Pay attention to the man in traditional clothing holding the book above the flames.

His name is Sharif and he’s leading this Bible burning protest in Paris.

Watch closely.

Something extraordinary is about to happen that will change everything.

Notice how he suddenly drops the book and falls to his knees.

My name is Sharif.

I’m 34 years old.

On September 2nd, 2023, I was burning Bibles in the streets of Paris.

I thought I was defending Islam and fighting against Christian conversion.

I had no idea Jesus was about to completely shatter my world.

I arrived in France when I was 19, fleeing poverty and violence from a homeland that had nothing left to offer me.

My pockets were empty, my French was broken, and my heart was filled with dreams that seemed impossibly distant.

The boat journey across the Mediterranean had been terrifying, cramped with dozens of other desperate souls seeking a better life.

When I finally stepped onto French soil, I thought I had reached paradise.

But paradise quickly revealed itself to be a harsh reality.

For 15 years, I watched my community struggle against a culture that seemed determined to erase everything we held sacred.

We were the invisible people, cleaning offices at night, working construction jobs that French workers wouldn’t take, sending every spare euro back to families we might never see again.

Our children spoke French better than Arabic, and that terrified us.

We were losing ourselves piece by piece.

The apartment blocks where we lived were concrete monuments to forgotten promises.

Families of six squeezed into spaces meant for two.

The elevators rarely worked.

Graffiti covered every surface and the police came only when there was trouble.

We created our own world within this walls, speaking our language, cooking our food, practicing our faith as best we could in a place that felt increasingly hostile to who we were.

And every Friday at the mosque, we heard the same warnings.

France wanted to change us, to strip away our identity and make us into something we were never meant to be.

The Imam spoke passionately about preserving our traditions, protecting our children from Western corruption and standing firm against those who would lead us astray.

These weren’t just sermons to me.

They were battle cries.

I became fiercely protective of everything I believed Islam represented.

When I saw French teenagers drinking and partying, I felt disgusted by what I saw as moral decay.

When I heard about French laws restricting religious expression, I felt my blood boil with righteous anger.

This wasn’t the freedom we had been promised.

This was cultural warfare, and I was ready to fight.

The first time I encountered Christian missionaries in our neighborhood, I I thought it was a joke.

Two young American women, barely out of college, standing on street corners with boxes of Arabic Bibles and warm smiles.

They spoke broken Arabic and handed out literature about Jesus Christ to anyone who would take it.

Most people ignored them or politely declined.

But something about their presence ignited a fury in me that I had never experienced.

Ask yourself this question.

Have you ever felt so threatened by something that had consumed your every thought? That’s what happened to me.

These missionaries weren’t just sharing their faith.

In my mind, they were attacking everything sacred about my identity.

They were trying to steal the souls of my people to convert vulnerable immigrants who were already struggling to maintain their cultural identity.

I started organizing resistance within our community.

I spoke at the mosque about the danger these Christians posed to our children and our faith.

I convinced other men to join me in confronting these missionaries whenever they appeared in our neighborhoods.

We would form groups and surround them not violently but intimidatingly.

We would debate them loudly in Arabic knowing they couldn’t respond adequately.

We would shame any Muslim who took their literature.

But the missionaries kept coming.

Different faces, same message, same boxes of Bibles.

The more we resisted, the more determined they seemed to become.

Word spread through our community about conversion attempts, about young Muslims being invited to Christian events, about families being torn apart by this foreign religion.

The Imam’s sermons became more intense, and my anger grew deeper.

I felt invisible, unwanted.

It constantly defending our faith against people who seemed to have unlimited resources and unwavering determination.

France had promised us opportunity and freedom, but what we found was a society that tolerated us at best and actively sought to change us at worst.

The Christians were just the most visible symbol of this assault on our identity.

My brother and cousin felt the same rage.

We would spend hours talking about the injustice of it all.

Here we were, working the jobs French people didn’t want, paying taxes, following laws, and still being treated like we needed to be saved from ourselves.

