In the Beginning…

I was a Christian.  I was Baptized at age ten, without question.  I loved being around my church family.  But, at some point, my father suddenly didn’t want to attend anymore, and there was tension in the church.  Apparently the deacons had kicked out a young preacher, because he said something they didn’t like.

Fast forward a bit.  My mother became a traveling nurse, and I was home schooled by my father.  One of my earliest memories is watching a conspiracy show about JFK’s death on the History Channel.  Needless to say, my Daddy taught me to be open minded, and ask questions anytime something didn’t make sense to me.  I tried reading the Bible, and the only part that could hold my attention was Revelations.  I found it peculiar, but wrote it off as my imagination.

A few years later.  My mother stopped traveling, and I began attending public school for my seventh grade year.  I rented a book on world religions from the school library.  I couldn’t believe the similarities between the religions of cultures that were so different, and lived so separately from one another.  The wheels in my head continued to turn.

By the time I went to a Presbyterian college (scandalous!  My family is Baptist!) I was questioning everything.  Why would God have one special son that he sent to Earth, if we’re all His children?  Why does He change his mind so often?  Why do so many Christians seem so much farther from Him than the atheists that I’ve known?  Did none of the people around before Christianity get to go to Heaven, because they weren’t saved?  These were just some of my questions.

But I was A Christian.  And A Christian didn’t question these things.  A Christian couldn’t interpret the Bible in their own way.  At least, not in the Bible belt.  Openly supporting gay rights is bad enough, without people thinking that you aren’t a Proper Christian.

So I kept to myself.  Of the friends I did confide in, I’d say about 20% didn’t get freaked out by it at some point or another.  I signed up for a world religion class, because I was still fascinated with the similarities in different beliefs.  My teacher (the preacher on campus, ironically) explained Hinduism to us one day as having multiple deities who were all aspects of one higher power.  This was about three years ago, and I can still hear those words.

I knew, at that moment, that every religion in the world was a different way to worship the same higher power.  Now, hardly anyone likes to hear an idea like that in this day and age.  But I knew it to be true, with every fiber of my being.

And so I became interested in Hinduism.

 

To be continued… 🙂

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