like Jesus I am so happy I came in contact with your word and I am shedding tears of joy because that was me in my hotel room on Wednesday October 3rd 2018 at approximately 11:45 p.m.

I was on my way to commit suicide after my wife and two children were killed in an auto crash.

Then I met a Christian worker just a few steps from the location where I had planned to kill myself.

He threw a Bible at me and ran away.

In my decision to just open the Bible and see what was there, the first passage I opened to and read changed my life immediately.

It was miraculous how I snapped out of my decision to die and returned home.

That was how Jesus changed my life.

But you deserve to hear the full story of how a Saudi prince dumped Allah for Jesus.

My name is Sultan bin Rashid also.

I am a prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

My father Rashid bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was senior prince in the royal family and a member of the inner circle of adviserss closest to the king.

I was born into a world that most human beings cannot even imagine.

A world where money has no meaning because there is so much of it that it becomes invisible like oxygen.

You do not think about oxygen because it is always there.

That is what wealth was like in my family.

It was not something we pursued or worried about or celebrated.

It simply existed around us in quantities so vast that the concept of not having enough was as foreign to me as the concept of breathing underwater.

I was born in the spring of 1982 in a private wing of the King Fisel Specialist Hospital in Riyad.

Not the public wing where ordinary Saudi citizens waited in crowded hallways, a private wing with marble floors and crystal chandeliers and nurses who spoke English with British accents and doctors who had been recruited from the finest medical institutions in Europe and America.

I was not a rebellious prince who chafed against religion or saw it as an obstacle to enjoying my privileged life.

I embraced Islam fully and sincerely.

I prayed five times a day with genuine devotion.

I fasted with discipline.

I performed Hajj Far.

The first time when I was 15, walking beside my father through the crowds of pilgrims in Mecca, feeling the weight and beauty of the ritual.

I gave charity generously, not because it was expected of a prince, but because I believed it was my duty before Allah.

I studied Islamic theology alongside my secular education.

I read the works of Iben Tamia and Al Gazali and Iban Caim.

I debated theological questions with visiting scholars who came to my father’s compound for dinner.

I was proud to be Muslim, proud to be Saudi, proud to be part of a family that I believed was chosen by Allah to guard the holy cities and lead the Muslim world.

My faith was real.

My devotion was sincere.

My relationship with Allah was the most important thing in my life.

Or so I thought.

until I discovered that there was something even more important.

Something I did not find in the Quran or the mosque or the palace or the prayers.

Something I found in the most unlikely place imaginable.

In the words of a man I had been taught was only a prophet.

Words that were handed to me by a stranger on a street in a town where I had gone to die.

I met Nura when I was 26 years old.

She was the daughter of Prince Fad bin Turkey al-Soud from a respected branch of the royal family based in the eastern province near Dahan.

Our marriage was arranged in the traditional way.

My father and her father discussed the union over several months.

Families exchanged visits.

Backgrounds were examined.

Compatibility was assessed.

But unlike many royal marriages where the bride and groom are strangers until the wedding night, I was allowed to meet Nura briefly at a family gathering before the engagement was finalized.

She walked into the room wearing a deep blue abaya with gold embroidery.

And when she lifted her knee up to greet the women in my family, I saw her face for the first time.

She had dark eyes that held a warmth I had never seen in anyone before, a quiet intelligence that revealed itself, not in loud words, but in the way she observed everything around her with calm attention.

She smiled at my mother and the room got brighter.

I know that sounds like poetry, but it is the truth.

The room actually felt different when she smiled.

I told my father that evening that I wanted to marry her.

He smiled and said he already knew.

We were married in the spring of 2010 at a ceremony in my father’s compound in Alderya.

Over a thousand guests attended, ministers and princes and diplomats and business leaders.

The celebration lasted 3 days.

But the moment I remember most is not the grand banquet or the fireworks or the music.

It is the moment after everyone left when Nora and I sat alone in the private quarters that had been prepared for us in the guest palace.

She looked at me and said, “Sultan, I want you to know that I did not marry your name or your money.

I married you and I want us to build something real.

Not a royal performance, a real marriage, a real family, a real life.

Those words planted themselves in my heart like seeds.

And over the next 8 years, they grew into the most beautiful garden I had ever known.

Nura was not just my wife.

She was my best friend, my counselor, my anchor, the person who saw through the title and the wealth and the protocol and loved the man underneath all of it.

The man I was not sure even existed until she found him.

Our son Fisizel was born in 2012.

Our daughter Lulua was born in 2014.

Fisel had my mother’s eyes and Norah’s smile.

He was serious for a little boy.

thoughtful.

He would sit on my lap during m prayer and try to mimic my movements.

Bowing when I bowed, prostrating when I prostrated, his tiny forehead pressing against the prayer rug beside mine.

Lulua was the opposite.

Wild and joyful and loud.

She ran through the palace like a small hurricane, laughing at everything.

She would grab my shimmok and wrap it around herself, pretending to be a princess, which of course she already was, but she did not understand that yet.

She just wanted to play.

Those two children became the center of my universe.

I had grown up in a world where fatherhood was largely ceremonial.

Royal fathers were distant figures who appeared at formal occasions and delegated parenting to nannies and tutors.

But Nora refused to let me be that kind of father.

She insisted that I be present, that I read to our children at bedtime, that I eat breakfast with them every morning, that I take them to the park and push them on the swings and get sand on my throbe and not care.

She taught me how to be a father by teaching me how to be human.

Those eight years from 2010 to 2018 were the happiest years of my life.

I still performed my duties within the royal family.

I attended meetings with my father.

I managed financial interests.

I traveled for diplomatic engagements.

But my heart was at home with Nora making tea in the kitchen of our private quarters while Fisizel did his homework at the table and Lulua drew pictures on the floor with crayons with my family praying together in our small prayer room with Nura reading Quran to the children before bed.

