I had arrived at Buca a broken man. But now I did something that changed my trajectory.
I realized I could not do much to fight for my freedom, but I could fight for my faith. If I did not survive spiritually, I knew I would lose everything. I had spent so many hours pacing the courtyard or lying on my bunk, accusing God, confused, and often angry and offended at him. But now I made a solemn decision, and announced it to God, almost in defiance: Whatever you do or do not do, I will follow you.
This became the basis of my declaration, and I added to it.
If you do not speak to me, I will follow you.
If you do not let me sense your presence, I will follow you.
If you do not show your gentleness or kindness, I will follow you.
If you allow me to be deceived, I will follow you.
If you leave me in prison, I will follow you!
I had no illusion that I could make it without God’s help. But insofar as it was up to me, I determined to persevere.
I made a decision: I will not give up!
I may be terrified, I may be weak, I may be broken, but I am going to hold on.
I will look to Jesus, not away from him. I will run to Jesus or, if necessary, crawl to Jesus.
EVERY PRISON MAKES ITS OWN RULES, within certain parameters. One of the most important differences from Sakran was that Buca did not require me to write in Turkish. They had a guard who could read English, and he was tasked with checking all my mail, incoming and outgoing. This meant that others could now write to me, and as a bonus, Robert from the consulate was able to bring typed notes to me on his visits. The prison checked them, and the guard got them to me within a day or so. It was like a treasure each time. I would quickly scan the pages Norine had collated for me, then pace myself and read them slowly over two or three days, savoring them.
Most significant of all, I could write in English to my children. During my time in Sakran I had been so distraught that I had almost nothing to give to my family. But in Buca Norine laid out the truth: the kids needed to hear from me. So I started to engage. I needed to be a father to my beautiful children, even though I could not see them and was missing so much in their lives. I did not know when I would be with them, so I started to think of the legacy I wanted to leave them. My letters gave an opportunity to encourage and affirm them, to speak into their lives, to give them my blessing and love. I wrote about the things I wanted them to learn, how to interpret what was happening to me, how they should respond to suffering, and the hopes I had for their lives.
While I was at Sakran, Jacqueline had told Norine that if I wasn’t released soon she would come to see us in the summer. We were concerned for her safety, because the Turkish government sometimes had imprisoned a man’s innocent children or elderly parents, so we knew they were capable of using our children as leverage. But even though she was afraid, Jacqueline said, “I’m coming!” I thought the fact that her husband, Kevin, was in the US military would deter Turkey from arresting her. We felt better about Blaise coming, because we thought it unlikely they would do anything to a minor child in a case with this high a profile, but we told Jordan not to come. In the end we had bought tickets for Jacqueline and Blaise and got permission from Ankara for them to come to my next open visit.
Two weeks before my open visit at Sakran they moved me to Buca. We worried we would lose our visit because Buca scheduled theirs on the odd rather than even months, but the prison director agreed to allow it to go ahead. And so, two weeks after my transfer, the day of the visit finally arrived.
I had mixed feelings. Of course I longed to see my kids and hug them, but I didn’t want them to see me in such a broken state.
The guards came to get me, but instead of taking me to the room used for visits they led me to the one they used for my meetings with Suna. It had a desk that cut the small room in half and foam padding on the walls to reduce the echo and make it easier for them to record the conversation.
I dug my heels in and refused to go inside. “The director told me I can have an open visit. I’m not going in that room!”
One of the guards waved a clipboard at me. “This is the room you’re using.”
“But I want to be able to hold them and hug them. I want to talk to the director.”
The guard stared at me with cold contempt. “No. This is what you get,” and pushed me in.
Norine was already there, vehemently arguing the same thing with the guard on her side of the room. It had been almost a year since I’d last seen Jacqueline and Blaise. I rushed toward them, and tried reaching over the desk to hug them, but it was awkward. Finally I decided to push the rules. I jumped up on the desk, swung my legs over to their side, and had them join me on the desk. I knew there were guards watching through the glass, and they might become angry, but I did it anyway. All that mattered was that for a while at least I got to sit beside my two kids, hugging them tight and feeling their sobs mixed with mine.
