Syrian Pastor Starved 54 Days in Taliban Prison &#...

Syrian Pastor Starved 54 Days in Taliban Prison – “They All Thought I was Dead, a Miracle Happened”

I want to start by telling you something that might surprise you. If you had met me 20 years ago, if you had sat across from me in Kabul in my father’s house, I would u offer a cup of green tea and you had told me that one day I would be a Christian pastor.

I would have looked at you the way a man looks at someone who has said something deeply offensive.

Not with loud anger, with quiet, serious concern. The kind of concern you have for a person who has lost their mind.

I was not a violent man. I never was. What I believed were the way I believed in the air I breathed and the mountains I could see from a rooftop that Islam was the only truth.

Not because someone forced me to believe it, because it was the water I had grown up swimming in and I had never once been outside the water long enough to know there was anything else.

So before I tell you what happened to me in that prison, before I tell you about the 54 days and the hunger and the cold and the moments when I was not sure I was still alive, I need you to understand who I was before any of that.

Because if I just start with the prison, you will think of me as some kind of special person, some kind of hero.

And I am not. I am just a man, a very ordinary man from Kabul who God somehow decided to reach and the reaching took a long time.

My name is Ysef Rahimi. Hello viewers from around the world before our brother Ysef continues his story.

We’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony. I was born in 1981 in the western part of Kabul in a neighborhood called Cartes.

This was during the Soviet occupation. So I came into the world already surrounded by war.

Though as a child you do not fully understand what war is. You just understand that some sounds mean you go inside and some sounds mean you stay inside.

Find that your mother’s face has a particular tightness to it that you learn not to ask about.

My father’s name was Abdul Karim. He was not a mala, not a religious scholar, but he was a deeply devout man.

He prayed his five prayers without fail every single day of his life for as long as I know him.

He fasted through Ramadan not as a cultural obligation but as something he genuinely looked forward to.

He would say that Ramadan was when he felt closest to God, when the noise of the world was quietest and something in his chest was most clear.

I respected that about him even as a child. There was nothing performative about my father’s faith.

It was simply who he was. My mother Fatima was a quieter kind of believer.

She prayed. She covered herself. She taught us the basics of the faith when we were small.

How to do woo for how to recite the fata, what the bellars meant. But her faith expressed itself mostly in how she treated people.

She was the woman in our street who always had food for whoever needed it.

She never asked questions about who you were or where you were from before she fed you.

I think about her a lot. I think about how much of what I understand about God’s generosity.

I actually learned from watching my mother’s hands. I had three siblings, two older sisters, Sora and Najiba, and one younger brother, Dawood.

Dawood. I will come back to Dawood. I have to. His story is part of mine in a way that I cannot separate.

Growing up in Kabul in the 1980s and 1990s meant growing up inside a series of catastrophes, the Soviets, then the civil war between the Mujahedin factions, then the first Taliban regime.

Each period had its own particular kind of fear. Each period changed the city a little more, took something from it that did not come back.

By the time the Taliban came to power the first time in 1996, I was 15 years old and Kabul had already been through enough to age everyone in it well beyond their years.

Under the first Taliban regime, our life contracted. There was no music, no television. My sisters could not leave the house without male escort.

Education for girls stopped. The things that had made Kabul feel like a real city.

The markets with their noise and color, the small pleasures, all of it became something that had to be done quietly or not at all.

But I want to be careful here because I do not want to give you the wrong impression.

Even during that first Taliban period and my father did not see them as the enemy of Islam.

He disagreed with some of their methods. He thought some of them were using religion as a tool for power which is a very different thing from actually having faith.

But he still prayed the same prayers. Faced the same direction, believed in the same God.

His Islam was not their Islam and he knew the difference. Many Afghans knew the difference.

I finished my basic schooling when I could under whatever circumstances existed at the time.

Then after 2001 when the Taliban were pushed out and the republic was established, there was a period about 15 years when the when Afghanistan breathed differently.

It was not peace. There was never real peace. But there was a kind of opening.

Schools reopened. Women went back to work and to university. Couple had traffic jams again.

One which sounds like a complaint but was actually a sign of life. I used that opening.

I studied hard improved my English which I had been quietly learning in pieces throughout my teenage years and I found work as a translator.

First for aid organizations, then for a period for international military units, then later for a variety of NOS and diplomatic bodies.

It was good work. It paid reasonably well, and more than that, it put me in contact with a world that was larger than the one I had grown up in.

I want to be honest about something. Working with foreigners, with westerners especially, it did not make me question my faith.

That is what some people assume that exposure to western culture is what turns Afghans away from Islam.

That is not what happened to me. If anything, some of what I saw of Western culture reinforced my sense that Islam had something valuable that the secular west did not.

The loneliness I saw, the way people seemed untethered from anything larger than themselves, the drinking, the restlessness, none of that made me want what they had.

I was proud of who I was. I was proud of my faith, my family, my language, my country.

I married Mariam in 2007. She was from a family in Kabul, educated, thoughtful, a woman with strong opinions that she knew when to share and when to keep to herself.

We were introduced through family, the way things are done. But we had several meetings before the formal arrangements were made.

And I remember thinking clearly that she was someone I could talk to, not just someone to manage a household, someone to actually talk to.

That meant a great deal to me. We had two daughters together. Lena born in 2009.

Sana born in 2012. So if you want to know what happiness looked like for me in those years, it looked like those two girls.

It looked like coming home from a long day of translation work to find them fighting over something small and ridiculous.

And Mariam trying to referee and all of us sitting down for dinner together in our small apartment and the ordinary completeness of that.

I did not know then how rare it was. You never know how rare the ordinary good things are until they are taken.

Now I need to tell you about Dood. My younger brother was born in 1985, 4 years after me.

Okay. He was, how do I describe him to people who never met him? He was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer just by entering it, not in a loud way.

Adawood was not loud. He was warm and funny in a quiet way. The kind of funny where something he said would hit you 5 minutes later and you would suddenly laugh at the wrong moment.

He became a mechanic. He was excellent at it. He had a small workshop near our parents’ neighborhood and he was always full of grease and always ready to stop what he was doing if you needed to talk.

He married in 2010, had a son in 2012, a boy named Karim, who he loved with the particular intensity of a man he had waited for fatherhood and was not going to waste a single moment of it.

In 2014, Dawood was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb. He was not a soldier.

He was not political. He was driving a vehicle to deliver some parts to a client outside the city and the bomb was meant for a military convoy.

And he happened to be on the same road at the wrong moment. This is how most people die in wars, not in dramatic confrontations in the wrong place on a nor in on an ordinary errand on a Tuesday.

I got the phone call in the middle of a work assignment. I remember exactly where I was sitting.

I remember the quality of the light through the window. I remember that I stood up and walked outside and stood in the street for a long time, not knowing what I was supposed to do next.

My brother, my Dawood, the funniest, warmest man I knew, gone just like that in a moment that had nothing to do with who he was or what he deserved.

What followed was the expected things, the washing and the burial done quickly as our faith requires.

The morning period, the relatives coming to the house, the prayers, people said the things you say, God’s mercy, God’s will, God’s plan, he is in paradise now.

These are not bad things to say. I had said them myself to others. But sitting in my parents’ house during those days, hearing those words, I noticed something happening inside me that I had not expected.

The words were not reaching me, not because they were wrong words, but because something in me was asking a question underneath all the words, a question I did not know how to ask in any language of faith I had available to me.

The question was not why did this happen. I knew enough of the world to know that bad things happen without meaning.

