You think you’re too far gone, but you’re not.
I’ve seen people like you change right here in these cells, and the same truth can reach you today.
I stood inside maximum security prisons across America and preached the name of Jesus to men who had taken dozens of lives.
I was a Saudi princess raised to believe Islam was the only truth, but the God I never expected found me first.
That was me.
But before you decide what kind of woman I am, let me tell you the full story because what happened inside those prison walls will either shake your faith or build it from nothing.
Stay with me until the end because the last part is the part that will stay with you forever.
My name is Amira Al-Rashid and I am from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
I was not supposed to be the kind of woman who ends up inside a prison.
I was raised in a world of marble floors and gold-trimmed curtains.
In a household where my father’s word was the law of the land and the law of God were considered the same thing.
You are my family name carried weight across the Arabian Peninsula.
My father was a senior advisor to the royal court, not the king himself, but close enough that when he entered a room, men who commanded armies stood up straight.
We were not royalty in the formal sense, but in every practical sense, we were untouchable.
We were respected.
We were feared.
And we were absolutely certain that we had been chosen by Allah for a life of privilege and purpose.
I grew up in a villa on the eastern edge of Riyadh in a neighborhood where the streets were quiet and clean and lined with palm trees that were watered every day by men we never learned the names of.
Our house had 12 bedrooms.
My mother had a personal seamstress who came three times a week.
My father drove a black Mercedes with tinted windows and a driver who waited outside no matter how long the meeting lasted.
My older brothers attended the finest Islamic universities in the country.
My younger sister and I were educated at home by tutors my father hired from Egypt and Jordan.
Serious men with long beards who taught us Quran, Arabic grammar, Islamic history, and mathematics.
I loved learning.
From the time I was a small girl, I was hungry for knowledge in a way that made my tutors uncomfortable.
I asked too many questions.
I wanted to know not just what the Quran said, but why it said it.
I wanted to understand the context of every verse, the story behind every command.
My father encouraged this curiosity in private, but warned me never to display it in public.
He said intelligent women in Saudi Arabia had to be like water or powerful beneath the surface, but calm and still on top.
I listened to him.
I always listened to my father.
My mother was a gentlewoman who had been married to my father at the age of 19.
She loved him with complete devotion and never questioned his authority over our household.
She prayed five times a day without fail.
She fasted every Ramadan with discipline I admired.
She read the Quran every morning before the rest of the household woke up, sitting cross-legged on her prayer rug in the pale light before dawn.
Her lips moving silently over verses she had memorized before she was 10 years old.
She was the most devout person I have ever known, and her devotion shaped everything about how I understood faith.
Islam was not a religion in our house.
It was the air we breathed.
It was the foundation under every floor.
I could see the frame behind every wall.
There was no separation between our faith and our identity.
To be Al-Rashid was to be Muslim.
To be Muslim was to be right.
To be right was to be at peace.
I never questioned this.
I never had a reason to.
I completed my secondary education at 18 and then faced the question every Saudi woman of my generation faced.
What comes next? My brothers had already been sent abroad for graduate studies.
My father had connections at universities in London, in Paris, in Washington.
He believed in education, even for his daughters, though he believed in it differently for us.
For my brothers, education was preparation for careers in government and business.
For me, he said education was preparation for leadership inside the family, for raising children who would carry the Al-Rashid name with honor.
I But I wanted more than that.
I told my father I wanted to study criminal psychology.
I had become fascinated with the human mind, with the question of why people did terrible things, with what drove a person across the invisible line between ordinary human being and monster.
I had read everything I could find on the subject in Arabic and in the English I had learned from my tutors.
My father was surprised by my choice.
He said it was a dark field for a woman of my background.
But he did not say no.
He said if I was serious, he would arrange for me to pursue a degree at a university in the United States where criminal psychology programs were the most respected in the world, provided I lived with a family he trusted and followed every Islamic guideline.
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
I arrived in Washington, D.
C.
in September of 2009.
I was 19 years old and I had never been outside Saudi Arabia.
The city overwhelmed me immediately.
The noise, the speed, the sheer size of everything.
People moved through the streets with a confidence that seemed aggressive to me.
Women walked alone at night without fear.
Men and women spoke to each other as strangers without formality or introduction.
