DARA : Born Again and Again

I was raised Lutheran and was always a God-fearing girl. I never had a time in my life when I was rebellious.

When I started undergraduate school, I wanted to find nice people to make friends with, so I looked for a Christian group because Christians tend to be nice people. I found InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) there, and I attended the weekly meetings to make friends and to be around people who hopefully thought like me. From here on out, my journey brought many changes to my thinking.

I had a good year of fellowship with the IVCF people. The weekly speakers we good, and I loved the contemporary songs we sang as opposed to the hymns. I was born again at one of those lectures. Being born again wasn’t a big change for me. It was just a decision to ask Jesus (A.S.) to forgive my sins and all the rest, but I still believed all the same things I had as a Lutheran, so it was easy, but I had a new label for myself, ‘born again.’

Also during this year, I helped out with activities of the International Student Association. Through those activities, I met many Muslims. I was asked if I wanted to read the Koran, and I said I would, but only after I read the entire Bible first. So I started reading the Bible from the very beginning.

In my junior year of college, I had my first big change in thought. I went to Valencia, Spain to study Spanish for one semester. Through the invitation of two fellow students, I ended up at a church in Valencia that was an outreach of an American church with an American pastor. I started attending that church with the girls and was introduced to the idea of adult baptism in water by submersion and the gifts of the Holy Spirit and baptism of the Holy Spirit. At this point, I still thought all these things were weird, but I was introduced to them and the seed was planted.

Back in the U.S. for the rest of that year, through study and prayer, I began to believe that Lutherans were incorrectly practicing baptism by baptizing people when they were babies. I now believed that people should be baptized by immersion as adults and that the baptism of the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Holy Spirit were real and true. I found a new church to attend. I think they called themselves non-denominational, but they practiced those three things. I was baptized by immersion at that church. I enjoyed the new beliefs and practices of the church. It was here that my life-long practice of tithing began, and I found the courage and a way to go on a mission. I went with a Baptist group to the slums of Reynosa, Mexico to build houses and witness.

The most important conviction this church gave me was the importance of prayer. I started a prayer group in IVCF and took on the leadership role on the executive board of Bible study coordinator.

Meanwhile, I became convinced of my burden to witness and wanted to help the Muslims I had met become Christians. I asked the regional director of IVCF where I could get help witnessing to Muslims, and he said, “Urbana ‘93”. It turns out that the IVCF conference at Urbana-Champaign that year was going to have an emphasis on witnessing to Muslims. I was so excited. I went to that conference and attended all the sessions about witnessing to Muslims. I bought the books that respond to Muslims’ objections to Christianity.

When I eventually did read some of the Koran, it irritated me. I don’t know why exactly—I was just so fundamentally Christian at the time, anything not born again Christian irritated me.

I became very enthusiastic about witnessing to Muslims back at my undergraduate school. It was so obvious to me that God had put all these Muslims in my path so I could witness to them. During one of these conversations, one of the Muslims suggested something that has turned out to be, I think, the single most important piece of advice I have ever been given. It was, “Don’t pray that I become a Christian, pray that God shows both of us the truth, whatever that may be.” I thought that was a wise suggestion, and, of course, I thought I knew the outcome because Christianity was the truth.

I moved to St. Paul and started graduate school at the University of Minnesota in Linguistics. Graduate school was a tough time for me. I had all the work of the Linguistics program, plus, I was intensely interested in studying Christianity further. I prayed every day that God would show me the truth and answer my questions.

I read a lot of books about the history of Christianity in graduate school and found a new church which was a mixture of a traditional Lutheran church and the non-denominational, evangelical, fundamental church I had been attending.

Studying the history of Christianity chilled my enthusiasm for things I had been told and led to believe at the fundamental church; for example, that the Bible as we know it today is the complete and inerrant word of God. Until then, I had believed the Bible was the complete and inerrant word of God because my pastor believed it, and I assumed he, being a pastor, must have had made an intense study of the subject and come to the correct conclusion.

I had thought the history of Christianity was uniform—that all Christians were like how we are today, but reading about the history of Christianity dissolved that illusion as well. It was particularly eye-opening to me that not all early Christians attributed divinity to Jesus (A.S.).

Slowly, through more months of study and prayer, I came to believe that the concept of the Trinity isn’t supported in the Bible and that it is a doctrine that hadn't been taught by Jesus (A.S.).

In summary, there was no one thing that made my belief in Christianity waver—it was the collection put together, fact piled on fact, that made me disenchanted with the Christianity I had known.

