One of the favorite things that I think we get to do is we get to hear from some of our listeners. Yeah, it's awesome. So Chris from Tennessee, he said this, I listen every day and I'm so glad that you have the app because if I miss a day, I can go back and listen to it.
And oftentimes I go back and listen to programs from before because they're worth repeating. And here's the great thing, there are millions of Chris's and Christine's out there listening to the Family Life broadcast, the podcast. They're going to our Weekend to Remember marriage conferences, they're buying our resources.
I mean, God is changing the world one home at a time and family life is a big part of that. And here's the thing, we want to invite you to help us change the world. Yeah, we have a goal of raising $250,000.
This month, in the month of August. I mean, that's a big goal, but I tell you what, you can be a part of joining us and being a partner with us. You can give at any level you'd like, and you can do that. Just go to familylifetoday.com and you can make a donation. And if you give, we're going to send you one of our favorite books by one of our favorite authors, Grant Hanson.
Oh yeah, he's the best. It's called Unoffendable. Yeah, you're never offended, neither am I. But no, it helps us to live an undefendable life. And we're going to send you a living edition family life pen so you can take notes of Grant's book. I want one of those. It's just another way to remember you're making a mark and we're making a mark together.
So go to familylifetoday.com and make a mark right now. We need you. You cannot just want the God of the law because if that's all you have, then you will become a punishing person, right? A person who wants justice at all costs and has no love. And then, of course, if you only want the God who listens, then absolutely you want love, but you want it without standard. You want it without expectation and you want it without obligation.
And you have to have both. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. All right, so we are back for part two.
And it may be part two of 12. I don't know. This story with Daniel Nari. Daniel, say your last name, because we've been talking about this off air. Yeah, Nari. Nari.
I mean, it's easy. Say the full name. The full, like a formal way of saying your name in the Middle East, of course, is you have to say, like, whose child you are. So like, Jaldin Ebneh Mohammed Ebneh Massoud Khosrow Nairi. But like, my first and last name is Khosrow Nairi. See how he said it, though?
Nari. I did my hand thing. You're using your hand. For listeners, you can't even say my name without a hand motion. Like, it's required. It's very Italian, Middle Eastern, that whole thing, you know? Yeah.
When you Americanize it, you put your hands in your pockets and you just say Nairi. And that's so boring. Well, you know, it might also put an eye out. It's not as boring as Wilson. Wilson is boring.
I can't even travel with my name because there's so many Wilsons. So we're talking about your book, Everything Sad Is Untrue, which is really your story. And yesterday you ended with, basically you sleep under the bed because you're so scared.
As a little boy. That's right. Wait, recap for us, Daniel.
38 seconds. Recap the whole last time on FLR. Yeah, where were we? Well, we were born and raised in Iran. My mother, a devout Muslim, converts to Christianity as a matter of faith and conscience. It's a capital crime.
And so she's caught by the secret police, interrogated and told that if they don't tell names of all the people in the underground church, they'll kill her and her kids. So jump forward to a quick escape from Iran where my father chooses to stay and my mother, my sister and I become refugees. And I think we pick it up there. We land from a plane into the UAE where at that point we become what is known as the global homeless. Right.
Anytime. The difference between a refugee and an immigrant, of course, is that their state of citizenship or their country of citizenship is trying to do them but harm. And so this happens in instances of genocide, civil war, revolution, these kinds of things. At that point, all our documents are moot. We don't have citizenship. I don't think we even packed, I know we didn't pack my birth certificate, so quite a lot of complexity gets put into the system, but effectively we are missing from our court date in Iran and now wandering in the UAE. And you are how old and your sister?
I'm five, she's eight and we're with my mom. And you're coming from an affluent family, or your dad was a dentist, your mom's a doctor and now you have nothing. Yeah.
I mean, that was quite a threshold, right? In Iran, there was quite a lot of land and my mother had her own practice. My father had his own practice. We had a lovely home in Isfahan and a nice area and all the families around. So there's all that kind of institutional, generational wealth of just like, grandpa has a house.
You can go there on the weekends and it's on a beautiful orchard because he, you know, he tills and works the land. And so, yeah, it was, I would call it a very, certainly by running by comparison, an incredibly affluent life. The minute we sort of become refugees, yeah, it sort of goes away. And there was actually a missionary couple from Australia and they were doctors as well. And they had a clinic in Abu Dhabi where, so the United Arab Emirates, the UAE is basically like 12 principalities and there's Dubai and Abu Dhabi are kind of the two most famous, right? And there, there's quite a strong caste system.