Everything was different from what I had known, and the difference was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.
I stayed with a Saudi diplomatic family in the Georgetown neighborhood, a household that provided the familiar structure of prayer times and modest dress while I adjusted to my new environment.
I enrolled at American University and began my studies in psychology the following week.
My professors were brilliant and unconventional.
The first day of my criminal psychology class, the professor walked in, put a photograph of a smiling suburban family on the projector, and said, “One of these four people has already committed murder.
” He waited while the room went silent.
Then he said, “Our job is to understand why before it happens again.
” I knew in that moment I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
My years in Washington changed me in ways my father had not anticipated and did not fully know about.
I was exposed to ideas I had never encountered in Riyadh.
I read philosophers who challenged religion.
I took a course on comparative theology that presented Islam and Christianity and Judaism as parallel human attempts to understand the divine rather than as competing claims on absolute truth.
I had never heard this framing before.
It unsettled me deeply.
I prayed harder to compensate for my unsettledness.
I kept my hijab on every day.
I fasted diligently.
I called my mother every Sunday and recited the Al-Fatiha with her over the phone.
But underneath my faithful routines, questions were accumulating that I had no framework to answer.
I graduated with honors in 2013 and returned to Riyadh as my father expected.
I had earned my degree.
I had maintained my modesty.
I had represented the Al-Rashid name with dignity.
My father was proud.
My mother was relieved I was home.
My brothers welcomed me back with the assumption that my adventure in America was finished and that I would now settle into the proper life of a Saudi woman from a respectable family.
But I had spent four years studying what happens inside the human mind when it breaks.
I had written my senior thesis on spiritual transformation in incarcerated violent offenders.
I had become convinced that the most damaged human beings on Earth, the ones who had done the most harm, were also the ones most capable of the most dramatic change.
I had a theory.
I wanted to test it, and I was not ready to set it aside for a husband and a household.
My father eventually agreed to let me pursue a research project with the Saudi Ministry of Justice studying rehabilitation outcomes in the kingdom’s prison system.
It was respectable enough to satisfy him and substantive enough to satisfy me.
I spent two years working inside Saudi prisons, interviewing inmates, analyzing case studies, writing reports that sat on ministry shelves and changed nothing.
The system was not interested in rehabilitation.
And it was interested in punishment and compliance.
I became frustrated.
And frustrated people make decisions they would not otherwise make.
In 2016, I applied for a fellowship at a criminal justice research institute in Chicago, Illinois.
My father was reluctant.
I was 26 and still unmarried, and the question of marriage was becoming a pressure I felt every time I came home for a visit.
But my research reputation had grown and the fellowship was prestigious enough that my father could frame it as an honor to the family.
He approved the trip with conditions.
I agreed to the conditions and then spent 5 years in Chicago doing the most important work of my life.
Chicago in 2016 was not the city I had read about in textbooks.
The research institute was located on the north side, but my field work took me all over.
Into county jails, you know, into state correctional facilities, into the long gray corridors of maximum security prisons where the air smelled like industrial cleaner and something older and heavier underneath it.
I was the only Saudi woman any of these institutions had ever admitted for research access.
I wore my hijab in every facility I entered.
The guards looked at me with curiosity.
The inmates looked at me with everything from suspicion to amusement to a strange quiet respect that I had not expected.
I was studying what my thesis had pointed toward.
The conditions under which violent offenders experience what psychologists call transformative change.
Not just behavioral compliance, not just following prison rules to earn early release, but genuine internal reorganization.
The reordering of identity.
This is the emergence of a fundamentally different person from the shell of a dangerous one.
I interviewed hundreds of inmates over those 5 years.
Men who had committed robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders.
Men who had spent decades behind bars and men who had been imprisoned before their 18th birthday.
I heard stories that kept me awake at night, details of violence that I recorded in my notebooks with clinical detachment during the interviews, and then sat with alone in my apartment where the detachment collapsed entirely.
But I also heard something else in those cells.
I heard testimony after testimony from men who described encountering something that had no place in my psychological framework.
Men who said they had been visited in their cells by a presence they could not explain.
You have men who said they had heard a voice call them by name in the middle of the night.
Men who said they had been on the edge of taking their own lives and had been stopped by something they described with words like light and peace and love and surrender.
