I Died in Tehran and Jesus Showed Me What Is Coming to Iran
I Died in Tehran and Jesus Showed Me What Is Coming to Iran
I died on an operating table in Tehran and the mullahs who run my life could not follow me where I went.
Jesus met me in that place and showed me five things about this world that I was not supposed to survive to tell.
What he showed me kept me awake for months after I came back.
I tried to stay silent.
I could not.
What you are about to hear will shake everything you think you know about death, about Iran, and about who God actually is.
Stay with me until the end because the fifth thing Jesus showed me is the one that changes everything.
My name is Soraya Tehrani and I am from Tehran, Iran.
I now live in Toronto, Canada.
There is a specific kind of woman the Islamic Republic of Iran works very hard to produce.
She is covered.
She is quiet in public and loud in agreement with the right things.
She repeats the correct slogans.
She raises her children inside the correct boundaries.
She does not ask questions that have no approved answers.
She performs her faith with precision and she measures her worth by how well she performs it.
She is useful to the system.
She is grateful to the system.
She believes the system is the same thing as God.
I was that woman for most of my adult life.
My name is Soraya Tehrani.
I grew up in the Tajrish neighborhood in the northern part of Tehran, which sits at the foot of the Alborz Mountains.
In summer, you could see the mountains clearly from the window of my childhood bedroom.
White peaks above the brown and gray of the city.
In winter, the smog settled over everything and the mountains disappeared entirely and you had to remember on faith that they were still there.
That detail has stayed with me.
I did not understand why until much later.
My father, Hossein Tehrani, was a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the University of Tehran.
He was a serious man with serious eyebrows and a mind that could hold enormous amounts of religious law and political theory simultaneously.
He had written three books.
He had trained dozens of students who went on to positions in the judiciary and the religious establishment.
He was respected the way men are respected in Iran when they have devoted their entire intelligence to confirming what the state already believes.
My mother, Maryam, was a teacher.
Elementary school, young children, the grades where you teach them the alphabet and their first prayers at the same time.
She was warmer than my father but no less certain.
Certainty was the air my family breathed.
Certainty about Islam.
What certainty about the revolution.
Certainty about Iran’s place in God’s plan for humanity.
I was the middle child of three.
My older brother, Siavash, studied law.
My younger sister, Golnaz, was the artist of the family, always drawing, always coloring, always seeing the world in shapes and colors that the rest of us walked past without noticing.
I was the one most like my father.
Precise, disciplined, argumentative in a focused way that teachers called gifted and classmates occasionally found exhausting.
I studied theology at the University of Tehran following my father’s path.
I was good at it.
I had a gift for the kind of thinking that religious law requires.
Careful, systematic, attentive to precedent and detail.
I graduated near the top of my class.
I married at 23, a man named Farshad who worked in the Ministry of Culture, which in Iran meant he worked in the Ministry of deciding what the public was and was not allowed to see, hear, and read.
We had two daughters, Roya and Nasrin.
I raised them the way I had been raised.
Prayers at the correct times, the correct clothing, the correct beliefs presented with the correct confidence.
I was proud of how I raised them.
I believed I was giving them the best possible foundation for a good life and a favorable judgment from Allah.
I was 38 years old and I had never once seriously questioned a single thing I believed.
Then the bleeding started.
It began as something small that I ignored because small things are easy to ignore when your life is very full and very structured and stopping to pay attention to your body feels like a disruption you cannot afford.
A heaviness, that a fatigue that did not respond to sleep, irregular cycles that I attributed to stress and did not mention to Farshad or to my mother because in our household the body’s problems were handled quietly and with minimum disruption.
Three months of ignoring it before I finally went to see a doctor.
The doctor referred me to a specialist.
The specialist ordered tests.
The tests ordered more tests.
The more tests ordered the conversation I was not prepared to have.
The word was uterine.
The stage was three.
The timeline was not as forgiving as I had been hoping.
I sat in the specialist’s office on a Thursday afternoon listening to her explain what she was explaining and I felt the world I had built with such precision begin to tilt.
Not collapse, just tilt has the way a table tilts when one leg is shorter than the others and you have just noticed it for the first time.
