take them seriously. But here is what I will say to those explanations.

I had been alone before. I had talked to myself before. I had cried before.

I had prayed sincerely before. None of those things produced what I was experiencing in that apartment in Utrect.

This was specific. This was responsive. This was not like speaking into a room with no one in it.

This was like the opposite of that. I was not converted yet. I want to be clear about the sequence because it matters.

I believed something was happening. I believed increasingly that the person I was directing my informal prayers toward was real and present.

But I had not made a decision. I had not said anything definitive out loud.

I had not crossed any formal threshold, but I was standing at the door, and this is where the other weight began to make itself felt.

The weight I had managed to mostly set aside while I was reading and thinking and questioning and attending Sunday services quietly in the back row.

The weight of what all of this would mean, not in the abstract, not theologically, but practically for my family, for my identity, for my title, for everything I had been raised to be and to carry.

Because in Indonesia, leaving Islam is not a private decision. It is not something that stays between you and God.

It has legal dimensions. The marriage act, matters of inheritance. The way your identity is classified by the state.

It has social dimensions that in a royal family of our standing are enormous. It has implications for your relationships, your standing, your entire place in the architecture of the world you were born into.

I knew all of this. I had not been living in the palace for 20 years without understanding how things worked.

And I knew I knew with a certainty that grew alongside my faith in those months in Utrect that if I walked through that door, I was walking away from something I could never fully walk back to.

That the person who came out the other side of this decision would not be able to return to the place she had come from, not in any complete way.

I knew all of that and still I stood at the door because the other side of it was something I had been hungry for since I was 12 years old sitting on the floor of my room crying tears I could not explain and I had found it or rather and I believe this more completely now than I did then it had found me.

I want to tell you about a Tuesday evening in November. By this point, I had been in Utre for about 14 months.

I knew the city well by then. I knew which bakery opened earliest, and which canal path was most beautiful in the fog, and which library corner was quiet enough to think in.

I had a small life there, honest and manageable, nothing like the life I had come from, and I had started to love it in a quiet way.

The simplicity of it, the anonymity of it, the fact that I was just a person there, not a title, not an expectation, just a person with a bag of groceries walking home in the rain.

It had been raining for 3 days by the Tuesday. I am telling you about the kind of northern European November rain that is not dramatic.

No thunder, no wind, just a steady gray persistence that soaks everything slowly and makes you feel that the whole world has turned the same color.

I had been home all day studying. I had made tea at some point, forgotten it, made more tea.

By evening, I was tired in the way that is not physical tiredness, but something deeper.

A tiredness of the mind that comes from carrying something heavy for a long time without putting it down.

I had been circling the same question for weeks, months. Honestly, I believed that part was no longer the question.

I had moved past the stage of intellectual uncertainty sometime before this evening. I knew what I believed.

I believed that Jesus was who he said he was. I believed that the resurrection was a real event.

I believe that everything I had been reading and hearing and praying over for the past year and more was not a story or a philosophy or a cultural system but was actually true.

I had arrived at that belief not through a single moment of revelation but through the accumulation of hundreds of small moments.

A sentence in the biatitudes, a woman crying while she prayed. The specific quality of silence in that small congregation in Utre.

The way my own prayers in my apartment felt different from every prayer I had ever prayed before.

It had built up slowly and thoroughly. The way foundations are built, not dramatically, but solidly.

What I was circling was not the question of belief. It was the question of commitment.

The because to say yes formally, to be baptized, to cross the threshold officially, to make it something real and not just an interior process happening privately in my apartment, was to start a clock that could not be stopped.

It was to begin a sequence of events that I could see stretching out ahead of me with great clarity and very little that was easy in them.

My family, my father, my mother, whose faith was her interior architecture and to whom my conversion would feel like a personal wound, a failure of her mothering, an accusation against everything she had built her life on.

My siblings, the palace, the community, the layers and layers of identity and obligation that were woven together so tightly that pulling one thread was going to affect all the others.

I sat with this for a long time that evening, the rain outside, the small lamp on the apartment very quiet, and then I picked up my Bible because that was what I did in the evenings now.

It had become as natural to me as breathing, and I opened it, not to any particular page deliberately, just opened it, and it fell open to John 11.

I had read this chapter before, The Raising of Lazarus. I knew the story, but I read it again that night because it was where the book had opened, and I was a reader who believed in following where you land.

I read the whole account carefully. Mary and Martha’s grief, the community of mourers, Jesus arriving after Lazarus had been dead 4 days already past any ordinary hope of intervention.

And what struck me that night, reading it in my small apartment in Utre with the rain against the window, was not the miracle itself.