I felt like a father again.
I HARDLY GOT OUT OF BED for three whole days after the visit. I replayed every minute of it, how we’d said over and over that we loved each other. Blaise’s final words—“I love you. Hang in there, Dad.”—stayed with me so clearly. I could still hear them. Still feel them.
I was so glad to have seen Jacqueline and Blaise, but I felt so helpless too. I could feel the familiar despair leak into me again, and the old questions about God resumed.
Was God thwarted? If so, has he so limited himself that he cannot save me? And if he was not thwarted—what happened? Why did he allow me to be so deceived—if I was deceived? Why has he withheld any sense of his presence? Why did he let me be broken so completely?
These questions were suffocating my relationship with God. I did not choose to dwell on them—they were there, they wouldn’t leave, they dominated, and I couldn’t escape them. And they kept me from receiving truth and encouragement from God, from the Bible, from Norine, from any source.
I had read a book by Dan Baumann in which he explained how, after suffering a great disappointment with God, he locked away his questions in an imaginary box. I decided to do the same thing. I imagined a modern, high-tech safe with a hand scanner on the front as well as a turn handle. God and I were the only ones able to open it. I took each of my questions and doubts and deliberately placed them in the box.
“God,” I prayed as I imagined myself sealing the lid shut. “I am locking these questions away. I am not going to ask them anymore, I am not going to demand answers. I do not understand, I am confused, and I am hurt. But these questions and doubts will remain in this box until a different time. You can open this box if you want, but I am leaving it sealed. I don’t need to know the answers in order to continue my relationship with you.”
From this point on whenever one of these questions came to mind, I would banish it back to the locked box.
EVEN THOUGH IT WAS COOLER up in the mountains than it was back in Sakran, I had no fan in Buca. My sheets were often soaked with my sweat, and I’d get heat rashes throughout the day on my neck, chest, stomach, and inner arms. At Sakran, even with meds the intensity of the crowded cell had kept me on edge and wrecked my sleep. But now the nervous energy had yielded to lethargy, and I dozed in and out for up to ten hours a day. Each day I’d look forward to the evening, when the air would begin to cool and I knew that soon I would be able to escape to some degree the stress that surrounded me by drifting off to sleep. This was my most peaceful time. It was also when I felt my strongest, and I could say, “Yes, Jesus, I am willing to suffer for you.” But I knew that in the morning I’d wake up and feel the fear, the dread, and the monotony of life behind bars start to batter at my heart all over again.
I would have to start fighting again to refocus on God and keep this up deliberately throughout the day. I tried to make my time—from morning to night, whenever I was awake—as God-oriented as I could.
RAMAZAN AND I were reading on our bunks one morning when the slot in the door clanged open. “Get your things together, Andrew. We’re moving you,” said one of the guards. “There’s a new directive that foreigners need to be in the same cell. So we’re moving you in with a German.”
“No! Please, no!” I said, scrambling to my feet. “I like Ramazan, I’ve just gotten used to him. I don’t want to start over. And I don’t speak German!”
When I’d finished protesting they agreed to ask the director, who sent them back to tell me that he was willing to compromise and move the German in with Ramazan and me. Before the end of the day the cell door opened and we were joined by Nejat—a bear of a man over six feet tall with a thunderous voice.
Nejat was Turkish born and raised but had studied engineering in Germany. He was a businessman who had taken up German citizenship, and like both of us he was accused of supporting Fethullah Gulen. But unlike so many of the others, Nejat admitted that he had participated in meetings, although he insisted—and rightly so—that he had done nothing illegal.