The question was something closer to is there a god who is actually near this pain or is there only a god who is far away and will eventually make it all make sense in some afterlife I cannot see or touch right now I did not say this to anyone you do not say this in an Afghan Muslim household during morning but I felt it and once I felt felt it.

I could not unfeill it. I went back to my prayers. I kept my fasts.

I did all the external things correctly. But there was something cracked open in me that the practices could not reach.

A room in my chest that had always been locked. And now the lock was broken.

And whatever was in that room was cold and asking questions. This went on for months.

I carried it alone the way Afghan men are expected to carry these things. Mariam knew something was wrong, but I could not explain it to her because I could barely explain it to myself.

I threw myself into work. I worked longer hours than I needed to. I told myself that purpose would fill the space.

It did not. It was about 8 months after Dawood’s death that I met Daniel.

He was with the European humanitarian organization that was running a food distribution program in one of the poorer districts of Kabul.

I was brought in as their translator for a series of community meetings. Daniel was in his late 40s from somewhere in Northern Europe with very plain features and very steady eyes.

He was not a dramatic person. He did not perform his goodness. He just worked and he was good at his work and he treated the Afghan staff with a straightforward respect.

That was not always common among foreign workers who sometimes had a way of being kind that was also beneath the kindness slightly superior.

Daniel did not have that. He was just level just there. We worked together for about 3 weeks.

During that time we had many conversations. Most of them were practical logistics, cultural context to how to approach particular community leaders.

But Daniel was also curious in a genuine way. He asked real questions about Afghan life, about the history of the city, about what the various periods of conflict had been like from the inside.

He listened to the answers. He did not wait for his turn to talk while I was speaking.

He actually listened. At some point during that 3 weeks, I told him about doubt.

I am not sure why I told him. Something about the way he listen made it feel possible to say things you would not normally say.

He did not immediately fill the silence with words. He sat with what I had told him for a moment.

Then he said something simple that he was sorry and that he hoped I had people around me who could carry some of it with me.

That was all. He did not tell me Dwood was in a better place. For he did not offer me a theological framework.

He just said he was sorry and that he hoped I was not carrying it alone.

It sounds like a small thing, but something about the simplicity of it reached me in a way that months of correct religious language had not.

Toward the end of our working period together, Daniel gave me something. He did it quietly, almost awkwardly.

He was not a pushy man. He said he wanted me to have something, that he had been thinking about our conversations, and that this was not meant as pressure or as any kind of statement, and that I should feel completely free to set it aside or throw it away.

And he gave me a small book, a New Testament translated into Dari. I looked at it.

I looked at him. I told him honestly that I was a Muslim and was not looking to change.

He nodded and said he understood completely and that it was still just a gift if I wanted it and that was all.

I took it home. I put it at the bottom of a box of work papers in my study.

I told myself I would decide later whether to get rid of it. A week later I took it out of the box.

Not because I had decided anything, just because I was curious in the way you are curious about something you have been told your whole life to avoid.

There is a particular pull to the forbidden thing. Not always out of rebellion. Sometimes just out of the honest desire to know what is actually in it.

I read it the way I would read any document. Carefully with a kind of professional distance, alert to what it was saying and what it was not saying.

I read through Matthew. I read slowly. I I kept stopping. I do not want to make this sound like a movie scene.

It was not a movie scene. And it was a man in a small room reading a book he had been told was dangerous.

Trying to hold himself at a scholarly distance and finding that the distance kept collapsing not because of any single verse or passage but because of something in the cumulative weight of it.

This Jesus the way he spoke to people. The specific people he chose to stop for the particular ones he chose to touch.

The ones everyone else had already given up on or written off. There was something in the texture of those encounters that kept pressing on the crack in my chest.

I read the whole New Testament over the course of about 6 weeks, hiding it, reading late at night, putting it away if I heard Mariam or the girls, feeling guilty about it and not entirely sure if the guilt was about the content or about the hiding.

Then I read it again. But by the second time through, I was no longer reading it like a document.

I was reading it like a man looking for something. Even though I could not have told you clearly what I was looking for.

I will tell you about the first time I prayed in Jesus’ name. Not because it was dramatic.

In fact, I tell you about it precisely because it was not dramatic. And I think that is important.

It was a night in late 2013. It was cold, which Kabul winters always are.

Mariam and the girls were asleep. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I had been sitting there for about an hour just thinking, which I had been doing a lot of in those months.

And without planning to without any kind of buildup or decision, I just started talking very quietly almost in a whisper.

I addressed Jesus directly and which felt strange and also felt completely natural in a way I cannot fully explain.

I told him I did not know if he was real. I told him I did not know what was happening to me or what I was supposed to do with the things I had been reading.

I told him about Dwood. I told him about the crack in my chest and I asked when not for a sign, not for anything spectacular.

I just asked if he was there, if any of this was real, if there was actually someone on the other end of this that was something more than my own voice in an empty room.

Then I stopped talking and sat quietly and something happened. I cannot describe it with theological precision and I’m not going to try.

I will just say that the room felt different. That the thing in my chest that had been cold for a year felt different.

That something that I can only describe as presence, a warmth and a weight of presence came into that room in a way I had not manufactured and could not explain and did not know what to do with.

I sat there for a long time. Then I went to bed. The next morning I woke up and I had no certainty about anything.

That feeling whatever it had been or had not resolved into a clear package of belief.

I was not suddenly a Christian in any organized sense. I was just a man who had had an experience he did not understand and who was now carrying something new alongside everything else he was already carrying.

But something had shifted and shifts unlike dramatic changes have a way of continuing to move even when you are not paying attention.

Over the following months I found myself praying that way more often quietly privately. Why in fragments reading the New Testament again, thinking, wrestling, asking questions that I had no community to ask them in.

I could not go to a mosque imam with these questions. I could not tell my wife.

I could not tell my parents. If what was happening to me became known, the consequences socially, legally, personally would would be severe.

I knew this with complete clarity. My faith was costing me nothing yet. But I could feel in the distance what it might eventually cost.

This was not a season of peace. I want to be honest about that. Coming to faith in Jesus for me was not accompanied by immediate lightness or happiness.

It was accompanied by profound fear, deep uncertainty, and the loneliness of carrying something this large entirely alone.

There were weeks when I pulled back completely. When I did not read the testament and did not pray in Jesus’ name and told myself that whatever had happened was a moment of griefdriven confusion and I should return to the faith I knew but I could not fully return because the room in my chest had changed because something had been in there and I knew it and I could not unknow it by 2014 quietly without any ceremony or formal declaration because there could be no such thing for me in my context in my country.

I understood myself to be a follower of Jesus. Not because I had everything figured out, not because I was brave, but because I had been reached by something I could not reach myself and I had run out of reasons to keep refusing it.

I became a Christian the way a drowning man grabs a rope. Not because I was looking for it, because I was already going under.

And in the moment my hand closed around it, I understood for the first time in over a year what it felt like to be held.

When people in other countries hear the word church, they picture a building, a physical place with a structure and a sign and specific hours when it is open and all of that.

When I say church, I need you to remove that image from your mind completely and replace it with something much smaller and much more fragile and in its own way much more alive.

Our church was a group of people. That is all it was. People who believed the same thing, who met when they could, where they could, as quietly as they could, and who prayed together and read whatever scripture they had access to, and tried to take care of each other.

There was no building, there was no sign, there was no address. If you asked me where my church was located, I would have told you it was located in the living room of whoever was hosting that week.

And the week after that, it was somewhere else. This is what Christianity looks like in Afghanistan.

And it has looked this way for a long time. Long before the Taliban returned, even under the republic, even during the years of relative openness, there was no legal space for an Afghan to be a Christian.

