Coming To Jesus Series: Episode 1 - In The Beginning Was The Word

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Warrior Women Show. I'm your host, Raina Patan. I'm a Christian mentor, speaker and lawyer. Join us every week as we talk about all things, faith, relationships, leadership, business and more. (upbeat music) Welcome to this episode of The Warrior Women Show. It has been a hot minute and we are coming off our hiatus, taking a complete detour on this podcast. We're starting off with a three-part podcast series. Last year, I had an unexpected supernatural encounter with Jesus. And from that moment, my life took a sharp turn north and became unrecognizable. This is my testimony from Islam to new age to Christ. I was born into a devout Muslim family. The first girl after nine grandsons and an only child for 16 years. This is significant and I'll share more about it in episode three. Since childhood, I felt pressed between a religious doctrine and a deeper knowing of who God is. My life before Christ was an internal everyday battle with two things. One, accepting Islam fully and two, a deeper confirmation of who I knew God is in his character being and feeling. Resistance with Islam is something that I have always felt and I couldn't pinpoint what it was about Islam growing up but it always created a resistance in my body that was very triggering. I always had a very visceral reaction to anything to do with Islam from the very beginning. The interesting thing is I never had any overt traumatic experience with a religion. I didn't have Mosqueert, betrayal from religious leaders or growing up in a country where Islam a clue was practiced or anything of that sort, which I know is a truth for many people. But for me, the journey has been so interlinked with family and acceptance. That to have the love and acceptance from my family equated with my acceptance and following of Islam. I knew that not being a Muslim would cause friction and resistance in my community for my family. It was just this unspoken thing that I knew. No one ever had to tell me that. And yet, deep down, I had a knowing that this is not the truth and there is something else out there that I need to discover for myself because it became very evident to me very early on in my life that Islam was not the path that I would walk on. It was almost as though God had already placed that on my heart. I remember as far as four years old learning the Quran in Arabic and I despised it. I used to have an Islamic teacher come home to help me learn and the dread I would feel before the lessons was unexplainable. The heaviness on my heart, I would want to escape but I felt trapped every time. I had no say in the situation and when I would read the words in Arabic, it would create this physical resistance in my body and this rage would just surge from inside me. At the time as a child, I didn't understand that. It didn't make sense to me. There had been so many moments in my conversations with God as a kid where I questioned him and I asked him why I was even born in a Muslim family because I could never and mesh my identity into being Muslim. It just never felt right to me. It never felt like the path for me. It felt like by some sheer chance, I was born in an environment where Islam is so deeply rooted and instilled in the bones that held my family together. It formed their identity, their way of life, their culture, their traditions, their value and belief system. And I just had to accept it in total line because the alternative was bad. The alternative was rejection. The alternative was abandonment, a life without my family. And I was not ready to accept that. I always felt such a deep and special connection to God. It was spiritual. I knew that I'm spirit and there is a deeper presence of God in my life. His presence is something I felt so familiar with since I was a little girl. And I've always been curious about God. I wanted to know him because in my mind as a child, he was my friend. God was my friend. But in my journey, God and I have wrestled together. We have fought battles with one another. And it always came from me questioning Islam as I grew older. And questioning the Quran, not getting the answers that were certain and clear. I could sense such a profound presence of God around me. And I knew the core truth of who God is. What his presence feels like. It is the epitome of love. Agape. The Greek word for the highest form of love. So profound, selfless and unconditional. And this is the truth of who I knew God to be always. As I grew older, I naturally had questions about God, faith, spirituality. But there was something inside that always made me afraid to ask. I was afraid of questioning God because of the fear that was instilled in me. The reality for a lot of Muslims is that the fear of God is instilled in us since childhood. And it doesn't create permission for us to question anything because it's almost forbidden to. We just believe what we're told. What is written in the Quran and the Hadith. What scholars, imams and religious community does tell us is the truth without ever questioning it. There is this illogical blind trust. And this is at the core of a lot of Muslims. And becomes a core tenant of why we don't question the religion. And for those of us that do and have question Islam, the responses are almost always universally the same. It's either do not question God because it says so or it's written. You're either chastised for asking or there is a very long-winded explanation about something that diverts away from the question. It defies all logic and intellect makes no sense, has no rooting in Scripture, but it's word of mouth. And in the end you'll sit there feeling like you've got a response and you just need to be a yes man and accept the response you got. Now here's a wild thing. I went to Catholic school between the ages of five and nine simply because it was a good school. It had nothing to do with religion. And looking back now, it seems almost illogical because my family were really devout Muslims. And God had a plan all along. There was a church on the school ground. that I would go to regularly. We would go to mass, we would go for prayers and