I am a religious woman.
My first response to the diagnosis was to pray.
My second response was to pray more.
My third response was to go to a respected mullah in our neighborhood and ask him to pray over me and advise me.
He told me that illness was a test from Allah.
He told me to be patient.
He told me that suffering purified the soul and that my reward in paradise would be proportional to my endurance on earth.
I left his home feeling the tilt deepen.
I underwent surgery, then chemotherapy, then more surgery.
Iranian hospitals at that level are competent, particularly in Tehran, and my husband’s position gave us access to doctors who were better than average.
My mother came and stayed with us for 3 months during the worst of the treatment.
She cooked and prayed and kept the girls’ routines as normal as possible.
My father came on weekends and sat beside my bed and recited the Quran in his careful professor’s voice while I lay under three blankets feeling my body fight a war I had not declared.
I prayed constantly, not with my father’s precision, with desperation.
I prayed to Allah to heal me.
I prayed to Allah to spare me for my daughters who needed their mother.
I prayed to Allah to tell me why.
Why me?
Why now?
Why at this moment when my daughters were still young and my life still had so much in it that felt unfinished.
Allah did not answer me, not in any way I could recognize.
There was silence from that direction.
The same quality of silence I had my entire life accepted as normal and sufficient.
But lying in a hospital bed with a body that was fighting cancer, normal and sufficient suddenly felt like very thin rations.
I noticed something during those months of treatment that I did not want to notice.
When I was at my lowest, when the nausea was worst and the pain was real and the fear of not surviving was most present, the prayers that actually reached some part of me were not the formal Arabic prayers I had memorized.
They were not the structured recitations of Quranic verses.
They were the desperate unscripted conversations I had with whatever God was listening at 2:00 in the morning when Farshad was asleep and the house was dark and I was staring at the ceiling genuinely afraid of dying.
Those prayers felt different, not answered, you know, but different.
As if they were traveling towards something real rather than dissolving into the ceiling above me.
I tucked that observation away and did not examine it directly.
Not yet.
The first round of treatment worked partially.
The cancer retreated enough that my doctors were cautiously optimistic.
I went back to something resembling my normal life.
I taught a class at a women’s Islamic studies center near our home in Tehran.
I took my daughters to school.
I cooked dinner.
I attended mosque.
I performed all the correct things with all the correct precision.
But something had shifted underneath all of it.
The tilt in the table was still there.
I could feel it every time I pressed my foot against the floor and the floor pressed back unevenly.
The cancer came back 14 months later.
This time it had moved.
My doctor sat across from me in her office and used the word aggressive and I heard it land in my chest like a stone dropped into water.
I watched the rings spread outward from where it landed.
My daughters’ faces, Farshad’s face, my mother’s face, all the faces of the people for whom I had to not die, arranged in a circle around the stone, rippling.
The second surgery was more serious than the first.
There were complications.
There was a moment, my surgeon told me afterward, when my heart stopped on the operating table.
There was a moment when the monitors went flat and the room became very focused and very efficient in that way that operating rooms become when the thing they are designed to prevent is actively happening.
There was a moment when I was clinically dead and in that moment everything I thought I knew about God, about [gasps] death, about the next world, and about what is coming for this one, was taken apart and rebuilt from the foundation up.
I am going to describe what happened as plainly and as honestly as I can.
I know there are people who will say this was a hallucination caused by the brain’s chemical response to trauma.
I know there are people in the Islamic world who will say this was a deception from Shaitan designed to mislead believers.
I know there are people in both camps who have made up their minds before reading a single word of what I am about to say.
I am not writing for those people.
I am writing for the people who are where I was before this happened.
The people who are performing their faith with precision and feeling nothing genuine underneath it.
The people who are afraid of dying and not sure what is actually on the other side of it.
The people who pray every day to a God who is silent and have started wondering in the dark whether the silence means something they are not ready to face.
For those people, I will be as honest as I know how to be.
When my heart stopped on that operating table, I did not experience darkness.
I did not experience nothing.
I experienced a transition.
It was less like going from consciousness to unconsciousness and more like stepping from one room into another.