It was the verses before it. Martha tells Jesus her brother would not have died if he had come sooner.

She is grieving and she is honest about her grief and she does not pretend otherwise.

And Jesus says something to her that the chapter records carefully the words he chose very deliberately.

I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?

Do you believe this? He asks her directly. He does not explain further. He does not provide additional evidence.

He does not give her a theological argument or a list of reasons. He simply says what he is and then he asks her, “Do you believe it?”

I sat with that question for a long time and then at some point I cannot tell you exactly when because it did not feel like a dramatic moment or it felt more like the natural end of something that had been in motion for a long time.

I put the book down on the bed beside me and I spoke out loud in Indonesian in the dark to the presence I had been becoming increasingly certain of for over a year.

I said that I believed I said it simply. I said I was afraid of what was going to happen when I walked this out into my actual life.

But that the fear did not change what was true. And what was true was that I believed.

I said I had been looking for this my entire life without knowing what I was looking for.

And now I knew and I was not going to pretend otherwise. It was not an eloquent prayer.

It was not the prayer of someone who had been taught to pray like this.

I was still learning that, still learning the language of it. It was just a person in a room telling the truth out loud to someone she was increasingly certain was listening.

I cried, not like the 12year-old on the floor on the last night of Ramadan.

This was different. That crying had been grief without a destination. This crying was relief.

The kind of relief that comes when you have been holding something for so long that you had forgotten you were holding it and then you finally put it down and your body has to process the weight that is suddenly gone.

I sat in that apartment for a long time afterward, not doing anything, not reading, not thinking in any structured way, just sitting in something I can only describe as a quality of presence that was new to me and that I trusted completely.

I went to the pastor the following week and I told him I was ready to be baptized.

He did not make a production of this. He asked me several questions thoughtfully, carefully, the way he did everything to understand where I was and what I understood and whether this was a settled decision or one still in process.

He was not trying to stop me. He was making sure he understood clearly who he was dealing with.

I told him what had happened, not everything. There are things I have only been able to articulate in writing years later, but enough.

He listened. He was quiet for a moment when I finished, and then he said that he was glad and that we would prepare together.

Over the following 3 months, he met with me regularly. We went through the basics of Christian faith systematically.

What baptism meant, what membership in the body of Christ meant, what my responsibilities and rights were as someone entering the faith formally.

I absorbed all of it carefully. I asked many questions. Some of them were quite technical.

I was still an educated person who needed to understand the architecture of things before she could fully inhabit them.

He was always patient. I want to say something about those three months because they were among the most quietly significant months of my life.

While on the surface I was still a foreign student living in Utre, studying, grocery shopping, navigating the Dutch winter.

Underneath there was something happening that I can only describe as a consolidation. All the things I had been reading and thinking and feeling over the previous year were being given structure and language.

The beliefs that had been forming in me were being examined carefully and found to be genuinely mine, not borrowed, not imposed, but arrived at through my own searching.

The pastor was helping me build something I would need later. A foundation solid enough to stand on.

When the ground outside shook and the ground outside was going to shake, I knew that I was building deliberately.

The baptism was in February, a Saturday morning. The congregation gathered in the small church where we met each Sunday.

It was cold outside. The church was not elaborate, just a rented hall really, with chairs arranged in a circle and a wooden cross on the wall and a baptismal pool they brought in specially not a permanent fixture.

About 25 people were there. I knew most of them by this point. They had become without my fully realizing it.

The first community outside my family that felt like home. I had prayed the night before for a very long time.

I thought about my mother. I thought about my father. I thought about the palace and the rituals and the life I was moving away from.

Not with anger, not with contempt for any of it, with grief. Actually genuine grief because loving something and leaving it are not contradictions.

And I loved the people I came from even as I was walking away from what they had built for me.

When I stood at the edge of the water that morning, I was trembling. Not from cold, though it was cold, from something else, from the weight of what the moment was.

The pastor said the words that are said about faith, about death to the old life, about resurrection, and then I went under.

I want to try to tell you what it was like in that moment beneath the water.

The world went silent in a way that was completely different from the silence I had felt during 17 years of prayer.

That silence had always felt like an absence. This silence was full. It was not empty space.

It was presence. It was as if everything unnecessary had been stripped away for one moment.

And what was left was just the truth of what I was and who I belonged to.

I came up from the water and I was crying before I could stop myself.

The congregation was singing something softly. The pastor had his hand on my shoulder. The room was warm despite the February cold outside.

I had been many things. A princess, a student, a diplomat’s daughter, a keeper of ceremony and tradition and bloodline, and all the weight that came with them.