Apostasy, leaving Islam, carried no formal codified state punishment under the republic’s constitution, but it carried enormous social and community consequences that could easily become physical one.

You did not leave Islam publicly in Afghanistan. You simply did not. Whatever you wore inside, whatever you believed in the privacy of your own heart and your own home, the outside world saw a Muslim.

So, and you kept it that way. So the community of Afghan Christians was and remains entirely underground, invisible to most of the country.

And within that invisibility, trying to do the same things any church anywhere does, gather, worship, grow, support each other, while carrying the constant awareness that discovery could end everything.

I need to explain how I found other believers because people always ask this and the answer is never satisfying to people who want a dramatic story.

The truth is that it happened slowly and almost accidentally over a period of about 2 years after I came to faith myself.

The first person I found was a man I will call Hakim. He was someone I had known slightly through work.

We had over overlapped on a few translation assignments. For one afternoon, we happened to be waiting together for a meeting that had been delayed and we were talking about something related to the organization.

We were both working with some discussion about resources or logistics. I don’t even remember exactly.

And somewhere in the conversation, there was a moment, one of those moments that you recognize only afterward, where something he said was slightly off for a Muslim, just slightly, a small thing, a reference he made and then quickly recovered from.

And I felt it the way you feel a particular kind of vibration when you are already tuned to that frequency.

I did nothing with it for several weeks. Then very carefully in a subsequent conversation.

I said something similarly small, something that was not quite what a Muslim would say, and I washed his face.

What I saw on his face was the same thing I imagine was on mine.

Recognition and behind the recognition, fear. And behind the fear, relief. We did not talk openly for weeks after that.

It was a long careful dance, saying a little more each time, watching and listening, making sure we were not misreading each other, making sure this was not a trap.

This is the reality of underground faith. The people you most want to talk to are also the people you most need to be cautious about because you cannot always tell the difference between a genuine brother and someone who is testing you.

This is not paranoia. This is the reasonable response to an environment where the wrong conversation can get you killed.

Eventually, over the course of perhaps two months of careful exchanges, Hakeim and I were able to speak plainly with each other.

Or he had come the faith before me through a combination of a Christian radio program that could be received on shortwave and an experience he described briefly and without much detail.

He was a private man. He had been a believer for about three years by then.

He had never met another Afghan Christian in person. When we finally sat together and prayed together for the first time in his car, parked in a quiet part of the city, speaking very quietly.

I think both of us were surprised by how much emotion came with it. Not because anything spectacular happened, just because of what it meant to not be completely alone in this thing.

Over the next year and a half, through equally slow and careful processes, we found others.

One woman who worked in a medical clinic and had come to faith through a Christian international worker while one young man who had grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and encountered the faith there a husband and wife separately neither knowing the other had come to faith and the discovering of that fact between them was something the husband Fared described to us later as one of the most extraordinary moments of his life.

Others gradually at our largest, which was sometime in 2019, we were 14 people. We never all met together at once.

That would have been too obvious. A gathering of that size in a residential home, even disguised as a social event, carries risk.

We typically met in smaller groups, three, four, five people at a time. We rotated locations.

We never use phones for yours to communicate details about meetings. Always in person, always in coded terms, not sophisticated spy codes, just practical things.

Want a phrase that meant there would be a gathering this week. A direction that told you which neighborhood.

The specific address communicated only at the last moment and only directly face to face.

This sounds exhausting and it was. But after a while it became the rhythm of life.

The way any habit becomes a rhythm. You stop noticing how much energy the caution costs because it has become simply part of how you move through the world.

The meetings themselves, I want to describe what they were like because I think people on the outside imagine them as either very sad and desperate things or very dramat dramatic and electric things and the reality was something different from both.

They were quiet. That is the main thing I want to say. The worship, if we sang at all, was done in very low voices.

Sometimes we only hummed as sometimes we only read the words of the songs to ourselves while someone led in a whisper.

Sound travels in Afghan houses and the walls between apartments are not always thick and the neighbors are close.

Quiet was not a choice we made for spiritual reasons. It was a survival requirement that over time became its own kind of spiritual discipline.

The prayers were the heart of it. We would sit sometimes on the floor, sometimes on whatever seating was available and we would pray.

And I will tell you what I noticed about the prayers of people who pray.

Knowing it could cost them everything. There is no filler in those prayers. There is no performance.

When you cannot afford to be in that room when every minute of being there is a calculated risk, you do not spend the prayer time saying words that do not mean anything.

You go directly to what matters. You say the things that are real. You ask for the things you actually need.

And there is a weight to that, a seriousness to it that I have not always experienced in prayer that costs nothing.

We read scripture together. We shared whatever we had a cru at times a single printed portion of a gospel photocopied and worn soft from handling passed among us.

At times sections memorized and recited. We talked about what we read, what it meant for us.

For our lives for the specific and impossible situation of being followers of Christ in this place and this time.

There was no trained theologian among us. There was no seminary graduate. There were just ordinary people trying to understand what they believed and why it was worth the cost.

There was also food. This is something I want to mention because it sounds mundane, but it wasn’t.

Whoever was hosting always made food. Always. Even if it was simple. Even if resources were tight, there was always tea.

And there was always something to eat. And we always ate together. And that eating together was its own kind of communion in the oldest and most straightforward sense of that word.

The sharing of a table, the breaking of bread in the most literal possible way with people who had chosen the same costly thing you had chosen and who you therefore trusted with your life.

And there was laughter. I want to make sure I say this too. There was real laughter in those meetings.

Not the loud kind, always kept low, but genuine. Hakeim was Fenny. One of the women in our group, a woman named Nasarin, had a dry, a fast humor that could catch you off guard at the most serious moments.

We were not only a community of fear and solemnity. We were also genuinely fond of each other.

We looked forward to each other. When someone had been unable to come for several weeks, they were missed in a specific and personal way.

This is what people in the comfortable world of visible Christianity sometimes miss when they think about the underground church.

It is not only suffering. It is also underneath the suffering a particular kind of joy that has been stripped of everything decorative and is left with something surprisingly pure.

Now I need to tell you about telling Mariam. This was the thing I had been most afraid of for almost 3 years.

In that time I had found a small community of believers. I had begun reading, learning, praying.

Had growing into whatever kind of pastor God was making me into. Not because I saw that role, but because someone had to lead and somehow I had become the one.

And in all of that time, the person I shared my bed with, the mother of my children, the woman who knew every other part of me, she did not know this.

I am not proud of the years of hiding. I understand why I did it.

If Mariam had reacted badly, if she had told her family, if she had felt compelled by her conscience or her fear to report what I was, the consequences would have been total and immediate.

I was protecting myself and in my own way protecting her from having to make a terrible choice.

But there was also a part of it that was simply cowardice. And I will not dress it up into something more honorable than it was.

I told her in the spring of 2018. We had been married for 11 years.

Our daughters were 9 and six. I told her one night after the girls were in bed and I had thought about how to do it for weeks and in the end there was no good way to do it.

So I just told her plainly what had happened. Daud’s death, Daniel, the book, the prayer in the cold bedroom, the years of secret faith, the community I had found.

She was quiet for a long time after I finished. A long time I could not read her face.

Then she started crying. Not the anger I had braced for, not the fear, just tears, quiet ones, running down her face while she looked at me.

She told me she had known something was different. She had not known what it was, but she had felt for years that something in me had changed around the time of Dwood’s death and that I was carrying it alone.

And it had made her sad and sometimes angry. And now she knew what it was.

We talked for hours that night. I told her everything. She asked many questions. Some of them were confrontational.

How could I know this was true? Was I not afraid? Had I thought about what this meant for the girls?