The surgical room with its lights and its machinery and the urgency of the people in it was simply no longer where I was.
Where I was instead was difficult to describe in the language of physical space because physical space was not the organizing principle of where I was.
There was light.
Not the light of the sun or of artificial lights.
A light that was the medium of the place the way air is the medium of our world.
Everything existed inside it rather than being illuminated by it.
I was aware of myself.
I was aware of being Soraya.
But I was aware of being Soraya without the body’s constant noise of sensation and need and limitation.
I was aware of my entire life simultaneously in a way that is impossible in physical experience where you can only hold one moment at a time.
All of it was present at once.
Every prayer I had ever prayed, every meal I had cooked for my daughters, every argument with Farshad, every student I had taught, every private fear I had never spoken out loud, every moment of genuine connection, and every moment of hollow performance.
It was all there and it was all known and none of it was hidden.
And then there was a presence.
I have tried many times to find the right language for this.
The presence was not a force or an energy or a concept.
It was a person.
Unmistakably a person with a specific weight of personality and a specific quality of attention that was directed at me with a completeness that I can only describe as total.
I have never in my physical life experienced being known that completely by another person.
Farshad does not know me that completely.
My mother does not know me that completely.
The presence knew me the way I knew myself in that moment, which was completely and simultaneously and without the distortion of time.
He spoke to me in Farsi, my language, the language of my childhood and my prayers and my dreams and my arguments and my love.
He spoke to me in the language I think in.
He said, “Soraya, you are not finished.”
I knew who he was.
I want to be very precise about this.
I did not know it the way you know a fact you have been taught.
I knew it the way you know the face of your own mother in a crowd.
Immediate, bone-deep recognition that required no argument.
The presence standing before me in that place of light was Jesus.
Not the prophet of the Quran, not the theological category I had been trained to file him in.
The living person, the actual being, the one the New Testament calls the word of God made flesh, the one I had spent 38 years categorizing as less than what he was.
He was not angry about that.
That is one of the things I want to say clearly.
There was no anger in his presence, no accusation, no presentation of my theological errors as evidence against me.
There was the same overwhelming quality that I have heard other people describe and dismissed and now understand from the inside, love.
Not the word, the actual thing, the reality that the word is pointing at, the thing that words are always falling short of no matter which language you use.
He was made of it the way the sun is made of light.
It was not something he produced or performed or directed.
It was what he was.
It poured from him the way heat pours from a fire and it filled every empty space inside me that I had spent 38 years not admitting was empty.
He said, “You have been worshiping at a distance.
I did not make you for distance.
I made you for this.”
And then he showed me five things.
I have prayed about whether to share these publicly.
That I spent months after I came back from that place wrestling with the question of whether what I saw was meant only for me or whether it was meant to be spoken.
Every time I prayed about it, the same answer came back.
Every time.
Speak.
So, I will speak.
The first thing.
The first thing Jesus showed me was a picture of Iran.
Not a map, a living image.
Tehran from above but seen with the clarity of that other place.
Seen without the smog, without the gray, with every detail visible all the way down to the individual faces in the streets.
And moving through those streets, through every neighborhood, through Tajrish and Narmak and Shahrake Gharb and the southern districts and the university campuses and the bazaars and the apartment blocks and the hospitals was light.
The same quality of light that filled the place where I was standing.
But moving through Iran like water moving through dry ground after rain, soaking in, going deep.
He said, “This is coming.
The great harvest of Iran is not in the future.
It has already begun.
What you see now are the first drops.
What is coming is a flood.”
He showed me young people, specifically young people, in numbers I could not count, turning toward him in private, in bedrooms and dormitories and in the back seats of cars and on rooftops at night.
Not in public, not yet, but turning.
A generation that the Islamic Republic built to be its future that was instead becoming something the Islamic Republic had no category for.
He said, “The children of the revolution are coming home to me and no wall built by men will stop it.”
The second thing.
The second thing he showed me was a woman.
I did not recognize her face.
She was Iranian, middle-aged, wearing a white headscarf instead of black.
She was standing in front of a large crowd, not in Iran, somewhere else, somewhere I did not immediately recognize.
She was speaking.
