Good morning. I enjoyed your musings! I am just going to write, mostly from the heart, and if I do happen to refer Scripture, it won't be with chapter and verse, but its in there-I'll be paraphrasing as I don't have time to check the references. One of my kids will be getting up soon and we have plans today so I won't be around much and nor do I possess LovingTrayBake's eloquence!
Many people, like Traybake, started their journey into Christianity after examining the Bible. My experience, seemed to happen the other way around. Born into a Catholic family and raised in it, the Bible was something very much in the background but I didn't know it or understand it at all. As the years went on, I explored a lot of other faith systems and modalities. I read the qu'ran and went to a Buddhist centre, looked into Kabbala etc etc. I was very open, to literally everything except Christianity because I just thought it was so backward.
Cutting a very long story short, when I was pregnant, I came across a Bible verse to give encouragement when in labour. I took a screen shot of it and forgot about it. I saw the Bible as just another ancient text with some wisdom to pick and choose from, like an old self help book.
Anyway, my waters broke and there was a bit of a panic because it was quite early and they admitted me to hospital for monitoring. I was alone and opened my phone to find that bit of Scripture in my gallery. I didn't just feel like the Scripture was really appropriate, that it hit the nail on the nail, that it was spookily accurate or even that it was sent from God to comfort me. I felt like the words were somehow living and they were experiencing my situation with me, in real time. I can't explain it but the words were alive. Obviously not long after that, I had a new born who took up my time, along with a toddler, but it never left me and as the years went on more and more things started happening and I started doing more research based on that experience.
I hadn't realised that this was common among believers, that the word was described as living and that other people had this experience. When I would listen to testimonies where people would say 'the word of God is alive!' I would think 'yes!'. I started having more and more experiences that I won't go into here, but they kept leading me towards Biblical Christianity (or should I say Christ!).
Nobody evangelised to me, put pressure on me, tried to argue with me, threaten me with Hell, anything like this. This was happening very internally and by myself. My husband is as staunch an atheist as you will ever meet and I told him what was happening and he was not happy at all. I actually felt like my world was turning upside down and that something was being revealed to me and I was trying to make sense of it.
I watched lots of testimonies from people from a vastly different array of backgrounds; atheist, Jewish, agnostic, New Age, Hindu, Buddhist, pagan, witch, satanist...and they all have an almost identical moment when they come to Christ that I too had. There were times when I wished that it wasn't happening to me because at the start there were difficulties. I had to 'come out' to my family as a born again Christian, and they thought I'd gone mad. I am a very 'normal', rational, stable person and this all seemed nuts. My husband thought I'd lost my mind. Everything is fine now, once the dust settled but at the time I had a sense of 'this is the truth and I can't unknow it' and I had to let the chips in my life fall where ever they landed.
This was 7 years ago and it has been a journey but all I compare it to (badly) is someone showing me a young man and telling me that he is my brother. The man looks just like me, has my mannerisms and I know in my heart he is my brother. On the table is the results of a DNA test in their raw form and I am trying to work my way through them. I don't always understand it but I have the proof with me and the book is backing up what I already know. Terrible analogy I know.
Certainly in the eyes of believers, Christ is the only way to heaven. There is a misconception that Christians are smug, thinking they are perfect and love telling others how bad they are. In reality, its like we discovered something very important and want other people to know, urgently. That Jesus is the only way to Heaven, and not by anything we can do but by what he already did. Christianity is the only faith system that does not rely on human effort to get to heaven. Its the only faith where God is a father. The post above advising someone to maintain their Hindu roots in Christianity is problematic, for example, as Brahman and God the Father are not the same entity.
So maybe there could be a careers class in school where you pick your religion based on your personality type, but in Christianity, you change with it and don't end up the way you started. We all have different personalities and are all different parts of the same body. The Holy Spirit transforms you from the inside out and you are conformed to the image of Christ as time goes on, and use your different personally types to serve God in different ways.
A lot of this was very personal so I may ask for it to be removed later, but ultimately these are my early morning musings. I hope I didn't go off on too much of a tangent, but these are words that I never dreamt I would be writing. It is exactly 7 years tomorrow that I felt God really come into my life; New Years' Day 2019. I suppose I am feeling reflective today
Right, I better go and wake my daughter so we can go on our our outing!
Happy New Year!