Men who had been the most violent, most dangerous, most irredeemable inmates in the facility according to every clinical assessment, who were now spending their days in prayer, in reading, in quietly helping other inmates find stability.
Almost all of them said the same name, Jesus.
I was a Muslim woman from one of the most orthodox families in Saudi Arabia.
I had been taught that Jesus was a prophet, honored in the Quran, but not divine.
Not a savior.
Not someone you encountered in a prison cell at 3:00 in the morning.
The testimonies I was hearing violated everything I had been taught about who Jesus was and what Jesus could do.
I told myself these men were psychologically vulnerable and had latched onto a culturally available narrative.
I told myself the brain under extreme stress will accept any work that offers relief.
I told myself this was not supernatural, it was neurological.
But I kept writing down everything they said because something in their faces when they talked about it did not match the psychological profile of delusion or manipulation.
These men were not performing.
They were not trying to impress me or gain sympathy.
Several of them were months or years from their release dates and had nothing to gain from appearing religious.
They spoke about their encounters with Jesus the way witnesses speak about car accidents.
A with precise detail.
With the slightly stunned quality of people describing something that happened to them rather than something they invented.
One man in particular changed everything for me.
His name was Marcus.
He had been convicted of six murders before the age of 30.
His case file was one of the most disturbing I had ever read.
He had grown up in circumstances of poverty and violence that would have broken most people before adolescence.
And he had responded to his circumstances by becoming the kind of predator that criminal justice textbooks use as a case study in the absence of empathy.
He had been in maximum security for 11 years when I interviewed him.
He had spent seven of those years in solitary confinement.
When I walked into the interview room and sat across from him, as I expected the flat flat effect and the guarded performance I had learned to recognize in men who had adapted to institutional life.
Instead, Marcus looked at me with eyes that were calm in a way I could not categorize.
Not the flat calm of emotional shutdown.
Something different.
Something that felt almost like warmth.
He told me his story without being asked to.
He said he had been on the floor of his cell one night 4 years earlier at his absolute lowest point planning to end his own life with a method he had spent weeks preparing.
He said the room had changed around him.
He said there was a light that did not come from the fluorescent bulbs overhead.
He said someone spoke to him.
Not audibly the way I was speaking to him now, but in a way that he said was more real than audible sound.
Just the way you know something in your bones rather than in your ears.
He said the voice called him by name and said, “Marcus, I know everything you have done and I love you anyway.
” He stopped talking for a moment.
He looked at the wall.
Then he looked back at me.
He said he had not been the same since that night.
He said every person he had harmed, every life he had taken, had become a weight he carried differently now.
Not with the numbness he had felt before, but with grief.
With genuine grief.
He said he wept for them every day.
He said he could not undo what he had done, but that the God who had spoken to him in that cell had given him a purpose in the years he had left.
And that purpose was to help other men find the same thing he had found before they left the world without it.
I sat across from Marcus for 3 hours that afternoon.
I drove back to my apartment in Chicago and sat in the dark for a long time.
I told myself what I always told myself.
Neurological response.
Cultural framework.
Psychological necessity.
I repeated my academic explanations like a prayer, but they were becoming less convincing.
The wall I had built around the testimonies I was collecting was developing cracks.
Over the following months, I began doing something I had not planned to do.
I began going back to visit inmates who had described encounters with Jesus.
>> [gasps] >> Not for research interviews, not to collect data, but just to sit with them.
To hear more.
To watch their faces.
To try to understand what I was genuinely encountering.
I started reading the Bible.
Not as a researcher analyzing a primary source, not as a Muslim cataloging Christian claims I had been taught to reject, uh but as a person with a question I could not answer any other way.
I bought a simple English translation from a bookstore near my apartment and read it in the evenings after I finished my research notes.
I was not prepared for what I found.
I had expected contradictions, distortions, the corrupted text I had been told it was.
Instead, I found a story that kept reaching me in places I had defended against everything else.
I read about a God who went looking for the lost instead of waiting for the lost to find their way back.
I read about a teacher who touched lepers and ate with criminals and said the people the religious establishment had given up on were exactly the people he had come to save.
I read about grace, a concept so foreign to everything I had been taught about divine justice that it stopped me mid-sentence every time I encountered it.
Not reward for obedience.
