I am a Christian. A grew up in church, saved and baptized when I was 13, born again at 25, filled with the Holy Spirit - evidence of tongues - Christian. My husband is Buddhist.
When my husband and I met he was studying Buddhism but had not
fully immersed himself into the religion so it didn't bother me much. After
all, we all get a little side tracked now and then, but he'd grown up Christian and we loved the same God.
But as our relationship progressed and he became more dedicated to
the Buddhist path the dogma of my Christian upbringing and youth spent in
church began to cause me a bit of uncertainty.
I was never one of those girls who grew up planning their wedding.
I never imagined what my husband would look like, or what kind of flowers I'd
have. I didn't spend hours picturing our first dance or how my hair would be
styled. Those things just never really mattered to me. I did have one picture of a dress torn out of a magazine that I tucked away for that special day but that was the
extent of my 'when I get married' fervor.
When it came to getting married, there was one thing though that did matter. One thing that
I knew would be an all or nothing stipulation for my groom to be and that was
that we would be 'equally yoked'.
"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for
what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion
hath light with darkness?" (2 Cor. 6:14, KJV).
My husband and I would both be Christians, go to church together,
pray and read the Bible together and love the same God.
So as Matthew and I became more serious I started to worry about
how 'unequally yoked' we appeared to be. I believed in Jesus... he followed
Buddha. And that's where I got hung up. But our relationship progressed, we got
engaged and as any 'good Christian' wife-to-be would do, I began praying for
his conversion or 'return to God' in time for the wedding.
I've always had a slightly different view on God and the Bible
than most Christians I know.. some things I'd been taught just didn't add up
with the God I knew in my spirit but that yoking thing was apparently drilled
in pretty deep because it really started to wear on me. But I had faith and was
sure he'd 'come around' and everything would be fine. I mean he grew up in a
Christian home.. his dad was a Southern Baptist minister for crying out loud.
No go back... you didn't say that right...drop your voice an octave......
slow down.....
and try again..
Suuuuthernnn Baptist. There you go. We're talking
DEEP South Southern.
To the point where if Matthew was caught trying to read a
book about another religion his parents would take it and properly scold him
about the dangers of letting in demons and the like by reading anything other
than 'Godly' material. So I thought surely this Buddhist thing was just a fad..
a lingering rebellion and he'd snap out of it and go back to being a Jesus
freak like me.
What I didn't know then.. and has taken me almost 3 years to
realize is that He loved Jesus and God the same way I did all along. He worshiped the same
God. We had the SAME beliefs. He just used a different method on his path to
spiritual growth than I did.
I recently had an extended Facebook debate with a Christian friend who is
the exact same as I was back before I decided to stop putting God in a box and
let Him be GOD. She in short 'educated' me about how Buddhists worship Buddha
as their God, and how they thought Jesus was 'below' Buddha and how she had no
need or desire to read about any religion other than her own and from no other
book than the Bible because that's what a Christian was supposed to do.
Needless to say I failed in my attempt to help her see how grossly
incorrect she was in pretty much every statement she made because even though
she'd never read one single thing about Buddhism she knew all she needed to
know about it because she read the Bible.. and that gave her the right and authority to
tell me (I'm paraphrasing here) that my husband - and I by proxy - was going to
hell for worshipping false Gods and that she'd pray I found my way back to the 'real' God. Because apparently mine was fake.
It made me sad... for her.. and for myself - because I'd been just
like her for so many years.
Blind in my 'faith' and unyielding in my views. Funny how easy it is for us to skip over or completely forget what the Bible actually says when it suits us... I mean I'm pretty sure Jesus said that we should Study and show ourselves approved.
"Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. " (2 Tim. 2:15, KJV).
Our different faiths actually caused some problems the first year
of our marriage.. I wanted a strong spiritual head of my home.. a husband that
'led me' in the right path who sat down and read the Bible and prayed with me
and Matthew's Buddhist practice of meditation and mantras just wasn't giving me
that. It wasn't that he didn't try... he did... it was that I wanted him to
believe like I did and anything else just wasn't good
enough.
Thank God (literally) that I've always been open to His voice and
leading - even when I wasn't open to anyone else and I finally realized that I
was being selfish. I wanted my husband to follow my faith my way yet I couldn't
even be bothered to so much as read a webpage about his... his faith and
spiritual practice that was just as important to him as mine was to me and here I was completely disregarding it because it didn't fit in the box I'd put God in.
It was hard but I finally opened my mind to learning something
knew and in the process I found my heart opening more to God. The same God I grew up
learning about and loving in small town Southern (did you say it right this
time) Baptist church. Learning about Buddhism didn't make me a Buddhist, or
less of a 'Christian'. It didn't take away from my faith and it wasn't going to
condemn me to the fiery depths of hell.
What it did was open my eyes to how amazingly big and wonderful
God truly is. God can't be put in a box.. and just because I call him 'God' and
you call him 'Dios' doesn't mean we're not worshiping the same marvelous
Creator.
This is a slight segway in this particular post so I'm only going to
mention it briefly but I feel it warrants attention. You may have noticed that
I spelled God in both English and Spanish as explanation that people may call
God by a different name but He's still the same God....
Allah... is GOD in Arabic... it literally translates to 'the God'.
Little mind blowing trivial for the Muslim haters out there. Same GOD.. different LANGUAGE.
Now back to Jesus...
By being open to actually educating myself about something I was
unfamiliar with I learned that the core teachings of Buddha and Jesus are
almost identical. In fact - Buddha taught those same core teachings a few
hundred years before Jesus was ever born. If they'd lived in the same time I
fully believe they would have been best of friends and brothers in their
mission to bring the world to enlightenment through peace and love.
Now I personally claim Christianity as my 'religion' because it was Jesus who led me to God.. it was through Jesus' story that I learned who God was
and developed the amazing relationship that I have with my Creator today. For
my husband.. it was Buddha's teachings that brought him to that place.
He doesn't worship a different God than I do... he doesn't
discredit Jesus for what He did by dying on the cross. He's not anti-Christian
or a lost sinner because he's Buddhist. His journey to God just took a
different fork in the road than mine did.
.... The important thing to know here is that this forked road
didn't take us on to separate paths... it brought us to the same one.
I now have a closer relationship with God than ever and my husband and I, both as individuals and as a couple, are growing leaps and bounds in our spiritual walk. A walk we're taking together.
