I want to start by saying something that might surprise people. I was not always a Christian. I was not born into a Christian family. I did not grow up going to church. I did not even know what a church looked like from the inside until I was already a grown man.
I was born Muslim, raised Muslim, and for the first 26 years of my life, I lived as a Muslim. Not a radical one. Not the kind the world sees on the news with a weapon in his hand and fire in his eyes. Just a regular Iranian man who fasted during Ramadan, who said his prayers sometimes more out of habit than conviction, who believed in a general kind of way that God existed and that Islam was the path to Him.
That was the world I came from. And I think it is important to say that clearly, because the story I am about to tell you is not the story of a man who had nothing and found religion as a crutch. It is the story of a man who had a life, who had a family, who had plans, and who was interrupted by something he could not explain and could not ignore.
My name is Elias Hosseini.
I was born in Tehran in 1976. I am the second of four children. My father was an engineer who worked for a government ministry. My mother was a school teacher. We were not wealthy, but we were not struggling either. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood in the north of Tehran.
It was an ordinary life in many of the ways that ordinary lives look similar everywhere. Children playing in the street, adults working and worrying, the rhythms of meals and school and family visits, and the kind of small daily drama that fills up a life without you ever quite noticing how full it is.
My parents were educated people. My father especially was a man who read widely and thought carefully. He was not someone who accepted things simply because tradition handed them to him. So he asked questions. He weighed things. He was a practicing Muslim in the sense that he observed the outward forms of the faith. But he was never a man who used religion as a club. He had a kind of intellectual integrity that I always admired, even when it frustrated me as a young person.
I think I inherited that tendency from him. The inability to simply go along with something that did not sit right inside me. The need to examine. The refusal to let things be settled by authority alone.
I went to school, studied hard, and eventually entered university in Tehran, where I studied civil engineering. Those were interesting years—and I say that with full awareness of the complexity of what university life in Iran actually involves.
From the outside, people often imagine Iranian universities as tightly controlled spaces where only approved thinking is permitted. And it is true that there are restrictions—significant restrictions. But inside those spaces, among the students, there is more intellectual life than the official picture suggests. There are young people wrestling with ideas they are not supposed to wrestle with. Books passing from hand to hand that were not on any approved list. Conversations happening in corners and in whispers about philosophy, about politics, about the meaning of existence.
I was one of those students who read whatever I could find: Persian poetry—our poets are among the greatest in human history, and they have always carried spiritual weight—and foreign literature and philosophy, and whatever else was circulating in those informal networks. I was not politically active in an organized way. But I was searching. Something in me was perpetually unsatisfied, and I kept turning over rocks looking for whatever was underneath, without being able to name clearly what I was looking for.
After university, I joined an engineering firm in Tehran. I was 24 years old, beginning a professional life, beginning to build something. I married Maryam when I was 28. She was from a similar background: educated, from a middle-class Tehran family, thoughtful, not rigid in her practice of Islam, but respectful of it as the framework of our culture and community. We were well matched in the ways that matter for a marriage. We could talk. We had genuine friendship underneath the romance. We shared a way of looking at the world that was curious rather than closed.
Within a few years, we had our son Dara, and then several years after that, our daughter Shireen. I remember holding Dara for the first time in the hospital—this small, complete person who had not existed and then existed—and feeling something that I did not have a theological framework for yet, but that I now understand was the presence of the holy in the ordinary, and the feeling that life was more than the sum of its material parts, that whatever this was, this mystery of a new human being arriving in the world, it pointed to something beyond itself.
Our life moved forward the way lives are supposed to: work, family, the apartment we slowly made into a home, the routines of parenthood and marriage and career. I was, by any external measure, a man who had everything he was supposed to want. And I was not unhappy.
I want to be precise about this, because I have told this story in different contexts and I have noticed the tendency for people to fill in a backstory of misery or crisis when none existed. My life was genuinely good. I loved my wife. I was engaged with my work. My children were healthy. I had friendships.