The crowd was enormous and the people in it were weeping and raising their hands and the atmosphere of the place was electric with something I recognized from where I was standing because it was made of the same substance, his presence, his actual presence filling a physical place the way it filled that light-soaked other place.
Jesus said to me, “She does not know yet what she will do, but I have prepared her from before she was born.”
I did not know what that meant.
I wrote it down exactly as I experienced it when I came back.
I have watched for that woman ever since.
I have not seen her yet, but I am watching.
God, the third thing.
The third thing was not a vision.
It was a direct communication.
Knowledge placed inside me the way a file is placed inside a cabinet, suddenly present and accessible where it had not been before.
The knowledge was this.
There is coming a moment of severe pressure on the Iranian government.
Not from outside, from within.
A pressure that will come from the accumulated weight of decades of broken promises and restricted lives and the specific hunger that grows in people when they are told that God requires their suffering and they finally stop believing it.
The system will fracture.
Not all at once, in the way that old concrete fractures slowly and then suddenly.
He said, “What looks like the Tell the people of Iran not to be afraid of the fracture.
Yeah, I am in it.”
The fourth thing.
The fourth thing was personal.
It was about my daughters.
He showed me Roya and Nasrin.
Not as they were then, young girls with school uniforms and backpacks, as they would be.
I saw their faces as women and they were different from what I had been shaping them toward.
Different in a way that frightened me at first and then filled me with a joy so large I could not contain it because I understood what the difference was.
They were free.
Not politically free, free in the deeper way, free from the performance, free from the hollow precision, free from the distance.
They were women who had found what I had just found in that place of light, and it was written all over their faces with the same unmistakable clarity.
He said, “What you find today, your daughters will carry forward.
Do not be afraid to show them the truth.
Children are not afraid of light.
Adults teach them to be.”
I wept in that place of light.
Real tears in a place where I was not sure a physical body could cry.
But whatever I was in that place wept, and it was the most relieving weeping I have ever done.
Because it was not weeping from sadness.
It was weeping from the end of a distance that had lasted 38 years.
The fifth thing.
The fifth thing was the one I hesitated longest about sharing.
It is the one that is most specific and most verifiable, and therefore the one that makes me most vulnerable to being wrong or being dismissed or being called a liar.
But he told me to speak.
So I will speak.
The fifth thing was about the underground church in Iran.
The community of secret believers was the house churches that meet in apartments with drawn curtains and whispered voices and smuggled Bibles.
The community that the Islamic Republic has been hunting and arresting and pressuring for decades.
He showed me that community not as it is, but as it will be.
He showed me numbers that I cannot precisely communicate because numbers in that place were not like numbers in this one.
They were not quantities you counted.
They were qualities you experienced.
What I experienced was vastness.
A community so much larger than what currently exists that the comparison was like comparing a stream to an ocean.
He said, “What is hidden will not stay hidden.
What is small will not stay small.
I am building something in Iran that will outlast every government and every religious system that has tried to contain it.
The gates of hell will not prevail against it, not even the gates of heaven.”
Then he said, “The thing that I have carried as my specific instruction since that day.”
He said, “Go back.
Tell them what you saw.
Not as a theologian presenting an argument, as a witness.
You were here.
You saw.
Tell them.”
And then I heard from a distance that felt like it was coming from another world entirely.
The sound of machines and voices and urgency.
And the transition happened in the other direction.
From one room back into the room I had come from.
I came back into a body that hurt everywhere and a surgical team that was very relieved and a bright white ceiling that was nothing like the light I had been standing in, but was still the most beautiful ceiling I had ever seen because it meant I was alive to see it.
Get The first thing I said when I could speak was not a prayer in Arabic.
It was a sentence in plain Farsi.
I said, “He is real and his name is Jesus.”
The nurse standing next to my bed looked at me with an expression I could not fully read.
She squeezed my hand and said, “Rest now.”
She did not respond to what I said, but she did not let go of my hand immediately.
I spent eight days in the hospital recovering from the surgery and from the event that had happened during it.
My surgeon told me that I had been clinically without a pulse for approximately 4 minutes before they brought me back.