Her voice soft and melodic filling the room with words that felt alive when she spoke them.

I thanked Allah every single day for my family.

I prostrated in gratitude during every prayer.

I believed that my wife and children were the greatest blessing Allah had ever given me, greater than the palaces and the money and the power and the title.

They were proof that Allah loved me, that he had favored me above most men on earth.

I held on to that belief with everything I had.

And then on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2018, Allah took them away.

Nura was driving to her family’s estate in Dahan with Fisal and Lulua.

A trip she had made dozens of times.

The Riyad to Dam Highway stretching across the desert.

Four lanes of asphalt cutting through flat empty terrain.

She was an excellent driver, careful and attentive.

But the truck driver who crossed the median at 140 km per hour was not careful.

He had fallen asleep at the wheel.

His 18wheel cargo truck drifted across the center divider and hit Nar’s vehicle headon.

The impact was so violent that the car was compressed to half its original length.

The highway patrol told me later that the collision was not survivable.

Nura died instantly.

Faizal, who was sitting behind her, died instantly.

Lulua survived the initial impact but died in the helicopter on the way to King Fod Military Medical Complex in Dahran.

She was 4 years old.

She died alone in a helicopter surrounded by strangers with machines attached to her little body.

She died without her mother holding her hand.

She died without her father’s voice telling her everything was going to be okay.

She died and I was not there.

The phone call came at 4:47 p.

m.

I remember the exact time because I was looking at my watch when my phone rang.

I was in my father’s office in the compound discussing a real estate development in Nem.

My assistant interrupted the meeting, which he would never do unless it was critical.

He handed me the phone and I heard the voice of a highway patrol officer speaking in formal Arabic.

He said, “Your wife and children have been involved in an accident.

” I said, “How bad is it?” He paused.

In that pause, my entire life ended.

He said, “Sir, I am sorry.

I need you to come to King Fod Military Medical Complex in Daharan.

” Immediately, I dropped the phone.

My father looked at me and I saw his face change as he read the expression on mine.

I do not remember the drive to the airport.

I do not remember the flight to Dahan.

I do not remember landing or getting into the car that took me to the hospital.

I remember walking through the emergency department doors and a doctor meeting me in the corridor.

He had blood on his scrubs.

He looked at me with eyes that carried the weight of what he was about to say.

He said, “We did everything we could.

Your wife and son were killed on impact.

Your daughter sustained massive injuries.

She did not survive the transfer.

I am deeply sorry.

” I walked into the room where they had laid them out.

Three bodies on three tables covered in white sheets.

I pulled back the first sheet and saw Nura’s face.

bruised and swollen, but still beautiful, still the face that had smiled at my mother 10 years ago and made the room brighter.

I pulled back the second sheet and saw Fisel, my serious, thoughtful boy, who pressed his little forehead against the prayer rug beside mine.

I pulled back the third sheet and saw Lulua, my hurricane, my laughing girl, her tiny body broken and still.

I stood there looking at them and the world ceased to exist.

There was no hospital, no doctor, no highway patrol, no kingdom, no royal family, no Allah, nothing.

Just me and three white sheets and the absolute certainty that everything I had ever believed about God’s love and God’s favor and God’s blessings was a lie.

Because a God who loved me would not do this.

A God who favored me would not take a four-year-old girl and crush her in a helicopter while her father was sitting in a meeting discussing real estate.

I fell to my knees beside the tables and I screamed.

Not words, just sound.

Raw animal sound pouring out of a man whose soul had just been ripped out of his body and shredded in front of his eyes.

They buried them the next day.

All three in the royal cemetery in Riyad, side by side, wrapped in white cloth, lowered into the ground facing Makkah.

Hundreds of people attended, princes and ministers and diplomats.

The king himself sent condolences.

Imams recited prayers.

People quoted verses about patience and divine wisdom and the reward that awaits the faithful in paradise.

To Allah we belong and to him we return.

I heard those words a thousand times that day and each time they fell on my ears like stones dropping into an empty well.

No echo, no resonance, no comfort, just the hollow sound of words that meant nothing to a man who had just buried his entire world in the sand.

In the weeks that followed, I retreated into darkness.

I stopped attending meetings.

I stopped answering phone calls.

I stopped leaving my quarters in the compound.

I stopped eating regularly.

I lost 15 kg in the first month.

My father came to see me every day.

He sat beside my bed and quoted Quran and told me that Allah tests those he loves.

My mother came and wept and held my hand and prayed over me.

Shakes were brought to counsel me.

They told me to be patient.

They told me that Nura and Faizel and Lulua were in Janna.

They told me that my tears were natural, but that I must not question Allah’s decree.

I listened to all of them and felt nothing.

Their words were sounds without substance.

noises without meaning.

I prayed because they told me to pray.

I prostrated and recited the words, but my heart was a locked empty room with no one inside it.

I begged Allah to speak to me, to give me a sign that my family was safe, to give me one moment of peace, one second of comfort, one whisper of reassurance that there was a reason for what had happened.

But the silence was absolute.

The same God who I had thanked every day for my family had taken them without warning and now refused to say a single word about why.

The silence was not just painful.

It was cruel and it was killing me.

6 months after the accident, I made a decision that I told no one about.

I was going to end my life.

The thought had been growing inside me like a vine wrapping itself around a dead tree.

At first, it was just a whisper in the back of my mind during the darkest hours of the night when I lay in bed staring at the ceiling of my quarters in the compound.

What if I just stopped existing? What if I could close my eyes and never open them again and wake up wherever Nura and Fisizel and Lulua were? The whisper grew louder over the weeks and months until it became the only voice I could hear.

Louder than the shakes quoting Quran at my bedside.

Louder than my mother’s prayers.

Louder than my father’s counsel.

louder than the call to prayer echoing through the compound five times a day, reminding me of a God who had stopped answering.

The voice said, “There is nothing left for you here.

Your family is gone.