But that restlessness was always there. It had been there since I was a teenager, and it never left. It is not the kind of thing that ordinary contentment can touch, because it is not about circumstances. It is something at the level of the soul. A deep, persistent awareness that something fundamental is unanswered, that for all the prayers I said, for all the fasting I did, for all the religious observances I performed, I did not actually know God. Not personally. Not in a way that was real and present and alive.
I knew propositions about God. I had been taught what to believe, and I broadly believed it. But knowing about someone and knowing them are two entirely different things. And somewhere inside me there was a hunger for the second kind of knowing that nothing in my religious life had come close to satisfying.
I think many people—many people across many religious traditions—know exactly what I am describing. The gap between the religion you practice and the encounter with the living God that the religion is supposed to point toward. The feeling of going through motions. The prayer that feels like speaking to a ceiling. The rituals that feel empty without meaning them.
I was living inside that gap. And I had been living inside it so long that I had almost stopped noticing it. The way you stop noticing a low-grade physical pain that has been present for years.
The first time I ever held a Bible was in 2005. I was 29 years old. A colleague at work—a man I will not name because he is still in Iran and his safety still matters—left a Persian New Testament in the drawer of a desk we shared. I do not know to this day whether he left it deliberately or by accident. He never mentioned it.
I found it one afternoon when I was looking for something else, and I took it out and looked at it for a long time before I opened it. I knew what it was. I also knew, in a practical sense, exactly what it meant to be found holding it. Possessing Christian scripture in Iran is not something the authorities treat casually, and distributing it or sharing it carries serious risk.
I was aware of all of that. And still, I could not put it down.
I opened it, and it fell to the Gospel of John. I do not have a dramatic explanation for why I started there. It was simply where the book opened in my hands. And I began to read.
I read the first few verses. The part that says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
And I stopped. I read it again.
There was something in those opening sentences that was unlike anything I had read in any religious text before. Not because I fully understood what they meant. I did not. Not then. But because they had a weight to them, a density, that I felt more than I processed intellectually. Like standing near something very large and feeling the gravitational pull of it before you understand what the thing is.
I read on. I read through the entire first chapter. And by the time I put the Bible back in the drawer, my mind was going in directions that I could not entirely control. The language of this text was doing something to me.
I was an engineer. I was trained to be logical and precise and to distrust what could not be measured. And I sat there in my office afterward, staring at my work, and thought, “Something just happened to me.”
Over the following weeks, I kept going back to that desk when my colleague was absent and reading more. Chapter by chapter, slowly, carefully. I was reading it the way a man reads something that he senses is important but does not yet fully understand—with a mixture of fascination and caution.
And as I read, something was accumulating in me. A conviction, still wordless at that point, that the person these pages were written about was real. Not historically real in the limited sense that any ancient figure was real. Real in the sense of present, alive, actually there.
I need to tell you about the dream, because the dream is where things moved from searching to encounter.
It was an ordinary night. I had not been reading the Bible that day. I was not in any heightened spiritual state. I went to sleep the way I always did, beside Maryam in our bedroom, with the sounds of the city outside.
And in the night, a dream came that was unlike any dream I had had before.
There was a man. I cannot give you a precise physical description that would satisfy a painter, and I will not try to manufacture one. What I can tell you is that there was a man standing in a quality of light that was not theatrical or blinding, but simply clear. A clarity that made everything in the dream visible and present.
And I knew, in the way you sometimes know things in dreams without being told, who this man was.
He did not preach to me. He did not give me a list of things to do. He simply looked at me. And in that look—in whatever that moment of being looked at fully was—I experienced something that I had been reaching toward my entire life.
It was the experience of being completely known. Not in a frightening way. Not in the way of an interrogation or a judgment. But in the way of being seen to your very foundation by someone who finds nothing there that changes their love for you.
And I felt known, and I felt accepted, in the same breath. And those two things together produced in me a peace that I can only tell you was the most real thing I had ever felt. More real than the walls of the room I would wake up in. More real than the work problems I had been thinking about the night before.
