Stranger No More

by Annahita Parsan

  My knees gave way, and I sank to the floor. I could feel every moment of pain I had ever endured welling up within me and forcing its way out through my sobs. I could not stop. At times I could barely breathe, but I knew that whatever was happening. God was in control.

  The singing had softened to a murmur by the time I could open my eyes and talk. The old man was in front of me, smiling.

  “I’m a Christian too,” I said.

  “Really?” he said. “We didn’t know. We thought you were a Muslim.”

  It was my turn to smile then.

  “So are you baptized?”

  I frowned. “What’s ‘baptized’?”

  Back home that night, I sat next to Siavash and watched the video tape we had been sent home with. It told the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. By the time the two hours were up, my heart was changed. I finally saw what it fully meant to be a Christian, to want to live life in pursuit of Him. I prayed the prayer that filled the film’s final few minutes and asked Him to come into my life.

  I was so happy to knock on my neighbors’ door the next morning. “I want to be baptized,” I told them. “I’ve been praying all night, and I know what it means to truly give my life to Jesus. Can you baptize me now?”

  “Now? No, it’s too soon. You need to learn about Jesus first. That takes time.”

  “But I’ve been learning about him for years. I really want to get baptized.”

  He thought awhile. “We don’t have a priest or a pastor, but there’s one we know. Maybe he can help you work out what to do.”

  I couldn’t wait a moment longer, so as soon as I had the address of the church nearby, I took the bus into town.

  The church was like no other church I had been in before. From the outside it looked more like an office than a place of worship. Inside there were no candles at the back and no hollow echo of my footsteps as I walked down the front. There was just an old carpet in a room that looked as though it had been used for many different purposes.

  I found the pastor, another Iranian man. I told him that my neighbor had suggested I visit so that he could baptize me.

  “Okay,” he said as we sat on plastic chairs at the front of the room. “How long ago did you come to Jesus?”

  “Yesterday.”

  He looked confused, so I carried on talking. I told him about the Farsi Bible and the nuns and how I had prayed in the court in Tehran and how God had answered my prayers then and so many other times as well.

  He was smiling when I finally stopped.

  “Okay. We’ll do it whenever you’re ready.”

  I picked a date twenty days ahead and decided that if I was going to get baptized, I wanted some witnesses who would be surprised. So I phoned my sister Mariam in Isfahan.

  “Do you want to come to Sweden?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “I’m thinking soon. Like three weeks.”

  “Three weeks? You know a visa takes six months, don’t you?”

  I did. I also knew that God is not subject to the same rules as government officials. I told Mariam and then Hussein that they should apply the next day and expect to be with me by the end of the month. I could hear the doubt in both their voices.

  Two weeks passed before Mariam called, amazed to be holding her visa in her hand. Hussein had not been so fortunate, but I told him to pack a bag and drive Mariam to Tehran anyway. And I suggested that they bring Mariam’s son, Davood, too.

  Getting the visa was easy, but finding the plane tickets was tough. I phoned a tour operator and asked whether she had two tickets leaving in four days’ time. She didn’t.

  An hour later the phone rang. Of course, it was the tour operator. “I’ve just had someone cancel. I have four tickets available exactly when you want them.”

  Hussein’s visa was issued by the time he reached Tehran, and Mariam’s son was able to pick his up at the Swedish embassy on the way to the airport.

  As amazing as all this was, I trusted that God had even more in store for them when they arrived.

  Almost every Iranian knows two things about Armenia, the country that meets Iran at its northern border. They know that it is full of Christians and that it is an excellent place to take a vacation from all the stress that goes with living under Islamic rule.

  This is why Hussein looked so confused when we sat down in my house and I told him that I was going to be baptized as a Christian the very next day.

  “You mean that you are to become an Armenian?”

  “No, Hussein. I’m a Christian.”

  He thought awhile. “Okay, I respect your choice, but why?”

  I didn’t need to think at all. Since that night when I visited my neighbor’s house, the answer was never far from my lips. “Because Jesus did everything for me.”

  He looked stunned.

  Mariam, on the other hand, looked skeptical. “This doesn’t sound so good. Maybe for you it is, but not for us.”

  My baptism service didn’t leave them convinced, but it didn’t send Mariam or Hussein away either. Throughout the whole two months that they stayed in Sweden, every time I suggested they come with me to church they both said yes. Even when it meant joining three thousand other people to hear a well-known pastor from Hollywood who believed that God’s power is just as strong today as it ever was.

  The place was packed, and we had no choice but to stand at the side. That meant we had a good view of everything that happened when the preacher invited people to stand and started to pray.

  When the first person fell over, we all stared.

  The second one fell soon after. None of us had ever seen anything like it, but I knew that whatever was going on was something that smelt of God.

  Hussein, not so much.

  “Ha!” he said, a little too loudly as more and more people slumped backward, some into their seats, some all the way down onto the floor. “Look at them all! That guy on stage must have bribed them to do it.”

  I didn’t have time to stay and explain to my brother what was going on. I just knew that I had to get down to the front and be prayed for myself.

