My faith did not come into being at a desk, but in Iran, when I was thirteen. An old man in a park near the University of Tehran gave me a book – a Bible in my own language. I began reading that very day, and something in me changed: the discovery that love does not ask where you come from, what you have done or how many mistakes you have made.

Since then this faith has carried me through very different chapters of my life – through years in which it cost me something, and through years in which it gave me ground under my feet again when I had lost it. I have learned that hope is not a naive confidence that everything will turn out fine, but a conscious decision not to give up, even when you do not know the answers.

What has stayed with me from this story is less a fixed doctrine than an attitude: that every person is worth being seen and loved, without conditions. That suffering is real and must not be played down, but that it does not have the last word. And that faith – especially in difficult times – holds people together and carries them when nothing else does.

This attitude is what I bring to my work: the conviction that people who have themselves walked through darkness can often pass on hope to others most credibly.

Siamak Aminmansour