I woke up and sat in the dark for a long time. Maryam was asleep beside me. I did not wake her. I just sat there with whatever that had been, turning it over, and knowing that something had fundamentally shifted, even if I could not have told you exactly what or how.
I was not a Christian yet, in any formal or confessional sense. But the door had opened, and I knew I was going to walk through it.
In the months that followed, I read everything I could access. I finished the New Testament. I moved into the Old Testament, through passages I could reach. I read whatever theological or explanatory material I could find through careful means. Some of it online, through systems that people in Iran used to access restricted content. Some of it through physical materials that passed through the informal network of people who were curious about or connected to faith.
I prayed differently. Not in Arabic. Not in the formal postures I had been taught. But in Persian. In my own words. In the way you speak to a person who is actually there and who you are beginning to know.
And I was being answered. Not always in dramatic ways. Sometimes in the quality of a particular morning. Sometimes in a sudden clarity about something I had been confused about. Sometimes in a physical warmth in prayer that I could not explain but that I had also learned to stop trying to explain away.
God was present. That was the simple fact of it. The God I had been reaching toward through years of formal religion and intellectual searching was present. And He was not cold or distant or conditional. He was close and warm and deeply personal.
And discovering that after years of the other thing—the empty ritual, the ceiling prayers—was like a man dying of thirst finding water.
“I need to find other believers.” That was the thought that settled in me after some months of this private, solitary journey of faith. I could not do this alone indefinitely, and I knew it. The scripture I was reading was not the scripture of isolated individualism. It was relentlessly communal. It spoke of a body, a fellowship, people who needed each other.
But finding other Christians in Iran is not a straightforward thing. It requires time, caution, and the slow building of trust that only comes through careful relationship.
It was through a friend who had a friend, through a chain of indirect connections, that I eventually made contact. The introduction was indirect and deniable at every link in the chain. And after several conversations and a gradual establishment of trust, I was eventually brought to a gathering.
There were nine of us the first time I attended. We met in a small apartment, sitting on the floor and on the edges of the furniture, close together because the room was not large. Everyone had brought something—food, a small contribution of some kind.
There were people from across the range of Tehran’s middle class: a doctor, two university students, a woman who worked in government administration, a retired teacher, a man who ran a small printing business. All converts. All from Muslim backgrounds. All people who had, through different paths and different encounters, found their way to the same place I was finding my way to.
They read scripture together. They prayed together in Persian, in voices that stayed low, not from lack of conviction, but from the awareness of what surrounded them. They sang softly, carefully. But they sang.
And there was something in that room, among those nine people in that small apartment with the curtains drawn, that was more alive than anything I had experienced in any mosque I had attended in 29 years of practicing Islam.
The presence of God was palpable. I know that sounds like the kind of thing people say at Christian events without always meaning it specifically. I mean it specifically. There was something in that room that was not explicable by the human ingredients present. And everyone there knew it, and none of them had to say so for everyone to know it.
I wept. I did not plan to. I am not a man who cries easily, and I never have been. But sitting in that room for the first time, surrounded by these people who had paid real prices for the thing I was only beginning to step into, I wept with relief. Mostly the relief of a man who has been alone with something enormous and has finally found people who understand it.
Over the following months, I became a regular part of this community. I formally gave my life to Christ in that group—not with any ceremony or elaborate ritual. I simply, with a prayer said aloud in the presence of those people, that I have never tried to repeat verbatim because I do not think the specific words were the point. The point was the intention, the surrender, the full and final stepping through the door that had been standing open since the dream.
Now I need to tell you about telling Maryam, because this was not a small thing, and I will not pretend it was.
I told her gradually, not in one conversation but over several weeks, peeling back layers as I gauged her responses, watching her face for the fear I knew was likely and for the openness I hoped was also there. I told her first about the Bible I had been reading, then about the dream, then about the group. And she listened to all of it in the quiet, attentive way that is very characteristic of who Maryam is. She does not react quickly. She processes. She thinks. And then she speaks from that place of having thought carefully.
Her first honest response was fear.
