The Hidden Revival In The Middle East…They Don’t Want You To Know
I don’t even know how to start this.
I’ve been sitting here for almost 20 minutes just staring at this page trying to figure out how to put into words something that my brain still struggles to fully accept.
My name is Yusuf.
I’m a 38-year-old man from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
I work in the oil industry.
I have a wife named Maryam and three children.
I am, by every measure anyone could use to judge a man, ordinary.
I’m not special.
I am not a preacher or a scholar or anyone important.
I’m just a regular man who went on a religious trip and came back a completely different person.
I want to be honest with you from the very beginning.
What I’m about to tell you is going to sound strange, maybe even impossible.
And I understand if you read this and think I’m lying or that I lost my mind.
I thought the same thing about people who told stories like this one before it happened to me.
I used to shake my head and feel sorry for them thinking they had been deceived or gone crazy.
But now I’m the one telling the story and I need you to hear it.
My hands are shaking right now as I type this.
Not because I’m cold or nervous in the normal way.
It’s a different kind of shaking.
It’s the kind that happens when your whole body remembers something that your mind can’t fully explain.
I’ve tried to tell this story to a few close people and I always end up with tears in my eyes before I’m halfway through.
I’m not a man who cries easily.
Ask anyone who knows me.
But this story, it breaks something open in me every time I try to say it out loud.
I need you to understand something before I go any further.
When this happened, I was a very serious Muslim.
I’m talking about someone who prayed five times a day without fail.
Someone who fasted every single day of Ramadan without complaint.
Someone who never touched alcohol, never missed Friday prayers, who had memorized large portions of the Quran and felt proud of that.
I believed deeply and completely in Islam.
It was not just my religion.
It was my identity.
It was the air I breathed.
I had never seriously questioned it, not even once in my entire life.
And I had no reason to.
I was happy with my faith.
I was at peace with it.
I tell you all of this because I need you to understand that what changed in me did not happen because I was searching for something new.
I wasn’t unhappy with Islam.
I wasn’t going through a spiritual crisis.
I wasn’t secretly reading about other religions or doubting my beliefs in private.
I was a completely committed Muslim man who went to Mecca for a religious visit and came back unable to live the same life I had lived before.
And I know there are at least a hundred thousand other people who can say the exact same thing.
I traveled to Mecca with my cousin Bilal and two other men from our neighborhood, Tariq and Sammy.
We went during the last 10 days of Ramadan, which is the most important time in the Islamic calendar.
For Muslims, these last 10 days are more sacred than anything else in the year.
One night in particular, the 27th night, is believed to be the night the Quran was first given to the Prophet Muhammad.
People pray through the entire night.
The mosque is packed beyond what you can imagine.
I had been to Mecca twice before in my life, but never during this time and the spiritual feeling in the air was something I still can’t find the right words for.
Millions of people all in white, all praying together, all pointing in the same direction toward that big black cube in the center of everything.
It fills you up.
It makes you feel like God is close.
We arrived in the evening and went straight to the mosque to begin our prayers and rituals.
The place was so full of people that we ended up in one of the outer areas, which was fine.
There were screens and speakers everywhere so you could still follow what was happening inside.
The Imam leading prayers in our section was a man named Sheikh Khalid Al Rashidi.
I knew who he was before I ever went to Mecca.
He was one of the most respected Islamic scholars in the whole country.
Older man, white beard, very serious and calm in the way he spoke.
Not someone who ever got emotional or dramatic.
He was known for being precise and strict in his teaching.
Traditional in every way.
The kind of man who made you feel that Islam was solid and unchanging just by the way he carried himself.
The night prayers began and everything was normal.
Sheikh Khalid was reciting from the Quran in his steady, clear voice.
We were all following along moving through the prayer positions together, millions of us like one body.
I remember feeling very at peace in that moment.
Very grateful to be there.
Then something happened.
We were in the position where you put your forehead on the ground, what Muslims call sujud.
We were supposed to stay there until the Sheikh said the words to move.
But the recitation stopped.
Right in the middle of a verse, it just stopped.
There was a second of confused quiet.
Then I heard Sheikh Khalid make a sound I will never forget as long as I live.
It was like a gasp, like someone who just saw something their brain couldn’t process.
It was a sound that went straight into my chest.
People started lifting their heads.