Not paradise in exchange for sacrifice.
Just love.
Unearned.
Unconditional.
Extended to people who had done nothing to deserve it.
Marcus had done nothing to deserve it.
That thought kept returning to me.
I was still praying five times a day.
I was still wearing my hijab.
I was still in every external way the faithful Muslim woman my family believed me to be.
But something was shifting underneath that surface.
Something I could not name and could not stop.
The questions I had been accumulating since my university days in Washington were no longer accumulating quietly.
They were pressing against the walls I had built with real force.
Yet I called my mother one Sunday night and told her I was struggling with questions about faith.
I did not tell her which direction the questions were pulling me.
She said what she always said.
She said when doubt comes, return to prayer.
She said the Quran is the rope of Allah and when you feel you are falling, hold the rope tighter.
She said she loved me and she would pray for me.
I held the rope tighter for a while, but I kept reading.
And the book I was reading kept speaking.
It was a Tuesday in November of 2020 when everything changed.
The prison system had given me access to a facility in downstate Illinois, a maximum security institution that housed some of the most violent offenders in the state.
I had been conducting interviews there for 3 months, hard working through a list of inmates whose files matched the psychological profile I was studying.
On this particular Tuesday, I arrived at the facility in the morning and was told that one of the inmates on my list had requested to speak with me urgently.
He had not been scheduled for an interview that day.
The request had come in the night [clears throat] before.
His name was Raymond.
He was 61 years old.
He had been incarcerated for 32 years for crimes that I will not describe in detail here because they are not mine to describe.
His file was the heaviest I had ever lifted, both literally and in terms of what it contained.
He had spent most of his incarceration classified as high risk.
He had hurt other inmates.
He had hurt corrections officers.
He was a man the system had, in every practical sense, abandoned.
His release date was listed as never.
I sat across from Raymond in the interview room.
He looked older than 61.
His hands were folded on the table and they were trembling slightly.
He said he had asked to see me because he had heard from another inmate that I was the woman who listened to people’s stories about God without laughing at them.
He said he needed to tell someone what had happened to him the previous night before he convinced himself it was a dream.
I told him to go ahead.
He said he had been in his cell just after midnight when he woke up from sleep for no reason he could identify.
He said the cell was dark except for the light that came under the door from the hallway.
He said he sat up on his cot and looked toward the corner of the room and there was someone standing there.
He stopped.
He looked at his hands.
Why he said he knew it was not a person.
It was not a guard.
It was not another inmate.
He said he could not explain what it was except to say it was the most real thing he had ever seen in 61 years of living.
More real than the bars on his cell window and more real than the concrete under his feet.
He said he was terrified for about 3 seconds and then the terror left him completely.
He said the presence looked at him and he felt, he used this word specifically, he felt seen.
He said not seen the way a camera sees you or the way a guard sees you when you are being counted.
Seen the way he imagined it would feel if someone knew every single thing you had ever done, every victim, every moment of cruelty, every night of violence, and looked at you anyway with something that was not judgment.
He said a name came into his mind the way light comes into a dark room when someone opens a door, not spoken, not written, just suddenly present.
The name was Jesus.
Raymond was not a religious man.
He had grown up with no church, no faith, no framework for what he was describing.
He said he did not know anything about Jesus except that Christians talked about him.
He said he had always considered religion a manipulation tool used to control weak-minded people.
And he had said this openly and proudly for three decades.
He said the previous night had destroyed every argument he had ever made against the existence of God in approximately 45 seconds.
He looked at me across the table.
He said, “Lady, I don’t know what you believe, but I need you to tell me who Jesus is because whatever happened in my cell last night, I am not the same man I was yesterday and I need to understand why.
” I sat in that interview room with Raymond for 4 hours.
I told him everything I had learned, not from the Islamic framework I had been raised inside, not from the academic detachment I had used to protect myself for the past 4 years.
I told him what I had read in the Bible.
I told him about grace.
I told him about the thief on the cross beside Jesus who had done terrible things and was told, “Today you will be with me in paradise.
” I told him about a God who entered human history, not in a palace but in a stable, who spent his ministry with outcasts and criminals and people the religious establishment had written off.
I told him about resurrection, about the possibility that death was not the final word, even for a man who had spent 32 years being told he was beyond redemption.