I want to be clear that this was a completely reasonable response. What I was telling her was that her husband had been secretly reading a banned religious text, attending illegal religious gatherings, and was in the process of converting from Islam to Christianity—a conversion that in Iran carries the legal designation of apostasy and can carry a death sentence.
The fear was not weakness. The fear was wisdom. She understood the stakes completely, and she was frightened for our family.
But Maryam is also a woman who does not dismiss things she cannot explain. And she could not dismiss what she was seeing in me. The change in me was real, and it was visible. I was calmer. I was kinder. There was something in me that had settled—that restlessness that she had known about since before we were married, that she had lived alongside for years without being able to touch. It was quieter.
And she noticed.
She began her own inquiry. She started reading carefully, privately, and with the same caution I had used. She prayed in her own way, and she told me later that she had said to God in that prayer, “If this is real, show me. If Jesus is who Elias says He is, show me.” It was an honest, unadorned prayer from a woman who was not going to be swept along by her husband’s experience without her own.
It took almost a year.
And then, one evening in the kitchen of our apartment, she told me that something had changed in her. That in prayer she had encountered something she could not explain and could not dismiss. That she believed. She did not use a lot of words to describe it. That is also characteristic of Maryam: the compression of deep things into few words. But her face told me everything the words did not say.
And from that night, we were walking this together.
I want to say something about what it means to hold a faith in secret in Iran, because I think people outside that reality sometimes romanticize it without understanding what it actually costs in daily life.
The double life is exhausting in a way that is not dramatic or acute, but chronic and grinding. Every day you make small calculations: what to say to the neighbors, how to explain why you are not at Friday prayers, what to tell your family when they ask questions. And the children had to be taught from a young age, before they could fully understand why, that there were things you did not say outside the house, that some of what we did and believed was private. That is a burden to place on a child, and I have never been entirely at peace with the necessity of it.
And yet, within all of that—within the secrecy and the caution and the daily weight of the double life—there was something extraordinary happening in us and among the people we were connected to.
People were being transformed. Not in the abstract, programmatic sense of a religious program producing behavioral change, but in the real, particular, individual sense of actual human lives being turned around. A man who had been crippled by shame for years, finding freedom in the experience of grace. A marriage being restored when both partners began to pray together. A young person who had been on the edge of something very dark, finding a reason to stay.
These were not statistics. These were people I knew. And watching these transformations happen was fuel for everything.
By 2010, I was leading a small network of house groups across Tehran. I want to be honest that the growth of this responsibility was not something I sought. It happened because people needed leadership, and I had, through the years of study and the depth of my own encounter with God, developed the capacity to provide it. I was teaching, counseling, baptizing. I was a pastor—not by any formal denominational process, there was no institution here to confer the title, but by the actual, functioning definition of the word.
The network numbered perhaps 60 to 70 people at its peak. Not large by any comparison with a conventional church. But each person in that number represented a story of real transformation, real cost, real courage. I knew all of them. I knew their families, their circumstances, their specific spiritual struggles. That knowledge—that pastoral intimacy—was one of the greatest privileges of my life. And also, when what came next came, one of the greatest sources of grief.
I knew by 2011 that I was being watched. It was not a single thing, but an accumulation of small signals that a person living in a surveillance society learns to read. I became more cautious. I talked to Maryam about it, and we prayed together about it seriously. But there were practical conversations about what she would do if I was arrested, who she would contact, where she would go with the children. These were not panicked conversations. They were the deliberate, responsible conversations of people who understood their situation.
And there was something else happening in those months before the arrest: something that I can only describe as a preparation. Not a preparation I chose or manufactured. A preparation that was being worked in me. A deepening of my prayer life that was qualitatively different from what had come before. A settling in me about the possibility of suffering that did not come from bravado or spiritual performance, but from something that felt like grace being deposited—like God filling a tank before a long journey.
I did not understand it fully at the time. In retrospect, I understand it completely.
The night I knew I was going to be arrested, it happened before it happened. I was sitting alone in my study after the children had gone to bed. Maryam was reading in the other room. And I had a very clear, very quiet sense—not a voice, not a vision, just a settled conviction—that whatever was coming, I was going to be okay. Not “okay” in the sense of comfortable or safe. “Okay” in the sense of held, sustained, not abandoned.