  The preacher was looking my way as I picked my way through the crowd. “Lord,” he prayed, “send your fire.”

  My legs went the moment he said “fire.” I was down, but I felt as though I was being lifted up by God’s love. It came in waves, again and again, speaking to every cell within me of the depth of God’s love for me.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. I opened my eyes to see Mariam and Hussein above me.

  “What happened?” said Hussein. “Are you okay? Did they give you money too?”

  I sat up and reassured him that I was fine and hadn’t been paid a thing. The preacher was nearby, so I waved him over. Soon he was praying for my brother and sister. It didn’t take long for Hussein to fall to the floor, shaking and crying out, “God, forgive me! Forgive me for what I’ve said!”

  Mariam and Hussein both returned home to Iran having asked Jesus to save them and pledging to follow him for the rest of their lives. As soon as Hussein told his wife and Mariam told her husband, they discovered how much that choice would cost them. Both marriages soon ended in divorce.

  “It is not easy here,” said Mariam on the phone. “We can’t worship in public, and there is a lot of anger toward us. We have to keep our faith secret.”

  My heart went out to my sister and my brother. It was no easy thing to be a Christian in Iran. They hadn’t even been able to tell our mom and dad the truth before our parents had moved away.

  My parents, aware of the growing disdain with which people in Isfahan were treating the family, knew that it was time for them to leave. They’d gone through the work of applying for and obtaining visas, packed up my younger sister, Mina, and moved to Sweden to be with me.

  Soon after they arrived I was serving the family a meal while I listened to my dad tell stories of how bad things had gotten.

  “People talk,” he said. “And now Mina ha
s no future there. We can never go back.”

  He spoke about the way people now viewed our family, about the problems each and every one of them had faced as our list of transgressions had grown longer and longer. “Even Hussein and Mariam are divorced now.”

  I wondered if he was blaming me. But his voice carried no anger, and it held no spite. It was, instead, just tired. He listed the troubles the way an old man lists his ailments, holding out for as long as he could, but full of the knowledge that in time they would win.

  I felt guilty. I had always felt guilty. From the moment they first pleaded with me to divorce Asghar and I had choked back the tears to tell them I could not, I had locked my secrets away from them. I hated it, but what could I do? Lying to them—about why I stayed with Asghar, about why we left Iran, about why I’d had to leave Daniel behind, about why we did not speak to them for five months, about why the Sepah wanted to talk to me—all of it had been my only way of keeping them safe.

  But I was done lying. It was time for the truth.

  “Mom, Dad, I have something I need to tell you. I am a Christian.”

  Mom’s anger was immediate. “What? How could you? We’re not even finished dealing with your divorce, and now you say you’re a Christian. Have you heard nothing that your father has just said? Your sisters, your brothers, even your cousins, they’re all affected by what you’ve done. How do you expect them to live with this? It’s not right.”

  “I love my God. I love Jesus. I’m never going back to Islam.”

  Mom stared at me. Dad, his arms folded, stared at the food. Mina had gone off to play with Roksana and Daniel. Siavash and his daughter had gone out. Nobody was eating.

  “Do you remember when I was in the court and the mullah suddenly let me go? That wasn’t just luck, and it wasn’t just chance. It was prayer. I prayed to Jesus to help me, and he did. Or do you remember when I got back and needed a job? I prayed, and that very same day I got one. Don’t you see? It’s all real.”

  Mom waved a hand. Dad carried on staring. None of what I was saying was taking root. So I tried something else.

  “I had a friend who worked for me at the boutique. She couldn’t get pregnant. For ten years she went to the mosque and did just as the mullahs told her to but still nothing. I was telling her about Jesus answering prayer and said we could pray. Her husband was a communist and he didn’t believe in God at all, but they both came here and I told them again that if Jesus can rise from the dead he can help couples get pregnant. So I put my hand on her stomach and prayed. The next month she was pregnant.

  “When she was six months pregnant she came into work and told me that her husband didn’t want her to have any more contact with me, so she quit. Three months later her husband called. He said that she was at the hospital, and the doctors couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. He wanted me to come and pray. So I went. The baby was dead, and the doctors were telling her that she needed to go home and wait for labor to start so her body could expel the baby’s body. They said it might take almost a week. Can you imagine having to wait that long? So I prayed again. Five minutes later the baby was born. Even in the sadness of losing their child, the husband knew that God had helped. And my friend said that she knew that God would help them conceive again. Just last week she told me that she’s pregnant again.”

  Mom was not listening. Nor was Dad. I so wanted to be able to convince them of the truth of what had happened and the power of God, but as I heard myself tell the story, I could feel their unbelief.

  We all just pushed the food around our plates that night. It was not the kind of reunion I had hoped for.

  When it was time to go to bed I grabbed Mom by the hand. “What do you want Jesus to do for you? What’s the one thing that would help you trust him?”

  “If he comes to me in my dreams tonight, then I will believe in him.”

  She knew I had no power to make that happen. “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to pray that he does just that.”