The arrogance of it was overwhelming.

Did these Christians really think our 1,400year-old faith was somehow inferior to theirs? Did they really believe they had something we needed? I began to see every Christian symbol as a personal insult.

in churches that had stood for centuries suddenly felt like monuments to colonialism.

The crosses on top of buildings seemed to mock our minouetses.

Even French Christians who had never spoken to a Muslim became enemies in my mind simply because they represented a religion that was actively trying to destroy mine.

The internet only fueled my anger.

I found videos of Muslims converting to Christianity, testimonies of former believers who claimed Jesus had changed their lives.

Each story felt like a betrayal, not just of Islam, but of everyone who had suffered and sacrificed to preserve our faith through centuries of persecution.

How could they abandon the religion of their ancestors for the religion of their oppressors? I started documenting every missionary encounter, taking photos of the literature they distributed, recording their conversations when possible.

I wanted evidence of their conversion tactics, proof of what I believed was a coordinated assault on Muslim communities throughout France.

In my mind, I was a guardian, a protector, a warrior for truth against deception.

When Christian missionaries started distributing Bibles in our neighborhoods more frequently, I saw it as an escalation, a declaration of war.

This wasn’t casual evangelism anymore.

This was a systematic campaign to convert vulnerable Muslims.

And I was determined to stop it.

I had no idea that my resistance was about to lead me into a confrontation that would change everything I thought I knew about God, about truth, and about myself.

I became the voice of resistance in our mosque.

At the man others looked to when they needed someone to stand up against what we all believed was cultural and spiritual aggression.

I was ready for battle.

I was prepared to defend Islam at any cost.

I just never imagined that the battle would ultimately be for my own soul.

The protest started peacefully on that September afternoon, just like dozens of others we had organized before.

We gathered in the public square near the train station, the same place where French citizens came to voice their political opinions.

If they could use this space for their causes, we reasoned, then we had every right to use it for ours.

About 30 of us showed up initially, holding handmade signs written in both Arabic and French.

Our message was simple.

Respect our faith.

Stop the conversion attempts.

Leave our community alone.

I stood at the front of the group, leading chance that echoed off the surrounding buildings.

My voice was from previous protests, but my passion was stronger than ever.

The other men followed my lead, raising their fists and repeating the phrases I called out.

We weren’t being violent or threatening anyone.

We were simply making our voices heard in the only way we knew how.

French democracy was supposed to protect minority voices, and we were exercising that right.

The afternoon sun was beating down on us as we marched in a circle, our signs held high, our voices unified in resistance.

Passers by stopped to watch, some nodding in understanding, others shaking their heads in disapproval.

A few police officers stood at a distance, monitoring the situation, but not interfering.

Everything was proceeding exactly as we had planned.

It It was going to be another peaceful demonstration that would send a clear message to the Christian missionaries.

We would not be silent while they attacked our faith.

But then someone appeared at the edge of our gathering carrying two large cardboard boxes.

I didn’t recognize him at first, but my brother called out that it was Ahmed, a man from our neighborhood who worked at a local charity.

He was breathing heavily, as if he had been running, and his face carried an expression of excitement mixed with anger.

He set the boxes down on the pavement with a heavy thud that immediately caught everyone’s attention.

Ahmed opened the first box and pulled out a handful of books.

Even from a distance, I could see what they were.

Bibles.

Dozens of them.

Arabic translations with glossy covers.

And the same ones the missionaries had been distributing in our neighborhoods for months.

The crowd gathered around Ahmed as he explained how he had intercepted these books from a Christian organization that was planning to distribute them outside our children’s schools.

The next morning, the moment those Bibles appeared, something shifted in the atmosphere of our protest.

The energy that had been focused and controlled suddenly became wild and unpredictable.

Men who had been calmly holding signs began shouting with renewed fury.

The sight of those books sitting there in boxes like weapons waiting to be deployed against our community ignited a rage that I had never witnessed before.