It's not a formal caste system, I shouldn't say it that way, but there are a lot of very, very wealthy people, a lot of people whose job it is to build all those shiny buildings. And so these missionaries, they had this clinic that was effectively for the poorest of the poor to try to try to have, you know, healthcare and for them and you know, we were, we were able to sort of live in the back of that clinic and, and my mother worked there for about 10 months while we were trying to figure out how to, how to get asylum. When you're a refugee, one of the tasks is that you're going to the embassies of these different countries. If you need protection from like Iranian government, what you, you're looking for is all you're looking for asylum, you're looking for protection.
So you're kind of, your choices are, you know, the UK, Canada, America, Australia, the West. And so you're going to these embassies and you're effectively speaking to these administrators and trying to convince them of a lot of things because it's a dark place, right? It's a dark world. So one of the first things you have to establish is are these actually your kids, right?
There's a lot of traffic in them. So if we don't have the documentation, if you don't have, and frankly, you know, if you don't even speak, you know, there's a lot of challenge in just saying, okay, we need to have a translator. We need to fill out all the papers.
You don't have your birth certificates. Right. Exactly. We have to sit in and then they're in Farsi, right? So so you're, you're kind of in this very amorphous holding pattern because the waiting room is chock full of people. There's babies everywhere. There's people everywhere.
There's crying. It's a very chaotic environment. Think of like the worst DMV you've ever been to and a lot of papers and in language you don't speak, a lot of people trying to hawk their translation services. Some of them from well-meaning NGOs.
That's great. Some of them maybe, maybe there to make a buck. So you're kind of trying to suss this out and you're trying to figure out what's going on. You're waiting for your turn.
You get your number. There's a person who is an unsmiling individual who's there to ask a lot of questions and frankly there to filter a lot of, you know, what we could just euphemistically call shenanigans. A lot of people trying to get places, a lot of people lying about their refugee status.
A lot of people who, you know, are just trying to get to the West and they're not in any kind of danger. So you have to establish the fact that you are in, in physical harm. There's there's actual danger for you. You have to establish that again, these are your kids.
They, you know, they're going to interview the kids. And so it's just a very pressurized environment. And then that's just for one country, your interview, you know, you're applying for other lots of countries. So there's just, it's a time that a lot of people describe as a lot of waiting, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of trying to tell your story to somebody who is, you know, it's not necessarily their fault, right? They're at that point immune to the pain of other people. Like they've just, they sit there and there's liars and there's thieves and, but there's also tragic, horrible circumstances. And there's, you know, people who are in extreme duress and none of it can be communicated.
The language barrier is very real. Have you ever asked your mom at that time, like what was going on for her spiritually? I'm imagining myself with two little kids, like I'm praying, I'm crying, like, God, I need you so desperately. Did she ever talk about that? She does. Yeah. The strain was, was quite heavy at that point. I remember days where she's just so stressed and crying and breaking down on the back of a bus or something like that. And you know, those, those days are there too, but, but on the whole kind of this feeling of provision.
She felt God's hand. Yeah. I mean, there was just so many instances of something wild happening, some, some very improbable, for example, you know, we hear that the Iranian government is still kind of, they're searching for us that it was a, it was a black eye to kind of lose this person who had committed apostasy and, and we hear this and we think, Oh no, you know what, what could happen? And you know, within a short period of time, we hear that we get a temporary admittance to Italy where they had a refugee camp set up, a refugee settlement.
It was an old hotel called the Hotel Barba in the outskirts of Rome. A lot of the people who are in the service camp are actually from Eastern Europe, right? A lot of, you're talking about the era where the communist Soviet block is kind of falling apart.
And, and so, um, a lot of what I remember were, you know, old Russian women sitting on cinder blocks in the parking lot of this building. And a lot of them are having, speaking different languages, so they're playing a game of telephone where one person will say something in Russian and it'll get translated from the next lady to the next. And they're just kind of all doing what you do, which is wait.
My mother was again, really active about this. There's a feeling, a malaise culturally and spiritually that happens in these places where you're just, you're just waiting and you're waiting for, like some of these older women are waiting for their sons to like come from the older country. They're going to join us and then he's going to, and then they're also waiting for the next place to go. So it's just this constant, I mean, if you've ever been stuck in a period of time where you know, you miss, you miss a plane and now you're just suddenly faced with three more hours of waiting and you're like, well, I can't be productive. I don't know what to do. You don't, you have a sudden like negative space that happens in your life. And this is, this is what's happening for months and months, right? You don't get the feeling. You can't garden, right?