Your faith is broken.

Your prayers hit the ceiling and fall back on your head like dust.

You’re already dead inside.

Why not make it official?” But I could not simply kill myself in the compound.

A prince of the royal family found dead by his own hand would be a scandal of catastrophic proportions.

It would bring shame on my father and my mother and the entire also family.

It would become international news.

Investigations would be launched.

Questions would be asked.

The royal family would have to manage the crisis publicly while grieving privately.

I could not do that to them.

Despite everything I had lost, I still loved my parents enough to want to protect them from that kind of devastation.

So, I devised a plan.

A plan that would allow me to disappear from the world so completely that when I died, no one would connect my death to the royal family.

No one would know that a prince of Saudi Arabia had chosen to end his own life.

I would simply vanish, become no one, and then die as no one.

A nameless foreign worker found dead in a town that no one cared about.

An unremarkable death in an unremarkable place.

Barely worth a police report.

Certainly not worth a headline.

I began repairing in secret.

I stopped shaving.

I let my beard grow thick and unckempt, something no prince would ever do.

I cut my hair short, almost to the scalp.

I lost so much weight from months of barely eating that my face had already changed dramatically.

The rounded, well-fed features of a royal prince had been replaced by sharp, hollow cheekbones and sunken eyes ringed with dark circles.

I barely recognized myself when I looked in the mirror.

I looked like a man who had been working hard, labor in the Gulf sun for years.

A man whose body had been worn down by poverty and exhaustion.

Perfect.

That was exactly what I needed to look like.

I went to a cheap clothing store in the Albata district of Riyad, a neighborhood known for its large population of foreign workers from South Asia and Africa.

I bought the kind of clothes that migrant laborers wore.

Loose cotton pants, a faded shirt, worn sandals, a cheap digital watch.

I paid cash and spoke to the shopkeeper in broken Arabic with a slight accent mimicking the way I had heard Pakistani workers speak.

The shopkeeper did not look at me twice.

I was invisible.

It was working.

I packed a small bag with the worker’s clothes.

some cash and nothing else.

No phone, no identification, no credit cards, nothing that could connect me to my real identity.

On a Wednesday morning in September 2018, I waited until my father left for a meeting in Riyad and my mother was visiting relatives in Bida.

I walked out of the compound through a service entrance used by the household staff.

The guards at the service gate barely glanced at me.

They were trained to monitor vehicles and important visitors entering the compound.

A thin bearded man in laborers clothes walking out through the staff entrance did not warrant a second look.

I walked to a bus station in central Riyad and bought a ticket to Tabuk, a city in the northwest of Saudi Arabia near the Jordanian border.

Tabuk was far from Riyad, far from Jedha, far from Maka and Medina and Dahran and every center of power and influence in the kingdom.

It was a military city with a large army base, but also a significant population of foreign workers employed in construction and agriculture.

A foreign laborer would not attract attention there.

It was the perfect place to disappear.

The bus ride took 12 hours.

I sat in the back row next to a window, watching the Saudi desert scroll past.

Flat empty terrain stretching to the horizon in every direction.

Brown and beige and gold under a sky so blue it looked painted.

I had traveled this country hundreds of times in private jets and chauffeered limousines and helicopters.

I had never seen it from the window of a public bus.

The seats were worn and uncomfortable.

The air conditioning barely worked.

The bus smelled of sweat and cheap cologne and the fried food that passengers had brought in plastic bags.

I was surrounded by workers, Bangladeshies and Pakistanis and Egyptians heading to job sites in the north.

men who had left their families and their countries to earn money in a kingdom that used their labor but rarely acknowledged their humanity.

I sat among them and for the first time in my life I was one of them.

Not a prince, not a royal, not a man of power and privilege.

Just a body on a bus heading to a place where nobody knew his name and nobody would notice when he stopped breathing.

I arrived in Tabuk late at night and checked into a small hotel in the Almasive district near the commercial center.

The kind of hotel that rented rooms by the week to foreign workers.

Bare concrete walls.

A thin mattress on a metal frame.

A bathroom with a plastic bucket and a cold water tap.

No air conditioning, just a ceiling fan that wobbled and clicked with every rotation.

The man at the front desk asked for my identification.

I told him I had lost my eama, which is the residency card that all foreign workers in Saudi Arabia must carry.

He looked at me with suspicion, but when I placed a stack of cash on the counter, enough to cover a month’s rent in advance, his suspicion disappeared.

He handed me a key and pointed down a dark hallway.

I walked to my room, locked the door, and sat on the thin mattress, staring at the bare wall in front of me.

This was it.

This was where the prince of Saudi Arabia would spend his final days.

A concrete box in a cheap hotel in Tabuk.

No marble floors, no crystal chandeliers, no servants, no guards, no family, no god, just a man and a wall.

and the growing certainty that very soon he would not have to feel anything ever again.

I spent the next several days walking through Tabuk, learning the streets, observing the rhythms of the city.

I moved through the markets and the construction sites and the parks like a shadow.

Nobody looked at me.

Nobody spoke to me unless I initiated conversation.

I was just another brownskinned worker in dusty clothes moving through a city that had thousands of men just like me.

The anonymity was both liberating and devastating.

Liberating because for the first time in my life, I was free from the weight of my name and my title and my family’s expectations.

devastating because the anonymity confirmed what the voice in my head had been telling me for months.

You are nothing.

You have nothing.

No one will miss you.

No one will notice.

Just do it.

End it.

Stop the pain.

I scouted locations.

I found a stretch of highway outside the city where trucks moved fast and the lighting was poor.

I could walk into the road at night and it would look like an accident.

A foreign worker hit by a truck on a dark highway.

It happened all the time in Saudi Arabia.

Barely worth a mention in the local news.

No investigation, no questions, just a body collected by the municipality and buried in an unmarked grave.

The perfect invisible death for a man who had made himself invisible.

I chose a date.