I had carried a lot of titles, some of them heavy. But in that moment, dripping and crying in a rented hole in Utrect, I was just a child of God.

And that was the only title that felt for the first time in my life completely and entirely real.

I want to tell you about the months that followed the baptism because they are important and because they were not easy and I think honesty requires me not to skip them.

I went home for Eid that year. This was about 3 months after my baptism.

I want to be very clear about why I went not to deceive my family but because I was not ready.

I know that is complicated and I have made peace with the complication over years of thinking about it.

I was a new believer who had just made the most significant decision of her life and I was not yet strong enough to stand in the full consequence of that decision.

I was still learning what I believed and how to hold it. I went home and I sat through the family prayers and the aid celebrations and I was present in body but I was somewhere else entirely inside.

It was not comfortable. It was actually one of the harder things I have ever done.

I watched my mother pray on Eid morning. I watched her face while she prayed.

Her real faith, her genuine devotion. Uh the thing that had sustained her through 40some years of her life.

And I loved her so much in that moment that I could barely stay in the room because I knew that what I was going to have to tell her eventually was going to cause her pain that I could not prevent and could not absorb on her behalf.

I was going to hurt her, not intentionally, not carelessly, but inevitably. And I sat there on Eid morning watching her pray.

And I accepted that. And it was one of the heaviest things I have ever accepted.

The double life was not something I could sustain indefinitely, and I knew it. I was not built for pretending.

The longer I lived inside the faith that was now mine, the harder it became to perform a faith that was no longer mine.

The prayers felt wrong in a way they had not felt wrong before my baptism before.

They had felt hollow, but not dishonest. Now they felt dishonest, which was worse, which was unbearable to someone who valued truth the way I valued it.

Back in Utrect, something else was beginning that would accelerate everything. I had grown careless with my Bible.

Or perhaps I had stopped caring as much about hiding it because the hiding felt like a denial that was becoming harder to sustain.

I had left it on my desk one afternoon in a visible place when my room was in the kind of comfortable disorder that happens when you have lived somewhere long enough to stop performing tidiness.

My mother came to Utre to visit me that spring. I had known she was coming and I had made efforts to tidy the apartment, but I missed the Bible.

I missed it because it had become so natural a part of my environment that I no longer registered it as something requiring attention.

It was just there on my desk next to my study notebooks the way your most ordinary possessions are just there.

She saw it on the second day of her visit. She did not react immediately.

She picked it up. She looked at it. The cover, the title, the fact that it was worn and annotated, not a fresh purchase, not something recently acquired.

She put it back down. We had lunch together, the two of us, and we talked about other things.

She stayed another 2 days, and we talked about my studies and my friends and the family news and plans for when I would come home next.

She was normal and warm and entirely herself and I was trying to match her and mostly failing and she said nothing about the Bible.

As she left on a Friday morning, I took her to the station. We embraced on the platform.

She held me for a moment longer than usual and then she got on her train.

She called me that night from home. I knew from the first second she spoke what the call was about.

Not because she was angry, she was not angry, which was in some ways harder to face than anger would have been.

She was quiet. She was careful. She asked me questions that were really only one question.

Asked several different ways. I answered. I told her everything. I was shaking while I talked.

She was very quiet while I talked. She cried. I cried. We were on the phone for a very long time.

And most of it was not words, just the sound of two people who loved each other in the middle of something that love alone was not enough to fix.

What she said at the end of that call, the specific words, I will not reproduce fully here, but the weight of what she communicated was this.

She believed I had made a choice that had consequences beyond just my own life.

That this was not simply about my personal faith. That who I was meant something to more people than just me and that what I was choosing was not separable from what I owed to my family and my lineage.

I understood what she was saying. I had always understood it. I had lived with that understanding for over a year.

Had turned it over from every angle. Had prayed about it more times than I could count.

But I had said yes in that apartment in November. And the thing about saying yes to Jesus is that you cannot undo it.

And not because of theology, because of truth. Because once you have tasted what is real, you cannot choose to believe it is not real.

The water was behind me. The water was part of me now. And I was going to have to live with everything that meant.

I want to be careful about how I tell this part of the story. Not careful in the sense of softening it or making it easier to hear than it actually was.

I want to be careful because it involves people I love. People who are real and still living.

People who made choices that hurt me enormously, but who I do not believe were ever cruel people.

They were people who believed what they believed and responded to what I did from inside that belief.

I try to hold that clearly. It does not always make it less painful, but it is true.

And truth is the foundation of this entire story. So I will not abandon it here.

I came home to Indonesia for good at the end of my second year in Utre.