Not even in our most passionate protests.

My cousin grabbed one of the Bibles and held it above his head and shouting about the audacity of these Christians who thought they could poison our children’s minds.

Other men began pulling books from the boxes, examining them with disgust, reading passages aloud in mocking tones.

The peaceful demonstration we had planned was transforming into something much more intense, much more personal.

Someone suggested we should burn them.

The idea came from the back of the crowd, but it spread through our group like wildfire.

Yes, we should burn these instruments of spiritual warfare.

We should send a message that could not be misunderstood or ignored.

These Christians wanted to destroy our faith with their false gospel so we would destroy their propaganda with righteous fire.

I found myself caught up in the excitement of the moment.

This wasn’t planned, but it felt absolutely right.

These books represented everything we had been fighting against for months.

They were symbols of cultural imperialism, religious arrogance, and spiritual colonialism.

Burning them would be an act of liberation, a declaration that we would not be conquered or converted.

Ahmed disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a metal trash barrel and some lighter fluid.

The crowd erupted with approval as he set up what would become our altar of resistance.

Men began feeding Bibles into the barrel while Ahmed doused them with the flammable liquid.

The symbolism was powerful and intoxicating.

We were literally destroying the tools our enemies planned to use against us.

When Ahmed lit the first match and dropped it into the barrel, the flames shot up with a whoosh that sent the crowd into a frenzy of celebration.

The Bibles caught fire immediately, their pages curling and blackening as they burned.

The smell of burning paper filled the air, and we all cheered as if we had just won a great victory.

It felt like we were finally fighting back instead of just complaining.

I grabbed book after book from the remaining boxes, throwing them into the growing fire with increasing enthusiasm.

Each Bible I burned felt like a personal triumph.

A blow struck against the forces that wanted to destroy everything I held sacred.

My brother and cousin were doing the same, laughing and shouting as we fed the flames with what we saw as enemy propaganda.

The crowd around the fire grew larger as words spread through the neighborhood about what we were doing.

More men arrived, bringing their own anger and their own stories about encounters with Christian missionaries, and some brought additional Bibles they had collected from previous missionary visits.

The fire grew hotter and higher as we continued our ritualistic destruction of these books.

I felt powerful, righteous, like I was finally doing something meaningful to protect Islam and defend my community.

The heat from the flames warmed my face, and the approval of my brothers warmed my heart.

We were united in purpose, united in action, united in our determination to send an unmistakable message to anyone who would try to steal our faith.

Look back on your own life for a moment.

Have you ever been part of something that felt completely justified in the moment, but terrifying to remember later? That’s exactly where I was standing as I reached for what would be my final Bible to throw into those flames.

And I had no idea that my entire worldview was about to be shattered in the most dramatic way imaginable.

I thought I was defending God, but I was about to discover that I had been fighting against him all along.

I reached into the box one more time, my hands already blackened from the smoke and ash of the burning Bibles.

The fire was roaring now, fed by dozens of books and the cheers of my brothers surrounding me.

I felt invincible, righteous, completely justified in what we were doing.

This was our moment of victory against the forces trying to destroy our faith.

I grabbed what I thought would be just another book to feed the flames.

But the moment my fingers made contact with its cover, everything changed.

The book felt different from all the others I had touched that day.

It wasn’t the texture or the temperature that was unusual.

It was something I cannot adequately describe in words.

Something that seemed to pulse through my fingertips and travel up my arms like electricity.

Not painful electricity, but a current of energy that made every nerve in my body suddenly alert and aware.

I tried to dismiss the sensation, telling myself it was just adrenaline from the excitement of the protest.

But as I lifted the Bible above the flames, preparing to throw it into the fire like I had done dozens of times before, my arm suddenly felt impossibly heavy.

It was as if the book weighed 1,000 lb, as if some invisible force was preventing me from completing the motion I had made so easily just moments earlier.

My muscles strained against this resistance.

But the harder I tried to move, the more impossible it became.