I do not fully know what happened in that room as the afternoon light changed and the guards shifted outside the door.
I only know that when I drove away from that facility in the early evening, something was different, not in Raymond only, in me.
I went back to my apartment and I did not turn on the television or open my laptop or make dinner.
I sat on the floor of my living room and I [clears throat] stayed there for a long time.
I thought about every inmate who had told me about an encounter with Jesus.
I thought about Marcus and his calm eyes and his grief for the people he had killed.
I thought about Raymond and his trembling hands and his question that had not been a rhetorical question.
I thought about the women my research had interviewed, mothers of victims who had found the capacity to forgive in the name of the same Jesus.
I thought about the Bible verses I had read alone in my apartment over years of private searching.
And I thought about myself.
I thought about the emptiness I had been carrying since Washington, the questions I had never answered, the longing for something I could not name, something that the five daily prayers and the Ramadan fasts and the Quran recitations had never fully filled.
I had followed every instruction.
I had obeyed every command.
I had been faithful in every observable way.
And still there was a hollowness in the center of me that I had learned to decorate around rather than fill.
What if the filling was not a practice but a person? The thought came to me clearly and I did not push it away.
I had spent 4 years watching the most broken human beings on Earth get filled by something I had been trained to dismiss.
I had watched men who had killed multiple people weep with genuine remorse because something had cracked them open and poured love into the cracked places.
I had watched the transformation that my thesis had theorized was possible and I had watched it happen through one consistent source.
And I had spent 4 years explaining it away because accepting it meant dismantling something enormous inside me.
I was tired of explaining it away.
I sat on the floor of my living room in Chicago, a Saudi woman from one of the most orthodox families in the kingdom, a Muslim woman who had prayed five times a day for 29 years, and I said out loud into the quiet of my apartment, “Jesus, if you are who they say you are, I need you to show me because I cannot keep pretending I have not seen what I have seen.
” The room did not fill with light.
I did not hear an audible voice.
What happened was quieter and more complete than either of those things.
The hollowness that I had lived with for years, that I had decorated around and prayed toward and never filled, simply stopped.
It was replaced by something I had no word for in Arabic or in English.
The closest I can get is this.
It felt like coming home to a house I had never been to before but had always known existed.
I stayed on the floor until midnight.
Then, I picked up my Bible and read until the sun came up.
The months that followed my night on the floor were the most difficult and most alive months of my life.
I told no one in my family.
I could not.
The consequences of what I had done, the internal act of giving my life to Jesus Christ, would be catastrophic if they reached my father.
In Saudi Arabia, leaving Islam is not a private matter.
It is a legal matter, a family matter, a matter of honor that can end careers and fractures and in extreme cases endanger lives.
My father’s position depended on his reputation.
My brothers’ marriages and business relationships depended on the family’s standing in the community.
I was the woman who had gone to America for research and come back to discuss her findings in conference rooms and ministry meetings.
I was not supposed to come back having met Jesus on the floor of an apartment in Chicago.
I kept my outward life exactly as it had been.
I wore my hijab.
I observed the prayer times in the company of others.
I fasted during Ramadan.
I continued my research with the same professional consistency I had always brought to it.
But inside, everything had reorganized.
I began attending a church in Chicago early on Sunday mornings before any colleagues were likely to see me.
A small congregation that met in a building that had been a warehouse before a community of believers claimed it and filled it with folding chairs and a sound system and a pastor named David who preached without notes for 40 minutes every week and made the gospel sound like news that had just arrived.
I sat in the back row every Sunday for the first 2 months, wearing a scarf that covered my hair, listening with both my researcher’s mind and the new open thing that had replaced my defended heart.
Though I cried during almost every service quietly in the back row, because I kept encountering the same thing I had encountered on the floor of my apartment.
The sense of being completely known and completely loved in the same instant.
It undid me every single time.
Pastor David noticed me eventually.
He approached me after a service not to question me or to lecture me, but to introduce himself and ask my name.
I told him.
He smiled and said he was glad I kept coming back.
I told him I was a Muslim woman, or I had been, and I was trying to understand what I was now.
He said that was a good place to start.
He said Jesus specialized in people who were trying to understand what they were now.
He became a quiet guide for me over the months that followed.