She said it with the clipped efficiency of a person reporting a medical fact.
She did not ask me what the 4 minutes had been like.
Farshad sat beside my bed every day.
He brought the girls on the second day.
I held both of them for a very long time, and I looked at their faces and I thought about what I had seen.
Their faces as women.
The freedom written across those future faces.
I held them and I thought, “I am going to have to do something very difficult, and I’m going to have to do it for them.”
I did not tell Farshad what had happened during the 4 minutes immediately.
I needed to understand it myself first.
I spent those eight days in the hospital the way I had spent almost no time in my adult life in genuine stillness.
Not performing stillness.
Not pretending to rest while my mind organized and planned and scheduled.
Actually still.
Actually listening.
Actually present in a way I had not been for years because my life had been so full of doing the correct things that I had no space left for simply being.
In that stillness, what what had happened to me settled into me the way sediment settles in water when you stop stirring it.
Jesus was real.
I had been in his presence.
I had been known by him completely.
I had been loved by him with a love that made every other experience of love I had ever had feel like a rough sketch compared to the finished painting.
And I had been given five things to carry back with me.
The theology I had spent my life building had a large crack in it.
Not because someone had argued me out of it.
Because I had stood in the presence of the reality it had been attempting to describe, and the description had been fundamentally wrong about the most important thing.
The distance.
Islam as I had practiced it maintained God at a careful distance.
He was great and we were small, and the correct response to the greatness was submission, which was the literal meaning of the word Islam.
And submission required precision and rule following and the careful management of your behavior to remain within boundaries that would keep you from provoking the greatness against you.
What I had experienced on that operating table was the precise opposite of distance.
He was closer to me in that 4 minutes than any human being had ever been.
He knew me more completely.
He loved me more specifically.
There was no distance.
There was nothing to manage.
There was no performance required or accepted.
There was just him and me and the overwhelming reality of being fully known and fully loved simultaneously.
I had built my entire theological career on a foundation of distance.
And the God I had just met had no use for distance at all.
I was released from the hospital on a Tuesday morning.
Half Farshad drove me home.
The girls had gone to school.
My mother was waiting at the apartment having come back to help during my recovery.
She had made soup.
The apartment smelled like cardamom and rice.
I sat down at the kitchen table and I looked at my mother’s face.
The woman who had taught me my first prayers and my first slogan simultaneously.
And I said, “Mama, something happened to me during the surgery.”
She sat down across from me and listened.
I told her everything.
Not strategically.
Not managing her reaction or packaging the information for easier reception.
I told her the way you tell someone something when you have just come back from a place where you learned that truth without the performance is the only thing that matters.
She listened without interrupting.
Her soup cooled in the pot.
When I finished, guess she was quiet for a very long time.
Then she reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
She said, “I have had a dream of Jesus three times in the past 2 years.
I told no one.”
We sat together in that kitchen for 2 more hours.
I will not tell you that my mother converted that day because conversion is not an event.
It is a direction.
She began moving in the direction that day.
The rest of the journey was hers, and she is the one who should tell it.
Farshad’s response was different.
Farshad worked for a government ministry.
His livelihood, his position, his standing in a society where those things were dependent on religious and political conformity.
The thing his wife was telling him she had experienced was the single most dangerous kind of experience a person could have in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He heard me out.
He did not dismiss what I said, but he also did not embrace it.
He looked at me with an expression that was three things simultaneously.
Love for me.
Fear for our family.
And the specific careful blankness of a man who has learned to not let his face show what he is thinking inside a system that punishes wrong expressions.
He said, “Be careful, Soraya.
Not because I doubt you.
Because I know where we live.”
He was right.
I knew where we lived.
I began searching carefully and quietly.
Not online.
Not in Iran where online searching of certain topics had specific consequences.
I contacted a cousin who had moved to Canada 3 years earlier.
She had converted to Christianity 2 years after arriving in Toronto.
I had not spoken to her about it when I found out.
Now I called her and told her what had happened to me, and she wept on the phone.
Dick, she sent me a contact.
A woman in Tehran who ran a small women’s Bible study group in her apartment in the Elahieh district.
My cousin had known her years before leaving Iran.