The electricity I’d felt in my fingertips was now coursing through my entire body.

My hands began to shake uncontrollably, and I could feel sweat breaking out across my forehead, despite the fact that it wasn’t particularly warm outside.

The book trembled in my grasp, but I couldn’t let go of it.

My fingers seemed frozen around its edges, as if they had been fused to the cover by some force beyond my understanding.

Around me, the celebration continued.

My brother was still throwing Bibles into the fire.

My cousin was leading chance.

And the other men were cheering with each book that went up in flames.

But their voices sounded distant to me now, muffled, as if I was hearing them through water or from a great distance.

The world around me was becoming strangely quiet while chaos raged just inches away.

I tried to call out to my brother for help, but no words came from my mouth.

My throat felt constricted.

Not painful, but somehow unable to produce sound.

I was trapped in my own body, holding this Bible that I desperately wanted to burn, but physically could not release.

The shaking in my hands was getting worse, spreading up my arms and into my shoulders.

Then something even stranger happened.

As I stared down at the book in my trembling hands, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of sorrow that seemed to come from nowhere.

Not sadness about my situation or fear about what was happening to me, but a deep, crushing grief that felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.

It was as if I could suddenly feel the pain of every person who had ever been hurt, every soul who had ever been lost, every heart that had ever been broken.

It the emotion was so intense that tears began streaming down my face without any conscious decision on my part to cry.

I had not shed tears since I was a child, not even when my father died 3 years earlier.

But now I was weeping uncontrollably in front of 30 men.

And I had no idea why.

The tears weren’t coming from my mind or my memories.

They seemed to be flowing from someplace much deeper, someplace I didn’t even know existed.

My legs began to give way beneath me.

The weakness started in my knees and spread through my entire lower body until standing became impossible.

I tried to brace myself against other people, but my shaking was so violent now that I couldn’t maintain my balance.

The Bible slipped from my trembling hands and fell to the ground beside me as I collapsed to my knees in the middle of the crowd.

The moment the book left my hands, I felt completely broken and completely loved at the same time.

These two impossible emotions existed in the same space in the same moment without canceling each other out.

I was devastated by my own emptiness while being filled with a love so pure and complete that it defied everything I thought I knew about reality.

It was as if someone was holding me while showing me exactly how lost I had been.

Look inside your own heart right now and try to remember a moment when you felt the presence of something greater than yourself.

That’s the closest I can come to describing what happened to me as I knelt there on the pavement with tears streaming down my face.

But even that comparison falls short because what I experienced transcended any category of human emotion or spiritual encounter I had ever heard described.

I began whisper praying in Arabic, but the words coming from my mouth weren’t the prayers I had memorized in the mosque.

I was saying things I had never learned, asking for forgiveness for sins I had never acknowledged, begging for mercy from a God I had spent my entire life believing I was defending.

The prayer seemed to be coming through me rather than from me, as if someone else was using my voice to speak to heaven.

The men around me gradually became aware that something was happening.

The celebration quieted as they noticed me kneeling in their midst, shaking and crying and praying words they couldn’t understand.

My brother knelt beside me and tried to ask what was wrong, but I couldn’t respond to him.

I was completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I was experiencing.

For the first time in my 34 years of life, I knew with absolute certainty that Jesus Christ was real.

Not as a prophet, not as a good teacher, but as the living son of God who had been calling my name while I spent years burning books that contained his words.

The knowledge didn’t come through reasoning or argument or theological discussion.

It came as pure revelation, as undeniable as my own heartbeat.

I realized in that moment that everything I had believed about defending Islam was actually rebellion against the God who created me.

Every Bible I had burned contained truth I desperately needed.

Every missionary I had opposed was trying to give me the greatest gift in the universe.

To every sermon I had heard about resisting Christianity was keeping me from the very salvation my soul was crying out for.

I collapsed completely to my knees right there in the middle of the crowd.

My body no longer able to support itself under the weight of what was happening to me.

The pavement was hard and cold against my shins, but I barely noticed the physical discomfort.