A Friday.

I do not know why I chose Friday.

Maybe because it was the holy day in Islam and some part of me that still believed wanted to die on a day that meant something to the God who had abandoned me.

I woke up that Friday morning and performed woo for the last time.

I spread my prayer rug on the concrete floor of my hotel room and prayed fajar.

Not because I believed anyone was listening, but because my mother had taught me to pray before I could walk.

And even in the depths of my despair, the muscle memory of faith still moved my body through the motions.

I bowed.

I prostrated.

I pressed my forehead against the thin rug and whispered the words I had whispered.

10,000 times before.

Subhan Rabiel Allah.

Glory to my Lord the most high.

The words tasted like ashes in my mouth.

I stood up from the prayer rug and looked at myself in the cracked mirror above the sink.

Hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, cracked lips.

a stranger staring back at me wearing the body of a prince who had died six months ago in a hospital in Dahran standing beside three white sheets.

I folded the prayer rug for the last time.

I put on my sandals.

I walked out of the hotel into the warm morning air of Tabuk and I began walking toward the highway where I had planned to end my life.

The sun was already hot when I stepped outside, even though it was barely 7 in the morning.

Tabuk sits in the northwestern desert of Saudi Arabia, where the days are long and dry, and the heat presses down on you like a hand pushing you into the earth.

I walked through the al-Masif district toward the eastern edge of the city where the highway stretched out into the open desert toward hail.

I had scouted this route three times in the previous days.

I knew exactly where the road curved and where the lighting was poorest and where the trucks moved fastest.

I had calculated the timing.

I knew that the cargo trucks coming from the Jordanian border picked up speed on that stretch because the road was straight and empty and the drivers were trying to make up time.

A man stepping into the road at the right moment would not be seen until it was too late.

It would be quick.

It would look like an accident.

And by the time anyone found my body, there would be nothing to connect a dead foreign worker on a desert highway to a missing prince in Riad.

I walked steadily, my sandals slapping against the cracked pavement, my shadow stretching long and thin in front of me.

I felt nothing.

No fear, no sadness, no hesitation.

Just the flat, empty calm of a man who has already made his decision and is simply carrying it out.

I was passing through a narrow street in a neighborhood near the eastern commercial district when it happened.

The street was lined with small shops that had not yet opened for the day.

Metal shutters pulled down over doorways.

A few stray cats picking through garbage bags piled on the corner.

The smell of old cooking oil and dust.

A tea stall at the end of the street was the only thing open.

A Yemeni man was setting up plastic chairs and boiling water in a blackened kettle.

I walked past him without making eye contact.

And then I heard footsteps behind me.

Fast footsteps.

Someone running.

I did not turn around because I did not care.

Nothing behind me mattered.

Nothing ahead of me mattered.

I was a man walking toward his own death.

And the world around me had already ceased to exist.

But then something hit me in the chest.

Not a fist, not a hand.

something solid and rectangular.

It bounced off my chest and I instinctively caught it with both hands before it fell to the ground.

I looked down at the object in my hands and my brain took several seconds to process what I was seeing.

It was a book, small, worn.

The cover was faded and dogeared, dark blue with gold lettering in Arabic.

The lettering said, “Alkitab al- Mukadas, the Holy Bible.

” I looked up and saw a man running away from me down the street.

He was short and thin with dark skin and closecropped hair.

He wore the kind of clothes that Ethiopian or Eratrian workers wore in Saudi Arabia, cheap pants and a long-sleeved shirt despite the heat.

He was sprinting as fast as his legs could carry him.

He reached the corner of the street and turned and for a fraction of a second he looked back at me.

Our eyes met.

His face was a mixture of terror and something else.

Something I could not identify in that moment but would later understand was obedience.

the obedience of a man who had been told to do something by a force greater than his own fear and had done it despite every instinct telling him to run.

He disappeared around the corner and was gone.

I stood in the middle of that empty street holding a Bible in both hands staring at the corner where the man had vanished.

My mind was blank, completely empty.

I did not know what had just happened.

I did not know why a stranger had run up to me and thrown a Bible at my chest without saying a single word.

I did not know why he had chosen me out of all the people on that street.

I did not know anything except that I was standing in the dust holding the most illegal book in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the man who gave it to me was gone.

I should have dropped it.

I should have thrown it in the garbage pile on the corner and kept walking towards the highway.

I should have been angry.

A Christian book, an illegal book, a book that contradicted everything I had been taught since childhood.

A book from the religion that Islam said had been corrupted and superseded by the final revelation of the Quran.

Every instinct I had as a Muslim told me to get rid of it immediately.

But I did not.

Something stopped me.

Not a voice, not a feeling, just a pause, a hesitation in my forward momentum that I cannot explain with logic or reason.

I had been walking toward death with absolute certainty.

And now I was standing still, holding a book I had never held before.

And the certainty was gone.

Not replaced by hope or faith or any positive emotion.

Just gone.

Like a wind that had been blowing steadily for months, suddenly dying and leaving the air perfectly still.

I looked at the Bible in my hands.

Then I looked down the street toward the eastern edge of the city where the highway waited.

Then I looked at the Bible again and I thought to myself, “What difference does it make? I am going to be dead in an hour.

What harm can a book do to a dead man?” There was a small public park two blocks from where I was standing.

A patch of dry grass and a few struggling palm trees surrounded by a low concrete wall.

three metal benches painted green with the paint peeling off in long strips.

A rusted drinking fountain that probably had not worked in years.

I walked to the park and sat down on one of the benches.

The metal was already warm from the morning sun.

I placed the Bible on my lap and looked at it for a long time.

I had never held a Bible before.

I had never read a single verse from the Christian scriptures.

Everything I knew about Christianity came from Islamic education which taught that the Bible had been corrupted and that only the Quran contained the preserved word of God.

I had been told that Christians worshiped three gods instead of one.

