“Everything Sad Is Untrue” by Daniel Nayeri
Read it! Or listen to it!
Read/listen to it because…
It talks about sojourners/refugees, and it will put pressure on you to make decisions that are aligned with the emphasis and Spirit of Leviticus 19:9-10!
It talks about bullying in school.
It talks about bidets.
It talks about the WORTH IT, and EXTREMELY COSTLY, impact Jesus of Nazareth makes on your life.
It talks about family domestic violence, and tenacity, and gumption.
It talks about Persian rugs.
It talks about Mounds bars and Twinkies.
It talks about baklava and ‘boss dad(s).’
It blends humorous storytelling with honest wrestling with gut-wrenching realities (like Harrison Scott Key in “How To Stay Married”).
Here are a few excerpts from the book:
“Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.
Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.
He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”
:::
“My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime.
That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister.
And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you.
When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that.
And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you.
And she believed.
When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?”
Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian.
All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now.
But I don’t have an answer for them.
How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”
Why else would she believe it?
It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.
My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.
If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.
That or Sima is insane.
There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it.
If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake.
But she doesn’t think so.
She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed.
And she’s poor now.
People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better.
It’s true.
We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma.
We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong.
But you can’t make Sima agree with you.
It’s true.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
This whole story hinges on it.
Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.”
:::
“Imagine you’re evil.
Not misunderstood.
Not sad.
But evil.
Imagine you’ve got a heart that spends all day wanting more.
Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.
Imagine you’re like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.
Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.
Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.
Imagine you’re evil and you don’t do any of those things, but you’re like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what’s going on and you say nothing’s going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.
Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone.
Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.
Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them.
Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone.
All the kindness you could have given.
All the excuses you gave instead.
Imagine that for a minute.
Imagine what it means.”:::
“Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.”
:::
“Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they’ll ferment and poison your brain.”
:::
“When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: 1. The streets were not paved with gold. 2. The streets were not paved at all. 3. They were the ones expected to do the paving.”
:::
“Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.”
:::
“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.”
:::
“Here is something I would like to tell you—stories get better as they get more true.”
:::
“We are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us. And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry.”
:::
“Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?”
:::
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
:::
“All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.
That’s what the kids in Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea.
My mom says it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.
Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
In one version, maybe I’m not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller’s class. I’m a prince in disguise.
If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. “Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange.”
That’s how they all begin.
With a promise. If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.”:::
“I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me. But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.”
:::
“If we can just rise to the challenge of communication—here in the parlor of your mind—we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.”
:::
“HERE IS A LIST of foods we discovered in America: Peanut butter. Marshmallows. Barbecue sauce. (You can say, “Can I have BBQ?” to a kid’s mom at potlucks and they’ll know what you mean.) Puppy chow. (Chex cereal covered in melted chocolate and peanut butter and tossed in powdered sugar. They only give it if you win a Valentine friend.) Corn-chip pie (not a pie). (Chili on top of corn chips with cheese and sour cream (not sour).) Some mores. (They say it super fast like s’mores.) Banana puddin. (They don’t say the g. Sometimes they don’t even say the b.) Here is a list of the foods from Iran that they have never heard of here: All of it. All the food. Jared Rhodes didn’t even know what a date was.”
:::
“In all our lives, my sister only told me her stories twice. We never compared our memories, ever. I think because where they were the same, they were painful and obvious. And where they were different–even just a little–they were so important to each of us, that we hated each other for not remembering them as we did.”
:::
“You either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both.”
:::
“But the truth is that no one is innocent in love, and nobody forced me to love Kelly J. I don’t want to stop just because she laughs at me. I want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person. It is a complicated thing that a little kid, or even a fifth grader, can’t understand, that we are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us.”
:::
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov”
:::
“in Persia, they would say King Fereydun shined with the light of greatness and wisdom, and people would have to cover their eyes when they saw him. Which is where salutes come from.”
:::
“The thing is that Scheherazade was telling her stories to a king in the language they both spoke as babies. So she never had to explain the demons who believe in God, or what was rude. She just showed it in the story. But the shame of refugees is that we have to constantly explain ourselves. It makes the stories patchworks.”
:::
“I put down Mr. Sheep Sheep. He props up on the dirt on a flat-panel bottom. His stubby round legs poke out in front of him. His arms reach out for a hug. I look in his black button eyes. They beg.”
:::
“She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed.”
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