Everything inside me was breaking apart and and being rebuilt at the same time.

The tears that had started as a trickle were now flowing like rivers down my cheeks, and I made no attempt to stop them or hide them from the men surrounding me.

The sound of the celebration around me began to fade into complete silence, as if someone had slowly turned down the volume on the entire world.

I could see my brothers still moving their mouths, still gesturing toward the fire, but I couldn’t hear their voices anymore.

The crackling of the burning Bibles became distant and muffled.

Even the traffic from the nearby street seemed to disappear entirely.

I was alone with whatever force had taken hold of my heart.

Alone with a presence I couldn’t name but somehow recognized.

All I could do was whisper the same words over and over again.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

The words came from the deepest part of my being.

from a place where I had stored every moment of pride, every act of rebellion, every choice to reject truth in favor of my own understanding.

I was apologizing not just for burning Bibles, but for a lifetime of running away from a god who had been pursuing me with relentless love.

My brother noticed my collapse first.

He dropped the Bible he was about to throw into the fire and rushed to my side.

kneeling beside me with genuine concern written across his face.

He placed his hand on my shoulder and asked in Arabic what was wrong, whether I was sick or whether I needed him to call for medical help.

His voice sounded like it was coming from underwater, distant and unclear, but I could see the worry in his eyes.

I tried to explain what was happening to me, but how do you describe the indescribable? How do you tell someone that the foundation of everything you believed has just crumbled beneath your feet? How do you explain that you’re experiencing the love of a god you’ve spent years opposing? The words simply wouldn’t come.

All I could do was continue weeping and repeating my whispered apologies.

My cousin joined my brother beside me, and soon several other men had gathered around us in a circle.

They were speaking rapidly in Arabic and trying to understand what had caused my sudden breakdown.

Some suggested I was having a medical emergency.

Others thought perhaps I was overcome by emotion from the intensity of our protest.

A few wondered if I had been affected by inhaling too much smoke from the burning books.

But I knew this wasn’t medical or emotional or physical.

This was spiritual in the most profound sense of that word.

Something fundamental about my understanding of reality had shifted and I was experiencing what I can only describe as the presence of divine love.

Not the distant demanding love of the Allah I had worshiped my entire life, but an immediate personal overwhelming love that seemed to know every detail of who I was and accept me completely despite my failures.

The men around me grew more concerned as my weeping continued without explanation.

My brother tried to help me stand, thinking that getting me away from the smoke and noise might help whatever was happening to me.

But my legs were completely useless.

Every muscle in my lower body felt like it had turned to water.

I wasn’t just emotionally overwhelmed.

I was physically incapacitated by the magnitude of what I was experiencing.

Through my tears, I became aware that the Bible I had dropped was lying on the ground, just inches from where I knelt.

Without thinking, I reached for it with shaking hands and pulled it against my chest, holding it like a precious treasure instead of the enemy propaganda I had considered it just moments before.

The book felt warm against my body, not from any supernatural heat, but from the tears that were falling onto its cover.

The sight of me clutching a Bible to my chest alarmed the men around me even more than my weeping had.

They began speaking more urgently, asking whether I had been somehow poisoned or bewitched by the Christian book.

In their minds there was no other explanation for why their leader, their voice of resistance, would suddenly be embracing the very thing we had gathered to destroy.

But I couldn’t let go of the book.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was holding something that contained real truth, something that could answer the questions I had been asking my entire life without even realizing I was asking them.

The weight of it in my arms felt like the weight of salvation itself, heavy with meaning, but light with grace.

I tried to speak to tell my brothers that something incredible was happening and that God was revealing himself to me in ways I had never imagined possible.

But every time I opened my mouth, only broken sobs emerged.

My voice was gone, taken away by the overwhelming emotion of encountering divine love for the first time.

I was like a man dying of thirst who had just discovered an ocean of fresh water but couldn’t find words to describe how it tasted.