That they had changed their scriptures to remove references to Muhammad.

that their religion was a distorted version of the truth that Islam had come to correct.

I believed all of this.

But sitting on that bench in a park in Tabuk on the morning I had chosen to die, I was not thinking about theology or doctrine or religious debates.

I was thinking about one thing.

What could this book possibly say that would matter to a man who has lost everything? I opened the Bible.

I did not choose a specific page.

I did not look at the table of contents or search for a particular book or chapter.

I simply opened it the way you might open a random page of any book, letting the pages fall where they wanted to fall.

The book opened to a page somewhere in the middle.

The text was in Arabic, small, neat print in two columns.

I looked at the top of the page and saw the heading Mazour 34.

Psalm 34.

I had never read a Psalm before.

I did not know what the Psalms were.

I did not know who wrote them or when or why.

I just started reading from the top of the page.

My eyes moved down the verses mechanically at first.

words without meaning entering my brain and passing through without leaving a mark.

And then I reached verse 18 and everything stopped.

The words on the page said alubas, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

I read those words and my hands began to shake.

Not from the heat, not from hunger, not from the physical weakness that months of starvation and grief had carved into my body.

My hands shook because those words had reached inside me and touched something that nothing else had been able to touch in 6 months of Islamic prayer and Quranic recitation and visits from shakes and condolences from princes and platitudes from everyone who had tried to help me.

Brokenhearted.

That was the word, the exact word for what I was.

Not sad, not grieving, not struggling.

Brokenhearted.

My heart was broken, shattered into pieces, so small that no amount of prayer or fasting or pilgrimage or charity could put them back together.

And this verse was saying that God was close to people like me.

Not distant, not silent, not waiting on the other side of a wall of ritual and performance.

Close.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

I read the verse again, then again, then again, five times, 10 times.

Each time the words sang deeper into the shattered landscape of my soul, like rain falling on cracked desert earth.

The cracks did not close.

The ground did not heal, but the rain was there, falling softly into places that had been dry for so long, I had forgotten what moisture felt like.

I sat on that green metal bench in a park in Tabuk, holding an illegal Bible in my trembling hands with tears running down my hollow cheeks and I whispered the words out loud.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

Is that true? Are you close to me right now? Because I cannot feel anyone.

I cannot feel anything.

I am broken and crushed and I was walking to my death 5 minutes ago.

If you are close then prove it.

Show me because I have been begging Allah to speak to me for 6 months and he has said nothing.

I sat on that bench for over an hour.

I did not move.

I did not turn to another page.

I just sat there with the Bible open on my lap reading that single verse over and over while tears fell on the thin pages and smudged the ink.

Something was happening inside me that I could not explain or control.

The flat empty calm that had carried me toward the highway was gone.

In its place was something raw and painful and alive, like a wound being opened so it could be cleaned.

It hurt, but it was a different kind of hurt than the grief.

The grief was a dead weight pressing me into the ground.

This was a sharp living pain that felt like it had a purpose, like something was cutting away dead tissue to reach the living flesh underneath.

I did not understand it.

I did not trust it.

But I could not deny that for the first time in 6 months, something had penetrated the wall of numbness I had built around myself.

And it was not the Quran.

It was not a shake’s sermon.

It was not a prayer toward Makkah.

It was a single verse from a book I had been taught my entire life to reject.

I closed the Bible and held it against my chest.

I stood up from the bench and instead of walking east toward the highway, I turned west and walked back toward my hotel.

I was not healed.

I was not saved.

I was not converted, but I was alive.

And for reasons I could not yet understand, I wanted to keep reading.

I walked back to my hotel room and locked the door behind me.

I sat on the thin mattress and placed the Bible on the bed beside me and stared at it for a long time.

The faded blue cover with the gold Arabic lettering, Al-Qitab al-mukadas, the Holy Bible.

This book was illegal in the country my family ruled.

Possessing it could get a foreign worker deported.

Distributing it could result in imprisonment.

for a Saudi citizen reading it was an act of apostasy punishable by death.

And here it was sitting on my bed in a cheap hotel room in Tabuk, placed there by the trembling hands of a prince who should have been dead on a highway 30 minutes ago.

I picked it up and opened it again, not to Psalm 34 this time.

I turned the pages slowly looking at the headings trying to understand the structure of this book I had never been allowed to read.

I saw names I recognized from the Quran.

Ibraim, Musa, Dawood, Suliman, Isa.

They were all here but in a different context telling stories I had never heard.

Revealing dimensions of these figures that Islam had never shown me.

I turned to the book of Psalms because that was where the verse that stopped me from dying had come from.

If that single verse had reached through the wall of my numbness, then maybe there were others.

Maybe this book had more words that could touch the place inside me that nothing else could reach.

I started reading from the beginning of Psalm 23.

The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

He restores my soul.

The words were simple, almost childlike in their simplicity.

But they carried a weight that pressed against my chest and made my breathing shallow.

He restores my soul.

I read that phrase and something cracked inside me the way ice cracks on a frozen lake when the spring sun begins to warm it.

not breaking apart yet, just cracking, letting light through for the first time in months.

I kept reading, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

” I stopped breathing when I read those words.

The valley of the shadow of death.

That was where I had been living for six months.

Walking through a valley so dark and so deep that I could not see the sky above me or the ground beneath me.

Just darkness in every direction.

And this verse was saying that even there, even in the deepest, darkest, most hopeless place a person could be, God was present.

You are with me.

Not you were with me in the past.

Not you will be with me in the future.

You are with me.

Present tense.

Right now in this hotel room, in this valley, in this darkness, you are here.

I turned more pages.

I found Psalm 147:3.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

There it was again.

The same theme, the same God reaching toward the same kind of people.

The broken ones, the wounded ones, the ones whose hearts had been shattered into so many pieces that they could not imagine being whole again.

This God was not standing at a distance evaluating their performance.