Will you wait for the stuff to come up? You can't, you don't think to yourself, could I maximize my productivity during this time? You just think, let me just wait for this paperwork to happen and who knows where I'll be.
Should you study English or should you study Swedish? Like I don't know, you could end up either one. So there's a real challenge there. And my mother was very aggressively trying to keep us out of that nihilistic, that's just the sadness of it all. And so she, she found the family again, she was sort of searching through these church organizations. She found a family that were, they were there for the husband's work, but they were homeschooling their kids. So they had these workbook, this curriculum. It was like 66 workbooks, 11 subjects or six subjects, 11 books. And they had kids our age.
And so she would, you know, we'd get on a bus every morning instead of staying in this kind of refugee holding space, we would get on a bus, go through Rome, get to their house. They were really kind about letting us have the old books that they'd used. She would buy these big erasers and she would sit next to us and just erase workbooks all day and hand them to my sister and I, and we would, we would fill them out.
And that's how I learned the beginnings of English. And it was happening. Where did your mom go? She's wild, right? Unstoppable. Yeah. And look at God, like giving her wisdom to know what to do, to where to go, who to talk to.
But he puts these pretty pivotal people in your lives. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's where I think a lot of the feeling of the answer to prayer happens in her life, because it's just in the form of somebody having kids exactly our age. Well, that's wild, right?
I mean, it's not improbable, but it's not exactly common either. And so I remember our time in Italy is kind of fascinating and beautiful. We didn't have the money to like sight see, but we would go to a town like Florence and sleep on the train on the way back, but also, but get six hours there, you know? And yes, she'd be packing our lunch, so you're not eating the... People asked me when I got back, when we got to Oklahoma, they were like, is the pizza good in Italy? And I realized I had never eaten the pizza. What was she making for food? And where did she get money?
Well, there's two good questions. The food... So they will feed you at the hotel, this sort of refugee space. They had a staff and it's pretty simple fare, but if you're... She would bag it up and we would go. In terms of money, yeah. So my father, they stayed in touch and he was able to send a little.
And so we had a little, and we were on a very extreme budget, but enough to buy a train ticket and not enough to stay in a hotel, but enough to buy a train ticket and go see the place. And I think it's really just that. It was the energy of her that like, we're not going to sit, we're not going to...
This isn't going to be a death sentence. Are you listening to that as women? I'm thinking of the many moms that are listening. We impact our kids. They're watching us. They feel our energy. They feel our walk with God. I think that's important to remind ourselves.
We're making a difference in our kids' lives. Yeah, to this day, that kind of travel is my favorite. Really? Yeah.
I adore backpacking and traveling in a really kind of limited way. And I think it's from that memory. So the story goes that during that, we spent another stint there until a family in Oklahoma, we hear, through several different church organizations were willing to sponsor us. And the names were Jim and Jean Dawson. And Jim was a retired engineer from NASA, and Jean was a teacher. And they had had their children, and their children were grown, and they lived in this house in Edmond and were retired. Kind of a wild thing to do.
I think back on it now, and they felt that God had put it on their heart to do that. And you would have to, because it's a logistically bananas thing to do. Imagine you're here on paper, a single mom, doesn't speak the language, two kids under 10. They're going to come. And if they become wards of the state, your credit is shot.
It's a complete... This coast sign for a refugee family is a really big burden, to my mother's credit. She wasn't here to be still either. So we landed, and within weeks, she has her driver's license and her green card, and she's got a job. And we weren't there longer than a few weeks.
We had an apartment. Could she speak English? At that time, it would be a very difficult English. She could understand pretty well, but making herself understood was a lot harder. Pretty strong accent. Not able to work in that kind of high professional capacity. She had sort of more menial jobs at that time.
The language barrier was the reason. But yeah, so we landed in Oklahoma, and now all of a sudden, it's that kind of story of everything is different and everything is kind of new, and I'm trying to just understand it all. When I'm listening to this story, in some ways, I'm almost tearing up about my own mom. Just hearing the strength of your mom.
My mom, single mom, divorced when I was a little boy, but I think I'm sitting here today because of her. She had a will to make really bad marriage, dad walked out, abused, that kind of thing. But she said, I'm going to make good.