My studies abroad were completed and I had a life to return to, a family to face, a conversation that had been begun on a phone call from the Netherlands and had to be continued in person.

I had not been naive enough to think that conversation was going to go well.

But I think I may have underestimated how thoroughly and systematically the world I was returning to would reorganize itself around what I had chosen.

Let me start with my father. My father and I had always had a particular relationship, respectful, somewhat formal, with a deep undercurrent of genuine love that we express primarily through attention rather than words.

He paid attention to me. He noticed things. He remembered conversations. He asked follow-up questions about things I had mentioned months earlier.

This was how he showed love. He threw the particular attention of an engaged serious mind directed at you, and I had always felt it and valued it enormously.

After my mother told him, and I do not know exactly when she did this or what she said, I was not present for that conversation, and I have never asked.

He stopped calling me. In itself, this was not unusual. He was not a man who spent much time on the telephone.

But when I called him, there was a new quality to the calls. He was polite.

He asked appropriate questions. He was not cruel, but the attention was gone. The specific personal attention that had always been the way I knew he loved me.

It was simply not there anymore. He was performing a call rather than having one.

I returned home and saw him in person and the same thing was present in the room.

He was there. He was functioning. Yeah. He asked about my flight and about my health and about my plans for the next stage of study.

He did not ask about my faith. He did not mention it at all. And the not mentioning was its own kind of statement.

It meant that what had happened was too significant to be addressed normally, that it had moved into a category of things that were simply not discussed, sealed behind a wall of dignified silence that was, I came to understand, how my father dealt with things that he found intolerable.

I could have wished for anger. Anger was at least engagement. Anger was at least acknowledgment that I was present and that what had happened between us was real and required response.

The silence was harder. He said, “You have stepped outside the boundary of what I can acknowledge and I am managing this by behaving as if the thing that is most real to you does not exist.”

This went on for 2 years. I want to say that simply so you understand the timeline.

2 years of careful, polite, hollow interactions with the man I had loved and respected more than almost any other person in my life.

Two years of calling on appropriate occasions and receiving appropriate responses and feeling the absence of him even when he was in the same room.

Two years of writing him letters that he did not answer. I wrote him letters because I needed him to know my thinking, my reasoning, what I had actually experienced, not the version of events that others would have given him.

I put everything into those letters that I could put into words. Uh I do not know if he read them.

He did not respond. My title was addressed more quietly than I expected, and in some ways that quietness was more final than ceremony would have been.

There was no announcement, no formal ceremony of stripping. I simply began to notice my absence from things, a family gathering I would normally have been invited to, and was not, my name missing from a list it would previously have appeared on.

A social occasion where I was present but introduced in a way that omitted the customary forms.

These were small signals but they were precise and they were consistent and I understood them clearly.

I was being removed from the official family narrative not through confrontation but through erasia.

The royal world is very good at making people disappear quietly when it needs to.

And it was doing that to me now. My siblings, I had three, one older brother, one older sister, one younger brother.

My older brother was the one I was closest to in temperament and history. We had always understood each other in that particular way that some siblings do.

Not always agreeing, sometimes arguing, but with a basic comprehension of each other’s way of thinking that ran underneath everything else.

He did not cut me off. What he did instead was something more complicated and in many ways more painful.

He maintained contact, but maintained it through a kind of careful compartmentalization. He would see me.

He would talk to me about ordinary things, about his work and his family and current events.

He would not talk about my faith when I tried to explain when I tried to bring it into the conversation.

I he would listen, but I could feel him managing something while he listened, not rejecting what I was saying, but also not letting it land, keeping it at arms length in a way that was self-protective.

He loved me, but he did not know how to love me and also hold the reality of what I had done.

So he chose to love me by not fully acknowledging what I had done which meant he was loving a partial version of me and that was its own loneliness.

My older sister was less nuanced about it. She was hurt and she was angry.

And she communicated both with a directness that was in its own way easier to handle than my father’s silence or my brother’s careful distance.

She told me clearly what she thought, that I had been selfish, that I had thought only of myself and not of the family’s position, and that I had taken something that belonged to all of them, and treated it as if it were only mine to decide about.

There was real pain in what she said. I heard the pain under the anger.

I did not enjoy being its target, but I understood where it came from. And I have never in all the years since stopped believing that she loved me, even when she was most cruel about it.

She simply did not have the tools to hold love and this kind of devastation in the same hands simultaneously.

My younger brother was 17 when all this came fully to light. He was in the position of watching adults he respected navigate something that had no good resolution.

And he did what teenagers sometimes do in that situation. He withdrew into an adolescent silence that was its own form of self-p protection.

We drifted. He grew up. We are in a different place now than we were then.