He was not checking a ledger of good deeds and bad deeds to determine if they deserved his attention.

He was healing, binding up wounds, coming close to the broken and doing the work of restoration with his own hands.

This was not the God I had been taught about in Islam.

The Allah I knew was magnificent and powerful and sovereign, but he was also distant.

He commanded from above.

He judged from above.

He blessed and punished from above.

But he did not come down.

He did not kneel beside the brokenhearted and bind their wounds.

He did not walk through the valley of death with you.

He watched from his throne and decided whether your suffering was a test or a punishment.

And you were expected to endure it either way without complaint.

But this God, this God in the Psalms, he was different.

He was close.

He was personal.

He was present in the pain, not above it.

I read through the night.

I did not sleep.

I did not eat.

I sat on that mattress with my back against the concrete wall and I turned page after page of the Bible by the dim light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

I found the book of Isaiah and in chapter 41 10 I read words that made me press the book against my face and weep into its pages.

So do not fear, for I am with you.

Do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you and help you.

I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Do not fear, for I am with you.

Every verse was saying the same thing in different ways.

I am here.

I am with you.

You are not alone.

I see your pain.

I have not abandoned you.

Do not be afraid.

It was as if the entire book had been written for a man sitting on a thin mattress in a hotel room in Tabuk in September 2018 who had been walking toward his death 2 hours ago.

as if every word had been placed on every page thousands of years in advance, knowing that one day a broken prince with hollow eyes and trembling hands would open this book and need these exact words at this exact moment.

The precision of it was terrifying and beautiful and impossible to dismiss as coincidence.

The next morning, I did something I had never done before.

I opened my laptop.

I had brought it with me out of habit, though I had not used it since leaving Riyad.

I connected to the hotel’s weak Wi-Fi signal and searched for Bible reading plans in Arabic.

I did not know what I was looking for exactly, but the verse from Psalm 34 had been like a single drop of water on a parched tongue, and I needed more.

I needed structure.

I needed guidance.

I needed someone to show me how to read this book that was so different from the Quran in its structure and style and voice.

I found a website that offered reading plans organized by topic.

There was a plan called words of comfort for the grieving, another called finding hope in dark times, another called the promises of God.

I selected all three.

Each plan assigned daily readings from different parts of the Bible.

Short passages followed by brief reflections and prayers.

I started with the first day of the grief plan.

It directed me to the book of Matthew 11 28.

Come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened and I will give you rest.

I read those words and my body went rigid.

Come to me.

not go to a mosque, not perform a ritual, not complete a pilgrimage, not earn enough good deeds to tip the scale in your favor.

Come to me.

It was a personal invitation, direct, intimate, from a person to a person, not from a deity on a throne to a servant on the ground.

From a God who was reaching out his hand and saying, “I see you.

I see your exhaustion.

I see the weight you are carrying and I want to take it from you.

Just come to me.

In all my years of Islamic practice, no verse in the Quran had ever spoken to me like this.

The Quran commanded, it instructed, it warned, it promised reward for obedience and punishment for disobedience.

But it never said, “Come to me in this way.

” It never offered rest.

It never acknowledged the weight.

It never reached out a hand toward a drowning man and said, “Let me pull you out.

” Islam told me to swim harder, to pray more, to fast more, to give more, to do more, always more.

And if I drowned, it was because I had not done enough.

But these words, these words from Jesus, they said, “Stop swimming.

Stop striving.

Stop drowning.

just come to me and I will give you rest.

Over the next two weeks, I followed the reading plans religiously.

Every morning, I woke up and read the assigned passages.

I read the Psalms and the prophets and the Gospels.

I discovered the voice of Jesus for the first time.

Not the Isa of the Quran who was mentioned briefly and respectfully but kept at a distance.

the Jesus of the Bible who spoke with an authority and a tenderness that I had never encountered in any religious text.

I read John 14 27 where Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you.

My peace I give you.

I do not give to you as the world gives.

Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

Peace, not the absence of problems, not the resolution of suffering.

Peace in the middle of the storm.

Peace that existed independent of circumstances.

Peace that the world could not give and the world could not take away.

I had been searching for this peace for 6 months in every mosque and every prayer and every verse of the Quran I could find.

And here it was in the words of a man I had been taught was merely a prophet offering it freely to anyone who would receive it.

I read Revelation 21:4.

And my heart stopped.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.

No more death.

No more mourning.

No more crying.

No more pain.

I thought of Nura.

I thought of Fisizel pressing his little forehead against the prayer rug beside mine.

I thought of Lulua running through the palace like a hurricane.

I thought of them wrapped in white cloth being lowered into the sand.

And for the first time since the accident, I felt something other than despair.

When I thought of them, I felt hope, fragile, tiny, like a candle flame in a windstorm, but real.

The possibility that death was not the end.

That somewhere beyond this broken world, there was a place where tears were wiped away and pain ceased to exist and that my family might be there, waiting, whole, alive, in the presence of a God who kept his promises.

Then I read John 10:10 and everything shifted inside me.

Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.

The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.

” I sat there staring at those words and I realized with a clarity that cut through every layer of fog in my mind that something had been trying to steal my life.

Not just my physical life on the highway, my entire life, my joy, my faith, my will to exist.

Something had been systematically destroying me from the inside out for 6 months.

And I had been cooperating with it.

I had been walking toward the highway like a lamb walking toward slaughter, believing that death was my only option.

But Jesus was saying there was another option.

Life, full life, not empty religious performance, not hollow ritual, not the dead mechanical faith I had been practicing since the accident.

life, real breathing, pulsing, joyful life offered freely by a God who came not to judge me or test me or punish me, but to give me life to the full.

I read Romans 8 28 and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

In all things, not in some things, not in good things, in all things.

Even in a car crash on the Riad to Dam Highway, even in three white sheets in a hospital room.

Even in 6 months of darkness and silence and the walk toward a highway where I planned to die, God was working.

