I was not going to miss this opportunity. I had been wanting to hear his story for weeks, and all of the other stories I’d heard from other Iranian-background believers were so incredible, I knew his would be too.
I was trying to think of a way to lead into the topic, but somehow we got there anyway and suddenly I was listening to one of the most incredible testimonies I’ve ever heard. Conversations around our little table faded into the background as Victoria, Bella and I leaned in, not wanting to miss a moment.
* * * * *
I first met Rajome, a young Iranian man in his early thirties, when he approached me after the first Farsi service we attended in Turkey. I had noticed him in the service, because he would occasionally suggest an alternative English translation to the interpreter on stage.
“My friend is coming to English club,” he told me. “Her name is Maryam. She is Muslim. Will you look for her?”
I promised him I would (multiple times—he was very insistent), then asked a few questions about his life. “What do you do?” He’s a welder/turner. “Do you like your job?” He does.
After that, our lack of mutual vocabulary made conversation difficult. I wonder what his story is, I thought, as I had with the other Iranian believers we had met up to that point.
I would spend a lot of time with Rajome in the coming weeks. Turns out, he’s a pretty good singer. When I offered to play keys for the Iranian service, Rajome was immediately volun-told to help. He had never sung in front of people before, and by his own admission knew nothing about music. This meant I spent my Thursday night piecing together minor key chord progressions from Youtube videos in a language I didn’t understand, but it’s chill, it’s chill… I figured out the patterns and he got to lead worship for the first time and everything was great.
You should have seen the smile on his face—on all of our faces—as the Iranian service had live music for the first time in… well, quite possibly ever.
And after that, Rajome stood up and preached an entire sermon on holiness. He referenced everything from Moses to Isaiah to Ephesians. I didn’t understand a word of what he said, so I asked him about it all afterward. That’s how I found out that Rajome really knows his scripture. Almost every thing he tells me about his own life starts with, “Do you know in the Bible where…?” or “Do you remember the story of…?”.
Now, I have a good head for memorization—God gave me a brain like that—but Rajome gives me a run for my money. Which, for a Muslim background believer who only trusted in Jesus four years ago, is pretty incredible.
* * * * *
We were lucky that day.
Rajome doesn’t normally stay for the Turkish service. However, on our last day, his boss was supposed to come—another of the people he insisted I meet. “They need your help, Sarah! They need you to tell them about Jesus!” The thing I love about him is that no matter how many times he says that, I never feel guilted or judged. Instead, I feel his excitement, passion, and Holy-Spirit-inspired determination for the Gospel to be known. Everyone must know about Jesus, Sarah! Everyone!
Rajome’s boss didn’t end up coming, but he still stayed for the service. Afterward, I pulled up a chair next to him, determined to finally get the story straight. This is what he told me.
* * * * *
Rajome grew up in a small town in Iran, in the same town as the prophet Daniel. “My story,” he said, “is very like Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, when they were accused of not praying to the statue Nebuchadnezzar had set up.”
When Rajome was fifteen, a famous ayatollah (Shia holy man, ironically named Jafar) met him on the banks of a river. They spoke for a while about Islam.
“I will go away now to meet with people,” Jafar said. “But I will come back, and then we will talk more.” He left, but did not return.
For the next few years, Rajome pursued his high school studies. He thought highly of Jafar, who was a well known teacher of the Qur’an. But then other stories started to come out. Stories of how Jafar had raped children in his own mosque. Horrible stories of corruption and greed.
“I did not want to live,” Rajome said. “If this was what Islam was, I thought, better to die. I did drugs, drugs, all the time. Heroine. I burned Jafar’s clothes.”
“Wait, what?” I said, thinking I couldn’t possibly have heard correctly. “You burned his clothes? Whose clothes? What do you mean?”
“His holy clothes,” Rajome said, “… and his Qur’an.”
“Jafar’s? But how?”
“I went to his house.”
“You broke into his house and burned his clothes?”
“And his car, yes.”
At this point, we were all gaping at him. What he had just said was the equivalent of breaking into the Oval Office and burning the president’s desk.
“I know.” He shrugs in response to my nervous laughter.
“What did they do to you?”
“They put me in prison,” he said. “Then they did the punishment.” He grabbed my shoulder and pantomimed beating it.
“How long were you in prison?”
“Not long. Two weeks.”
If there was ever any evidence that God preserves his people, this is it, I thought. How in the world had he only gotten away with two weeks?
“It was his problem,” Rajome said with a shrug. I took this to mean that the ayatollah was in the wrong for what he had done. Nevertheless, it was obvious Rajome felt remorse for his actions, though they were no-doubt justified.
* * * * *
After that, Rajome went to university and studied accounting. He was still using heroine and had given up on Islam completely, which was a great disappointment to his father. During this time, his aunt and uncle, who did not live in Iran, would call him and tell him about Jesus. “He is the true way,” they would say.
Rajome talked with them often, but did not believe.
“You should go to Bible school,” they said. “There is one in Turkey. You can go there.”
In his search, Rajome sought to learn about different religions, but no one could give him answers.
“There was a protestant church in his city, but it was closed. There was an Armenian orthodox church, but they did not recognize me,” he said. “They sent me to a seme… semi… the place where the dead people are.”
“A cemetery?” I said. “But why?”
He shrugs. “I was also very confused.”