The Sheikh was supposed to tell us to rise, but he said nothing.
When I looked toward where he was standing, I saw him frozen completely still staring up and ahead of him at something no one else could see.
His face was white.
His mouth was open.
His eyes were wide and his expression was something I have never seen on another human face before or since.
It was like terror and wonder mixed together combined with something else, a total and complete certainty about what he was seeing.
Then he spoke.
His voice came through the speakers so that hundreds of thousands of people heard him.
His voice was shaking but every word was clear.
He said, I see him.
I see Isa al-Masih, Jesus the Messiah.
He is standing here before me.
He is real.
He is here in light.
I don’t have words for what happened after that.
The whole area broke apart.
People were screaming.
Some were shouting that the Sheikh had gone mad.
Some were frozen in shock.
I was completely still, unable to move, unable to think.
I just kept staring at the Sheikh as he kept talking, his voice getting stronger.
He said that Jesus was showing him his hands, that they were wounded.
He said Jesus was telling him that he is the way, the truth, and the life.
He said that he had been teaching wrong his whole life.
He said that salvation does not come from our work or our prayers or our fasting.
He said it comes through faith in Jesus alone.
Security people appeared out of nowhere and started pushing through the crowd toward him.
The noise was overwhelming.
People were running in different directions.
Some were crying.
Some were trying to get closer to the Sheikh.
I stood there in the middle of all of it completely unable to move.
The last thing I heard from Sheikh Khalid was his voice crying out, I believe.
I accept you, Isa.
Forgive me.
And then the security forces reached him and he was dragged away.
His voice faded as they pulled him through the crowd.
That whole thing lasted maybe four minutes.
But it felt like time had stopped completely.
The announcements came quickly after that.
A calm voice through the speakers said that Sheikh Khalid had suffered a sudden medical emergency and had been taken for treatment.
They asked everyone to remain calm and continue with worship.
Other men were brought in to lead the prayers as if nothing had happened.
But everything had happened.
You could see it on every face around you.
No announcement was going to undo what hundreds of thousands of people had just heard with their own ears.
Bilal and I and the others walked back to our hotel without speaking.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
When we finally got inside the room and sat down, Bilal said it first.
He said the Sheikh had been taken over by a jinn, an evil spirit.
He said it firmly, like he needed to believe it so that the world could go back to making sense.
Tariq and Sammy agreed right away.
They started talking about how powerful evil spirits can be, how they can take over even the most faithful and respected people, how this was clearly an attack on the believers during the holy month.
Their explanation was logical.
It fit into everything we had been taught.
And a big part of me wanted to accept it so that I could calm down and go to sleep and stop feeling the way I was feeling.
But I kept thinking about that face.
Sheikh Khalid’s face.
I’ve been around sick people.
I’ve seen people having episodes, people in confusion or pain.
What I saw on his face was nothing like that.
There was no confusion there.
There was no loss of control.
What I saw was a man who was seeing something absolutely real, something so real that nothing else in the world mattered anymore.
I had never seen that kind of clarity on any human face in my entire life.
I couldn’t sleep.
I kept replaying it in my head over and over, his words, his face, the way he cried out when they were pulling him away.
The next morning we found out he had been arrested.
The official statement said he was being held for psychiatric evaluation.
Anyone who talked about the incident publicly was warned to stop.
The message was simple.
Forget what you saw.
Accept the explanation.
Move on.
But people weren’t moving on.
Quietly in corners of hotel lobbies and mosque courtyards, in whispered conversations, it was all anyone wanted to talk about.
Most people had settled on the same explanation my cousin had given.
Jinn, mental illness, some kind of attack on the faith.
But there were other voices, too.
People saying they couldn’t stop thinking about it.
People who didn’t have an easy explanation ready.
People who looked troubled in a way that had nothing to do with fear of the government.
Then the other story started.
At first I heard them as just rumors.
People saying that others were having dreams and visions of Jesus.
Not just in Mecca, but in other cities, too.
Other countries.
People waking up in the middle of the night claiming a figure in white appeared in their room.
People interrupting their own prayers saying they saw someone standing in front of them.
I told myself it was mass imagination.
People had been shaken up by what happened with the sheikh and now their minds were running wild.
But the stories kept coming and they were too similar to each other to just be imagination.
Same descriptions.
Same messages.
The same wounded hands.
