I Was Sentenced To Death For Being A Christian – Then Gave Birth In Chains & Refused To Deny JESUS!
My name is Sophia Dowit.
I am 34 years old.
I am a wife, a mother of two children, a follower of Jesus Christ, and I am a woman who was sentenced to death for saying so.
I am here to tell you that he is not because my life became easy after I chose him.
Not because the suffering was small or the price was cheaP. I am here to tell you that he is worth it precisely because I paid the full price and found him on the other side of every single thing they took from me.
I paid with my freedom.
I paid with my body.
I paid with the early months of my daughter’s life spent on a prison floor.
I paid with my husband’s presence, with my son’s childhood, with the safety and the ordinary life that most people take for granted every single day.
I paid all of it.
And what I received in exchange was not a comfortable religion or a set of rules or a distant god who watched from far away while I suffered.
What I received was a presence, a companion, a voice in the dark of a prison cell that knew my name and knew my pain and never, not once, not for a single hour of the worst hours, left me alone in it.
That is what I want to tell you about.
Not just the suffering, though I will not hide the suffering from you.
I will not soften it or make it easier to hear than it actually was.
But the presence inside, the suffering, the one who was there on the cold floor, the one who was there when they read the sentence, the one who was there when I held my newborn daughter in chains and wondered if she would grow up without her mother.
He was there.
He was there for all of it.
And by the time I finish telling you this story, I believe you will know, not just in your head, but somewhere deeper than your head, that he will be there for you, too.
My name is Sophia Dawit, and this is my story.
I was born in Cartoum North in a neighborhood called Hafaya, the second of four children.
My father’s name was Idris.
He was a Muslim man, not deeply religious, not a scholar, not someone who prayed his five prayers without fail, but Muslim in the way that identity works in Sudan, where your religion is not just what you believe, but who you are, where it is written into your name and your family and your legal existence before you are old enough to have an opinion about any of it.
My father left when I was 3 years old.
I have no memory of him that is not constructed from photographs and the careful edited stories my mother told us when we were young enough to need a father to be something other than what he was.
He left and he did not come back and he sent nothing.
No money, no letters, no word of any kind.
He simply removed himself from our lives the way you remove a stone from a path without ceremony, without explanation, without apparent awareness that the path itself might need the stone for something.
My mother’s name was Adisa.
She was a Christian woman, a member of the Sudin Episcopal Church, raised in the faith by her own mother, a woman whose belief was not performance or habit, but the actual living center of who she was.
After my father left, it was her faith that held our family together.
Not dramatically, not with grand gestures, but in the daily quiet, sustaining way that real faith works.