Some of them were genuine curiosity. What was it like in the meetings? What did we read?

Did people like us find this? She did not become a believer that night. That would be too simple a story.

What happened that night was that the wall between us came down and she agreed to read the New Testament herself, which she did over the following months.

And what happened in her after that was her story to tell, not mine. But she did come to faith quietly in her own way, in her own time.

And when she did, f something between us deepened in a way that I had not expected was possible.

After 11 years of marriage, we were in it together after that. All of it.

Then August 2021 came. I will not spend a long time on the chaos of those weeks because most of the world watched it from the outside and knows the broad shape of it.

The American withdrawal, the Afghan armies collapsed. Neil, the Taliban sweeping into city after city, the fall of Kabul.

I will just tell you what it was like from the inside. It was unlike anything I had lived through before and I had lived through a great deal.

There was a particular quality of fear in those days that was different from the ordinary.

Long-term fear we had been managing for years. That old fear was like a low noise you had learned to live with.

This was something much louder, much faster. That the sense that everything was changing at a speed you could not keep up with and that the world you had carefully built your hidden life inside was dissolving faster than you could figure out what to do next.

For the underground church, the Taliban’s return meant something very specific. Everything that had been dangerous under the republic became existential under the new regime.

Apostasy which had been a social and community risk before now carried Taliban law which in practice meant death.

The risk calculation that we had all been living with changed overnight and not in survivable direction.

Members of our small community began making decisions. One family managed to get to Kabul airport in those first desperate days and eventually got out.

Others went to family members in other provinces lying low going dark cutting all contact for their own protection.

One of our members a young man named Tatarik. I will tell you about Tariq later because his story is part of mine in in in in a way I cannot avoid.

He went completely silent in the first week of the Taliban’s takeover and we did not hear from him for a long time.

We had a meeting uh the last one where several of us were together. I’m about 2 weeks after Kabul fell in a house in a neighborhood where we had met several times before.

We sat and we prayed and we talked about what to do. Some members said we had to stop meeting entirely, perhaps indefinitely.

It was no longer a risk we could calculate in the old way. The environment had changed too fundamentally.

I listened to all of it and I understood all of it and I could not argue with any of it and at the end of it I said what I said.

How which was that I understood if people needed to step back, that no one should do anything that put their family at risk beyond what they could bear, and that whatever anyone decided, I would not judge them for it.

But for myself, I said I was going to keep meeting with whoever was willing.

Not out of bravado, not out of any particular sense of spiritual heroism, but because I had come too far and paid too much to let fear be the last word.

And because the people in that room, the ones who stayed, the small handful who were still there and still willing, needed somewhere to bring the thing they believed.

And I was not able to take that away from them. Three people besides Mariam and me continued to meet with me in those final months before my arrest.

The risk was known. We all knew it. We met anyway. In those months, poor meetings were stripped even further down to the essentials.

No food, too much movement in and out of home drew attention. Very short, very quiet, almost entirely prayer.

We prayed for the people who had left for their safety. We prayed for Afghanistan.

We prayed for each other. We prayed for whatever came next. I do not know how we were found.

I have thought about it many times, turning it over, and I still do not know.

It could have been a neighbor who noticed a pattern over time. It could have been someone who saw or heard something.

It is also possible that someone in or near our network under pressure or fear said something they did not intend to be harmful or did not fully understand the consequences of.

I do not say this with anger. Fear does things to people. I know this better than almost anyone now.

Wait, what I know is that they came on a cold night in December 2021.

Mariam and I had put the girls to bed. We were sitting together in the main room, not doing anything particular, just sitting.

And the knock on the door came, the knock on the door of an Afghan home late at night in that period.

You knew what that knock was. It was not a visitor. It was not your neighbor needing something.

It had a particular quality to it. A loudness, an assuress that told you everything before you even stood up.

I looked at Mariam. She looked at me. There was a lot in that look.

Everything that we had been to each other. Everything we had walked through together. Everything we both knew about what came next.

It was all in that look and none of it could be said in words.

I stood up and I went to the door. I already knew the men who took me that night were not dramatic about it.

That is one of the first thing I noticed in the strange calm that comes over you when the thing you have feared for years finally happens.

They were businesslike, efficient. There were four of them. Two stayed outside. Two came in.

They told me to come with them. They told Mariam to sit down and not make noise.

And they searched the apartment briefly. Quickly going through the shelves and the cupboards, finding nothing because over the years I had learned how and where to keep the few physical things I had connected to my faith.

They took me down the stairs and into a vehicle. I had time in those few seconds between the moment they told me to come and the moment I walked out the door to look back at Mariam.

She was sitting where they had told her to sit very still with her hands in her lap.

She looked at me. I looked at her and then I went out the door and the door closed behind me.

And that was the last time I would see her for 54 days. The drive was not long.

I have tried to trace it in my memory many times and I cannot map it accurately because I was not in a condition to track directions.

It was dark and cold and I was trying to control my breathing and my fear and focusing on streets was not something I had the capacity for.

What I know is that we arrived somewhere in the city, that it was a compound of some kind, that there were lights on the outside and more men inside, and that this was clearly a place being used by Taliban security authorities as a holding and interrogation facility.

It was not a formal government prison. I want to be precise about this because it matters for understanding the conditions.

Official Taliban detention facilities, as bad as they are, have at least some structure, some chain of command that connects to something larger.

This place was more informal, the kind of facility that the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus operated in those early months in parallel with the official system where the rules were whatever the people running it decided they were and accountability to anything above them was limited.

They put me in a room, not a cell yet, just a room, concrete floor, one light.

They left me there for a long time, hours alone. This I later understood was itself an interrogation technique.

The waiting than not knowing, the silence giving your own imagination room to generate more fear than anything they might actually do.

Ah, when the questioning began, it continued over several sessions across multiple days. The men who questioned me were not all the same.

There seemed to be a structure. Someone who asked the opening questions. Someone who came later who seemed to be in a position of more authority.

The questions were consistent across all of it. Who else was with me? Where did we meet?

How many people who led us to this faith? How long had this been happening?

Did I know of any other such groups in the city? I told them my name.

I told them I was a translator. I told them nothing that would lead them to anyone else.

This was the one thing I had decided in those first hours alone in the waiting room that I would not do regardless of what came.

I could not protect myself, but I could protect the others. Whatever happened to me, their names would not come from my mouth.

The physical part of the interrogations I will not describe in detail. I will just say that they hurt me and that they were not careful about it and that there were days when the pain made it very hard to think.

This is something that happens in these places. It was not something that surprised me.

I had known in the abstract that this was possible. Knowing a thing in the abstract and experiencing it in your actual body are not the same knowledge.

But at least I was not surprised by it. And not being surprised helped me in a strange way to manage it.

What I want you to understand about those interrogation sessions is not primarily the physical element.

What I want you to understand is the particular goal of what they were trying to do which was not only to get information and it was to get recantation.

They wanted me to say formally in front of witnesses that I was returning to Islam that I renounced Jesus that I acknowledged I had been deceived and was now correcting my error.

This was the thing they pressed most consistently across all the sessions. The information about the others was secondary to this primary objective.

I did not give it to them not because I was strong. I want to be clear about this.

I was not strong. I was terrified. I was in pain. There were moments during those sessions when the recantation was so close to the surface of my mouth that I could feel the shape of the words.

But each time I got to that point, something stopped me. Something that was not courage in any conventional sense, but was more like clarity.

The same clarity I had felt that first night in my bedroom when I knew something real had come into the room.

Whatever else I was unsure of, I was not unsure of that. And I could not deny a thing I was not unsure of after the formal interrogation sessions ended.