The crowd around our small circle began to disperse as word spread that something was wrong with me.

Some men continued throwing Bibles into the fire, determined to complete our mission regardless of my personal crisis.

Others gathered their signs and prepared to leave, uncomfortable with the unexpected turn our protest had taken.

But my closest friends remained beside me, confused and concerned, but unwilling to abandon me in my moment of obvious distress.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely broken and completely whole at the same time.

Every defense I had built around my heart was crumbling.

Every wall I had erected against spiritual vulnerability was falling down.

But instead of feeling exposed and endangered, I felt safe in a way I had never experienced before.

It was as if I had spent my entire life hiding from the very person who loved me most.

I don’t know how long I knelt there on that pavement, clutching a Bible and weeping for reasons I couldn’t explain to the men surrounding me.

Time seemed to have stopped entirely.

But in those moments, everything I thought I knew about God, about truth, about my own identity was being transformed.

The angry young man who had arrived at that protest ready to burn Christian books was disappearing, and someone entirely new was being born in his place.

Jesus was real, and he had been calling my name through every Bible I had tried to burn.

The next weeks were the darkest of my life, darker than the poverty that had driven me from my homeland, darker than the years of feeling invisible and unwanted in France.

At least in those struggles I had known who I was and what I believed.

Now I was caught between two worlds, no longer the man I had been, but not yet understanding who I was becoming.

The certainty that had guided my entire adult life had been shattered in a single moment, leaving me a drift in an ocean of confusion and doubt.

My brother was the first to confront me about what had happened at the protest.

3 days after my collapse, he appeared at my apartment with a worried expression and a dozen questions I couldn’t answer.

He sat across from me at my small kitchen table, studying my face like he was trying to recognize a stranger, asking repeatedly what had made me break down in front of our entire community.

When I tried to explain about feeling God’s presence, about knowing Jesus was real, his face went white with shock and then red with anger.

The conversation that followed was the most painful of my life.

My brother accused me of losing my mind, of being brainwashed by Christian propaganda, of betraying everything our family had taught us about Islam.

He reminded me of our father’s devotion to the mosque, of our mother’s prayers, for our faithfulness, of the generations of Muslims whose blood ran in our veins.

How could I abandon all of that for the religion of our oppressors? And I had no good answers for him because I barely understood what was happening to me.

All I knew was that something fundamental had changed in my heart.

Something I couldn’t deny or explain away.

The love I had felt while kneeling on that pavement was more real than anything I had ever experienced, more certain than my own heartbeat.

But trying to describe that reality to someone who hadn’t experienced it was like trying to explain color to someone who had been blind from birth.

Within a week, word of my spiritual crisis had spread throughout our community.

The Imam called me to a private meeting where he spent two hours trying to convince me that I had been the victim of some form of Christian witchcraft or psychological manipulation.

He quoted verses from the Quran about staying strong against the deceptions of unbelievers as about the tricks Satan uses to lead the faithful astray.

He prayed over me in Arabic, asking Allah to restore my mind and heal my corrupted heart.

But even as he prayed, I felt the presence of Jesus more strongly than ever.

It wasn’t dramatic or supernatural in the way that Hollywood movies portray spiritual encounters.

It was quiet and gentle and completely undeniable, like having someone you love sitting beside you even when you can’t see them.

The more people tried to convince me that what I had experienced wasn’t real, the more certain I became that it was the most real thing that had ever happened to me.

My family’s reaction was swift and devastating.

When my brother told them about my apparent conversion, they gathered for an emergency meeting at my uncle’s house to decide how to respond.

I wasn’t invited to participate in these discussions about my own spiritual condition.

The decision they reached was delivered to me through my cousin who appeared at my door with tears in his eyes and a message that broke my heart into pieces.

I was no longer welcome at family gatherings.

My name would not be mentioned in their prayers.

If I chose to pursue this path of spiritual rebellion, I would be doing it without the support or recognition of the people who had raised me.

They loved me too much to watch me destroy myself with Christian lies.

