By Theresa Corbin, 28th August 2014
Theresa Corbin reveals the story of her journey to the faith.
Like most life changing events in the teen years, it happened in a car. A tan, beat-up, hatchback from the 80s, to be precise. All of my things (and my roommate’s things) had been packed, shoved, and forced into the back of the microscopic hatchback, so it looked like our bags were being vacuumed sealed in the car for freshness.
“I believe God exists, okay? I just haven’t pinned down his exact location or function,” I said to my roommate, who was driving us home from college for the summer in the car packed full of our dorm room junk.
We had survived the first year of college, but our respective faiths had not. My roommate had been a Christian Baptist and I, Catholic. But our endless conversations, classes and independent research about religion, culture and history had effectively changed our minds about Christianity that year.
Thinking about the past year, I realised how different I had been when I first entered university. I looked over at my roommate sitting in the summer heat in her loose pants, loose long-sleeved shirt and scarf over her hair. I realised her journey that year had been much more dramatic.
In my roommate’s search, she had stumbled upon something completely different, but strangely familiar – something called Islam.
In all our dissection of the true nature of Jesus and God, knowledge, and how culture shaped what people believe, we had yet to discuss the prophets.
Until that fateful car ride.
With the tedium of travel, we fell back into our discussion about faith. She wanted to know what I believed now that I had given up on Christianity. And I was articulating to her that I was leaning toward Judaism, thinking it would be the original truth.
“The further you go back, the more mankind has changed the message,” she replied to my mention of Judaism.
“God sent us prophets. They all had the same message: worship God alone and follow the example of the prophet. And every time mankind changed the message – whether they started worshipping false gods or ignoring the laws their prophet came with – God would send another prophet with the original truth and message for the people,” she said.
Never in all my Catholic school lessons about prophets nor in any Sunday mass I attended had I ever heard what the message of the prophets was. It never occurred to me that all the stories and all the old men in the Bible were linked by one message.
She continued, “Moses’ message, Noah’s message, Abraham’s message, Jesus’s message and Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) message were all the same. Earlier prophets came with different laws because they came to different people, but the message was the same: Worship God alone, follow the prophets.”
She talked about her new faith in Islam. She shared what she knew about a man I had never heard of before – Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). “The last Prophet came to all mankind with the same message as all the prophets before him. And as the last prophet, the laws he brought are for all mankind. This man was Muhammad,” she explained.
My roommate told me about a man who came with the same message as Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus. She told me about a man who loved God, who was kind to animals, and who was honest, gentle and respectful of women. She told me about a man who suffered to convey the message of God; a man who was allowed to performed miracles; a man who cared for the poor and weak.
I flashed back to a time in Catholic grammar school when we were being taught about Noah and how his people rejected his message (what Noah’s message was, exactly, was never discussed) and were destroyed by the flood.
It was in this grammar school lesson that I feared that I would be like the disbelievers in Noah’s time. It seemed too easy to write off a man of God as insane. So in that grammar school class, I prayed with my whole mind, body and soul to be guided if God sent another Prophet.
Flashing forward to that conversation in the car with my roommate, I realised that the Prophet of God I prayed to follow was Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of God be upon him). The prayer I had made in grammar school was answered in that car ride.
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