And I do not know exactly when that transition happened because the days had already begun blurring.

I was moved to the cell. The cell was approximately 2 m by 2 1/2 m.

I know this because I paced it many times in the early days when I still had the physical capacity to pace.

The walls were concrete. There was a small opening near the ceiling on one wall that provided ventilation and some light, but not much of either.

The floor was concrete. There was nothing on the floor. No mat, no blanket. Later, after some time, a thin blanket appeared for pushed under the door without explanation.

It was not enough for the cold, but it was something. There was a bucket in the corner which served as a toilet.

Someone removed and replaced it periodically. The smell in the cell was what you would expect.

There were other prisoners in adjacent cells. I could hear them but not see them.

Mostly men. Occasionally there were sounds that I will not describe. At night it was cold and dark and the sounds of the other prisoners, their coughing, their sleep, occasionally their crying became the texture of the darkness.

The deliberate starvation began as far as I can reconstruct. Within the first week, it was not immediately clear to me that it was a policy.

At first, I thought it was disorganization or that food for prisoners was simply inconsistent in this kind of informal facility.

I I would see guards moving around would smell food from somewhere else in the compound and nothing would come to my cell.

This happened for several days in a row. Then one of the guards told me directly what was happening.

He came to the cell door. They had a small sliding panel in the door that they could open and he told me that it had been decided I would not be fed.

He explained the reasoning without apparent emotion. I had rejected Islam which meant I had rejected God which meant I was already spiritually dead.

And a spiritually dead man did not require food. They would not waste resources on me.

He said they were giving me time to change my mind and that if I changed it and recanted the situation would change.

If I did not, it would not. He slid the panel closed and walked away.

I I sat on the floor of the cell for a long time after that.

I was already hungry in but several days with almost nothing had made certain of that.

Now I understood that the that the hunger was not an accident but a mechanism.

A mechanism designed to do one of two things. Break my faith before it killed my body or kill my body in a way that is very strange to explain knowing the intention behind it helped me more than it frightened me because it was no longer uncertainty.

It was a clearly defined situation and I have always been better with defined situations than with formless fear.

I want to take you through what the weeks felt like as accurately as I can.

Not to make you feel sorry for me, but because I think it is important for people to understand what this kind of suffering is actually like.

But rather than imagining it through a movie lens that makes it bearable by making it beautiful.

It was not beautiful. It was very ordinary and very physical and very slow. The first 10 days without proper food, the body is angry.

There is real sharp persistent pain in the stomach. The hunger is loud. Your mind focuses on food in a way that is almost involuntary.

You start remembering specific meals, specific smells with a clarity and a vividness that almost feels like hallucination, but it’s really just the brain’s way of expressing what the body needs.

I thought about my mother’s cooking. I thought about specific meals, the smell of karma on a cold day, the particular way Mariam made bologani on Friday mornings.

The mind goes to very concrete and specific places. During this period, I prayed, but the prayers were effortful in a way they had not been before.

Hunger makes concentration difficult. I found myself starting a prayer and losing the thread of it.

Finding myself somewhere else had having to pull myself back. I would recite verses I had memorized simply to give my mind something to hold on to.

The 23rd Psalm. Parts of the gospels I had committed to memory. I recited them the way you hold onto a railing on a steep staircase.

Not with spiritual inspiration necessarily, just with need. The guards or some of them developed a particular cruelty during this period.

They would sometimes open the panel in the door at meal times from other parts of the compound when food smells were strongest and hold food near the opening, not offering it, just letting the smell in.

And and asked if I was ready to talk. I do not think this was something they had been specifically instructed to do.

I think some of them enjoyed it. This is also part of what imprisonment does.

It gives small authority to people who might not otherwise have it. And some people do ugly things with small authority.

This is not unique to Taliban guards. It is a very human thing and a very sad one.

By the second and third week, the body enters a different phase. The loud angry hunger becomes quieter in a way that is itself frightening because you understand dimly that the quiet is not the pain listening but the body beginning to use itself.

Your thinking changes. It becomes slower. It takes longer to follow a thought from beginning to end.

Physical movement becomes costly. Standing up from the floor becomes a process that takes planning and effort.

I slept more or tried to, though the cold made sustained sleep difficult. My prayer life during these weeks was strangely the most honest it has ever been in my life.

Not the most eloquent, not the most theologically sophisticated, the most honest because I did not have the energy for anything other than the direct thing.

No preamble, no Polish language, just I am here. I am cold. I am hungry.

I don’t know if I can do this. Are you here? That was most of my prayer for weeks.

Just that I just the bare minimum of reaching towards something I hoped was there.

There were also moments during this period when I was very angry. Angry at God.

I will not pretend there were not. Angry in the way you are angry at someone you believe exists and has the power to act and is not acting.

I said angry things in the privacy of that cell. I accused God in those whispered prayers of things of abandonment, of cruelty, of not being what he had seemed to be.

I said these things and then sat in the silence after them. And in the silence something held me that was not my own will holding myself.

Something steadier than me met the anger and did not collapse under it. And that was its own kind of answer.

By the fourth week, the physical deterioration was serious. I knew this not from any medical assessment, but from my own body’s communication, which becomes very direct when you are in this condition.

My muscles were losing substance. Sitting on the concrete floor had become painful in a new way because there was less cushion between bone and surface.

My hair was coming out when I ran my hand through it. The cold felt colder than it had in the first weeks, which I understood was related to the loss of fat and the body’s reduced ability to maintain warmth.

I had also begun to lose track of time in a more complete way. The small panel of light from the ceiling opening told me when it was day and when it was night, but beyond that, the days had become a texture rather than a sequence.

I tried to keep count by marking scratches on the wall with my thumbnail, but I was not always consistent, and the count I was keeping by the middle of the ordeal was probably not precise.

Around what I think was the fifth week, a guard, a different one younger, who I had not seen often, slid something through the lower gap under the door when he passed.

It was a small piece of bread, dry, not much, but real. He did not say anything.

He did not stop walking. He just pushed it through the gap and kept going.

I never saw him do it again. I ate that bread very slowly, carefully. The way you treat something precious, and I wept while I ate it, not dramatically, just the quiet tears of a man who has been without basic human kindness for a long time and then encounters one small unearned piece of it.

I do not know why that guard did it. I have no way of knowing.

I have prayed for him whoever he was. I believe God can use any person to do any small thing at any moment when it is needed.

I as I move deeper into the sixth and seventh weeks, there were periods where I was no longer entirely present in a normal way.

I want to be very careful about how I describe this because I do not want to claim things I cannot verify or make it sound more supernatural than I can honestly present.

What I can tell you is that there were periods during those last weeks where my consciousness was not operating in normal or consistent way.

Whether this was the result of starvation induced delirium or sleep deprivation or hypothermia or some combination of all of these things.

I cannot tell you scientifically. Probably it was all of those things. During those periods I experienced something that I can only describe as not being alone in the cell.

Not in a visual way. I did not see anyone but a sense of presence.

Felt the same quality of presence I had felt in my bedroom that first night years ago, but much stronger and much more sustained.

A warmth that the physical temperature of the cell did not account for. A sense of something steady next to me in the dark.

I know how this sounds to someone approaching it skeptically. I also know what I experienced and I am describing it as plainly as I can.

I also had what I can only describe as a deep settled peace during some of those periods.

An absence of fear that was not the same as the absence of fear you have when nothing is threatening you.

But the absence of fear you have when something is absolutely threatening you and you are somehow not afraid of it anyway.

I cannot manufacture that. It was not something I talked myself into. It was simply there and I was simply in it.