The same words about forgiveness and salvation.
These were people who didn’t know each other.
People from different countries.
People who hadn’t heard about each others experiences.
And they were all describing the same thing.
I was scared.
Not in the way you’re scared of something normal.
I was scared in the way you feel when you sense that reality itself is different from what you always thought it was.
On the third night after the sheikh incident, I woke up at 3:00 in the morning.
My cousin Bilal was asleep in the other bed.
The room was completely quiet.
And then I noticed that the room was not dark.
There was a soft light that had no source.
Not like a lamp was on.
Not like light from outside.
Just a gentle glow that seemed to come from the air itself.
I sat up in bed.
I was completely awake.
More awake than I had ever been in my life.
And then I saw him.
A man was standing at the foot of my bed.
He was dressed in white that seemed to give off its own light.
His face, I don’t know how to describe it.
It was gentle and powerful at the same time.
His eyes were full of something I can only call complete love.
Not the kind you feel from family or friends.
Something much bigger than that.
So big it almost hurt to look at it.
I knew immediately, without thinking, without reasoning it out, that I was looking at Jesus.
Not because someone told me.
Not because I figured it out.
I just knew it the way you know your own name.
I couldn’t move.
I tried to call out to Bilal, but I couldn’t make my mouth work.
I couldn’t look away.
All I could do was stay completely still and look at this figure who was more real to me in that moment than anything I had ever seen or touched or experienced in my entire life.
He didn’t speak out loud.
His voice came straight into my chest, into the center of me, like it bypassed my ears completely.
He told me he loved me.
He told me he had always loved me.
He told me he had come to show me what was true.
He held out his hands and I saw the wounds in them.
And something broke open inside me when I saw them.
He said those wounds were for me.
He said that my sins had created a distance between me and God that I could never close on my own, no matter how much I prayed or fasted or did the right things.
He said he had crossed that distance himself by dying in my place and coming back to life.
He said that all I had to do was believe it and accept it.
That salvation was not something I could earn.
That it was already done and he was offering it to me freely.
Then he said something that hit me hard.
He told me I was not alone.
He said that thousands and thousands of people were having this same experience at the same time.
That he was calling his people and they were hearing him.
And then the light faded and he was gone.
I lay in my bed until the morning call to prayer.
I didn’t sleep.
I didn’t move much.
I just lay there with everything I had ever believed rearranged inside me.
Every prayer I had ever prayed, every fast I had ever kept, every verse I had ever memorized, all of it was still there in my memory.
But now there was something bigger than all of it sitting right next to it.
Something I couldn’t argue with or explain away.
I had seen something.
I had heard something.
And I was absolutely certain it was real.
The fear that came after that was immense.
Because accepting that this was real meant accepting things that would destroy my life as I knew it.
In Saudi Arabia, leaving Islam is not just a personal decision.
It is a crime.
People are punished for it.
Families are destroyed.
Careers are ended.
And in the most serious cases, people are killed.
I’m not being dramatic when I say that.
I’m describing what actually happens.
I had a wife at home.
Three children.
A job.
A whole life.
And the thing I had just experienced was pulling me away from all of it.
I tried to act normal around Bilal and the others for the rest of our time in Mecca.
I prayed with them.
I ate with them.
I participated in everything.
But inside I was a different person and there was nothing I could do about that.
On our last day before returning home, I saw something I’ll never forget.
I was walking near the shopping area close to the mosque when I saw a crowd forming ahead of me.
I got closer and saw a young man, maybe 20 years old, standing up on a bench above the crowd.
His face was completely lit up, like he was the happiest person in the world.
He was shouting that Jesus had appeared to him.
That Jesus was the son of God.
That anyone who believed in him would have eternal life.
Security reached him fast and pulled him down, but he kept calling out his message even as they dragged him away.
What I remember most about that moment was not the young man.
It was the crowd watching him.
Some people looked angry.
But many others looked like they were hearing something they had already heard somewhere deep inside themselves.
Some people had tears running down their faces.
You could see it all over them.
These were people who had been touched by something and hadn’t known what to do with it.
The drive home to Riyadh took several hours.
Bilal and Tariq and Sami talked the whole way, being careful not to mention the sheikh or any of the strange things we had seen.
I sat by the window and looked at the desert and thought about my wife Maryam and what I was going to say to her.