I think it was for me. And I had a little brother who died of leukemia, so I think she was like, I'm going to do what I have to do so that this little boy becomes the man that God wants him to be. I'm looking at you thinking, man, your mom had that. I mean, I'll read a quote from your book about your mom. I know a lot of people read this because it just jumps out. I read it to Ann the other night, I'm like, listen to this quote, it says, the legend of my mom is that she can't be stopped. Not when you hit her, not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage, not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little by little poison of sadness. And the legend is true, I think, because she's fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood to a beautiful place on the other side.
How else would anybody do it? I mean, what a tribute really to your mom. Yeah. Yeah. She's absolutely the hero of this book.
Yeah. There's another line in there that sort of, I think of as my mother's mantra, which is, you know, trying to redefine strength for people. And it says like, it's not this like gigantic muscled, you know, tough guy. It's, you know, for me, it's, it's this image of my mother who, as I said, is this very diminutive person. And the line is, you know, if you don't stop, you're unstoppable.
You know, not that if you're incapable of being stopped, but if you don't stop, you're unstoppable. And I, I think about that a lot when I think about her. I mean, when you think back on your life and even now, where do you see God or Jesus in the story besides walking in your sister's bed, but I mean, as you look through and think about your life, do you feel like there's a Jesus behind the curtain the whole time? Oh, of course. I don't know if he was so removed as to be behind the curtain.
I think he was right in the middle of the whole thing. I mean, it's almost impossible and not to, it's a very, it's very, it would be very challenging for me to disassociate this. Cause my life is utterly different. I grew up here. I, Oklahoma is my home state.
I love Oklahoma. And, and I, you know, when I went to college, I met my wife. She's from here. My son is, you know, all American and all Persian, as far as I'm concerned.
Like he's, you know, he's, he has all of that in his story as well. And, but you look at this and go, I couldn't, I would never have met her. I would have never had my son, like a story, no matter how sad or problematic once, once it ends this way has to have been the best path because it ended with my wife and son. So people will sometimes, especially young readers will ask, they're like, are you sad that you left?
Well, that's a really tough question. Of course. I was extremely sad. My grandfather meant the world to me and I never got to see him again.
I would love nothing more than to cook with my grandmother, right? These are, these are sad things, certainly, but this whole thing ends, you know, once, once you have a kid, the valence of almost every decision you've made changes because no matter how bad your run was up until that moment, God gave you this kid that is the best thing that could have happened to you. So you, on some level you have to be okay with it. You have to, you have to say that journey led to here and I'm just utterly grateful for it.
I mean, was there a moment where your faith in that Jesus, like your mom's faith, did that happen for you in high school or middle school or any time? Yeah. Yeah. One thing I always say is when you have a mom like mine, you have to contend with this topic, right? You can't, you cannot like, uh, moms are you listening to this is so good for us to hear. Well, cause I mean everyone, like I'll tell my friends and you know, any, anywhere I'll tell adults, like we'll be sitting around, I'll tell them part of the story and I'll describe what she had, right.
And all the sort of material things of the world. And then I described what life was like for a long time for us, where we were just dirt over. And there'll be a moment where people are kind of, you know, they're, they're standing around there listening and someone will always pause and go, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait. So then why did she do all this? And what's funny is my mom always gets this really cheeky look in her face when someone asks that question. Cause she'll just, the only answer is cause it's true.
Like cause you have to, you have to ask yourself when you look at my mother, was she nuts? Like the worst trade in the history of trades or did she make a good trade? And the trade was everything, family, home, country, money, wealth, practice, professional advancement, you name it.
And on the other side is nothing but Jesus. And you go, well, she's either nuts or she's a logical person who made a trade that was the, had absolutely the right value. Like she, cause no one makes a trade unless they think they're getting the better part of it. Right.
Right. And so she got the better part of that trade. I mean, it makes me think of the scripture of Jesus saying like, you will lose father and mother, sister and brother to follow me.
And she totally did. And I also think as you're talking about your mom's the hero of the story and your mom's hero is Jesus. Jesus is the one that did all of that. And he continues to do that for all of us. I look at you like you grow up as a young man, you're in Tim Keller's church being discipled by him for years of all the places to go spiritually for that depth of being discipled. Well, it could have been in our church being discipled by me, but you know, Tim Keller's a good second. I'm imagining your mom to be a woman of prayer that she has just been on her face before God asking her to lead, to guide, to show. And her life has been hard and yet miraculous too. Yeah. And you're such a reflection all of that. Like don't you think that with him? Oh yeah. I mean, I haven't met her.