worship and I learned the Lord's prayer of heart and we sang him every day. And coming from a Muslim home, I didn't understand anything but I remember I used to feel this deep sense of peace and safety whenever I would walk into church. It felt like a safe space. I remember asking my dad about Jesus when I was a child and why we as Muslims don't believe in him. The answer was that Jesus is a prophet but he didn't die on the cross and the Bible has been corrupted because Jesus ascended to heaven before dying on the cross. He was super naturally lifted up and replaced by someone else on the cross who resembled him. And as a child, my mind was like, wow God can do that. He can confuse you to believe something that's in front of you but it's not true. How? Why would he change someone at the last minute? I was told that the Quran is a continuation of the Abrahamic faith and that the Abrahamic faith was revealed in the Torah then the Bible and that the Quran is the final revelation that the Quran is a continuation of the Bible. It corrects everything in the Torah and the gospel because those books were corrupted and we don't have the uncorrupted versions so God sent a final revelation through Muhammad to rectify these errors because Christians got it wrong. Jesus was not the son of God. Muslims believe that Jesus is an important prophet and that he is also the final Messiah who will come back. At their core the belief is that Islam corrected the biblical errors so the Quran is a supreme authority over the Torah and gospel according to Muslims. And naturally I went along with that for a long time. To my undeveloped brain it seemed like a plausible explanation and I never questioned even when I wanted to. I told the line and I was a good Muslim child. The problem for many Muslims including myself is conceptually understanding Islam both in its scripture and its theology. It's not something we learn. We don't learn how to understand the scriptural text and how they need to be read. We don't learn theology in Islam. In fact it's nonexistent in our Islamic upbringing in how we understand the religious doctrine. I learned to read Arabic at the age of four but I never understood a word of what I was reading since it was not my first language. When I began reading the Quran in English around 16 I was shocked. It began to hurt me. I started questioning God and it felt wrong. I felt guilty. But I started questioning what I was reading because I sensed that these are not words that God would write. What I was reading was a very different character of God to what I imagined him to be of what I knew him to be. It contradicted my belief about who God is. Agha pay the epitome of love. That God's love is not attained. It is freely given to us unconditionally. Everyone gets hundred percent of God. You get some and you get some and you get some and you get some. God was my friend. He loved me. He was always around me. He had his veil of protection around me. But every time I would reset something or question something in the Quran I was told that I was not scholarly educated and that I should not divulge in my own research because I could misguide myself about the religion. I should only see guidance from scholars who are learned on topics. I should only read from certain types of people. I was unqualified and that only some special people can read and understand this book because it's such a complex book. It's not written for the masses to understand. But I didn't buy it because why is someone else who is also a sinner more qualified than me to read a book that has God's word in it? Because surely he would have written it for me to also understand. Most Muslims don't learn about God from a relational dynamic. We learn the practice of the doctrine of Islam. Because the doctrine places heavy emphasis on the practice of the religion and less on the relationship because the theology of Islam is rooted in the practice and in the way of life to gain salvation. And that's why you you hear a lot of Muslims say that Islam is a way of life. The understanding of a relationship with God in Islam is that his love is not freely given. It is earned and attained. And we can never form a balanced relationship with him because there is a separation and a disconnect between us and God. That the path to heaven is in the practice, not in the relationship. And even though there is a relational dynamic there, the foundations of the relationship are rooted in the works, the practice, the way of life. And that heavy focus on being Islamically practicing and living an Islamic life completely diverts the relational dynamic with God. And I want to digress here a little. I never knew how to have a relationship with God until I opened the Bible and started to read it. It is a manuscript for it. It is a revelation of God's character, his personality, who he is, how to speak to him, his boundaries, his way of communication, his sense of humor because God is funny. You want to hear what God's voice sounds like. It is all over the Bible. Coming back, I used to be told as a child that there is a good angel sitting on my right shoulder and a bad angel on my left. And the good angel records my good deeds and bad angel records my bad deeds. And when I die, my books will be placed on a balancing scale. And the one that weighs more will dictate whether or not I go to heaven. And I wanted to go to heaven because I wanted to see God who was my friend. Okay? So I tried my best to love Islam, to love the God of Islam, the practices, the teachings, the way of life. It was forceful and pretentious because I thought it was my only way. I didn't want to be doomed in hell for eternity because I couldn't get this right. I religiously read the Quran. I prayed five times a day. I fasted Ramadan since I was five years old. I did all the Muslim things. In fact, late into my teens in early 20s, I did the whole being a devout Muslim thing. I was a defender of the religion. If you said that the religion didn't respect women, I came for its defense. If you said that it doesn't protect human rights. As a human rights lawyer, I came for you. You questioned why Muhammad marra 6 year old, I came for the contextual history