When I got home that evening, Maryam could see something was different the moment she looked at me.
After the kids were in bed, she sat with me in our room and I told her everything.
The sheikh’s declaration.
The rumors of Jesus appearing to people.
My own experience in the hotel room.
I told her all of it.
She listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she was quiet for a long time.
Then she asked me if I was sure I hadn’t dreamed it.
I told her I had never been more sure of anything in my life.
She asked what I was going to do.
I said I didn’t know yet.
The first thing she told me was to tell no one.
She said people were being arrested.
She said everything we had built our life on could be gone in a moment if the wrong person found out.
She was right and I knew it and I agreed to keep quiet.
But keeping quiet was its own kind of pain.
I went back to work at the company.
I sat in meetings and did my job.
I went to the office mosque for the midday prayers and moved through the motions of it all.
I came home and played with my children and ate dinner with my family.
And inside I was a completely different person from the man everyone around me thought they knew.
At night when everyone was asleep, I started searching online.
I used a private connection because I knew the government monitored these things.
What I found surprised me.
Saudi media was almost totally silent about what had happened with Sheikh Khalid.
But outside the country, the story was alive.
There were accounts from people who had been in Mecca that night.
There were testimonies from people in other countries describing encounters with Jesus that had happened during the same period.
And there was a clear picture forming of something much bigger than one imam having a moment at the Grand Mosque.
The numbers I was seeing varied a lot depending on the source.
But the word that kept coming up was thousands.
Thousands of people across the region and beyond who were claiming similar experiences.
And the Saudi government’s response, the arrests, the psychiatric facilities, the silencing of anyone who spoke publicly, all of it suggested they were seeing the same numbers and were terrified by them.
About 3 weeks after I got back from Mecca, I received a message on an encrypted app.
The sender asked if I had been in Mecca during the incident with Sheikh Khalid.
When I said yes, he asked if I would meet him in person to talk.
Every logical part of my brain said this was a trap.
This was how the government caught people.
Someone reaches out, builds trust, and then reports you.
I almost said no.
But something told me to go.
Not a voice, exactly.
More like a quiet certainty that I should meet this person.
His name was Faris.
He was in his 50s, well-dressed, calm, with eyes that felt like they had seen a lot.
We met in a coffee shop in a part of Riyadh far from where either of us lived.
We sat in a corner and spoke quietly and he told me his story.
He had been in Mecca that night.
He had also witnessed the second imam in a completely different section of the Grand Mosque who had also declared seeing Jesus that same evening.
That one had been shut down even faster and suppressed even more completely than the sheikh’s incident.
Faris had been there for that one.
And Faris had his own experience.
Jesus had appeared to him three nights after the Mecca incident.
His whole understanding of everything had shifted.
He asked me if I had experienced anything personal beyond what I witnessed in Mecca.
I sat there for a moment.
I thought about Maryam’s warning.
I thought about my kids.
I thought about everything I could lose.
And then I told him.
When I finished, he reached across the table and held my hand and his eyes were full of tears.
He said I was not alone.
He said there were others.
He said he wanted me to meet them if I was willing.
Over the weeks that followed, Faris introduced me to a group of people I will never forget as long as I live.
We met in homes and private offices and once in a field far outside the city.
Every person had a story.
Some had dramatic visions like mine.
Some had dreams.
Some hadn’t seen anything but had heard the testimonies of others and felt something shift inside them that they couldn’t push away.
There was Halima, a school teacher in her 40s who had been praying at home when she felt a presence in the room and heard a voice telling her she was loved completely, that she didn’t need to earn God’s acceptance, that it was already hers.
She said she had cried for an hour straight because she had never in her entire life believed that she was fully accepted by God without condition.
There was Nasser, a doctor who had been working a late shift when he saw a figure standing in an empty hallway showing him his hands telling him that those wounds were the price of Nasser’s freedom.
There was a young woman named Reem who had dreamed of Jesus seven nights in a row, each dream showing her more about who he was and what he had done.
Every story was different in the details.
But the center of every story was the same.
Someone had appeared to these people and told them that they were loved.
That their sins could be forgiven.
That salvation was not something they had to earn.
That Jesus had already done what needed to be done.
Faris told me that based on what the network had been able to piece together, at least a thousand people had been detained in psychiatric facilities following the Mecca incident.
