Faith for many people is deeply instilled upon them from birth and is central to their identity and the way that they conduct their lives. However: for some of us, the origins of our faith is not the end of the discussion.
From the earliest moments in my spiritual recognition, I knew something didn’t feel right, didn't make sense.
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I was raised in the Methodist Church by my mother, who had also been raised Methodist by her grandfather, a Methodist minister. I had repeatedly been told to have faith in what would come. I was always told not to question, but to accept what I was told. For the longest time, I accepted and did just that.
When I was twelve years old, I was confirmed into the Methodist Church. From third grade to sixth grade, I had attended Church and Youth Group every Sunday. During the confirmation process, I went to confirmation meetings, church, and youth group every Sunday, yet in the back of my mind, I continued to have resounding doubts. I tried to repress them.
The following year, when I was in seventh grade, I moved up to the next Youth Group in Church, yet I felt even further from God. Rather suddenly, I stopped attending Church and Youth Group all together.
Faith did not make sense to me. I felt as if no one was there. I felt deeply misunderstood. My liberal viewpoints made me feel isolated within the Church. I was tired of hearing self righteous people who felt it was within their prerogative to condemn all those whom they deemed forsaken by God without coherent and logical basis.
The intolerant views of these people caused me to paint all religious persons with the same brush. I thought this intolerance was the predominant view of the Christian community. My journey out-of-state to attend college was partly inspired by my desire to discover my own sense of identity, yet I have ended up seeing the world in a way that I had not imagined.
When I got to college, I met people who caused me to reconsider my skepticism. These people showed me that you can love the sinner while still hating the sin, which contradicted the ‘hate the sinner, hate the sin’ attitude that I had seen for a very long time. Their genuineness caused me to look introspectively and helped me to break down the wall I had built between myself and faith over the course of several years.
The first time I attended Mass, a warm feeling washed over me that I had not felt before. This has sparked a change within me and caused me to begin to embrace faith and religion in a way that I had not prior.
While the reaction from many within my life to my conversion is mixed at best, I do not regret embracing God in a new light. The importance of God in my life going forward will hopefully never again be diminished.