During this time in graduate school, there was one other major event that made me start to think that maybe there was more to Islam than I had thought. I was quickly healed of a terrible bout of food poisoning while traveling abroad (on an overnight bus trip with no bathroom) by a desperate plea to Imam Ali (A.S.) (Nade Ali). By quickly, I mean very quickly—it took about three seconds for the pain and symptoms to wane from want-to-go-to-the-hospital intense to non-existent. Then…not another hint that I had been in increasing agony for hours before.

This was such a major event for me because I was led to believe as a Christian that part of the evidence supporting the divinity of Jesus (A.S.) is that you could be healed asking him for help. (Indeed, I had been healed by Jesus (A.S.) in the past as well.) In other words, I was led to believe that Jesus (A.S.) is God (astagfirullah) because he could heal illnesses—the premise being that only God can heal. Being healed by a prayer to Imam Ali (A.S.) astounded me for two reasons—first, that I was healed so perfectly and quickly and secondly, that he responded to the plea to him despite the fact that I didn’t even know who he was. After this event, even still being a Christian, I carried with me a nagging question about how the healing “command structure” of God works. I now understand that God truly is the only one who can heal (as Christians believe), but that, by his leave, he allows others to heal—Jesus (A.S.) and Imam Ali (A.S.) in the case of my life. Everything Jesus (A.S.) did (healing, bringing the dead to life, forgiving sin) was BY GOD’S LEAVE, but that doesn’t make him God.

During lent of 1998, I felt I had to fast, intensely, not something simple like Catholics not eating meat on Fridays. Since I had been taught as a Christian to fast, but not how to fast, I decided to borrow the Muslims’ way of fasting—no food or drink from dawn to sunset for a month.

Feeling alienated from the Christian beliefs I had known and loved, I turned one last time to the church for an answer. I went to church one of those Sundays I was fasting and went down front after the sermon for “laying on of hands.” I didn’t have the courage to tell the concerned eyes looking at me that I was questioning the basic tenets of Christianity, so I just said I needed direction, and so they prayed for direction for me.

I had to continue with my academic life during all of these months of study and prayer and questioning. I had soon to decide on the topic for my thesis. I had come to know that the Koran mentions many mysteries of the universe, so I decided to read through the Koran strictly from a pedagogical point a view to see if I could find a topic for my thesis. I was hoping to find something related to language because language interests me so.

I was fasting, for lent, the day I took the Koran off the bookshelf and started to read. As I read the words, I was emotionally and physically stricken with an epiphany. The entry for epiphany from the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains it well: a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something, a revealing moment. My epiphany was that the words of the Koran were true—they were the word of God; Jesus (A.S.) was not God, but a Prophet.

I spent some weeks thinking about what was happening to me. Every time I would pick up the Koran and read some more, I believed what it said. I just believed. I read, and I believed.

I was worried now about these happenings. How could I continue to be a Christian if I was believing what the Koran said? I thought about implications of a conversion for my life and family.

I struggled for a time with these thoughts. I didn't want to tell anyone I was a Muslim until I was sure, and I wasn't sure myself. I finally decided I was a Muslim, after all, how could I not be if I believed the Koran. I was just struggling with the practicalities of it. Would I cover my head? Where would I buy scarves? How would I learn the daily prayers? How would I tell my family? What would my Christian friends say?

It seemed scary and overwhelming, but I couldn’t hide the fact from myself that I now wholeheartedly believed the Koran—outward conversion was just something I was going to have to face. I admitted to myself that I could no longer call myself a Christian. I said the declaration of my belief in Islam thinking I somehow needed ‘one moment’ in which I became a Muslim. Looking back, my ‘one moment’ in which I became a Muslim was probably weeks before when I the epiphany—even though I hadn’t considered myself a Muslim at the time.

I had many emotions at once. Disbelief, for one, that I was now a Muslim because I thought I would never see the day that I would be a Muslim. I was overjoyed. I was content.

Thanks be to God, all my family members have responded with respect and understanding to me being a Muslim. All that has happened since then is another story that isn’t often told. Conversion stories tend to stop at this point, and I will, too. I will say though that the process that started with the epiphany all those years ago has inspired my current ongoing interests—working on my Web site, which is a directory of online modest clothing shops (modestclothes.com), writing children’s books with Muslim/Christian dialogue, and, now, starting Shia Muslim Converts of Minnesota to help others who will follow in my footsteps.

©2006