By approximately day 40 I could no longer stand unaded. I moved from a sitting position to lying down and staying mostly lying down because the effort of changing position was significant.

My prayers at this point were almost nonverbal. I was not sure I was forming full sentences in my own mind.

I was mostly just directing myself toward God. The way you face toward a light source even when you cannot see clearly just facing just turning toward at some point in those final days I cannot tell you the precise timing.

I stopped praying for rescue. I had not consciously decided to stop. I had simply run out of the structure that request required.

And what replaced it was something much simpler which was let me not be alone when this ends.

Whatever this ends into, let me not be alone in it. And I was not I was not alone in it.

That is all I can tell you. I I was not alone. I was lying on the floor of the cell.

I did not know what day it was. I did not know very clearly what was happening around me.

I was not afraid. And then the door opened. The door opened and I did not respond to it.

I was aware of it. Aware that the door was open. That light was coming in that was different from the usual small amount of light.

But I did not have the the capacity to respond to it. My body had reduced itself to the most basic functions.

Moving toward something, responding to something. Those were not things I could do. I heard voices, more than one person.

I heard the particular quality in a voice when a person is surprised by something.

Not alarm exactly, but the vocal register of someone confronting something unexpected. I understand now that what surprised them was that I appeared to be dead.

From my stillness, my physical state, my color. I have been told since by people who have worked with severe starvation cases that a person in the final stages looks a particular way, that the body has been communicating death even before actual death arrives.

One of the men came closer. I was aware of him closer to me. And then I made some kind of sound.

I do not know what kind. I have no clear memory of what I produced.

But it was enough. It was enough to change the atmosphere in that room very quickly.

The voices became louder. Different voices. It seemed like more people came to the doorway.

But there was a quality to what was happening around me that I can only describe as confusion.

Not the practiced confusion of a procedure being followed, but the genuine confusion of people who did not know what they were looking at or what to do about it.

I want to be careful about what I claim here and what I don’t. I am not going to tell you that I saw an angel standing in the cell or that a voice from the sky spoke to the guards and they were struck with awe.

I do not know exactly what each person in that room saw or experienced. What I know is what happened next and that what happened next was not what should have happened next by any logic of the system I was inside.

There was a prisoner in the cell next to mine. I will call him Rosam.

He was not a Christian. He was there for reasons having nothing to do with faith.

I lost some connection to the to the previous government. I think though I never knew the details.

We had spoken occasionally through the wall in brief exchanges and whispered Dari just enough to know we existed on either side of the same concrete.

He was eventually released sometime after I was and through a chain of people that I will not trace in detail, we eventually communicated once I was outside the country.

What Rosam told me from what he had been able to observe. And here in the adjacent cell during the final days of my imprisonment was that by the last few days the guards had stopped going in.

They would check through the door panel, see no movement, and leave. He said that on at least one day he heard the guards talking to each other outside and the gist of what they said was that the man in that cell was finished.

Find that they were discussing what would be done with the body. There was discussion about timing about who would be responsible for the removal about keeping it quiet.

Rostam also told me something else. He said that during those last days, the other prisoners in the cells nearby, there were three or four people in that section of the facility.

All noticed something that none of them could account for. He said there was a quality to the air in that section of the building, particularly near my cell that was different.

He described it as warm. He said that several of the other prisoners, men of different backgrounds, at least one of whom was, he said, a fairly harsh and unscentimental person, remarked on it.

One of them asked a guard about it. The guard had no explanation. I do not know what to do with this information except to share it as it was shared with me exactly as plainly as Rostam told it to me.

I am not claiming a scientific explanation. I am not claiming to know exactly what occurred.

I am only telling you what was witnessed by other human beings who had no reason to report it in the direction of the miraculous and who did report it.

What I know is that when the guards came that morning expecting to remove a body and found instead a living man barely living but living that it created a problem they were not equipped to handle.

The days that followed the morning they found me alive. I am going to tell you this period honestly which means admitting that my memory of it is fragmentaryary and not entirely reliable.

I was in a very compromised state. What I am about to describe is a reconstruction built from my fragments and from what I was later told by people who were part of what happened.

Sometime after the morning, the guards found me alive. I began receiving water. Small amounts brought to the cell.

Then after a day or more, something like food, watery, minimal, but something. I was not able to eat much at first.

The body after prolonged starvation cannot simply receive food and process it normally. The refeeding has to be slow or it causes its own serious harm.

Whoever made the decision to give me something must not have known or cared about that particular medical nuance.

But the amounts were small enough that it did not make things worse. My consciousness became more consistent over the following days.

Uh not normal, not anything close to what I would have called normal 2 months before, but more present, more continuous.

I was aware of where I was. I was aware of time passing in a more order way.

I was aware that something had shifted in the situation around me. Though I could not have told you what or why, the guards who interacted with me during the period were noticeably different in their manner from what I remembered of the weeks before.

Not kind, I would not use that word, but less certain of themselves. The way people act when they are not sure of the rule anymore.

When the situation has moved outside the procedures they understood, there was a weariness in how they approached the cell door that had not been there before.

I was aware of it even in my compromised state. I heard conversations outside the cell, not clearly then not completely but fragments.

There seemed to be disagreement about what to do with me. This is consistent with what I learned later, which was that my continued existence had become a complication within the facility.

The intention had been that I would not survive. That I had survived created a question of what happened next.

And the question was not a simple one because doing anything overt at that point carried risks of attention that the people running the facility did not want.

I need to explain something about how Afghan Christian prisoners have been released in documented cases because how I was released is consistent with patterns that are real.

And I want you to understand it is not a miraculous escape in any cinematic sense.

It is in its own way something on almost more interesting than that. It is the story of how networks of ordinary people on the outside work quietly to bring someone out.

The diaspora of Afghan Christians, people who had left Afghanistan and were now in various countries in Europe at in North America, in Australia, constituted a community that was small but connected.

They maintained and in the awareness of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan as best they could through family members still inside, through trusted contacts, through organizations that worked specifically on the issue of religious persecution in Afghanistan.

Open doors, voice of the martyrs, smaller, less public organizations that worked in ways that required discretion.

These networks operated in the background of the visible world. When someone was arrested, when a believer disappeared, neither community noticed.

Word traveled through the networks encoded ways. A message through a family member to someone abroad, a contact who knew a contact.

It was slow and imprecise, but it moved. Mariam had been in contact through means I will not specify because they involve people who are still inside Afghanistan with someone connected to one of these external networks.

She had communicated what had happened to me. Not all the details, but enough. This had set into motion a quiet process on the outside that involved, as best I understand it, two elements.

The first was what might be called documentation and visibility. People outside knowing what was happening, being aware and in a limited and careful way making sure that certain parties understood that this situation was not invisible.

This is not a loud or dramatic thing. It is the quiet work of making it known that someone is watching.

The second element involved, as I understand it, a financial transaction that I am not going to moralize about or pretend was anything other than what it was.

In Taliban controlled Afghanistan, as in many environments of this kind, certain outcomes can be facilitated through money.

Someone somewhere in the chain of people connected to my case made an arrangement with someone who had authority in the structure above the facility where I was being held.

The amount involved the the precise mechanism. I do not know the details and I am not sure I want to know them.

What I know is that it was not my doing was not Mariam’s doing was the doing of people outside the country who had worked and prayed and given their resources to make it possible.

What is the order for my release? Whatever form it took, whatever justification was used to legitimize it within the system came down through the facility.

I was told I was being released. I was told this by a guard who came to my cell on a morning, slid the panel open and said it simply.

No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment of what had been done to me. I asked him to repeat it.