But those years of his adolescence in which I was a kind of shadow presence, present but compromised, the family member who had caused the fracture, I think those years left something in him that took a long time to heal.

The social consequences moved outward from the family in predictable waves. People in the palace circle knew or sensed.

Some were discreet about it. Some were not. Old friends became awkward around me or stopped calling.

People who had previously been warm became carefully neutral. I was navigated around rather than engaged with.

These were not dramatic ruptures in most cases, just the steady, quiet withdrawal of the social warmth that had been the natural atmosphere of my life.

The way the temperature of a room drops after the fire goes out. And there were also more direct interventions.

An uncle who held religious authority within the family came to see me. I want to describe this with fairness because he was not an unkind man.

He was a man who genuinely believed what he believed, who loved his family and his faith, and who saw my conversion as both a personal tragedy and a theological crisis that it was his responsibility to address.

He spent several hours with me. He made his arguments carefully, drawing on scripture and Islamic theology, addressing what he understood to be the Christian claims about Jesus and explaining why he found them theologically untenable.

He was intelligent and he was sincere. I listened to everything he said. I asked questions.

I responded honestly when I disagreed. The conversation was respectful, which I appreciated because it did not have to be.

When he left, I think we both knew that nothing had changed, that his arguments, as carefully constructed as they were, were not going to move me because the foundation of my faith was not primarily intellectual.

It was experiential. You cannot argue someone out of something they know from the inside.

He had not been where I had been. He had not felt what I had felt and there was no argument that could replicate that or dislodge it.

There was a job that disappeared. I will not go into extensive detail because to do so would identify specific institutions and specific people.

What I will say is that there was an opportunity connected to cultural foundations with royal associations, an opportunity that aligned perfectly with my education and was genuinely suited to my abilities and that this opportunity was simply no longer available after my conversion became sufficiently known.

It was not explained to me this way. Nothing was said directly. But I understood the sequence of events clearly, and I knew what had happened.

It was one of the cleaner illustrations of how thoroughly my change status had penetrated the practical architecture of my life.

I want to stop here in the middle of all this damage and tell you about something different because I think if I only tell you what fell, I will have given you an incomplete picture and an incomplete picture would be a kind of dishonesty.

There was a woman I met during this period. I will call her Ibu Marta, which is not her name, but which captures something of who she was.

She was Chinese Indonesian in her late 60s and a member of a small church I had begun attending after I returned to Indonesia.

She had been a Christian her entire life. Her family had been Christian for generations.

She had lived through things in Indonesia’s history that I will not detail here, but that those who know Indonesia’s history with its Chinese minority will understand.

Things that required a particular depth of faith to survive with love intact because survival without love is possible, but it is a kind of death of its own.

She was a small woman, very direct, very unimpressed by status or ceremony of any kind.

She found out what my background was because someone in the church told her, and her response to this information was entirely practical.

She invited me to her home for a meal. She cooked for me a lot.

Every time I went to her home or which became more frequent during the worst of the period I am describing, she would cook something substantial and she would put it in front of me and she would sit across from me and she would ask me how I was and she would listen to the answer and then sometimes she would say something and sometimes she would not say very much at all.

She had a gift for presence that did not require filling with words. She could sit with you in silence without the silence being uncomfortable.

She was simply there solidly, warmly, without agenda. I cried in her kitchen more times than I can count during those months and years.

Not because she prompted it, but because she was safe. And I had so few places that were safe during that period.

She would put her hand on mine and not say anything particularly profound. She would just be there.

And sometimes when I was leaving, she would say something simple that God saw what was happening, that God had not lost track of me, that I was not as alone as I felt.

I want to say clearly that woman kept me sane. Not my theology, not my intellectual understanding of what I believed and why, not the arguments I had rehearsed against the objections I kept facing.

All of those things were important, and I am not dismissing them. But what sustained me in the darkest stretches was the practical, physical, unglamorous love of a woman who cooked rice and sat with me while I cried and told me I was not alone.

The church at its best is exactly that. Not a building or a doctrine or a set of practices, but a woman with a stove and an open kitchen and an unshakable certainty that the God she served had not looked away from me.

Uh there was also during this period the sustaining power of the Psalms in a way I had not expected and cannot fully explain.

I had read the Psalms before but I read them differently now. Psalm 27 became something I returned to again and again during the hardest stretches.

The combination of complete honesty about terror and complete confidence in God’s faithfulness. The Psalms held both things simultaneously without resolving the tension dishonestly and that honesty was something I needed enormously.

The Psalms did not pretend that pain was not real. They did not offer easy comfort.

They just kept coming back again and again to the same certainty that the God who had been present before was present still.

