Stranger No More

by Annahita Parsan

  I ended up having to sell everything to pay my taxes. Even my bed. But then, little by little, things started to improve. Mina got better and came home. My parents were told they could stay.Roksana transferred home, and the business started to grow again. After a year the house had furniture again. After two, the business had expanded enough for me to buy a new boutique on the other side of the city.

  I took out a loan and paid Siavash every dollar he asked for and thanked God for the power to forgive him.

  “Annahita,” my pastor didn’t give up. “You’ve got to go to Bible school. How else are you going to make it as a pastor?”

  “Pastor,” I begged him. “Can we please stop having this conversation? I’m never going to be a pastor.”

  I gave in eventually, but only to a few of my pastor’s requests for help in ministry. He had asked me to serve with a group of Iranian Christians, and I met with them regularly in the church. We prayed together, studied the Bible, and talked about what it means to be a Christian. It was a sweet time, but things changed when a church leader from Iran joined the group. He didn’t believe a woman should be helping to lead. He made it clear that I was not welcome.

  It wasn’t hard to back off. I knew all along that my pastor’s encouragements toward ministry were just that—nice words intended to give me a little confidence boost. I was never going to be a pastor, and now I had the proof of why.

  By now, my parents had their own apartment, and I phoned them one day as I was driving back from work. I told them I’d be there soon, and Mom said she’d set an extra place at the table.

  Just after I hung up, I happened to glance to my right, only to see my field of vision dominated by an SUV driving straight at me.

  All I had time to do was pray.

  God, help me!

  When my mom heard the sound of sirens, she looked out of the window. Something didn’t feel right, somehow, and she called my cell. The voice that answered it belonged to a stranger. As soon as she heard them talk about a crash, she ran out of the apartment to find me.

  My injuries were severe, but not life threatening. My little Peugeot had not stood up well to the Volvo, and I had been pulled out of the tailgate by the emergency crew that arrived on the scene. I’d broken three ribs and needed surgery to fix the place where the broken gearstick had pierced my hand. But it was my legs that had taken the biggest beating.

  “Your kneecaps were like eggshells,” the doctor told me. “They’d been forced halfway up your thigh.”

  After eleven days in the hospital I was allowed to go home. With both legs and one hand in plaster I was confined to the couch and unable to do much of anything for myself. God had me all to himself.

  It took me four months to be able to walk unaided, but much less time to realize that I had gone away from what God wanted. I had closed my eyes and ears to him, and for that I was deeply sorry.

  “God,” I prayed. “I promise I’m coming back to you. I’ll serve you. Just please don’t make me go back to working among Muslims again. Other than that, I’m all in.”

  God’s response was clear.

  “You are lying!”

  I didn’t understand. I had meant every word I said; I was willing to go all in for him. But the more I prayed, the more I understood. How could I claim to be really serving him if I put my own conditions on what he was calling me to do? How could I claim to be all in if a part of me was so closed?

  The elevators were all in use when I arrived at the hospital. I joined the knot of people waiting by the closed metal doors, their eyes locked on the display above and the numbers that counted slowly up and down. It suited me fine to wait awhile. I needed to think.

  I could still feel the dream of a few nights earlier in my mind. It lingered within me like woodsmoke on a winter scarf. I let myself drift back, my imagination folded within the words I knew were from God.

  There had been no images in my dream, no people or places. Only words. The dream was like a thought I did not think myself or a voice I heard deep within my bones. But it felt more real than most. Three times I heard the words from Matthew 18, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault.”

  As soon as I woke up I knew what it meant.

  A few months before my accident, I had watched a well-dressed Muslim woman a little older than me walk into the shop one Friday afternoon. She ignored my customary greeting and looked around the dresses, flicking them along the rails with her hands while her eyes scanned the store. I knew she was not interested in buying anything. Women in head scarves rarely shopped in my boutiques.

  When I finished with the other customer and the door closed behind her, the woman walked up to me. It surprised me how soft her voice was as she spoke.

  “I hear that you are a Christian,” she said, her eyes still scanning the room. I nodded my reply. It was no secret that I went to church, though I did not make a habit of talking about it with Muslim strangers.

  When she next spoke, her eyes locked on mine. “Can you tell me about Jesus?” She said his name as though the very syllables themselves were both precious and dangerous. I knew I had nothing to fear from her. I knew I had to say yes.

  For the next three months Sarina and I met most weeks in the back of my shop and talked about Jesus. We prayed and read the Bible, and the more Sarina heard about the Son of God, the more she fell in love with him.

  But it had all stopped the day my phone rang.

  “Annahita Parsan?” said the voice in heavy Farsi.

  “Yes.”

  “You have been talking blasphemy to my wife!” He was shouting now, the rage hurting my ears and setting my heart racing. “You are haram, and the Qur’an allows me to kill you for what you have done. If you see her again you will die.”

  I was scared. For days I felt as though I was going to suffocate beneath memories of Asghar’s attacks and the horrors of the Hotel. I feared what would happen if this man ever came to make good on his threat, and so I did exactly what he said. When I received no more visits from Sarina, I made no attempt to contact her myself.