defense. If you said that the religion allows for child marriage, I came for it. I was a thorough defender of the religion. Yet I felt the existence of this never-ending void in the pit of my heart. And every time I would prostilate to pray to the Lord, I would beg Him. I would be in tears to God if you can just take this void, if you can just fill it up with you. I craved to feel Him inside my heart. And I thought that that void was from my past trauma and the pain that I was carrying from it. And some of it was. But I felt somehow that if I just became the epitome of a good Muslim, this void would disappear. It would be filled. In my mind, somehow the antidote to everything was to be a good Muslim. You know, make my good book on my right shoulder way more. Read the Quran to earn my brownie points. Pray five times a day. Fast. Exalt a man named Muhammad. But the more practicing I became, the more empty I felt. My insides echoed of a silence that was so loud. The separation from God that I felt at my core consumed me. I wanted to know Him. I wanted to hear His voice when I read the Quran. But every time I read the Quran in Arabic, which was most of the time. I never understood what I was reading. I couldn't hear God's voice in it. I didn't understand why I was fasting. What these practices even meant. I just saw it as the norm of what everyone did around me and how I learned to be a good Muslim since the age of four. And I did and followed accordingly. Monkey see monkey do. That was me. Now you're wondering, Reina, why did you not just read the translated book of the Quran only because many Muslims are told that your brownie points are earned when you read the Quran in Arabic. It doesn't matter if you don't understand it. What's more important is that you read it and you earn your points because on the day of judgment, the Quran will intercede for you. The book is exalted because Muslims believe it is the unchanged, unedited word of God revealed in Arabic and therefore must only be read in that language. That's how God wants you to read it. Islam was so rooted in the breath of my family dynamics in the oxygen of my culture. I grew up in a large family with my grandparents, with my parents, everyone prayed five times a day, everyone did the devout Muslim thing. So if I'm the odd one out and I'm the only one who seems to have a problem with it, then it must be a me thing. So what do I do? I forcefully try to conform with what the family is doing. But I came to a point where I needed to escape it because through my twenties, my contentions would trigger this wild and raging response. Anything to do with Islam brewed up this anger inside me. It was so unexplainable. It was like a battle with fire. I had to give myself the permission slip to question the religion. The more I educated myself about it and read the Quran in English, researched, understood. There were too many gaps, too many unanswered questions and historically unverified information, word of mouth explanations that had no rooting in scripture. You're being told that something was the truth without having any written confirmation of it. It was just something in the air that somehow a god had proclaimed we should believe and do. The lawyer inside me had to rationalize what I was finding out. I needed evidence, I needed a facts and I needed certainty. And the more I learned about Muhammad, I questioned his character and whether he was a moral standard for what God deemed godly for a prophet. Because growing up, I learned that he was a perfect human being. And I was afraid to even question anyone around me about him because to question his character is to blaspheme the religion. He is exalted to a completely different standard and you can't speak against him or question his character without severe repercussions. A few years ago, I had an epiphany about how Muslims face a central point, the Kaaba that's made of stone to worship and prostrate to. And that realization blew my mind because not only did it feel like idolatry, but it was so illogical to me that when I was a Muslim, I never questioned it once ever. And when this veil dropped, I couldn't even pray Islamically anymore because I refused to prostrate to a stone that claimed to have gods invisible thrown above it. And the more I learned about Muhammad, I couldn't pray the Islamic way anymore because the Islamic prayer in Arabic exalts Muhammad. And when I realized this, it defied the belief that no one shall be exalted except God. I refused to spew words out of my mouth in Arabic, exalting a man who defied all godly principle. Now, you think naturally if I had an issue with Islam, that this would encourage me to look further and open the Torah and the gospel and read what it says. Well, firstly, it was not my time. And while the enough, it never occurred to me to look at the previous scriptures because my mind was focused solely on finding the truth out about Islam and itself. The reality as well for a lot of Muslims is that our upbringing and our environment highly forbid us from looking into any other scripture. There's a lot of control. There's a lot of indoctrination of the mind of the beliefs. And the fear of God is so prominent, so real and consuming that we don't even dare to think about opening something else. What we believe may be a logical, but we will be defenders of it. And it goes against our logic to look at anything else. It's a big sin to even read anything other than the Quran. My transition out of Islam was a slow burn and gradual. By my mid-twenties, I was convinced that I'm not a Muslim. The more independence I had, the more freedom I had to look outside the room. I detached from Islam completely. I knew that God was real. I just thought, well, if it's not this, then it doesn't matter what religion I choose to connect with him through. So I dabbled a bit in Sufism and Sikhism, but nothing really, even Hinduism, nothing really brought me that relief and peace in my heart. Until new age, spirituality stumbled and fell into my laps. And I turned to focus on it completely. The concept of new age was so far from the familiarity of Islam. It was almost like a bit of everything, and that worked for me, because it was the