So they were cutting all contact until I came to my senses and returned to Islam.

The isolation was crushing.

I had spent my entire life surrounded by community by people who shared my language and my culture and my faith.

Suddenly I was completely alone in a foreign country with no one to talk to about what I was experiencing.

The mosque that had been my second home for 15 years was now closed to me.

The friends who had followed my leadership in protests now crossed the street to avoid encountering me.

But even in that loneliness, I couldn’t deny what Jesus had done to my heart.

I started reading the Bible I had almost burned, the same one I had clutched to my chest while weeping on the pavement.

Every page revealed more truth about who Jesus really was.

Not the weak prophet Islam had taught me to believe in, but the living son of God, who had died for my sins and risen again to offer me eternal life.

The words jumped off the page with a clarity and power I had never encountered in any religious text.

When Jesus said he was the way, the truth, or in the life, I felt those words resonate in the deepest part of my being.

When he promised that anyone who came to him would not be cast out, I knew he was speaking directly to me.

a former enemy who had spent years burning books that contained his message of salvation.

I found a small church on the outskirts of the city where the pastor spoke Arabic.

Father Michelle was a Lebanese Christian who had immigrated to France decades earlier and understood something about the challenges of maintaining faith in a foreign culture.

When I appeared at his door with my story and my questions, he didn’t seem surprised.

He said he had been praying for years that God would reach the Muslim community.

And he welcomed me like a son who had finally come home.

Under Father Mitchell’s guidance, I began to understand what had happened to me that day at the protest.

I hadn’t just had an emotional experience or a psychological breakdown.

I had encountered the living Christ, the same Jesus who had appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus and transformed a persecutor of Christians into the greatest missionary in history.

My story was different in its details but identical in its essence.

So I’m asking you just as a brother would.

What’s holding you back from accepting the truth that your heart already knows? For me it was pride, fear, and loyalty to a religion that had given my life structure but never given my soul peace.

It took loing everything I thought mattered to discover the one thing that actually did matter.

Jesus wasn’t just calling me to believe in him.

He was calling me home to the father who had been waiting for me my entire life.

The pain of rejection from my family was real and deep.

But the joy of finding my true identity in Christ was deeper still.

Every page I read revealed more about God’s character, more about his love, more about the salvation that was freely offered to anyone willing to accept it.

I was no longer a lost immigrant trying to defend a foreign faith in a hostile culture.

I was a beloved son who had finally discovered his true father.

6 months later, I stood waist deep in the Sen River on a cold February morning, surrounded by a small congregation of believers who had become my new family.

Father Michelle stood beside me in the water, his hand on my back, preparing to baptize me in the same city where I had once burned Bibles with hatred in my heart.

The contrast between that angry man and the person I’d become was so dramatic that it felt like I was burying one life and being born into another entirely.

As Father Michelle lowered me beneath the surface of that freezing water, I thought about everything Jesus had taken from me and everything he had given me in return.

Yes, I had lost my biological family, my community, my sense of cultural identity, but I had gained something infinitely more valuable, a personal relationship with the God of the universe, peace that surpassed all understanding, and a purpose that filled every moment of my existence with meaning.

When I emerged from those waters, gasping from the cold, but overwhelmed with joy, I knew I was exactly where God wanted me to be.

The small crowd of believers on the riverbank erupted in celebration, a welcoming me officially into the family of Christ.

These people, most of whom I had only known for a few months, loved me more authentically than some people I had known my entire life.

They had seen my anger, heard my story, witnessed my transformation, and embraced me without reservation.

I now work with the same Christian organization I once protested against, the very group whose missionaries I had intimidated and whose literature I had burned in public demonstrations.

The irony of this reversal isn’t lost on me, but it perfectly illustrates the redemptive power of God’s grace.

He doesn’t just forgive our past mistakes, he transforms them into opportunities for ministry and testimony.

My role focuses specifically on reaching Muslim immigrants who are struggling with the same anger and isolation I once felt.