I sat with that sense for a long time. I held it carefully, the way you hold something fragile. And then I went to bed.
Two nights later, on a cold night in January 2012, the knock came.
It was a Thursday night. I know it was Thursday because of the significance of that detail in Iranian life. Thursday evening is the beginning of the weekend in Iran. A time when families are home, when things are relaxed, when the pace of the week eases. There was nothing unusual about that evening. The children were asleep. Maryam was in the kitchen. I was in my study looking over some notes I had been preparing. The apartment was quiet in the particular way it gets quiet when everyone you love is safe inside it and the world outside is holding its noise.
The knock came at around 10 at night. It was not a polite knock. It was the kind of knock that does not distinguish itself from a demand. Loud, flat, immediate.
And I knew, in that fraction of a second between hearing the sound and standing up from my chair, I knew—not with fear exactly, with a kind of solemn recognition. The thing I had been preparing for had arrived.
There were four men at the door. Plain clothes. No uniforms. This is deliberate. The intelligence agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence almost never appear in the recognizable dress of police or military, because the ambiguity is functional. You do not know exactly who these men are, what authority they carry, what is about to happen.
They identified themselves. They showed a document that I was not given time to read carefully. They told me I needed to come with them.
They were professional and controlled. There was no unnecessary drama in how they moved. They had done this many times before.
They came into the apartment. They did not wait to be invited.
Maryam came out of the kitchen when she heard the voices, and I watched her see what was happening. I want to tell you what I saw in her face in that moment, because I have carried that image with me through everything that followed, and it is central to who she is and what she is.
There was fear. I will not lie and say there was not, because she is a human being, and fear was the only rational response. But there was also something else underneath the fear and not destroyed by it. A steadiness. A refusal to collapse.
She looked at me, and I looked at her. And in that exchange, which lasted only a few seconds because the men were moving through the apartment, everything that needed to be said between us was said without a single word.
*I love you. I am afraid for you. I am going to be okay. Take care of them. I know. I will.*
She held herself together in a way that, even now when I think about it, fills me with a grief and an admiration that are difficult to separate from each other. She did not scream. She did not beg them. She stood in her own kitchen with the dignity of a woman who understood exactly what was happening and who had decided in that instant that she was not going to give these men the satisfaction of seeing her fall apart.
They took my phone. They went through the apartment looking for materials: books, notes, anything that could be used. They found things—portions of scripture I had written out, notes from teachings I had prepared. They took what they found into bags.
I was allowed to pack a small bag of personal items. I was not allowed to wake the children to say goodbye. Dara was 8 years old. Shireen was five. They were asleep in their room, and I was not allowed to walk in there and hold them one last time before everything changed.
I have thought about that specific denial many times over the years. The cruelty of small things.
I walked out of my home and into a waiting car.
We drove to Evin Prison in silence.
Evin sits in the north of Tehran, tucked against the foothills in a way that makes it feel geographically separate from the city, even though it is not far. If you did not know what it was, you might not look twice at the walls and the gates. But every Iranian knows what it is. It has been the site of some of the darkest chapters of Iranian history—under the Shah and then under the Islamic Republic—different political authorities using the same location for the same essential purpose, which is the confinement and the breaking of people they find inconvenient. The name “Evin” carries a specific weight in Iranian consciousness that no other location in the country quite matches.
When you first arrive at Evin, particularly in the intelligence ward, which is often called Ward 209, the first thing they do is take from you the things that keep you oriented. Your clothes are replaced. Your possessions are cataloged and removed. You are put in a temporary cell. And then the most important thing happens: you lose time.
There is no window. The lights do not change with the outside world. You do not know if it is day or night, what hour it is, how long you have been in that room. This disorientation is deliberate, and it is effective. The human mind depends on temporal reference points in ways we take completely for granted until those reference points are removed. Without them, anxiety rises and judgment begins to blur.