I liked Nejat. He had traveled and lived in a Western culture so I was not an object of curiosity. At the same time, he was very fervent in his faith. Almost as soon as Nejat arrived I noticed a change in Ramazan. He instantly became more animated, laying out his prayer mat before dawn and kneeling next to Nejat, praying louder than I’d heard him pray before. In my early morning haze I thought of some of the friends I would most like to have in prison with me. I so missed being with other Christians, and it gave me a new appreciation for the church.
At first I wondered if the cell might go the same way it did in Sakran, with me becoming even more of an outsider. And when Ramazan reminded me not to cross his field of vision anywhere in front of his mat while he was praying, I thought, Oh, well . . .
“That’s wrong,” bellowed Nejat. “The area on my prayer rug is the holy space, not the space in front.”
Nejat didn’t just stop at correcting and encouraging Ramazan. He frequently turned his attention to me, his deep voice rolling through the cell as he shared his opinion on my predicament.
“You need to stop stressing, Andrew. Stop thinking about the news, trying to figure out every new thing that happens. Stop worrying about the politics and what is going on. It doesn’t matter what Trump says and it doesn’t matter what Erdogan says. When God says you will come out you will come out. Until that day you aren’t going anywhere, so don’t even think about what anyone is doing!”
His words were just what I needed. “You know, Nejat,” I told him a few times, “you’d make a better Christian than I do.”
He’d brush away my words with his big hand. “We’re both being tested, Andrew. And God is in charge. That’s all there is to say.”
WHEN NEJAT AND RAMAZAN weren’t praying they’d often be in front of the TV. I wasn’t the chess player Ramazan had hoped for, and between the stress and the sluggishness caused by my meds, which had been continued, I just didn’t have enough interest to maintain the focus required to follow TV dramas in Turkish. Plus it was painful to watch normal life, knowing that it was going on without me. Sometimes they watched a house-hunting show taking place in North Carolina, not only close to home but the kind of show Norine and I used to enjoy together. What energy I had I put into the one thing I knew was essential for me: pressing into God.
Norine and I made a plan. As a family we would focus our prayers especially on one person each day, starting with the youngest—Blaise on Monday, then Jacqueline, Jordan, Kevin, and Norine on Friday. Since we were scattered in three countries, we picked a time we would all pray—8:00 p.m. Turkey time. We were trying to bring the family together. I started to fast two days a week—one day for the kids, and one day for Norine because she was carrying such a heavy load. I also agreed with her on a daily reading plan, and each evening I’d sit on my bed and open my Bible to Psalms. Even though we were separated I felt closer to her knowing that we were reading the same thing.
By now the Turkish government had canceled her yearlong visa and she was only allowed to apply for three-month visas. We held our breath each time she requested an extension. As our wedding anniversary approached, I was struck again with just how grateful I was for my wife. I wrote to her:
I was thinking today especially of our upcoming anniversary when I won the lottery and married you. Thank you for twenty-eight years—especially this last one that has been the most difficult. I think that I would not be alive now if you had not provided the encouragement, truth, the occasional correction/rebuke (never resented, you should know), and frequent reminders of your love for me. Thank you for your faithful love, for fighting for me, waiting for me, suffering with me.
PLAYING THE GUITAR was another positive step that I took in Buca. On her first visit to the new prison, Norine was surprised to see “classical guitar” on the list of approved items—along with canaries!—o she immediately set out to find one. The first I knew of it was when the guard showed up at my cell the next day. “Here Andrew,” he said, holding up a guitar. “Your wife brought this to you.” Norine encouraged me to play it every evening. I had led worship with a guitar for years, but this seemed so distant now, and I did not feel like singing. But I carried on, as a discipline. I was determined to reclaim a part of me that existed long before I was a prisoner and to worship, even from a broken heart.
Most unusual of all, I had started dancing. I had been reading about Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor who was imprisoned and tortured for fourteen years under the communist regime. He took Jesus’s words “rejoice and be exceedingly glad” as a direct command and chose to rejoice by dancing in his cell, in spite of the horrors he was facing.
