What I Thought Strength Looked Like at Age 14
I was 14 years old when Hezbollah recruited me. That sentence still takes a moment to land when I say it out loud. At that age, I thought I was stepping into something meaningful, something with purpose and power. I had no framework yet for distinguishing between strength and indoctrination. I was a boy who wanted to belong to something larger than himself, and the structure around me made Hezbollah look like the answer to that hunger. What I experienced inside that world over the months that followed changed everything I would ever believe about faith, force, and what it actually means to lead people.
What I saw up close was not strength. It was manufactured hatred. The "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" chants were not conviction. They were conditioning. The religious authorities I watched operated through fear and corruption, not through any genuine devotion to God. I was close enough to see the gap between what they preached and how they lived. That gap is what first cracked open my questions about Islam. I didn't reject the program because someone argued me out of it. I rejected it because I was inside it long enough to see what it actually produced in people.
At the time, I thought clarity would come from walking away and finding something quieter. I didn't yet understand that the real work was just beginning. When I converted to Christianity at age 20, it was not a gradual, intellectual process. It was a rupture. A full turn. And almost immediately, I felt called to share what I had found, not someday, not carefully, but now and openly. Looking back, I can see that the urgency I felt then was shaped partly by those Hezbollah years. I had watched what it looks like when a message spreads through intimidation. I wanted to see what would happen when a message spread through love instead.
So I started building house churches across Iran. Dozens of them over the years. At the time, I understood intellectually that it was dangerous. What I did not fully reckon with was the particular danger of the orphanage project in Rasht. I believed that a state-approved humanitarian effort, children's care, something no government could reasonably oppose, would provide a kind of cover. I thought I was being strategic. I was wrong about that. The arrest that followed taught me something I now consider one of the most important lessons of my life: the regime was never afraid of my strategy. They were afraid of the fact that young Iranians were choosing something different.
Three and a half years inside Evin Prison gave me long stretches of time to sit with the difference between what I thought I was doing and what was actually happening. I had entered ministry thinking that growth, real growth, was something I was producing. I was building networks, founding churches, moving from city to city. I had covered more than a thousand cities in my work by that point. The cell stripped that sense of authorship away. I came out understanding that I had never been the source. I had only been willing.
That shift, from builder to vessel, is one I still return to. It's easy to read it as humility language and move on. But it has real weight in how I approach the work now. When I founded the first Persian Christian Zionist church in our history, I didn't start by mapping out influence or audience reach. I started with what I believed the Holy Spirit was directing, which was that Iranian and Israeli believers needed a space to stand together in this moment. The strategy followed the calling. That's the opposite of how I approached things at 20.
I think about the 14-year-old who joined Hezbollah sometimes. Not with shame, but with a kind of sober attention. He was looking for something true in the wrong place. The mercy is that the wrongness became undeniable fast enough for him to look elsewhere. Every person I minister to now, whether in a conference hall, in an online church gathering, or in a conversation with someone whose faith has cost them everything, I see some version of that same search. People want something real. My job now is not to build impressive structures around them. It's to point honestly toward the thing that held me together inside a prison cell in Tehran, and still does today. If you want to know more about where that work is going, I'd invite you to read more about my ministry or reach out directly.