She said the woman was trustworthy and experienced in the particular kind of discretion that underground faith in Tehran required.
I contacted the woman.
Her name was Mina.
She met me for tea in a public cafe first.
The way these initial meetings went where you could be seen together as nothing more than two women having a regular conversation in a regular place before deciding whether to trust each other with the irregular truth.
We talked for 3 hours.
I told her what had happened on the operating table.
She listened with the expression of someone hearing something she has been waiting to hear without knowing exactly what form it would arrive in.
When I finished, she was quiet.
Then she said, “I have been leading this group for 6 years.
In 6 years, I have had women come to faith through arguments and through longing and through loneliness and through their husbands’ cruelty and through their children’s suffering.
But you are the first woman I have met who came through dying.”
She said it as if it was the most natural sentence in the world.
She invited me to the group.
The group met on Wednesday evenings in Mina’s apartment in a building that had enough foot traffic that two or three women arriving separately over the course of 30 minutes did not attract attention.
The curtains were drawn.
Phones were left outside the door in a basket because even then >> [clears throat] >> phones could listen.
There were eight women, different ages, different backgrounds, different stories, a doctor, a retired teacher, a young woman who was a graduate student, two women who had been brought by their sisters, one woman who had simply wandered into the group 6 months earlier after reading a verse on a piece of paper that someone had left in her building’s elevator.
I sat in that circle of women in Mina’s apartment and for the first time since waking up from surgery, I felt the same quality that I had felt in that other place, his presence, quiet, unperformative, real, in the room with us the way he had been in that place of light.
Not as intense, not as overwhelming, but recognizably the same.
I wept again.
The women passed tissues around the circle.
Several of them wept with me.
Mina handed me a Farsi New Testament.
Um I held it in my hands and I thought about the fact that this small book was technically an illegal object in the country where I was sitting and the thought seemed almost too absurd to fully process.
The word of God, illegal, in a country whose government had organized itself around being God’s government on Earth.
I read the entire New Testament in the 3 weeks that followed, reading in pieces during times when I was alone in the apartment, keeping the book hidden in the same way I imagined every believer in Iran hid their most important things inside something ordinary, a cooking textbook, a stack of prayer booklets, somewhere unremarkable.
What I found in the New Testament confirmed and deepened and gave language to what I had experienced on the operating table.
The Jesus of the four Gospels was the same person I had met in that place of light, not a simplified version, not a less intense version, the same person, the same quality of knowing, the same complete, unearned, unperformative love, the same specific attention to the individual person in front of him regardless of their status or their religious credentials or their history of correct behavior.
He was consistently most present and most tender with the people who had the most wrong with them.
The woman who had been married five times, the tax collector despised by his own community, the dying man on a cross next to him who had lived badly and had exactly enough time left to ask one question honestly.
He turned toward all of them with the same completeness he had turned toward me in that place of light.
A theology professor’s daughter, a woman who had spent 38 years performing Islam with precision and feeling nothing underneath it, a woman who had been losing a fight with cancer and had died on a table for 4 minutes and come back carrying five things she had been told to speak.
He turned toward me with the same completeness.
I could not be a different woman after that.
I tried briefly.
The trying lasted about 3 weeks during which I continued attending mosque and continuing the Friday prayers and performing the external life of the woman the Islamic Republic had built while knowing with every cell of my body that I was no longer that woman.
The performance had always been hollow.
Now it was hollow and I knew exactly what it was hollow of.
It trying to fill the shape of something with nothing in it was a different kind of emptiness than not knowing the shape could be full.
I stopped pretending.
I told Farshad everything, not just the experience on the table, what it had led to, the women’s group, the Farsi New Testament hidden in the cooking books, the direction I was moving in and the fact that I could not move in any other direction and remain honest.
I told him quietly sitting on the edge of our bed after the girls were asleep with the TV on in the living room loud enough to cover our voices from the walls.
He sat very still for a long time.
Then he said, “How long do we have before this becomes visible?”
It was a practical question from a practical man who loved me.
It was also the right question.
In Iran, faith that stays completely private can survive indefinitely.