  Dad went to bed soon after as well, and as I cleared the table I told God that I was weak and powerless to help. If he really was going to break through to my mom, he had to do it himself.

  “I believe you can do it, God,” I prayed out loud.

  I was expectant the next morning. I knew that Mom had met Jesus in the night—not because of anything I’d heard, but simply because I trusted God completely.

  She was silent from the moment she entered the kitchen. I asked how she was, gently probing for signs. I got none. Only silence.

  Things stayed that way for most of the day. When she did talk, it was through gritted teeth. I began to doubt my earlier certainty.

  At breakfast the following morning, I decided to take a different approach. I said nothing. Mom was soon crying.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What did I do?”

  “That night you prayed, I did have a dream. A man came, and he was holding a shovel. He dug up some earth and put a seed in the hole. Then he turned to me and said, ‘You can do it.’ He reached out to give me some seed, and when I looked I saw that he had a hole in his hand. He wasn’t like any other man I’d seen. He was light.”

  Mom had never heard anything about Jesus, apart from a line or two in the Qur’an about him being a prophet. She knew nothing about the holes in his hands or the way the Bible describes him as the light of the world. But none of that mattered. She had met Jesus for herself that first night in Sweden. From then on nothing would ever be the same.

  I was so grateful to God and so relieved as well. I never doubted that he could reveal himself to my mom, but I wondered whether she would have eyes to see. To know that he had heard and answered my prayer was a wonderful thing.

  Even more wonderful was the fact that two months later my mom, my dad, and my sister Mina were all baptized.

  I had prayed hard about my parents coming to Sweden. Part of me had been scared of them coming to live with me and potentially being unhappy when they found out about my faith in Christ. If that was going to happen, I would rather they stayed in Iran. But when they got their visas within a month, and then both Mom and Dad, as well as Mina, became Christians so soon after their arrival, I was sure that all my fears had been in vain.

  And, for a time, I was right. Life was good. Being reunited with my parents and seeing both them and my little sister take their first steps of faith was a privilege and a joy. We went to church as a family and studied the Bible together, along with those gray-haired neighbors down the road. To be able to live free alongside them under the same roof brought healing to some deep, old wounds.

  But life under that one roof also started to get crowded. Mom, Dad, and Mina squeezed in along with Siavash and me, Roksana, Daniel, and Siavash’s daughter Sara. Soon, Siavash’s mom and brother arrived from Iran and moved in as well. The house had felt big when it was just the five of us living there. With ten of us in it, there was barely any room to breathe.

  The cramped conditions added extra stress to Siavash’s and my marriage. While I had been passionately pursuing my newfound faith, Siavash had stalled. He hadn’t gone back to Islam, but he hadn’t trusted his life to Jesus either.

  Then, after six years of marriage, Siavash moved out.

  It was a bad time. In the sadness and tears there were echoes of so many other bad times in my life. Feelings of loss, sorrow, and worry all took up residence within me. But the darker the skies, the more I knew that only God could help me though.

  Yet even though I was desperate for him to help me, a part of me was still holding back. At church my pastor repeatedly told me that I, too, was going to be a pastor one day, that I would travel the world and preach. No way, I thought. Why would I want to? I had my business and my life, and both of them demanded more of me than I felt like I had to offer.

  I was sitting alone in my bedroom one day, looking at a flower I had been keeping alive for months. Overnight, quite without warning, it had died. A small pile of curling petals lay at its base.


  I couldn’t have found a better picture of my life at that time. In the space of just a few months, it was as if a bomb had gone off within it.

  By this time, the kids were grown. Daniel had moved out, and so had Roksana. She had headed up north of Stockholm to enroll at a Bible college. I loved her passion and commitment to her faith, but between the monthly fees I couldn’t afford to pay and the fears for both of their safety that visited me every night as I tried to sleep, the stress was starting to build.

  Mina was unwell in the hospital and didn’t seem to be getting better.

  My parents were approaching the end of their allowed stay in the country, and all their appeals for leave to remain had been rejected.

  Siavash had filed for a divorce. He was playing tough, asking for half the house and half my business—a business which had been thriving for so long but was now on the brink of collapse.

  I could not keep up with my car payments. I owed $50,000 in tax payments that I had missed in order to pay my workers’ wages. According to my accountant, I was about to find myself in real trouble. At times I couldn’t even afford the train fare to get into work.

  I was unhappy and depressed. I cried uncontrollably. Every day.

  There was not a single leaf that had not fallen from the flower.

  “Annahita,” my pastor said again after church one day. “You’ll be a great pastor. All this? It’s just the testing.”

  I didn’t have the energy to tell him that being a pastor was the last thing on my mind. But his words didn’t go unnoticed. I thought about the testing as I walked home that day. I remembered what had happened to Job in the Bible, and how, even in the midst of tragedy, he had stayed firm in his faith in God.

  By the time I reached the house, I was praying out loud.

  “If you think I’m going back to Islam, you’re wrong. I’m not going back. I’m like Job. So many bad things have happened in my life, but I trust my God. I always will.”