You won't separate me from Jesus

Even for someone used to the cruel regime, the faces of her Iranian prison guards were too much for Marziyeh Amirizadeh.

They yelled at her to deny Jesus, but she refused with the same determination that stopped her looking into their eyes.

“You could not look at their faces,” she recalled, “because you would see demons. There were many times during my interrogations when I had so much fear because their behaviour was so brutal.”

She’d been introduced to that brutality early through the death of the young man she was engaged to marry. He was tortured for months over false claims of drinking wine and having an immoral sexual relationship. Despite a lack of evidence, he was forced to confess, and endured beatings so violent and relentless that he later died.

Every Iranian was under the threat of such cruelty through the ‘morality police’ who could arrest anyone for the most trivial reason.

It made Marziyeh start to question the way she saw Islamic laws being enforced, often through fear, shame and harsh physical punishment. Despite such laws pointing to a harsh God, she felt the need to remain open to the possibility of an alternative, loving Almighty.

Aged 18, God appeared to her in a dream in the form of a white horse. “He revealed his amazing love. I knew nothing about Jesus, but through that dream I knew there was a God who loved me. I also knew I was able to communicate with him in my own language of Farsi, rather than with the Arabic words I had been taught but didn’t understand.”

… story continues