Even when I could not see him, even when I could not feel him, even when I accused him of abandoning me, he was there working in the rubble of my shattered life, building something I could not yet see.

That night, I was reading the Gospel of John, chapter after chapter, the words of Jesus flowing through me like a river of light cutting through a landscape of darkness.

And somewhere around midnight, sitting on the floor of my hotel room with the Bible in my lap and the dim bulb uh flickering above me, something broke open inside me that I can only describe as a dam collapsing.

every wall I had built, every defense I had constructed, every barrier between me and the raw bleeding core of my grief and my longing um and my desperate need for God.

All of it collapsed at once and through the breach poured a flood of something I had not felt since before the accident.

Joy, not happiness, not relief, not the temporary lift of a good mood.

Joy, deep, irrational, inexplicable.

Joy that had no business existing in a man sitting on the floor of a cheap hotel room in Tabuk who had been planning to kill himself 12 days ago.

Joy that made absolutely no sense in the context of my circumstances, but it was there filling me, overflowing, pushing out the darkness, pushing out the death, pushing out the silence.

I fell sideways off my sitting position onto the floor and I wept harder than I wept in the hospital in the Aan harder than I wept at the funeral.

Harder than I wept on any of the thousand nights I had spent staring at the ceiling begging Allah to speak.

But these were not tears of grief.

These were tears of a man who had been dead and was coming back to life.

a man who had been drowning and had finally grabbed the hand that was reaching for him.

I lay on that concrete floor crying and laughing at the same time and I said words I had never said before.

I said, “Jesus, I said, “Thank you.

” I said, “I do not understand any of this, but I know you are real because no dead words on a dead page could do what these words have done inside me.

You are alive.

You are here and you just saved my life.

” I stayed in Tabuk for three more weeks after that night on the floor.

I was not the same man who had checked into that hotel room planning to die.

Something fundamental had shifted inside me.

The darkness was not completely gone.

The grief was not erased.

I still thought about Nora and Fisizel and Lulua every single hour of every single day.

I still felt the weight of their absence pressing on my chest when I woke up in the morning and reaching for the empty side of the bed where Nora used to sleep.

But the weight was different now.

It was not crushing me into the ground anymore.

It was sitting on my shoulders and I was standing under it.

Bent but not broken.

Carrying it but not being buried by it.

And the difference was the words.

the words of Jesus that I read every morning and every evening and sometimes in the middle of the night when the grief surged and the old darkness tried to creep back in.

Every time I felt the shadow returning, I opened the Bible and read, “He restores my soul.

Come to me and I will give you rest.

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

The words were like medicine administered directly to the wound.

They did not make the wound disappear, but they kept it from killing me.

During those three weeks, I read the entire New Testament cover to cover, Matthew to Revelation.

I read about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.

I read about his baptism in the Jordan River.

I read about his miracles, healing the blind, raising the dead.

feeding thousands with a few loaves of bread.

I read about the way he treated people that the religious leaders despised.

Tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, foreigners.

He did not condemn them.

He did not lecture them.

He ate with them.

He touched them.

He looked at them with eyes that saw not their sin but their suffering.

He saw people the way I had never seen anyone in my entire life as a prince.

Not as categories or classes or ranks, as souls.

Precious, irreplaceable souls that mattered to God individually.

I read about his death on the cross, the nails through his hands and feet, the crown of thorns, the soldiers mocking him, the sky going dark, and his words from the cross that shattered me completely.

Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.

A man being tortured to death, asking God to forgive the men who were killing him.

I had never encountered anything like this in my entire religious education.

Islam taught strength and justice and retribution.

Jesus taught forgiveness and grace and love for your enemies.

The contrast was so stark, so absolute, so fundamentally different that I could not reconcile the two.

And I did not want to because the God I met in the Bible was the God who had reached into my hotel room and pulled me back from the highway.

The God of the Quran had been silent for 6 months while I drowned.

The God of the Bible spoke through every single page.

I knew I needed to go back to Riyad eventually.

I could not stay in a hotel room in Tabuk forever reading the Bible and hiding from my family.

My parents were certainly searching for me by now.

A prince does not disappear for weeks without the entire security apparatus of the kingdom being activated.

I needed to make a decision about what to do next.

But before I returned, I did one more thing.

I read the book of Jeremiah.

And in chapter 29 11, I found the verse that gave me the courage to face what was coming.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

Plans to give you hope and a future.

Hope and a future.

Two things I had been certain I would never have again.

Two things that had died on the Riad to Dam Highway with my family.

But here was God declaring through a prophet who lived thousands of years ago that he had plans for me, not plans to harm me, plans to give me hope, plans to give me a future.

I did not fully understand how that was possible.

I did not know what that future looked like, but I believed it.

For the first time since the accident, I believed that my story was not over.

That God was not finished with me, that the broken pieces of my life were not garbage to be swept away, but raw materials for something new that only he could build.

I left Tabuk on a Monday morning.

I took a bus back to Riyad, the same 12-hour ride through the desert.

But this time, I was not a dead man traveling to his grave.

I was a living man traveling toward an unknown future with a Bible hidden in his bag and the words of Jesus burning in his heart.

When I arrived in Riyad, I did not go to the royal compound.

I went to an apartment I owned in the Allaya district that I had used occasionally for private meetings, a place my family knew about but rarely visited.

I cleaned myself up.

I shaved the unckempt beard into something presentable.

I cut my hair properly.

I put on clean clothes and I looked at myself in the mirror.

I did not look like a prince yet.

The weight loss and the months of suffering had carved deep lines into my face that would take time to fill.

But my eyes were different.

The hollow emptiness that had stared back at me from the cracked mirror in the tabbook hotel was gone.

In its place was something fragile but real.

Life, the faintest spark of life in eyes that had been dead for 6 months.

I did not go to my family.

Not yet.

I was not ready to face them as a follower of Jesus.