I met with him once a week in the church office, reading through the Gospels together, or to asking the questions I had been accumulating for years, receiving answers that were not always the ones I expected, but were always honest.
He did not ask me to renounce anything loudly.
He did not tell me my family was wrong or my culture was inferior.
He understood the complexity of what I was navigating, and he helped me navigate it with patience and respect.
Meanwhile, my research had taken a direction I had not planned.
I had begun returning to the prisons not only as a researcher, but as something more.
I started leading what the facilities called informal discussion sessions with inmates who wanted to talk about spiritual questions.
The prison chaplains welcomed my involvement.
They had more need than they had time for.
I would sit in a circle with eight or 10 men, and we would talk about the testimonies I had collected and about the questions those testimonies raised and about what it meant to believe that change was possible for people the rest of the world had categorized as permanently broken.
In those circles, I talked about Jesus, not as a psychologist now, as a witness, as someone who had been in the broken place herself, and had been reached there by the same presence that had reached Marcus and Raymond and the dozens of others whose stories I had spent years collecting.
Something happened in those circles that I cannot fully explain with the training I have.
Men who had been hardened against every form of intervention, who had resisted therapy and medication and behavioral programs and religious services for years or decades, began to open.
These slowly at first, then with an urgency that was almost frightening in its speed and depth.
They began asking the same question Raymond had asked me, who is Jesus? Not as an academic question, as a desperate one, as a question that came from the place where a human being stands when they have no more strategies left and they need something real.
I told them what I knew.
I told them my own story.
I told them about the Saudi princess who had spent years studying broken people and had been broken herself in an apartment in Chicago and had been put back together by a God she had been trained to define differently.
I told them grace was not a Christian word or a Muslim word or an American word.
I told them grace was the truth underneath every genuine encounter with the divine.
The truth that love comes before earning.
That forgiveness is not something you work toward, but something that is handed to you by someone who has every right to withhold it and chooses not to.
Over the course of my time in that system, I watched 100 men make decisions that my psychological training could not fully account for.
100 men who had been assessed as violent, as high risk, as treatment resistant, who encountered Jesus in those circles or in their cells afterward, and were changed in ways that the behavioral data in their files reflected clearly.
Reduced incidents, increased empathy, voluntary participation in restorative programs, letters written to victims’ families.
Not because they were trying to earn early release.
Several of them were never getting out.
100 men.
I counted them because I needed to understand the scale of what I was witnessing.
Since I had gone into those prisons to study whether transformation was possible, I had my answer.
It was not just possible, it was happening.
It was happening through the same name every single time.
And it was happening through a Saudi woman who had no business being in those rooms, who had grown up on the other side of a world from everything those men had experienced, who had been drawn into prison halls by an academic question, and stayed because she had received the same answer they were receiving.
Jesus was moving through maximum security prisons in the American Midwest, and he was using a Saudi princess to carry his name into the cells.
I still cannot say that sentence without feeling it land in my chest like something dropped from a great height.
In the spring of 2022, I made a decision that I had been building toward without fully knowing it.
I called my mother in Riyadh.
She was delighted to hear from me.
She asked about my research, about my health, about whether I was eating well.
I gave her my usual answers.
Then I told her I needed to tell her something important.
I said I needed her to listen without speaking until I had finished.
She was quiet.
I could hear her breathing.
I told her everything.
I told her about the inmates and the testimonies.
I told her about Marcus and Raymond.
I told her about the night on the floor of my apartment.
I told her about the hollowness that had been filled and the Sunday mornings in the back row of the Chicago church and Pastor David and the circles inside the prisons and the 100 men.
I told her that I had given my life to Jesus Christ and that I was telling her because I loved her and I could not carry this alone anymore.
The silence on the phone lasted long enough that I wondered if she had disconnected.
Then she said my name.
Just my name.
Amira.
She said it the way she had said it when I was a small girl and had done something that worried her.
With love and with grief mixed together in a way that only mothers can combine.
She said she did not understand.
She said she did not know how this had happened to her daughter.
She said she was frightened for me.
She said what I was describing was a path away from everything that had held our family together for generations.
She said she would pray for me to find her way back.
I told her I had found my way.
I told her the finding was what I was trying to explain.
Who, she cried.
I cried.
We stayed on the phone for an hour without resolving anything.