I was held in initial processing conditions for what I later estimated was about three days, though I could not have told you that at the time.
The first interrogation came when I was already confused about time and had not slept properly and had eaten very little. This too is deliberate timing.
The interrogations were conducted in a small room with a table between me and the interrogators. Sometimes one man, sometimes two. There was a primary interrogator—I will call him the interrogator who led most of my sessions, particularly in the early months. He was not the kind of man you might imagine if you are drawing on film or television depictions of this kind of figure. He was not loud or physically threatening. He was measured, educated, articulate. He spoke in a careful, almost academic way about complex subjects. In a different context—in a university perhaps—he might have been someone whose lectures you found interesting.
But he was very good at what he did. And what he did was not primarily information extraction. The questions about my network, about names and locations and funding sources—those came, and I refused to answer them consistently. And there were consequences for those refusals.
But the deeper project of the interrogations was not information. It was dismantlement. He was trying to take apart the framework of my faith and my sense of self in a way that would leave me with nothing to stand on.
He would spend an entire session examining the logic of my conversion—not in a philosophical debate format, but in a way designed to introduce doubt. Had I been manipulated by foreign interests? Had the people who brought me into the Christian community used me? Was I certain that what I felt in prayer was not simply a psychological phenomenon produced by isolation and group suggestion? Was I willing to destroy my family, my children’s future, my wife’s life, for something that might ultimately be nothing more than self-deception?
These questions were not random. They were targeted at the places where my inner life was most vulnerable. A man can resist a question that has nothing to do with him. It is much harder to resist a question that reaches into the real complexity of your actual experience. Because the truth is that I had asked some of those questions myself—not as evidence of doubt, but as part of honest faith. And he was using my honesty against me.
The physical conditions during this period were an instrument as much as the interrogations were. The cell was small. The light was constant. There was never darkness, never the normal signal to the body that rest was available. The temperature was kept low. The food was minimal in both quantity and quality.
I was not beaten in those early weeks, though I knew that others elsewhere in the prison were subjected to physical violence. I heard things through the walls that I will not describe in detail, because the people those sounds belong to deserve more than to have their suffering described in a testimony that is primarily about my own experience.
But the cumulative effect of constant light and cold and minimal food and irregular, unpredictable sleep and the relentless pressure of the interrogations—the effect of all of that together is something that I want people to understand is a form of torture. It does not leave visible marks. It leaves something else.
There came a point—approximately 6 weeks into my detention, I believe—where I reached a place of interior collapse that I have not fully spoken about publicly before.
I was in my cell alone, late in what I assumed was night based on some internal sense that was no longer reliable. And I experienced something that I can only describe as a complete internal darkness. Not just fear. Not just exhaustion. Something that felt like the total absence of God. Like every experience I had ever had in prayer, every encounter, every moment of that warmth and presence that had sustained my faith for years—all of it had been some kind of extended self-deception. And now, stripped of everything external, the truth was becoming visible. There was nothing there. There was a cell, and a wall, and a light that never went out, and a man who was completely alone.
I lay on the floor of that cell. I do not know for how long. And I prayed—though calling it prayer almost sounds too dignified for what it was. It was more like a desperate reaching in a direction where I was no longer sure anything existed to be reached.
I said—and I do not remember the exact words and would not pretend to—something that amounted to: “If you are there, I need you to be real right now. Not later. Now. Because I have nothing left.”
What happened next I will try to describe as accurately as I can and without embellishment, because embellishment would dishonor it.
The darkness did not lift dramatically. There was no sudden vision, no audible voice, no light show.
But into the room where I was lying on that floor, there came something that I can only call a presence. Quiet. Unmistakable. And entirely external to me. Meaning, I know the difference between something I generated from my own psychological resources and something that arrived from outside them. And this was the second thing.
This presence settled into that room the way warmth settles into a cold space when a heat source is brought into it. And with it came a verse that I had memorized, but that arrived in that moment not as a recollection but as a communication. From Isaiah 43: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”
I am not going to try to make that moment sound more dramatic than it was. I am going to tell you that after that night, something in me was settled that was never fully unsettled again during those 8 years.