Uh the faith that begins to change how you live when and what you say and how you raise your children becomes visible.
Visible faith in Jesus in Iran had a trajectory that did not end in anything my husband wanted for our daughters.
We began making plans.
Leaving Iran is not a simple act.
It is not like leaving a country where leaving is a bureaucratic inconvenience.
It is an amputation.
It is cutting yourself away from the land where your parents’ parents are buried, from the mountain you could see from your childhood window, from the language that lives in your body at a depth that no second language ever fully reaches, from the specific quality of light in the late afternoon over Tehran that does not exist anywhere else on Earth.
I loved Iran.
I want to say that plainly, not the government, not the system, Iran.
Oh, the language and the poetry and the mountains and the food and the specific dark humor of people who have learned to find absurdity in suffering because the alternative is despair, the way Iranians gather around a table, the way they argue with warmth, the way they grieve thoroughly and communally and without pretending that grief is not what it is.
I loved all of it.
Leaving it was not a simple loss.
It was the kind of loss that never fully stops aching.
But the girls were 14 and 11 and the direction I was moving was not compatible with their safety in the country we were in.
And Jesus had shown me their faces free and full of light and had told me not to be afraid of showing them the truth.
Children are not afraid of light.
Adults teach them to be.
I did not want to be the one who taught my daughters to be afraid of light.
The exit took 8 months to arrange through legal channels primarily, which took longer but created less visible risk.
Farshad’s ministry work had involved some international conferences and that provided legitimate reason for travel paperwork without triggering the specific scrutiny that leaving permanently would have attracted.
We told almost no one we were going.
We told our families we were going for medical follow-up treatment for the cancer, which was partially true.
We told them we did not know how long it would take.
My mother knew the fuller truth.
She said goodbye at the apartment door the morning we left for the airport and held me longer than usual and said in my ear, “Tell me everything when you arrive.
I want to hear it all.”
We arrived in Toronto on a gray November morning, gray in a different way from Tehran gray, colder, more horizontal, the kind of gray that feels like the sky is thinking rather than the sky being blocked.
We stayed initially with my cousin, the one who had become a Christian after moving to Canada.
She had a house in a suburb north of the city and she gave us her basement and her complete practical attention for the first 3 months.
Her church had a Farsi-speaking congregation.
The first Sunday I walked through the door and sat in a pew and heard worship songs in my own language, in Farsi, played openly without drawn curtains or whispered voices or a basket of phones by the door.
I could not stop crying for the first 20 minutes of the service, not from sadness, from the specific relief of something that has been compressed for a very long time being allowed to expand to its natural size.
Roya sat next to me and watched my face with the careful attention of a 14-year-old trying to understand what was happening to her mother.
After the service, she asked me why I was crying.
I told her the truth.
I told her everything, not strategically managed, not age-appropriately edited, the truth offered to my daughter the way I had learned that truth should be offered without distance, without performance, with the full weight of what it cost and the full weight of what it gave.
She listened to the whole story.
Then she said, “Can I read the Bible?”
I gave her my Farsi New Testament that night, the same one Mina had given me in Tehran, still with the careful crease marks from where it had been hidden in the cooking books.
She read the Gospel of John in 2 days.
At dawn on the third morning, she came and found me in the kitchen and said, “Maman, I want to believe this, but I need to know if it is real.
Not if you experienced something real, if he is real.
I told her to ask him directly.
I told her to go to her room and ask Jesus if he was real and be willing to be answered in whatever way he chose.
She was in her room for 45 minutes.
When she came out, her face was the face I had seen in that place of light.
I recognized it immediately, not as a vision, but as its own reality standing in front of me in the kitchen of my cousin’s house in suburban Toronto.
The freedom.
The specific quality of freedom that comes not from the removal of external limits, but from the resolution of something that has been unresolved inside a person for as long as they have been a person.
At the moment, my 14-year-old daughter looked at me and said, “He answered me.”
I thought I had already cried every kind of tears possible in the previous year.
I was wrong.
Nasrin came to faith 4 months later in her own way and on her own schedule, which is exactly as it should be.
Farsha’s journey was longer and slower and more private, which is also exactly as it should be.