I understand their pain because I lived it for 15 years.

I know what it feels like to be caught between cultures, to feel unwanted and misunderstood, to believe that Christianity represents a threat to everything sacred in your life.

But I also know what it feels like to encounter Jesus personally and discover that he offers something no religion or culture can provide.

Unconditional love and eternal purpose.

The ministry has grown beyond anything we initially imagined.

What started as informal conversations with individual immigrants has evolved into structured programs that serve dozens of families throughout the city.

We offer French language classes, job placement assistance, legal aid, and cultural orientation.

But more importantly, we offer hope to people who often feel hopeless.

Demonstrating Christ’s love through practical service before we ever mention his name.

Last month, I had the incredible privilege of leading my first Bible study conducted entirely in Arabic.

Eight men gathered in the church basement, all of them Muslims who had heard my testimony and wanted to learn more about Jesus.

Some came out of curiosity, others out of desperation, a few because their own spiritual hunger had become impossible to ignore.

As I opened the same type of Bible I had once tried to burn, I marveled at God’s sense of irony and his perfect timing.

During that first study, we read Jesus’s words about coming to give life abundantly, about being the bread that satisfies spiritual hunger, about offering rest to all who are weary and heavy laden.

And I watched as understanding dawned in the eyes of these men who had been carrying burdens they were never meant to bear.

The questions they asked were the same ones I had wrestled with.

How could Jesus be both human and divine? Why did God need to sacrifice his son? What happens to our Muslim family members if we convert? Three of those eight men have already made the decision to follow Christ.

Hassan was the first, a construction worker whose wife had left him and whose children lived in Algeria with his parents.

He had come to France with dreams of prosperity, but found only loneliness and financial struggle.

When he heard about God’s love for him personally, about forgiveness for his failures and hope for his future, he wept just as I had wept on that pavement 6 months earlier.

Ahmed followed two weeks later.

He had been attending the mosque irregularly, going through the motions of Islamic practice without finding any real spiritual satisfaction.

The night he prayed to receive Jesus as his Lord and Savior, he said he felt like he was finally breathing freely for the first time in his adult life.

The weight of religious obligation had been replaced by the lightness of divine grace.

Mahmood was the third, and his conversion was particularly meaningful to me because his story so closely paralleled my own.

He had been involved in community activism, organizing protests against what he saw as Western attempts to undermine Islamic culture.

When he heard my testimony about encountering Jesus during a Bible burning protest, he recognized his own anger and spiritual hunger.

His surrender to Christ was complete and immediate.

Then a dramatic transformation that reminded me of my own encounter with divine love.

We now have evening services conducted in Arabic with worship songs translated into our native language and sermons that address the specific concerns of Muslim converts.

The church basement that once held only storage boxes and cleaning supplies now hosts a thriving community of former Muslims who have found their true identity in Christ.

We call ourselves the Damascus Road Fellowship, acknowledging that we all share the experience of having our spiritual journeys dramatically redirected by an encounter with the living Jesus.

My mission extends beyond just Muslim immigrants to anyone who feels lost, angry, or spiritually empty.

Last week, I spoke at a university about religious extremism and the power of personal transformation.

My students who had never heard a testimony like mine listened with amazement as I described how Jesus had changed me from a Bible burning radical into someone who now dedicates his life to sharing the very message I once supposed.

Jesus didn’t just save my soul from eternal damnation.

Though that would have been enough.

He gave me purpose beyond my wildest dreams.

Turning my passion for defending what I thought was truth into passion for sharing what actually is truth.

Every day I wake up knowing that God has a specific plan for my life.

That my experiences with anger and conversion have prepared me uniquely to reach people who might never listen to anyone else.

What’s stopping you from surrendering to Jesus right now? If a Bible burning radical like me can be completely transformed by God’s grace, anyone can be.

The same Jesus who met me in my moment of greatest rebellion is waiting to meet you in whatever circumstance you find yourself today.

He doesn’t want to destroy your identity.