The particular fear—the fear of abandonment, the fear that my faith had been nothing and that I was alone in the universe—lost its power over me. Not all fear disappeared. The fear for Maryam and the children never left. The physical and psychological difficulty of what I was enduring did not change. But the deepest terror, the existential terror, was addressed in that cold cell on that floor by something that was not me.
My trial took place after several months of pre-trial detention. I want to describe the charges clearly, because I think it is important for people outside Iran to understand exactly what the Iranian state criminalizes.
I was charged with apostasy—leaving Islam. I was charged with leading an illegal church—which in Iran means any gathering of Christians that is not part of the small number of officially recognized, pre-revolution historic churches, and that includes converts from Islam. I was charged with evangelizing Muslims—which means sharing my faith with people who were not Christians. And I was charged with acting against national security through what was described as connection with foreign anti-revolutionary organizations—a charge that is applied to almost every house church leader, because the state categorizes the entire network of international Christian organizations that support Iranian believers as hostile foreign actors.
These charges together, in Iran’s legal framework, can carry a death sentence.
My lawyer—who had been assigned rather than chosen, and who was navigating a system with very little room for genuine defense—told me plainly that the apostasy charge alone could result in execution. He urged me, in the careful language of a man who could not be too direct, to consider the benefit of demonstrating cooperation with the court.
I understood what he was saying. And I told him, as clearly and respectfully as I could, that I was not going to recant my faith, that I was not going to provide information about other believers, that I would speak honestly in court about who I was and what I believed.
He absorbed this information with the expression of a man who was not surprised, but who had been obligated to try.
The court session itself was not long. In Iran’s system for cases of this nature, the proceeding does not resemble what most people in democratic countries understand as a trial. The judge in my case was also a cleric. The outcome, based on what had been gathered during my detention, was not genuinely open.
I was allowed to make a statement. I used that opportunity to say clearly that I believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, that I had come to this faith through my own genuine conviction and not through foreign manipulation, that I had led a community of believers whose only activity was worship and the study of scripture, and that I did not consider this a crime against my country or my people.
I said that I loved Iran. I said that the God I served was not the enemy of Iran. I said that I was prepared to accept whatever judgment the court gave, but that I could not deny what I had encountered and what I believed.
The sentence was life imprisonment.
The words landed in my chest like something physical. Not because I had not known they were coming. I had. But knowing and hearing are different. Life imprisonment. I was 35 years old. I had a wife and two children. And a man in a court in Tehran had just told me that I would die inside Evin Prison.
I looked at my lawyer. He looked down at the table. I looked at the judge, who was already moving on. I looked at the wall. And I felt, under the weight of those words, something that I want to be honest about, because I think dishonesty here would damage the authenticity of everything else I have told you.
I felt, for a period of days after that sentencing, a grief so profound that it was almost physical. Not for myself. I had made my peace with whatever came for me. The grief was for Maryam, for Dara and Shireen, for the life they were going to have to live without me in it. For Dara’s growing up. For Shireen’s childhood. For all the ordinary things: birthday meals, homework, the first day of a new school year, the conversations you have with your children late at night when they cannot sleep and they come to find you. All of that now taken from them.
And I had chosen this—in the sense that I had the option to prevent it and had refused to take that option. That weight was real.
But I had also chosen it in the deeper sense that I could not have done otherwise and remained who I am. And in that deeper sense, it was not a choice at all. It was simply the consequence of being, without apology or reservation, exactly who God had made me.
I was taken from the courtroom back into the body of the prison, and the next chapter of my life began.
There is something that happens to time in a long imprisonment. In the first year, you are still anchored to the outside world by memory and by hope. You count weeks. You remember what you would normally be doing on a specific day. You celebrate your children’s birthdays inside your own head, alone in a cell, picturing what their face might look like blowing out candles you are not there to see. The first year is, in many ways, the hardest, because you are carrying the full weight of the life you are missing, and you have not yet found a way to set that weight down.