That the light had not gone out even when it was impossible to see. I prayed.

I prayed a lot. Some of my prayers during this period were not eloquent. Some of them were essentially just stating facts that I was exhausted, that I was lonely, that I was grieving, that I needed help getting through the day.

And the help came not dramatically, not in the way of visible miracles or dramatic interventions, but it came in the quality of the morning after the very worst nights.

In the capacity to get up and function, and even sometimes to feel something that resembled hope in the church community that was small but real in Ibu Marta’s kitchen.

In the moments of reading that broke through the heaviness and reminded me of what was true, I want to tell you about one other thing that happened during this period because it would be dishonest to leave it out about 2 years into the worst of it.

Two years after my return in two years of my father’s silence, two years of navigating everything I have described.

My phone rang one evening, an ordinary evening. Nothing particular about it. I looked at the screen and it was my father’s number.

I answered. He did not explain why he was calling. He did not say anything about what had happened between us.

He did not offer an apology or an explanation or any of the things I had sometimes in my more human moments fantasized about receiving.

He simply asked how I was, whether I was eating properly, whether I was well.

The questions a parent asks a child, the most basic vocabulary of parental love. I told him I was well.

I told him I was eating. I asked about his health. He told me the call lasted maybe 10 minutes.

When it ended, I sat very still for a long time. It was not reconciliation.

It was not resolution. It was not everything healing at once, which is not how things heal.

Things heal slowly and incompletely and with setbacks and over years. But it was him choosing to call.

It was him after 2 years deciding that he was not ready to let the silence be the whole story.

It was a small crack in a wall I had been afraid was permanent. I wept when the call ended.

Not from sadness, not from relief exactly, from something more complicated than either. From the recognition that love is more stubborn than rupture.

That it persists and finds its way through in small unglamorous ways. That my father, dignified and traditional and wounded by what I had done, could not finally let two years be the last word.

I do not want to overstate what that phone call was. I have been careful not to do that.

It was one phone call. The relationship did not restore to what it had been.

It began from that point a slow and partial and still ongoing thawing. But that phone call meant that the wall between us was not infinite.

And that was more than I had allowed myself to hope for. And it was enough.

For that moment it was enough. The road that I was on had not become shorter by this point.

The costs I had absorbed were real and lasting in some ways that I have had to make peace with.

But I was still standing, 30some years old, a long way from the palace and from everything the palace had meant.

But standing, still believing, still knowing that what I had found on a Tuesday in November in Utre was more real than anything I had lost.

Even the things I had loved still standing. I am going to talk to you directly in this final part.

I have been talking to you throughout this entire story. But in this last section, I want to drop whatever small remaining distance there is and just speak to you plainly, person to person because this story is not mine alone.

The reason I agreed to tell it, the reason I have spent time putting all of this into words is because I believe it belongs to more people than just me.

I believe some part of what I have described will reach into the experience of someone reading it and I want to be fully present for that.

I want to be as direct and as honest as I know how to be.

Let me start with Christians. If you are a Christian reading this, I want to say something to you that I mean completely sincerely without condescension or judgment.

Do not waste what you have. I do not mean this as a criticism. I mean it as someone who spent the first 20 years of her life looking for what you already hold and who now sometimes watches people treat their faith as an inconvenient obligation, a social identity, a box checked on a form, a tradition maintained for comfort.

And it breaks something in me. Not with anger, with sadness, because I know what it cost.

I know what the searching costs. I know what the finding felt like. And I know that many people who have been holding this their whole lives have become so accustomed to the weight of it that they have forgotten it is treasure.

Your faith is alive. Not a system, not a set of practices, not a cultural inheritance, not a family tradition.

Alive. The God you pray to is not a principle or a force or an energy in the universe.

He is a person who knows your name. The distance you feel when you pray, if you feel it, is not permanent.

It is not the nature of things. I am a witness to what happens when that distance closes.

And it can close. Not because you perfect your technique, but because you ask for it with honesty.

Just honesty. That is what I had that November in Utrect. Not eloquence, not perfect theology, not a long record of faithful observance, just honesty, just the willingness to say what was actually true.

So if you have been going through the motions, I say this with all the gentleness I have, stop not stop going to church or stop reading or stop the practices.

Stop going through the motions. Start meaning it again. Start bringing the real things, the difficult things, the questions you have been afraid to ask inside a faith community.

The doubts you have been hiding because doubt seems like weakness, bring them. He is not fragile.

He does not need your performance. He wants your presence, just your actual presence. And if your faith is alive and real and sustaining, do not take it for granted.

I am serious. I did not have it for 20 years. I know what its absence feels like.