He repeated it without apparent impatience. I asked him again because I was not entirely sure my mind was working correctly.

He said it a third time and then slid the panel close and walked away and then came back a short while later and open the door.

Walking. This is the part that no one who has not been in a comparable state will fully understand.

I had not walked properly, not stood and moved more than a few shuffling steps within weeks.

Other guards had to help me, not with any care or gentleness, but with the practical necessity of men who needed to move something from one point to another.

They got me upright. They moved me forward. My legs understood the concept of walking, but the execution was not reliable.

I held on to the wall when there was a wall. I held on to the guard when there was nothing else.

The corridors, the compound steps. Getting down steps was a significant challenge. And then outside the cold air hit me with a physical force.

I had been inside in that cell breathing that particular recycled air for 54 days.

Outside air, even the cold, still air of a cobble winter, hit my lungs in a way that was almost painful in its intensity.

I stopped at the threshold. The guard pushed me forward. Not harshly, but firmly. I went forward and then I was outside.

What? I the sky. I looked up at the sky. I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it before the guards moved me again.

It was overcast that morning. Not blue, not dramatic, just a gray cabbble winter sky.

The kind of sky you would walk under a 100 times without noticing it. But it was enormous.

It was endlessly, staggeringly enormous in a way I had completely stopped being able to imagine from inside four concrete walls.

I had forgotten how large the sky was. I had forgotten that there was so much space in the world, that the world was this big.

They put me in a vehicle, short drive, stop somewhere, made me get out and Mariam was there.

I have tried many times to describe the moment I saw her and I find that every time I try the words are not right and not because the emotion is too large though it was but but because the moment itself was very simple and very quiet.

She was there. She looked at me at what I had become in those 54 days and her face did something that I cannot describe in any language.

Then she came to me and put her arms around me and I put my arms around her and we stood on a street in Kabul holding each other and I could feel that she was praying.

Her lips were moving against my shoulder and she was praying barely audible and I could feel the words even if I could not hear them.

I could not stand for long. She had arranged for somewhere nearby to go, not our apartment which was no longer safe, a relative’s home where we could be for a short time.

She got me there. She had figured out how to do all of it while I was inside.

She had kept the girls safe and managed our situation and coordinated with the networks outside and somehow remained standing through all of it.

She is a stronger person than I am. I think I knew this before. I was very sure of it afterward.

The first day outside I slept. That is mostly what I remember of it. Being horizontal somewhere that was not a concrete floor under actual blankets and sleeping in a way I had not been able to sleep for weeks.

Deep and long and without waking to cold or noise in the same way. The first time I ate real food, Mariam brought me rice and a little broth, the most gentle things she could find.

I could only manage a few spoonfuls. My body did not know what to do with food anymore and had to be reintroduced to the concept slowly.

This process took days. The full process of my body learning how to eat again and my system adjusting took several weeks and was not without setbacks.

I was 41 years old when they put me in that cell. I looked by Mariam’s account closer to 60 when I came out.

We could not stay in Kapul. This was clear. Whatever had facilitated my release was not a guarantee of permanent safety.

It was a window and windows closed. The networks that had helped get me out were also the networks that helped us understand we needed to move and that helped us think about how the process of leaving Afghanistan is not something I will describe in detail.

Partly because it involved people and methods that I do not want to put at risk and partly because that story belongs to others as much as it belongs to me.

What I will say is that it took time. I it required going through several places before we reached safety and that the moment we finally crossed into a country where we could stop running where we could take a breath and know that the breathe was not a risk.

The girls who were 12 and nine by then and had been through things no child should go through sat together on a floor and cried.

And Miam and I sat with them and we all cried together for a long time.

And then Sana, the younger one, the 9-year-old, stopped crying and looked at me and said that she was hungry.

And I laughed for the first time in I did not know how long. I laughed just like that because she was right and because hunger this time was something I could do something about.

The sky the day we left Afghanistan for the last time was blue, clear, cold, very blue.

I looked at it before I looked at anything else. I always look at the sky now every morning.

I do not take it for granted anymore. The space of it, the simple extraordinary fact of it.

I am going to ask you to sit with me for a little while longer because I want to tell you about the part of the story that does not get told as often as the dramatic part.

People who hear a testimony like mine, people who come to hear about the prison and the starvation and the survival, they come for that part.

And I understand that it is a remarkable part. I am not going to pretend it is not.

But the part that has actually shaped me the most, the part that I live in every day is not the cell.

It is everything that happened after the cell. Survival is not the same as recovery.

And recovery, I have learned I is not something that happens on a timeline. It does not follow the schedule that your hope would assign to it.

The physical recovery took far longer than I expected. I understood in a general way that the body takes time to restore itself after severe malnutrition.

What I did not understand is how total the disruption is, how many systems are affected, how long they remain affected, how the recovery has its own difficult phases that are in some ways harder than the deprivation itself.

Because the deprivation has a clarity to it, a defined enemy, and the recovery is just slow and uneven and sometimes discouraging.

For the first 3 months after my release, I was not able to walk for more than a short distance without my legs giving in.

My muscles had been so depleted that rebuilding them was a genuine effortful process. I needed help with things a grown man should not need help with.

I need to be honest about that because I think the public understanding of what these kinds of orals do to a person tends to skip past this part very quickly.

You do not come out of 54 days of deliberate starvation and then stand up the next week and give a sermon.

You come out and you learn to walk again. Literally, that is what you do.

My digestion was disrupted for months. There were foods my body could not process normally for a long time after.

I lost significant muscle mass from my heart which is a muscle and this left me with a cardiac situation that I still manage carefully with the help of doctors.

My immune system was compromised in ways that expressed themselves repeatedly through that first year.

Illness after illness, things that a healthy body would have handled easily, landing on me heavily and taking a long time to resolve.

My hair grew back. My weight came back slowly, unevenly over the course of about a year.

Looking in the mirror during that first year was a strange experience. Watching the face of the man I used to be gradually reassert itself over the face of the man the cell had made and wondering which one was more true.

The psychological dimension of recovery. I will speak of this because I think it matters and because I think people of faith sometimes skip over it in testimonies as if the spiritual experience of survival means the the psychological damage does not occur.

It does occur. The grace of God does not make trauma not happen to you.

It accompanies you through the trauma. It is with you in the aftermath. But the aftermath is still the aftermath.

I had dreams for a long time. The same quality of dreams. Cold, dark, confined, the sound of the door panel sliding.

I still have them sometimes, less often now than before, but they come. I developed in the months after release a strong and involuntary response to certain sounds.

A knock on a door in a particular rhythm, the sound of boots on a hard floor, the specific sound of keys.

These are not things I chose to respond to. They are things my body had learned to treat as signals of danger.

And the body does not unlearn those associations quickly or easily just because the mind knows the context has changed.

There were days in that first year when the weight of everything was very heavy.

Days when I sat somewhere safe in a room and in a country where no one was going to knock on the door and take me away and felt something very close to despair.

Not because I had lost my faith, but because despair is its own kind of weather and it does not always care whether you have faith.

It comes in and sits with you. And on those days, I did not always feel the presence of God the way I had felt it in the cell.

On those days, I had to choose to believe what I had experienced rather than feel it.

This is a thing I want to say very clearly to anyone who is listening.

Anyone who is walking through their own difficulty. The felt presence of God that carries you through the crisis is not always the presence you have in the ordinary days after.

The ordinary days require a different kind of faith. Not stronger necessarily, but different more deliberate, more like a choice and less like a gift.

And that choice is its own form of faithfulness. It does not feel as glorious as the cell moments, but it is real.