I've seen her on video. And I love how you described, do you want a God who listens or a God who speaks? Explain that. I was watching all the adults and kind of as a young person and starting to kind of think about the way they interact with God. Cause when you talk to my mother, especially during that time, like the answer to so many things was God.
Like she was like a bad Sunday school teacher where it's just like, it's like, so wait, why, why are we leaving my house like with Jesus? And you're like, okay, is that going to be the answer to everything? Could we, um, I was as a kid kind of very aware of what people, how people interacted with their impressions of God. And so there's this line in the series and the theme in the book that where he's saying, would you rather a God who speaks or a God who listens? And he sort of describes a God who speaks is the God who comes down the mountain and gives you the law. He declares, he tells you how to be, he's the God of the Old Testament. He is, he's the God who holds forth and your job is to shut up and submit. And that is, and then there's the God who listens, who sits down beside you and lets you talk and here's your troubles and here's your sadness and understands it and takes it on. That's the God who listens.
And interestingly, as he's going through the book, um, he's realizing that it can't be either or right. It can't be, you cannot just want the God of the law because, um, if that's all you have, then you will become a punishing person, right? A person who, um, wants justice at all costs and has no love. And then of course, if you're only want the God who listens, then absolutely, um, you want love, but you want it without standard. You want it without expectation and you want it without obligation. And that will also, um, not be a proper way of mercy to have, you know, you have to have both. They have to, you have to hold both in your hand somehow. A God who speaks and a God who listens.
And um, you know, you look around the world and you look around different cultures and that's, that's pretty hard to come by. There's a lot of gods who speak and a lot of gods who listen only. Um, and there he starts to see as the book goes on that Jesus is a God who speaks and a God who listens specifically came down to listen, right?
And at the same time to declare a very particular and important standard, right? So going back to Tim Keller, that's pretty much like my paraphrasing of, he talks about that a lot too, right? You can't, you cannot, it cannot just be, you know, justice without mercy is cruel.
You know, mercy without justice is, um, lawlessness. And so as a young person, that would be the early seeds of, you know, me sort of trying to make that choice, you know, for myself, you know, I knew what, where everybody else stood. And in some ways, as I think of your mom, again, never meeting her, she revealed the God who speaks and listens to you. I mean, you sort of saw it, she, she incarnated it in a sense. She's not God of course, but I thought, you know, Jesus did that because when you finally get to him and he says, Hey Phillip, if you've seen me, you've seen the father, you get both. You get the Old Testament wrapped up in grace and love. You're like, wow, I think your mom sort of modeled that as well.
It had to be so compelling, like who wouldn't follow that God that my mom is like making known through her incarnation of Jesus. I keep having the picture of you guys coming back on a bus, imagining her packing up lunches and taking that eraser and erasing all of those workbooks so that you can do that. That's what moms do. That's what we do when we love our kids. And I just want to remind us as moms, there's never a time Jesus hasn't seen you, hasn't been wanting to talk to you, loves you and will care for you no matter where you are in the world. Yeah.
He loves you and sees you. Daniel. Thanks. Thank you.
Thanks for having me. That is so true. I really appreciate Anne's perspective there and reminder, Jesus sees you in all those mundane moments of life. The savior of the world sees you, values you and loves you more than you can imagine. It's really important to remember that when things are kind of chaotic and crazy and also just kind of boring, that the Lord sees you, He knows you, He values you, He appreciates the contributions that you make to your own family by sacrificing yourself, your time, your energy in order that your family might flourish.
I'm Shelby Abbott. You've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Daniel Nayeri on Family Life Today. His story is compelling, isn't it?
Well, you could read more about it and learn more about what God did from this little refugee from Iran to Oklahoma in the memoir that he wrote called Everything Sad is Untrue. You can get your copy right now by going online to familylifetoday.com or you can find a link in the show notes or feel free to give us a call at 800-358-6329 to request your copy. Again, that number is 800-F as in family, L as in life and then the word today. You know, stories like these come to us because of the partnership of people just like you who donate and make the ministry of family life today possible. And all this month, we are looking to raise an additional $250,000 in new funds by the end of August. And we'd love it if you would hop in with us and become a part of the solution here at Family Life.
It's easy to do. All you have to do is go online to familylifetoday.com to make your donation or give us a call at 800-358-6329. You could also drop a donation in the mail if you'd like.
Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. Now coming up tomorrow, Daniel Nayeri is back to talk about his journey to fatherhood, the challenges of raising a child and the influence of Tim Keller in his life. That's coming up tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