  The car crash had put Sarina and her husband out of my mind. But as I lay on the couch with my legs and arm locked in place, prayers of repentance and surrender formed on my lips, and my mind had started to drift to her again.

  Not long after I could talk again, I had the dream. I knew it was about Sarina and her husband. I had been sinned against and threatened, and in response I had hidden when really I should have trusted God more. After all, hadn’t he promised to protect me? Wasn’t his love the thing that had already brought my daughter back from the dead and saved me from prison not once but twice?

  The very next day after the dream I looked up in the shop to see a woman standing in front of me. “Do you know Sarina?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She is sick and in the hospital. She has cancer.”

  I did not know what to say.

  “She is sad that you have not been in touch. Will you visit her?”

  What could I do? I nodded and asked for the hospital details.

  I stepped carefully out of the elevator and walked the short distance to the bed in the corner of the ward that Sarina’s friend had described. But before my eyes could pick out my friend, they rested on a man I knew could only be her husband.

  He looked up at me, his stare like the wolves from the mountain that sometimes crept into my dreams. Did he know who I was? I could not be sure. I tried a smile, but none came.

  He was standing on the other side of the bed. Sarina was lying there, her eyes closed. Drips and monitors stood like silent sentries around her. She looked pale and weak, and inside I felt a thousand prayers explode as I pleaded with God to heal her.

  When I looked back across the bed again his heavy-lidded eyes were still on me. This time they could not conceal the hatred within him.

  “Why are you here?” he hissed in the same thick accent I remembered from the phone call. “This is all your fault. Allah
has punished her for becoming a Christian. You crushed my life.”

  I thought about running, but I knew I wanted to stay. I wanted to get away, but I also wanted to be close to God. I wanted to trust him, and I knew that meant staying right where I was.

  I thought about the words from my dream. Should I do as Scripture said and tell this man that he had sinned against me? I had no idea what to do, so I looked back at Sarina and prayed silent prayers. I pleaded for her healing but also for protection. I was desperate, powerless, and unable to do anything but pray. Only God could rescue me. Only God could rescue him.

  We stayed like that for some minutes—my eyes on Sarina, her husband’s eyes on me. Then she started to stir. When she looked my way she was anything but weak and pale. Her eyes were wide and full of life. Her hand reached out for mine.

  “Can you see him here, Annahita? Can you see him? Jesus is here with me. He says I’ll be all right. I’m coming back to life!”

  Her husband was still for a moment, as if he was slowly deciphering the true meaning of Sarina’s words. And then he exploded. He stepped toward Sarina, grabbed her by the shoulders, and started to shake. She gasped and tried to draw back, but he was too strong. I shouted at him to stop, and for some reason he listened. He froze, staring at his wife. Her eyes were shut tight, but still the tears leaked out.

  He turned to me. “You!” he said, rounding the foot of the bed with a few short steps. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me round, pushing me out of the room so fast that I could do nothing to stop him. He bundled me toward the elevator that was already open and waiting. “When you come back I will kill you,” he said as he threw me between the doors.

  I watched him turn and march back toward Sarina. The doors closed in front of me. I shut my eyes, ignored the pain in my knees, and carried on praying.

  I didn’t have a strategy, and I didn’t have a plan, but visiting and praying for Sarina marked a change for me. From then on I decided to follow God the only way I really knew how: to open my eyes and say yes to the invitations that he continued to lay before me. Once I decided to do that, the opportunities flooded in. Like the young Muslim man from Afghanistan who came into my shop one day. He told me that a friend had suggested I could help. I took him to a pastor and asked him to baptize the man. When the pastor asked me if I’d start a home group to help support the young man, I said yes. And when, a year later, the young man himself asked if I would baptize him in church one Sunday, I said yes again.

  My mom and dad joined us when we met every week. We prayed together, read the Bible a little, and talked about who Jesus was, why he died, and what it means to follow him. Not much more.

  And when my mom asked if she could bring a friend along too, I said yes.

  “She’s a Muslim,” Mom added.

  The next week my mom’s friend showed up. The Afghan man brought a few of his own friends too. They were Muslims. So there we all were, four Christians and six Muslims, all reading the Bible, talking about Jesus, and praying. Mom’s friend wanted prayer for her son in Iran. He was a drug addict and very sick. We prayed. He got better, and the next week the mom gave her life to Jesus. Soon after that, the son did too. He said he met Jesus. In a mosque.

  Soon we were not four Christians and six Muslims, but thirty people, some Christians, some Muslims, but all praying to Jesus. All expecting him to heal us. All learning to say “yes” to him.

  We saw marriages restored, lives transformed, and so many refugees who were desperate for help turn to Jesus and give him their lives as a result. Whenever we prayed, I knew God would answer. And I knew that God had given me this job—to serve my people.

  Soon we were too big to meet in my house, so we were invited to move to a church.

  It seemed like God’s work, so I just said yes.