I have spoken with the counselor, a Christian counselor connected with one of the organizations that has been supporting our family in exile.

Not because I am ashamed of needing it, but because I am a pastor and I understand that the tools God makes available to us include the wisdom he has given to human beings who understand how suffering affects the mind and body.

I am grateful for this help. It has been part of the healing. I need to tell you about the church members who did not make it out.

This is the part of my testimony that I find hardest to speak about publicly.

Not because I do not want to speak about it, but because I am always aware of the gap between what they experienced and what happened to me.

I survived. Not all of them did. Tariq, the young man who went silent in the first days after the Taliban returned, the one I mentioned earlier.

We eventually learned what happened to him. He had been arrested before I was several months before by Taliban authorities in the district where he lived.

He was held. He did not survive his detention. I do not know the specific circumstances.

I do not know if he recanted or not. I do not know exactly what they did to him.

What I know is that he was 26 years old and that he had come to faith with a hunger and a seriousness that I found deeply moving and that he is gone.

There was another member of the community to a woman who had been one of the most spiritually mature people in our small group who I will not name at all for the protection of her family still inside Afghanistan.

She went through her own period of detention. She survived it but at the cost I will not describe in specifics out of respect for her.

She is still inside the country. She is still a believer. I know this because I heard from her through the channels that still exist.

And she sent a message that was simple and short and said that she was still standing.

When I received that message, I sat down and I wept for a long time.

Good tears, the kind that mean something. Others have made it out. Some are in Pakistan, some in other countries in the region, some in Europe.

The community is scattered. It exists now as a diaspora rather than a gathered body.

How connected through prayer and through the networks that keep us in contact across borders and time zones.

It is not what we had in those quiet rooms in Kabul, but it is still something.

We are still the church. The church does not require a building. We already knew that.

I want to say something about forgiveness because people always ask about it. They expect I think that I will tell them I have fully forgiven my capttors that I hold no bitterness that the love of Christ has washed every trace of it away and I am now completely free and clear.

I will tell you the truth instead which is more complicated and which I think a think is more honest and ultimately more useful.

I am in the process of forgiveness. That is where I am. It is not complete.

It is not a finished thing. There are days when I feel what I think is real forgiveness.

A genuine absence of the al desire for harm to come to the people who did what they did.

A genuine hope that they would encounter the same mercy I encountered. There are other days when something surfaces a memory, a dream, a sound and I feel something much raw and less clean than forgiveness.

What I have come to understand about forgiveness in the specific way I have come to understand it through this experience is that it is not an event.

It is not a decision you make once and then it is and it is settled.

It is a practice. You have to choose it repeatedly. The way you choose anything that runs counter to what your instincts are telling you and some days the choice is easy and some days it is very hard and both of those things are true without one cancelelling out the other.

What helps me in this practice of ongoing forgiveness is thinking about who those guards were before they were guards.

They are Afghan men. Some of them are probably not old young men who grew up in a country of war who were shaped by violence and ideology from childhood who may have known nothing else.

This does not excuse what they did. I am very clear that what they did was wrong and that deliberately starving a human being because of his faith is a serious moral evil that cannot be explained away.

But understanding the formation of a person is different from excusing their actions and understanding it makes the practice of forgiveness more possible.

Not by minimizing the wrong but by restoring the humanity of the person who did it.

I pray for them. I pray for Afghanistan every day. I love my country. I want to say this clearly because I think people expect that I would hate it.

That what happened to me would have turned me against the land and the culture and the people.

It has not. Afghanistan is in my blood. The language is in my dreams. The mountains, the specific quality of light.

The people, ordinary people, not soldiers or ideologues, but the ordinary Afghans I grew up alongside.

I love them and I miss them and I pray for them. What was done to me was done by a regime, not by a people.

This is a distinction I hold on to. There are things I want to say to different groups of people.

I say this at the end of my public testimony and I want to say it here too to Afghan Christians still inside the country and there are some.

I know there are some more than the world might imagine. I want you to know that you are not forgotten.

The global church knows you exist. People are praying for you specifically. Your faith is not invisible to heaven.

I know how alone it feels. I know how complete the isolation can seem. I was in a cell by myself for 54 days and I was not alone.

I need you to believe me when I say this, not because I am trying to make you feel better with a nice phrase, but because it is the truest thing I know from direct experience to Christians in places where faith costs nothing.

Where you can put a church sign on a building and drive to it on a Sunday morning and sit in a hated room and sing at full volume and walk back to your car and go get lunch.

I want to say something that I hope you receive in the spirit in which I offer it, which is love and not condemnation.

What you have is precious. It is more precious than I think many of you know I because you have never had it taken from you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty. Guilt is not useful. I am saying it to invite you to treasure it, to take it seriously, to let the fact that your faith costs you very little in terms of safety make you ask whether it is costing you enough in terms of depth.

I say this not from superiority. I did not choose to be tested the way I was tested.

I would not have chosen it. I would not recommend it. But I have something now, a quality of certainty about what I believe, a directness in my relationship with God, an understanding of what matters and what does not.

That I did not have before the cell. And I know that this thing I have, this particular quality was given to me through suffering.

And I wish there were another way to get it. And I do not know if there is.

And to Muslims listening to this story, Alis, and I hope some are, I hope you would hear me out.

I want to say this with every bit of respect and genuine regard that I have for you which is substantial.

I am an Afghan man. I grew up inside Islam. I know what it is to love that tradition, to have been formed by it, to have prayed toward Mecca since I was a small child.

I am not your enemy. I am not trying to take something from you or tell you that everything you believe is worthless.

What I want to say to you is simply this. I found something in the darkest place I have ever been.

I found a presence that held me when I had nothing left to hold onto myself.

I am not asking you to take my word for it. I am asking you to consider that the question of who Jesus actually is deserves serious attention on not the Jesus of western culture or political Christianity.

The Jesus of the gospels, the one who stopped for the people everyone else had stopped noticing.

I was one of those people in that cell and he stopped. The last thing I want to tell you is what I pray for every night.

Not for great things, not for my own safety or comfort. Not even primarily for Afghanistan, though I always pray for Afghanistan.

What I pray for every night is this, that I would remain the man who came out of that cell and not slowly become again the man who went in.

The man who went in had faith. I do not want to dismiss that. He had real faith and he loved God in the way he was capable of loving him at that time.

But the man who came out knows something. The man who went in did not know.

How the man who came out knows exactly what he believes and exactly why and exactly what it costs.

And he is not confused about what is essential and what is decoration. And he is not able to be satisfied with a faith that lives only on the surface of things.

I do not want to lose that man. I am afraid in the ordinary comfortable days of exile life, the days with grocery stores and reliable heating and safe streets.

I am afraid of slowly forgetting of the urgency fading of the clarity going soft around the edges.

This is a real fear. The comfortable life is in its own quiet way a danger.

So I pray every night to remain awake, to remain clear, to keep the essential thing essential and to not let the peripheral things take more space than they deserve.

And then I go to sleep and sometimes I dream of the cell. F I wake up and I am in a room with a ceiling that is not concrete and the wife who is breathing next to me and two daughters in the next room and outside the window.

If I pull back the curtain. The sky. The sky enormous, full of stars if the night is clear or gray and overcast and ordinary if it is not.

It does not matter. It is the sky. It is outside. It is the world big and open and full of the presence of a god who found me in a cell and decided I was worth staying with and who has not in all the days since let go of my hand.

I am Yu Rahimi. I am a pastor. I am an Afghan. I am a man who was starved for 54 days and did not die.

And I’m here to tell you, he is real. He is present. He is worth everything it costs to know him.

That is all I have to say.