But the real number of people who had experiences was much larger, possibly 10,000 or more, with most people keeping it completely secret out of fear.
And fear made sense.
People were being arrested.
Facilities had been set up specifically to hold people who were claiming to have seen Jesus.
These were not regular jails.
They were places where people were held against their will, given medication meant to alter their thinking, subjected to intense religious questioning aimed at getting them to say their experiences were not real.
But here is what the government did not plan for.
The people coming out of those facilities were not broken.
They were more certain than when they went in.
Because even in those places, they said they felt the presence of Jesus with them.
They said they had a peace that made no sense given what they were going through.
One former detainee told me that during his three weeks in one of those facilities, he had led seven other patients to faith in Jesus simply by sharing what he had experienced and praying with them.
The government eventually started releasing people quietly and without explanation because the facilities could not handle the numbers.
And because the doctors and nurses working there were starting to have their own experiences.
One psychiatrist apparently quit after listening to three of her patients describe their visions with such peace and clarity that she went home and sought Jesus herself.
A nurse had a vision of Jesus while giving medication to a patient who had been arrested for talking about the Messiah.
You cannot lock up an experience.
You cannot medicate a truth.
When they released these people and sent them back to their communities, what happened was the opposite of what the government wanted.
These people found each other.
The underground grew faster than before.
About two months after Mecca, Faris told me about a gathering happening outside Riyadh at a private property.
He said around 40 people were planning to be baptized.
He asked if I wanted to be there and if I was ready to make that commitment.
I spent three days thinking about it.
I went back and forth.
I knew what it meant.
Once you’re baptized as a Christian, you have crossed a line in Islamic law that can never be uncrossed.
You are an apostate.
And in Saudi Arabia, that word carries consequences that are not small.
But I also knew I couldn’t keep living the way I was living.
One foot in Islam and one foot somewhere else.
Believing something in secret and performing something else in public.
It was eating me from the inside.
I told Maryam about the invitation.
She was scared.
But she surprised me.
She asked me to tell her more about Jesus.
Not to argue against it.
She genuinely wanted to understand what I had learned.
So over several evenings, I shared everything.
I told her about grace, about what it meant that Jesus had paid for our sins so we didn’t have to earn forgiveness.
I told her about his death and resurrection.
I showed her testimonies from other people in the network, people who had given up so much to follow Jesus and who had a peace and joy that didn’t make sense considering everything they were going through.
Maryam never had a vision.
She never saw Jesus in a dream.
But she told me that as I shared these things with her, something changed in her chest.
She said she had spent her whole life afraid that she wasn’t doing enough to please God.
Afraid of judgment.
Worried that her prayers weren’t good enough, her fasting wasn’t sincere enough, her heart wasn’t clean enough.
She said the idea that Jesus was offering forgiveness freely, that it didn’t depend on her efforts, brought her a relief she had never felt before in her entire life.
Three days before the gathering, Maryam told me she was coming with me.
She said if I was going to follow Jesus and face whatever came from that, she was not staying behind.
She said we were one family and she would not let me walk this alone.
I’m not ashamed to tell you that I cried when she said that.
The night of the gathering, we told the kids we were visiting family and drove for over an hour until we reached a private property owned by a Lebanese Christian businessman who used it as a vacation place.
When we got there, I expected to find 40 people as Faris had said.
There were more than 70.
They came from Riyadh, from Jeddah, from Mecca, from Medina.
Some had driven six hours to be there.
Many were people I had never met.
Others were faces I recognized from smaller meetings.
Everyone spoke quietly and there was a feeling in that room that is hard to put into words.
It was joy and seriousness at the same time.
Everyone knew the risk of what they were doing.
And everyone had decided the risk was worth it.
Before the baptisms began, a Pakistani pastor who had been running an underground church for foreign workers in Riyadh for 15 years stood up and invited people to share their testimonies.
Person after person stood and told their story.
A woman talked about how she had been very close to ending her life.
She had done things in her past that she believed Allah would never forgive no matter how hard she tried.
And then Jesus appeared to her and told her that all her sins, everything, were washed away by his blood.
That she was clean and completely loved.
She said she was still amazed every single day that such forgiveness was real.
A young man talked about how strict and judgmental he had been as a Muslim, how he had looked down on anyone who didn’t follow Islam exactly the way he believed it should be followed.