I decided to do the same. I felt no joy and my body was weak and my spirit sad, but there was something about Wurmbrand’s story that captivated me. It also convicted me, as I realized how far I was from Jesus’s words that specifically said we should rejoice when persecuted. So I decided to dance like Wurmbrand danced. Each day, for a minimum of five minutes, I would leap around the courtyard. No matter how much I didn’t feel like doing it, how hot the sun or how cold the rain, I danced. It was an act of the will.
Norine told me, “I am sure that when you get up to dance, the courtyard is full of angels who are following your lead.” And I know Father God was pleased. As for Ramazan and Nejat, they just cast sidelong glances at me.
ON AUGUST 24, six weeks after I’d been moved to Buca, the guards came to my door and told me to get ready. Norine was due at the prison for our weekly visit, but that was at least an hour away. I looked at them, confused. “My wife’s here already?”
“No. You’ve got a court appearance in ten minutes. Let’s go.”
I followed them to a small room where a video camera and TV screen were set up in a booth. I could see the judge and as soon as I sat down he started proceedings. I interrupted. “Sir, I’m not going to participate in anything without my lawyer.”
The judge paused and stared at me. “We’ll appoint you a lawyer then.”
At the start of all this I would have given in. I would have agreed, hoping that by not putting up a fight I might earn their goodwill. But I was done with all that. “No,” I said. “I want my lawyer.”
The judge looked annoyed and ordered that I be taken back to my cell.
Within the hour I was being marched back to the video room. “Excuse me,” I told the guard before he closed the door on me. “My wife is coming to visit me today and I don’t want to miss that. Please can you have her wait if I’m not ready?”
This time I could see my lawyer, Suna, on the screen as well. She looked harried and the judge ran through proceedings faster than ever. The whole thing was strange and rushed.
“Andrew Brunson, there are new charges against you. Attempt to overthrow the government. Attempt to overthrow the constitutional order. Attempt to overthrow the parliament. In addition you are charged with military espionage. The original terrorism charges are still in place. What do you say?”
At first I had nothing to say. I had heard every word that the judge had said, but I was stunned. Could they really be talking about me and these crimes in the same breath?
Military espionage carried a twenty-year sentence, while each of the first three charges I was now facing carried an aggravated life sentence. That meant solitary confinement, with one hour’s exercise each day, one phone call every two weeks, and an open visit every two months. For the rest of my life!
I felt indignation begin to boil in me. I leaned into the microphone and shot out my words. “When and how have I engaged in military espionage? Why would I support an Islamist movement? I want the government to explain this to me.”
“This is an insult to me and to my faith. I came to Turkey with one sole purpose, to explain Jesus Christ. And I did this openly.”
“Anything else?”
“You make general accusations, but you don’t ask about anything specific. When? Where? With whom? I have no way of knowing what I am supposed to give an answer for.”
My protest didn’t make any difference. It barely made them pause. Instead the judge waved me away. “You are now arrested under these charges.”
THE GUARDS took me—frustrated and fuming—to see Norine. In God’s mercy they’d kept her back to see me, but there was little to smile about. When I finished telling her what had happened we both sat in silence, eyes locked through the glass that separated us.
Fear had invaded every part of my body. It had saturated every breath I took.
“Do you realize what this means, Norine? I’d been thinking that maybe I was facing ten to fifteen years. But this is a whole other level. Even if they just convict me of one of these political crimes, it is life without the possibility of parole. They’ll never let me go.”
Norine held her hand up to mine against the glass. She told me that CeCe at the ACLJ had said that in cases like mine people are often found guilty before they’re released, but her words sounded distant and too far away.
“What if the US government believes them? Do they know the courts are completely politicized? They won’t fight for me any more if they think I’m caught up in all this.”
She couldn’t hold me—all she could do was press her hand tighter against the glass.
“It’s not enough to humiliate and hurt me. They know I’m innocent, but they want to destroy me. How can I make it, Norine?”