  The work that God laid out for me didn’t just wait until we started holding our church meetings. Even before then, more and more people were coming to the boutiques to see me and ask questions about God. I would invite people to the office out back and ask if they wanted me to pray. I never talked much about Islam, partly because of what had happened with Sarina, but mainly because God never took me there. It was his Spirit that worked in people’s lives, not my words or arguments.

  I would pray in whichever of the two shops I was in each morning before I opened up. I would pray for the till, that the money might come in and be used for God’s work. I prayed for the people who would visit, that God would be preparing the ground and show me what to say and how to pray. And I prayed for the power of God to be present, that even those who just walked in and looked at a few outfits would know something of God’s love.

  One morning my prayers took a little different turn.

  “God, what do you want? Do you want me to build a business and have people come in and pray and meet you? Or do you want me in church, working with people there? If I’m staying I want to expand the business, to grow it all over the country. But if you want me in the church, take it all away from me so that I can be free.”

  Six hours later, my neighbor knocked on the shop door. He owned a Chinese restaurant and told me that he and his wife had been thinking how much they would like to make their premises bigger, and he asked if I would I sell them my shop. “We’ll pay good money!”

  I told my neighbor that I needed to think about it for two weeks. I knew God was at work, but did he have to move quite so fast? What was the plan? I prayed, but I heard nothing.

  While I was waiting for an answer from God, Mina called from her university and said she was feeling sick, so I drove up to bring her home early for Christmas vacation. I had parked on campus, but never before had I seen the sign for the theology school. I told my sister to wait in the car while I went in to find out more.

  I liked the feel of the place as I walked through the building and asked the receptionist if I could talk to someone about studying there. Ten minutes later a smart-looking lady came out, shook my hand, and suggested I come back next week to talk properly.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t live here. I’ll be back in Stockholm next week.”

  “No problem,” the lady said. “I’ll be down there next week. Let’s meet.”

  Mina was skeptical when I got back in the car and told her what had happened. “Admissions officers don’t visit out of school. I think you might have been confused there. You know your Swedish isn’t all that good.”

  But the lady called as she promised the next week, and we sat and ate burgers as I told her my story. I left nothing out—not Asghar’s violence, the reason why we left Iran, or the way that I had wrestled with the idea of becoming a pastor. I told her about the boutique and the man with the Chinese restaurant and the fact that, maybe, this was the time for me to finally say yes to God when, for so long, I had been saying no.

  When I finished speaking she pulled a piece of paper out of her bag and slid it over to me. “If God chooses you, who am I to say no?”

  It was an admissions form. I scanned it quickly and saw all the boxes in the academic qualifications that I would have to leave blank. I went to speak, but she interrupted me.

  “If God chooses you, who am I to say no?”

  Back home, it was Roksana’s turn to be skeptical. “She can’t really have the power to let you in the course like that, Mom. I think you must have gotten confused somewhere. Let me Google her name and see who she is anyway.”

  Roksana tapped a little on her computer, then fell silent. “Mom, she’s not the admissions officer. She’s the dean of the whole college.”

  That was that. It seemed God’s prompting was clear. I sold the boutique to my neighbor and banked enough money to last the full four years of college. As my start date in August approached, I started getting nervous, and when the course itself began, I started feeling a whole lot worse. I was forty-four years old and over twice the age of most of the others in the room. They did everything so fast, with their phones and their laptops and their Swedish accents that I still had
trouble following.

  The hardest thing of all was the first time I had to get up in front of the class and tell my story. I had ten minutes to speak and years’ worth of life to convey. I was in tears by the end of it and felt physically sick as I sat down. That night, I couldn’t sleep.

  I felt even worse the first time I was asked to preach and again share my testimony. My mom and dad were there this time. I knew that it would be the first time they had heard about Asghar’s violence, about the truth behind our leaving Iran, about Turkey and the prison and everything else.

  Again I felt sick as I finished and walked back to my seat. This time, I felt guilty as well. Should I have told them sooner? How would they cope?

  I didn’t see them until the end of the service. Both of them were silent, their faces drained in shock.

  When we hugged, none of us ever wanted to let go.

  Since those first couple of times when I finally broke my silence, I have told my story hundreds of times, maybe thousands. I have told it to royalty and to refugees. I have shared it with people who know nothing of Islam and people who know nothing of Jesus. I have spoken in hospitals and churches, in front of television cameras and alone with just one other person in my office sitting beneath the cross fixed to the wall.

  One of those times came when I sat opposite a surly looking seventeen-year-old. He had already told me that he would never go to church and had only agreed to visit me out of respect to the Swedish family who had adopted him.

  “I respect Mohammed,” he said. “There is nothing you can say that could change my mind. But you, sister, would you like to return to Islam? Allah can forgive you, and you can become a Muslim again.”

  “No,” I said, smiling a little but not so much as to give offense. “I understand what you are saying. We both know about Islam, so there’s really no point in our talking about it, is there? But I know about Jesus, and you don’t. So why don’t we start there? Would you like to know him?”