He said Jesus appeared to him and asked him why he was working so hard to earn what was already being freely offered to him.
He said he broke down and accepted Jesus and he was now learning for the first time in his life what it meant to love people instead of judge them.
An older man stood up, probably around 60, with tears already on his face before he even began speaking.
He said he had been a faithful Muslim his entire life.
He had made the full hajj pilgrimage four times.
He had memorized large parts of the Quran.
He had prayed every prayer every day for decades.
But he said he had never once in 60 years felt truly close to God.
Never felt certain he was loved.
Never felt at peace about what would happen to him when he died.
He said that in one encounter with Jesus, he experienced more of God’s love and presence than in 60 years of doing everything right.
He said his only regret was not knowing this truth sooner.
When Maryam and I stood up to speak, we stood side by side and I held her hand.
I told about witnessing the sheikh’s declaration in Mecca, about my own vision in the hotel room, about the months of confusion and fear and searching, and about how God had worked in my wife’s heart even without giving her the kind of dramatic experience he gave me.
Several people came and embraced us before we even sat back down.
The baptisms happened in a large pool at the property.
The pastor explained what baptism meant.
He said it was an outward sign of an inward change, a public declaration that you belonged to Jesus, that you were identifying with his death and his coming back to life.
One by one, we went into the water and were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
When I came up out of that water, something settled in me.
The fear and the confusion that had been living in my chest for months, it didn’t disappear completely, but something under it was solid now.
Something was decided.
Whatever was going to happen from here, I was not going back.
I had made my choice in front of witnesses, in front of God, and there was a peace in that which I cannot fully explain.
That night, 73 people were baptized.
73 people who had been raised in Islam, who had prayed toward Mecca their whole lives, who had believed they were on the right path, all declaring their faith in Jesus Christ.
In the months that followed, I learned more about how big this thing actually was.
Through Faris’s network and connections with other groups across the region, a picture came together of something that had no real comparison in modern history.
Best estimates put the number of Muslims who had visions, dreams, or personal encounters with Jesus during and after that Ramadan period at somewhere between 10 and 15,000 in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region.
But the experiences had spread beyond that, too.
People in Iran.
People in Pakistan.
In Egypt.
In Indonesia.
The same pattern everywhere.
Jesus appearing to people.
Showing wounded hands.
Giving the same message about forgiveness and salvation being a gift.
And people responding despite enormous cost to themselves.
Of all those thousands of people who had initial experiences, the number that eventually made genuine commitments to follow Jesus, people who were baptized, who joined underground churches, who made the decision to follow him no matter what it cost, that number by the best available count reached somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people within a year of the Mecca incident.
100,000 former Muslims now following Jesus.
I am one of those 100,000.
Maryam is one.
The people I was baptized with that night in the desert are part of that number.
Halima the teacher, Nasser the doctor, Reem the university student, Hassan the former Imam who led seven people to faith inside a psychiatric facility, Faris the businessman who first reached out to me with a simple message on an encrypted app.
All of us.
My life today looks the same from the outside.
I still go to work every day.
I still live in the same house in Riyadh.
To the outside world, I look like a regular Muslim man with a family and a steady job.
But in secret I am part of a group that meets every week to read the Bible, to pray, to share what God is doing in our lives, and to help others who are seeking truth find their way.
The risks are still real.
We know the government monitors people suspected of apostasy.
We know some people who were released from the facilities have been arrested again.
We know families that have been torn apart when some members followed Jesus and others refused.
We know that everything we have built our lives on could fall apart at any moment.
But we also know what we have found.
I used to pray five times a day because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
Now I pray because I want to.
I used to fast every Ramadan because the rules said I had to.
Now I still choose times to fast, but it comes from a different place inside me.
I used to do everything right because I was trying to earn something, approval, paradise, peace of mind.
Now I know that none of that could ever earn what Jesus already gave me freely.
The wounds in his hands, the ones he showed me that night in my hotel room in Mecca, they were real.
And they were for me.
And I will spend the rest of my life grateful for them no matter what it costs me to say so.
I still don’t fully understand everything that happened.
I still have questions I can’t answer.
But I know what I saw.
I know what I heard.
And I know that I am not the same man who left for Mecca thinking he had everything figured out.
That man is gone.
And I don’t miss him.