I know the specific texture of praying into silence and feeling nothing return. What you have is extraordinary.

Treat it that way. Now I want to talk to those of you who are where I was somewhere in the searching.

You may be Muslim as I was. You may be from another faith tradition entirely.

You may have no faith and be reading this with a skepticism that is honest and deserved.

You may be someone who was raised religious and walked away and is not sure where you are now.

I am not writing this section to argue with any of you. I am not qualified for that and it is not my calling.

I am simply going to tell you what I know from my own life and you can do with it what you will.

I prayed five times a day for 17 years. I recited the Quran. I fasted through every Ramadan of my childhood and adolescence and early adulthood.

I did these things sincerely and with real effort and within a community of people whose faith was genuine and whose lives were shaped by it in good ways.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that Islam produced nothing good in my life or the lives of the people around me.

It would not be true and I would not say it. My mother is one of the best human beings I have ever known and her faith is the thing that made her who she is.

I honor that. But here is what I will tell you simply and without decoration.

I prayed five times a day for 17 years and I never felt heard. And I said one sentence in a dark apartment in Utre and everything changed.

I am not telling you to analyze that. I am not telling you to immediately trust it or to act on it or to make any decision based on it.

I am just telling you what happened to me. These are the facts of my experience.

I am a reasonably intelligent person with a good education and a suspicious mind and a strong aversion to easy answers and sentimentality.

And I am telling you that the thing I experienced was real. It was not a feeling I manufactured.

It was not a psychological need I filled with convenient belief. It was real in the way that the floor under your feet is real.

In the way that hunger is real, in the way that grief is real, realer than all of those things, actually, if you are somewhere in the searching, if you are reading a Bible the way I did, in secret or in private or with one eye over your shoulder, I want to say to you, keep reading.

You are not doing something dangerous. You are doing something brave. The truth does not need your protection.

It will hold up under examination. I examined it from every angle I could find over years with serious attention and it held.

It holds. If you are afraid of what will happen if you believe, if you are looking as I was looking at the cost of the decision and the cost is enormous and real and you are wondering whether it is worth it, I cannot tell you that it will not cost you.

I cannot promise you the cost will be different from mine or easier than mine.

It might be harder. It might be different in ways I cannot predict. What I can tell you is this.

There is no version of my life in which I regret what I chose. Not in the darkest moments of it.

Not when my father did not answer my calls. Not when my title disappeared from the documents.

Not when my sister said things I had to work hard to forgive. Not once.

Because what I found is worth more than anything I lost. And I say that as someone who genuinely deeply loved what she lost.

The Bible says, and I read this early, and it struck me, and it still strikes me, what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

I had a significant portion of the world as it was handed to me. I had a title and a palace and a lineage and a community and a social position that most people on earth will never touch.

And none of it reached the place in me that needed reaching. None of it quieted the hunger.

None of it made the 12-year-old on the floor stop crying. And what quieted it was not more of the world.

It was something that the world did not contain and could not manufacture. If you are not a Christian and you have read this entire story with respect and an open mind, I honor you for that.

I do not take it for granted. I know this is a complicated story to read from the outside of the faith I am now inside.

I know it raises questions. I know it may make you uncomfortable in ways that are worth sitting with.

All I ask is that you do sit with them. Not that you make any particular decision.

Not that you rush anywhere. Not that you respond to this with any action other than honest reflection.

But if something in this story has stirred something in you, if any part of what I described resonated with something you carry, do not simply move on and let that stirring die.

It costs nothing to attend to a feeling of that kind. It costs a great deal to ignore one.

I want to say something now about where I am with my family because I think it would be dishonest to end this story without it.

I have described the damage clearly. Now let me describe with equal clarity where things stand in a different way.

My father and I speak regularly now regularly. Not daily, but with consistency. He does not ask about my faith.

I do not press it on him. We have found over years of slow and careful work a version of our relationship that contains his love for me and my love for him.

And also the reality that we stand in different places spiritually and that this does not have to be resolved for the love to be real.

This has taken years. There are still moments of distance. There are still subjects that close like doors.

But he is my father. He calls. He asks if I am eating. He remembers things I mentioned before.

The attention is back partially carefully. And I am deeply grateful for every fraction of it.

My older brother has started asking me questions about my faith. Not to challenge me, just to understand.

He comes to me with curiosity. Quiet, private, the way he does everything and asks things that tell me he has been thinking, turning things over in the way that thoughtful people do when they are given enough time and space.

I do not know where he is. I do not know where he will end up.

I do not tell him what to believe. I just answer what he asks and I pray.