I needed time to understand what had happened to me.

I needed to grow stronger in this new faith before I could withstand the hurricane that my confession would unleash.

Instead, I contacted a Christian organization outside Saudi Arabia through an encrypted messaging application I had found during my weeks of online Bible study in Tabuk.

I told them I was a Saudi citizen who had recently come to faith in Jesus Christ.

I did not reveal my royal identity.

I simply said I needed guidance and community and help understanding the Bible.

They connected me with a mentor, a former Muslim from Egypt named Butros, who had converted to Christianity 15 years earlier and now helped new believers from the Muslim world navigate their faith.

But became my lifeline over the following weeks.

We spoke every night through encrypted voice calls.

He taught me about grace and salvation and the Holy Spirit.

He answered my questions with patience and scripture.

He prayed with me.

He wept with me when I told him about Nura and Faizal and Lulua.

He said, “Brother, the God who saved you from that highway is the same God who is holding your family in his arms right now.

And one day you will see them again, not in a grave, in glory.

” After 2 months of secret disciplehip, I knew I could not stay hidden any longer.

The words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew kept echoing in my mind.

Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my father in heaven.

But whoever denies me before men, I will deny before my father in heaven.

I could not acknowledge Jesus in private while denying him in public.

I could not read his words in secret while performing Islamic prayers in front of my family.

The double life was unsustainable.

And more than that, it was dishonest.

Jesus had saved my life with his words.

He had pulled me back from the age of death.

He had poured joy into a heart that had been empty for 6 months.

He deserved more than secrecy.

He deserved my voice, my name, my testimony, even if it cost me everything I had left.

I contacted the Christian organization again.

This time I told them who I really was.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted a long time.

Then Bro said, “Brother, do you understand what will happen if you go public?” I said, “Yes.

” He said, “They will take everything.

Your title, your inheritance, your citizenship, your freedom, possibly your life.

” I said, “I know, but Jesus gave me something they cannot take, and I owe him everything.

” They arranged a secure recording location outside Saudi Arabia.

I traveled to Bahrain on a private trip that I told my family was for medical follow-up related to the weight loss and depression.

In a small apartment in the Joffer district of Manama, I sat in front of a camera and I told my story.

I said, “My name is Sultan bin Rashid al-Saud.

I am a prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

6 months ago, I lost my wife and my two children in a car accident.

The grief destroyed me.

I stopped living.

I stopped believing.

I stopped wanting to exist.

I planned to kill myself on a highway in Tabuk disguised as a foreign worker so that no one would know a prince had taken his own life.

And on the morning I was walking to my death, a stranger ran up to me on the street and threw a Bible into my hands without saying a word.

I sat on a park bench and opened that Bible.

And the first verse I read changed everything.

It said, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

” I paused and picked up the same Bible, the same faded blue cover, the same dogeared pages.

I opened it to Psalm 34, and I read verse 18 out loud on camera, and I broke down.

The tears came flooding out of me the same way they had on the floor of the hotel room in Tabuk.

I wept on camera and I did not try to stop it.

I let the world see a prince crying over the words of Jesus because those words deserved to be cried over.

When I composed myself, I continued.

I said I read the words of Jesus for the first time in my life and they did what? years of Islamic prayer and Quranic recitation and visits from shakes and consultations with scholars could never do.

They reached into the darkest, most broken, most hopeless place inside me and they pulled me back to life.

I read, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened and I will give you rest.

” And for the first time in 6 months, I felt rest.

I read, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

” And for the first time, I felt that someone was actually with me in the valley, not watching from above, walking beside me.

I read, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

” And for the first time since the accident, I felt hope that I would see my wife and my children again, not in a grave, in glory.

The video was uploaded, and within 48 hours, it had crossed 25 million views.

a Saudi prince, a member of the royal family, crying on camera while reading the Bible.

It was the kind of story that the internet devours.

Saudi state media responded with controlled fury.

They issued a statement saying that no prince by my name existed in the royal family records.

My father released a private statement through royal channels disowning me.

My name was removed from the family registry.

My financial accounts inside the kingdom were frozen.

My properties were seized.

The prince who had everything was now a man with nothing.

Nothing except a faded blue Bible with tear stained pages and a heart that had been brought back from the dead by the words of a carpenter from Nazareth who lived 2,000 years ago.

The messages came by the thousands from Saudi Arabia, from the Gulf States, from Egypt and Jordan and Iraq and Pakistan and Indonesia, from Muslims around the world who were struggling with grief and depression and the suffocating silence of a god who never seemed to speak back.

Messages from men and women who said I was going to kill myself until I watched your video.

Messages from people who said, “I have been reading the Quran for years and feeling nothing.

And your testimony made me pick up a Bible for the first time.

Messages from mothers who had lost children and said, “For the first time, someone showed me a God who weeps with me instead of testing me.

” One message that broke me completely came from a woman in Jedha who said I lost my daughter 3 years ago and I have been dead inside ever since.

I watched you read that verse and cry and something cracked open in my chest.

I found a Bible online and I read those same words.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

And I felt him for the first time in 3 years.

I felt God not above me, beside me, close.

Thank you, Prince Sultan.

You saved my life the way Jesus saved yours.

I want to end by reading one final verse, the verse that gave me the courage to face the future.

Jeremiah 29 11.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

Plans to give you hope and a future.

I was a prince with everything the world could offer and I wanted to die.

Then I read the words of Jesus for the first time and I wanted to live.

He did not give me back my family.

He gave me something my family could never give me.

He gave me himself and he is enough.

He is enough.

If this testimony touched your heart, write in the comments, he is enough.

Let it be a declaration over your life.

Let it be a lifeline thrown to someone drowning in grief or depression or hopelessness right now.

You are not alone.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

He saved me on a bench into book with a Bible thrown by a stranger.

And he will save you too.

Just open the book, read his words and let him do what only he can do.

He is enough.