Rajome began to read the Qur’an, trying to find the true way. He wanted to understand who Muhammed was and what Shia and Sunni meant. Islam could not satisfy his craving for truth, but what else was there in Iran, except Islam? Nothing else was legal. He wanted to learn, but couldn’t, so long as he was in the country.
When he graduated, he joined the Iranian military. He reached the rank of captain, but refused to pray or do namaz. When this became known, his commander confronted him. When Rajome still refused, he was exiled to Iraq.
“Was it safe?” I said.
“In Iraq? Yes. Your people were there. Iran was not safe.” He chuckles. “After a year, I came back to Iran and they beat me again. You know, Muslim punishment.”
I hadn’t known.
* * * * *
When Rajome was 24, his father died. A powerful sadness gripped him at the funeral and he was ashamed of himself as a son. Instead of living as he should have, he was addicted to heroine, and had been beaten, imprisoned, and exiled for refusing to be a good Muslim.
After the funeral, he was sitting in his house and prayed, “Where are you, God? Why aren’t you showing yourself to me, even though I search for you?”
As soon as he prayed, he saw a bright hand reaching toward him from the opposite side of the house. Terrified, he immediately curled up into a ball.
“Did it touch you?”
He didn’t know. He’d been too busy hiding.
Shortly after, his cousin arrived, driving an American Cadillac. “For eight years I was drugs, drugs, drugs, all the time.” He pantomimed shooting up. “God sent my cousin to me to help me get free of my addiction.”
* * * * *
A month after he saw the hand, Rajome left Iran to go to Turkey.
“Why did you leave?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
Figuring he hadn’t understood us, we all tried asking the question in different ways. Actually, as it turns out, he really doesn’t know why he left Iran. “There was no way to find the truth there,” he said with a shrug. “So I had to go other places.”
He went to Bulgaria, then Armenia, where he met a policeman who asked him about his faith. This policeman—astonishingly—was a Christian. They talked for three days about Jesus. The policeman helped him get to Turkey, where he ended up in Istanbul, selling clothes.
One day, his mother came to him and gave him a piece of paper. “You can go to church,” she said. She had met some evangelists on the street. “They are good men. You can go to church.”
“But wasn’t your mother muslim?” I said.
“Yes.”
“So why…?”
“She knew I would not be a Muslim,” Rajome said with a shrug. “So she must have thought that perhaps I could be a Christian.”
* * * * *
Finally, Rajome ended up in Ankara, at the UN office, where he applied and was granted official refugee status. In 2015, he met the Pastor of our host church, who offered to study the Bible with him.
“We started in Matthew. I read about Jesus and how he escaped to Egypt and how he went to the temple and his parents were looking for him.”
“How long did you study?”
“For one year. At the end, Pastor told me, ‘You can go to Bible college. There is one here in Turkey.’
“This was the second time someone had told me about Bible college. So I went.”
“But you didn’t believe in Jesus yet!”
“No.”
“So when did you decide to believe in Jesus?”
“One year after Bible school started, I went into my room and prayed for God to give me the Holy Spirit. That night, I saw Jesus in a dream. He came down and touched me, and from that moment my entire life changed.”
* * * * *
In Rajome’s last year of Bible school, he went to the Iranian embassy and one of the officials questioned him about his faith. “Are you Christian?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to church and reading the Bible?”
“Of course,” Rajome said. “Is this wrong or a bad thing? Am I doing the wrong thing?”
The Iranian official revoked his citizenship. They even stripped him of his monthly salary that was given to his mother. Since his father had passed away, Rajome was the only working male in the house.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him.
“No, it is great!” he said. “Turkey has boosted my faith. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.’”
“What did you do after they took away your citizenship?” I said. I had meant for work, but his response surprised me.
“Nothing,” he said. “I thanked them.”
My mouth fell open. Rajome, unfortunately, didn’t see it, because this particular part of the conversation was via text. “You thanked them? Why?”
“Forget it, sister Sarah,” he texted back. “It’s not an important issue.”
* * * * *
Today, Rajome is living and working in West Turkey. He has decided to continue his theological education online through an American university in California.
“I know I am following what Jesus wants,” he told me. “After I believed in him, sometimes I would see shiny and colorful things. For example, a few months ago some Koreans came to our church from a city in Turkey. In the midst of worship I closed my eyes and prayed and I saw a group of people dancing together hand in hand.
“It was dark everywhere. But those people were shining with blue light in the absolute darkness.
“The same bright hand I had seen before opened the circle and invited me to join, but I didn’t go. I was confused, wondering why they were shining.
“When I opened my eyes, I was in church. Music was playing and everybody was worshipping God. Suddenly, the pastor said, ‘Make a circle for dancing!’. His wife grabbed my hand and pulled me into the circle.
“Many other things like this have happened, but I don’t have time to tell you about all of them. God is great. God is good. Jesus saved me. The Holy Spirit speaks to me. I am nothing without him. If I seem great or spiritual, it is only because of Him.”
* * * * *
Pray for Rajome:
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That God would bring him a Christian wife.
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The he would get permanent residency in Turkey. Right now he does not have residency; neither is he an Iranian citizen. All he has is his refugee status.
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For the Iranian believers in Turkey, that God would continue drawing hearts to himself and build up the church there. That the believers would stay united.
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That he will continue to grow and learn and develop in his faith. And that God would use him and his story to continue reaching Muslims.