complete tail end of the stick. It was a new toy. I felt like an oxygen mask had been given, and I could finally breathe. When I came to new age, I was thirsty. And I drank that up. Now remember how I said that God and I have been in battle zones at times. Around that same time, they came a point where I was mad at God. I was mad at God because I thought that if God is all knowing and he knew that Islam was not for me, why would he choose me to be born into a Muslim family? And my back and forth questioning and wrestling with God about this, it calcified my heart. It made me very bitter to words him. And I detached from the conceptual idea of God completely and I turned to the universe. The source, the divine, the creator. And that was not an easy mental transition. Islam has a stronghold on Muslims. It's not just about the religion. It's a way of life that's so deeply ingrained in Muslims. Being Muslim is not just about the religion. There are cultural dynamics that are enmeshed into the way of life of a Muslim. The way we eat, the way we live, the way we pray. Our communities, our home environments and our relationships. It is very intertwined into our way of life. And when you are leaving Islam, there's not just a sense of betraying God, but also your family letting your parents down of making things more strict or worse for your siblings of being an embarrassment to your family within the community. There is a fear of being killed for a lot of people. There is a fear of being exiled. There is a lot that goes on. And so leaving Islam is a process because first, you almost have to surpass leaving it in your heart and mind. And then the second stage is to declare it out to the world around you and face the repercussions of that. You have to be prepared to face the repercussions. As ex-Muslims, we face repercussions. And that fear of the wrath of God, the fear of the repercussions being abandoned by our family, it is all such a deep human fear. You go through such an unconditioning process. You doubt yourself. You question what you're reading, what you're learning. There is the veil when the veil drops. Your whole world becomes unrecognizable because everything you've been told and taught and indoctrinated about and it's been enmeshed into your identity is not true anymore. And so you even question your decision to leave, you question your decision to question God, you question what you've read and been taught. And what if you're wrong? What if I'm wrong? Am I going to go to hell if I'm wrong? Because you almost have to mentally accept that if I'm wrong, I'm doomed for an eternal hell. Before I can even begin to think about leaving the religion, about looking outside the box, about dismantling my upbringing, my value system, my beliefs to explore something else. You are going against the grain of everything that has formed your way of life, your foundations, your identity, who you are, your personality to step onto a path that is so foreign. So foreign from your way of life as a Muslim, from your culture, from your food, your traditions, your family dynamics and norms. And even though I had left Islam in my heart at mine a long time ago, the truth is that I didn't have the courage to stand up and declare it to the world around me. The fear of the repercussions was very real for me. The words would not even leave my mouth. I would physically freeze and my heart would pound uncontrollably. Every time I wanted to say I'm not a Muslim. And throughout my time in New Age, I wrestled with the thought of people finding out I'm not Muslim. I had to pretend to be a Muslim to my family, even when I was steeped in New Age spiritualism. In my home life, living solo, I was bathed in New Age spiritualism. I was meditating every day, I was living the whole spiritual life, I was manifesting and doing all of these things. But I lived two lives for many years so I could continue being accepted into the tribe, to avoid being abandoned and exiled. The fear of being found out especially by my dad was very real. When I was around family, I would put my Islamic switch on. And when I left, my New Age spiritual switch would come back on. I stopped observing Ramadan many years ago and felt like every time it would come around each year, I was in formal, watching my family and cousins eat iftar and go through this togetherness process for a month. While I was out here living solo, meditating every day, eating, but lying about how my fast went because every day someone would text me to ask, how did you fast go? What are you having for iftar today? And so I had to pretend to have iftar because I couldn't let anyone find out about my true beliefs and that I was not Muslim. I was not fasting. The fear of being questioned, why are you not fasting? I didn't want anything to do with it. I didn't want to explain it to anyone. But that pretentiousness ate me up. I had to hold a veil up to my life and what I truly believed in. And I held that veil up, faithfully. I couldn't be myself. But those years in New Age spirituality became the bridging years. They were the years of the breathing space I needed to explore what faith meant to me and redefined the constructs of my relationship with God, faith and spirituality. They became the years of healing my relationship with God and vitting my heart of this anger and frustration I felt with Him, healing the deep wounds that I carried from my battle with Islam. And I was lucky enough and fortunate enough to be living alone and away from my family so that I had the freedom in my environment to do this. And I know that this isn't the circumstance for everyone. When you're in an environment where you are reminded of something day in day out that you know is not your truth. It is a difficult position to be in and eventually most people come to a decision that I'm going to accept the repercussions because the conviction I have that Islam is not the truth is it's too big, it's too clear. And I want to remind you that whatever the circumstance, God's hand is on your life. Now, next week's episode I will share my journey with New Age Spirituality before coming to Christ. So stay tuned and see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]