The direction was the same.
The timeline was his.
I began speaking publicly about what had happened to me on the operating table approximately 14 months after arriving in Toronto, carefully at first, then less carefully, then with the full clarity that comes when you have prayed 4 months about a thing and the same answer keeps coming back.
Speak.
Tell them.
Not as a theologian presenting an argument, as a witness.
I began with the Iranian Christian community in Toronto, then online, then in Farsi language Christian media that reached into the Middle East and into Iran itself through the same encrypted channels and VPNs that Iranian believers had always used to receive what the state wanted to prevent them from receiving.
The responses came the way they always come when something true reaches the people it is meant for, from unexpected directions, in unexpected quantities, from people who had been waiting for something to say the thing they needed to hear before they were willing to say it back.
I want to speak now directly to the people this testimony is for, to the women of Iran.
I was you.
Not the version of you that is resisting or protesting or already on the way out, the compliant version, the precise, careful, yet correct version that had made peace with performing something hollow because she did not know anything else existed.
I was 38 years old and I had never once felt genuinely loved by God.
I had felt judged by God, measured by God, required to perform for God, but loved.
The specific personal love that says, “I know everything about you, the whole of it, and I choose you anyway.”
I had never felt that inside Islam.
I felt it in 4 minutes on an operating table in Tehran, and I am telling you it is available to you right now in whatever room you are in, without a surgery, without dying first.
You do not need to earn your way to it.
It is already reaching for you.
His name is Jesus, and he is not what you were told he was.
To the men and women who are carrying religious performance as a weight rather than a life, who pray and fast and give and attend and observe and do everything correctly and still feel the hollow center where something real should be.
You are not broken.
You are not faithless.
You are hungry for something that the system you are inside cannot give you because the system was built on distance and you were made for closeness.
The closeness is available.
It has always been available.
The one who offers it has been attempting to reach you through the hollow center of your performance for as long as you have been performing.
Turn around and look at what is already behind you.
He is there.
To everyone who is afraid of dying, of what is on the other side, of whether any of this means anything, or whether the darkness after death is simply darkness.
I have been on the other side.
Not as a story I have constructed or a vision I have elaborated into meaning.
As a woman who had no pulse for 4 minutes in a surgical room in Tehran and who was somewhere else during those minutes and who came back carrying things she was given to bring back.
I want to tell you with the directness that I have left and the clarity that I still carry from that place.
There is something on the other side.
There is someone.
He is more real than the most real thing you have ever touched in this world.
He is made of love the way the sun is made of light and the most surprising thing, the thing I was least prepared for, was that he knew me.
Completely.
The whole of it.
And he was not disappointed.
He was not holding my failures over me.
Wait, he was simply fully present with me in the way he has always been fully present with everyone and we are simply too distracted by the performance to notice.
Stop performing.
Start listening.
He is already speaking.
The five things I was shown are not finished being fulfilled.
I watch for them.
The young people turning in their private rooMs. The woman with the white headscarf who does not yet know what she will do.
The fracture in the system that will look like an end and will be a beginning.
My daughters carrying forward what I found.
The underground church growing toward the ocean it is becoming.
I watch for all of it.
And while I watch, I live in the direction I have been living since I got up from the floor of my cousin’s basement in Toronto, where I knelt on the first morning in Canada and said thank you to a God who is not distant or who is not silent, who was in every gray sky over Tehran and I simply did not know what to call him.
His name is Jesus.
He is real.
He is close.
And if you will do one thing for me today, one thing, I want you to go somewhere quiet after you finish reading this and say his name out loud and tell him you want to know if he is real.
Tell him you are tired of the distance.
Tell him you are tired of performing for a God who never answers.
Tell him you want what I found on that operating table.
And then be still because he has been waiting for exactly that moment from a long time before you were born.
He has been waiting for exactly that moment and he will not waste it.
My name is Soraya Terrani.
I am from Tehran, Iran.
I died on an operating table and came back carrying five things I was told to speak.
I have spoken them.
Turn.
What you do with them is between you and the God who sent them.
He knows your name the way he knew mine and he is not waiting for you to be ready.
He is ready for you.