When she said goodbye, her voice was thick with a grief that cut through the phone line and settled somewhere in my chest where it still lives.
My father found out 3 weeks later.
I do not know how.
Families like mine have networks of information that move quietly and efficiently.
He called me from Riyadh at 7:00 in the morning [clears throat] Chicago time.
His voice was controlled in the way that was more frightening than shouting.
He said he had heard something from someone he trusted, and he was giving me the opportunity to tell him it was not true.
I told him it was true.
What followed was the worst conversation I have ever had.
My father did not shout.
He spoke in a low and precise voice about honor and shame and the consequences of what I had done.
He said my behavior had endangered the family’s he had given me.
He said I was no longer welcome in the family home.
He said if I chose to remain in my current path, I had chosen to walk that path alone.
I sat on my bed after that call and looked at my hands for a long time.
My father’s voice was still in my ears.
The loss of him, the loss of the home I had grown up in, the loss of the world that had formed me was real and it was heavy.
I will not pretend it was easy.
I will not tell you that faith removes grief.
Faith sits with grief.
Faith says grief is not the last word.
I thought about Raymond asking me who Jesus was from across a prison table.
I thought about Marcus with his calm eyes and his daily tears for the people he had harmed.
I thought about the 100 men and the moment I had felt in each circle when something broke open and light came through.
I thought about the night on my floor and the hollowness that became fullness.
I wiped my eyes and I opened my Bible.
The path forward was not a path back to the life I had known.
My research fellowship ended that year and I transitioned into full-time work with a nonprofit organization that provided spiritual care and counseling services inside correctional facilities across the country.
I was baptized in a lake in Indiana on a Saturday morning in June with Pastor David and 12 members of my Chicago congregation standing at the edge of the water.
I went under and came up, and the sky above me was the most ordinary blue sky I had ever seen.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No lightning.
no voice.
You were just the ordinary world waiting on the other side of that water with everything it contained.
The loss of my family’s approval, the uncertainty of my future, the weight of being a Saudi Muslim woman who had become a Christian prison minister, and beneath all of it, running underneath everything, like a river under the ground, the peace that my five daily prayers had never given me, and that I had found on the floor of an apartment in Chicago when I stopped defending myself and started listening.
I want to tell you something before I finish.
I am not standing in front of you as someone whose life became easy.
My father has not spoken to me in 2 years.
My mother calls occasionally and always cries.
My brothers have made it clear that what I have done is not something that can be undone in their understanding.
Thus, the family I was raised in is not the family I can return to.
Not now, and perhaps not in this lifetime.
But I am standing in front of you as someone whose life became real for the first time.
I spent the first 30 years of my life in structures that were built for me, the villa in Riyadh, the Islamic framework, the role of a faithful daughter from an honored family.
These structures were beautiful in some ways and suffocating in others, and they were held together not by love, but by compliance, by the requirement that I be a certain thing in order to belong.
Jesus did not ask me to be a certain thing.
He met me exactly where I was, in the research apartment in Chicago at midnight.
A Saudi woman with a notebook full of other people’s testimonies and the hollowness she had spent a decade decorating around, and he filled the hollow, and he sent me back into the prisons, not as a researcher now, but as a witness.
100 men.
100 men who had been written off by courts and families and systems and sometimes by themselves.
100 men who had committed the worst things one human being can do to another.
100 men who encountered Jesus in a circle or in a cell and were changed in ways that cannot be fully explained by anything in my graduate training.
I counted them because I needed to know the number.
Because when people ask me whether I believe this is real, I want to have an answer that is grounded in something I watched happen with my own eyes in facilities where nobody was performing for cameras, in rooms where the only thing at stake was the truth.
100 is the number, and I am number 101.
If you are watching this and you are a Muslim who has been carrying questions you are not allowed to ask out loud, I want you to know that Jesus is not the enemy of your culture.
He is the answer your culture was always pointing toward without knowing it.
If you are watching this and you are someone who has done something you believe puts you beyond the reach of forgiveness, I want you to sit with the story of Raymond and the story of Marcus and the story of a Saudi princess who found the same grace in the same cells.
The reach of Jesus is longer than your worst day.
I know because I watched it reach men whose worst days filled volumes.
His name is Jesus, and he is not finished.