And I trust the God who found me in Utre to be capable of finding my brother in Yogyarta without my help managing the timeline.

My older sister and I have reached something cautious and real. The anger has settled.

What is underneath the anger which was always love is more visible now. We are not close in the way we once were and we may never be fully but we can sit together at a family meal.

We can talk about things other than this. We are both trying in our different ways to hold the family together across a fracture that cannot be undone and the trying itself is a form of love even when it is imperfect.

I have thought a great deal in the years since everything I have described about the concept of wahu that divine grace flowing through royal blood that I grew up believing in.

I used to think that I had by converting broken with that idea entirely, abandoned it as a Japanese cultural construct that I had outgrown.

But I think differently about it now. I think my ancestors were reaching for something.

The idea that the divine chooses certain people and invests in them and flows through them into the world, that is not a false idea.

It is an incomplete one because what they were reaching toward was a grace that does not flow through bloodlines or royal titles or inherited status.

It flows through a cross. It is available to everyone. The humblest person alive can stand in the flow of it and be entirely soaked.

The most elevated person alive cannot access an extra drop of it through their elevation.

That has always been the scandal of it. The thing that has made powerful people deeply uncomfortable about Jesus from the very first century.

He made the grace completely democratic, completely with no exceptions, with no premium tier. I grew up believing that who I was by birth made me special in the eyes of heaven.

I now believe that everyone is special in the eyes of heaven, which is a completely different and much more astonishing thing to believe.

I want to say something about suffering before I close because I have described a great deal of it and I want to make sure I have been honest about what it taught me rather than just cataloging what it cost.

Suffering is not the evidence that God has abandoned you. I know this sounds like something on a greeting card.

And I want to be very clear that I mean it as something far more concrete than that.

I know it because I live through the version where I was most certain I was alone.

Where the silence from my father was total. Where the social architecture of everything I had known had rearranged itself around my absence.

Where the loss was real and daily and physical in the way that loss is when it involves people who are still alive and still present but simply no longer reaching for you.

During all of that, the presence I had encountered in Utrect did not retreat. It did not diminish.

If anything, the experience of those years is that the presence was more available, more tangible, more real during the worst of it than it has ever been during easier times.

I do not fully understand why. I do not have a tidy theological explanation. I just know what was true in my experience.

And what was true was that I was not alone in any of it. Not for a single day.

The palace that I came from is still beautiful. I have passed by it in recent years and it is still beautiful in the way it has always been with its open pavilions and its incense and its quiet dignified motion.

I do not look at it with bitterness. I look at it the way you look at a place where a significant part of your life happened with recognition, with memory, with a complicated affection that does not require everything to be uncomplicated to be real.

I am glad I came from there. I am glad I know what it contains.

I am also clear that what I was most looking for was never inside those walls and that no palace, however beautiful, however ancient, however freightated with history and grace and the long human reaching toward the divine is large enough to contain what I eventually found.

I am going to end this story the way I began it simply. No grand rhetorical gestures, just a person telling the truth.

If you are reading this and something in you has stirred, something small, something you might dismiss if you are not careful, I want to ask you not to dismiss it.

I felt that stirring at 12 years old and I spent years explaining it away.

I became very good at explaining it away. I had excellent explanations, theological, psychological, cultural, circumstantial.

None of them were true. The true explanation was simple, and I kept refusing it because simple things that are enormous are frightening.

But the stirring was real. The stirring had a source. And the source is not an idea or a tradition or a system or a story.

The source is a person who is right now as you read this aware that you exist.

Not aware of you as a category or a demographic or a soul among millions of souls.

Aware of you specifically. The version of you that sits in the room alone and feels the distance.

The version of you that has done everything correctly and felt nothing in return. The version of you that cried once without knowing why and told yourself it was tiredness.

He knows that version. He has known it longer than you have. And he is asking you the same thing he asked Martha at the edge of a tomb in a village 2,000 years ago.

Do you believe this? You do not have to have everything figured out to answer.

I did not have anything figured out. I had a room and rain and a worn Bible and and the honesty to say what was true.

That was enough. It is enough. It has always been enough. Whatever you lose, and you may lose things, real things, important things, things you love, you will not regret this.

I am willing to stake everything on that. And everything is in fact what I staked.

I know what the other side of that gamble looks like from the inside. And I am telling you with everything I have, it is worth it.

His name is Jesus. He found me inside a palace, inside a tradition, inside a faith that held everything except the thing I most needed.

He found me in a city far from home in the rain on a Tuesday at the end of myself.

He will find you too. You only have to let him. I do not know your name.

I have not told you mine. But I know we have been sitting here together, you and I, through everything I have described.