Muslims who consider leaving their faith often face tremendous costs: The potential loss of their families, or even if not the complete loss, the realization that their actions will cause immense heartbreak to those they love the most. In some parts of the world, the risks are higher still, mounting to possibly losing one’s own life rather than having the family lose their honor.

While Qureshi does not fear being killed by his family, he is afraid of the heartbreak he would bring to his parents if he left Islam. Even more, he knows that in Islam, shirk—the denial of Allah—is the unforgivable sin, and so it is not something one would undertake lightly. Agonized by these possibilities, Qureshi nonetheless feels that if God reveals to him that the gospel of Jesus Christ is indeed the truth, then he will follow that truth regardless of the costs.

The narrative now returns to Qureshi’s moment of prayer as portrayed in the Prologue, where he lies prostrate in a prayer hall, begging God to reveal the truth to him. Qureshi pledges to follow that truth, despite whatever challenges might remain in his way. He holds on to two verses, one from the Quran and one from the Bible, but both of which promise the same thing: That if one earnestly seeks God in prayer, God will hear and answer their call.

Qureshi has now finished his first semester of medical school, and he accompanies his father on a conference to Orlando. He enjoys the rare one-on-one time spent with Abba, but he is still inwardly conflicted and crying out to God for guidance.

In the hotel room, Qureshi waits until Abba has fallen asleep, and then he begins to pray, begging God to show him a dream or a vision. At that moment, a vision comes: Qureshi finds himself looking out at a field of hundreds of crosses, glowing against the darkness. Though Qureshi is stunned, he doesn’t want to accept it as sufficient proof. He wants still more, something that can’t be interpreted any other way, something that couldn’t possibly be a trick of Satan or a manifestation of a subconscious desire. Qureshi asks for a dream to confirm the vision.

Later, after dropping his father off at the conference early and returning to the hotel room to sleep, Qureshi receives the dream he prayed for. It doesn’t at first seem to be all that clear, involving multi-layered animal symbolism: A giant iguana that camouflages itself, a boy that confronts the iguana, and then the boy’s cricket, which fights the iguana and saves Qureshi. It seems possible to interpret this dream as God’s guidance toward Christianity, with the iguana as Islam and the boy as David, and David’s cricket being Christianity.

However, Qureshi isn’t sure, so he calls his mother so she can refer to a classic Islamic book of dream interpretation which she has often mentioned. As he gives Ammi each symbol within the dream, the book identifies each one in a way that matches almost exactly with Qureshi’s gut instincts: It was a dream that pointed toward his own experiences, and of the way that Christianity was saving him out of Islam. Qureshi believes that the coincidences are so striking that it seems to Qureshi that God designed the dream specifically to be interpreted by Ammi’s book of dream interpretation.

Qureshi is still hesitant, wondering if the dream might be too subjective and too symbolic to give him the certainty he wants. He decides to ask for more dreams, reasoning that if God were triune, then sending three dreams seems appropriate. He prays, and receives another dream. Qureshi finds himself standing at a narrow doorway in a brick wall. Through the doorway he sees people seated at a banquet, waiting to eat, including his friend David. When he asks David if he is going to eat with him, David answers, “You never responded” (268).

The next morning he calls David to get his interpretation, but David tells him that the dream is so clear it requires almost none. David just recommends a Bible verse to Qureshi—one that he had never heard before, but when he looks it up, he immediately sees the connection: A passage in which Jesus says, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door” (269). This is the turning point for Qureshi, who realizes that he has to respond to the invitation that has been offered him.

Qureshi receives yet another dream, completing the three he asked for. In this one, he finds himself on a flight of stairs in a mosque, but he finds that he is out of place relative to where the imam is sitting. He understands the meaning as soon as he wakes up: “For me, the dream was clear enough. I was on stairs that led out of the mosque” (272).

He checks with his mother again for confirmation from her book of dream interpretation, and while she cannot give a full explanation, there are symbols in the dream that confuse and unsettle her, but which now make perfect sense in Qureshi’s mind. When he shares this final dream with David, his friend urges him to finally convert.

Throughout the remainder of the summer, Qureshi visits mosques and speaks with imams, hoping to find something he has missed along the way, but nothing is forthcoming. He comes to understand that he is holding back not because he is unconvinced by the call to Christianity, but because he wants time to mourn what he will be leaving behind.

He takes out a Bible to look through it for guidance, and soon finds the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (276). He keeps reading, and with each new verse he finds an application that strikes right to the heart of his condition.

As Qureshi dives deeper into his study of the Bible, he feels like he comes to know God personally: “I thought I had known Him my entire life, but now that I knew who He really was, there was no comparison. Nothing compares to the one true God” (277). Qureshi finds that the Bible speaks to every question and movement of his heart, almost as if he were in conversation with it.

Many of the verses that speak to him most deeply are ones that include Jesus’s call to costly discipleship and sacrifice. He still does not want to have to tell his family that he is converting, but the call of the Bible’s message on his heart is undeniable. He prays a prayer of submission to the gospel, and finally considers himself a Christian believer.

Two weeks after his conversion, Qureshi is in tears, crying out to God for an explanation as to why his path to Christian faith has required such desolation and heartbreak. He has told his parents about his conversion, and saw the raw emotional wreckage that it made of the people he loved and respected most in his life. To his parents, this news feels like an unspeakable betrayal, and their reactions stab such grief in Qureshi’s heart that he almost wishes that God had killed him rather than have to go through it all.

In the midst of his agonized questions, he feels God’s voice nudging him that what is happening is not all about him, not about Qureshi as the main character in the story, but rather about God’s message of salvation reaching out to all people. This counterintuitive comfort calms Qureshi’s soul, and he looks out at the world around him with fresh eyes—no longer consumed with his own spiritual journey, but suddenly aware that God might use him to reveal the joy of the gospel to others around him.

In the Epilogue (expanded beyond the material in the book’s first edition), Qureshi ties up some loose ends of the story, particularly with regard to the events of his conversion and his early years as a Christian. After submitting himself to the gospel in prayer, Qureshi waits till the following Sunday to reveal it to David and their friends. He does this by attending church with them and then requesting to say the blessing over the food at lunchtime—a prayer he ends with an invocation of the Trinity. David rejoices with Qureshi, but he still has the pain and heartbreak of his conversations with his parents to go through. They find out not from his own disclosure, but from accidentally seeing some messages on a screen he has left open.

Though their initial reactions are heartbreaking and devastating, they do not cut Qureshi out of the family, and although many tensions remain, relations gradually improve over the following decade. Not long after those events, Qureshi meets the woman he will marry—Michelle, a Coast Guard trainee—and his choice to marry a Western girl puts further obstacles in his relationship with his parents, as does his choice to study for full-time ministry instead of pursuing a career in medicine.

At the time of writing his expanded Epilogue, Qureshi is attending a PhD program at Oxford and working as an apologetics speaker for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.