The Revert Stories

A BLIND WOMAN SEES THE LIGHT

The name I am called by my Christian parents is Bobbie Evans, but the name I am known by in the Muslim community is Khadija Evans. This is the story of how my husband and I came to embrace Islam.

I can remember standing in the kitchen of the house I lived in when I was just seven or eight years old and looking towards the door that went outside. I prayed to a god whom I wasn't sure existed and I begged Him to show himself to me if He was really there. Nothing happened.

I can remember being nine or ten years old and writing a letter to God and hiding it in the heat register in my bedroom, thinking God, if He existed, would come and retrieve it and answer my prayers. But the next day, the letter was still there.

I had always had a hard time accepting the existence of God, and of understanding the beliefs taught in Christian churches. Even though my parents weren't very religious, and rarely went to church, they thought it was best that my two brothers and I go. We were allowed to choose our religion when we very young. I think I was about six or seven, and my brothers were one and two years older then I. I chose a Methodist church for no other reason then it was a few blocks away from our house, and my brothers chose a Lutheran church because it was also close, and I hadn't chosen it.

I went to the church until I was thirteen years old. I was baptized and confirmed there when I was 11. I went along with the baptism and confirmation because all children who were 11 received confirmation, and if they hadn't already been baptized, that was done at the same time. Even then I knew that doubts about God and Christian teachings were things best kept to myself.

When I was 13 my family moved to another town with no churches within walking distance, and my parents weren't eager to get up early and drive us kids to church, and so our religious training stopped until I was 15 and my mom suddenly found religion. She began attending an Assembly of God church, occasionally dragging my dad along. I went willingly. I had already begun a search for God that wouldn't end until I was 42 years old. I remember being "born again". Caught up in the fervor of the hell and damnation that the minister preached at the Assembly of God church. I became "high on religion" thinking I had finally found "Him." Little did I know, but the high would be short lived, as I again began to have doubts and unanswered questions. When I was 17 I met the daughter of an assistant Baptist minister and began going to their church. I had been sexually abused by my dad from the time I was at least six years old and I told the assistant minister about it. He arranged with my parents to let me live with him and his family in a type of "private foster care." My dad paid him $100 a week. My parents also attended the church for a brief time, until the minister announced on the pulpit that my dad was a child molester. Before that though, my mom, dad and I were each baptized at the church.

One day after spending the day with my parents I returned to my foster home only to find the house empty. Cleaned out. Not a stick of furniture. We found out that the minister had been caught embezzling from the church and he and his family had left town in a hurry. I returned to my parents home and the abuse.

As a result of that incident what little faith I had in God was totally lost and I became an atheist. For the next 25 years I would fluctuate between believing, wanting to believe, and Agnosticism, and Atheism.

When I was twenty-six, I went to three months of Rights of Initiation for Catholic Adults and then was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church. I had been allowed to by-pass the full year of classes because I hadn't called the church to inquire about converting until three months before the Easter Vigil Mass when confirmation for adults was held.

I had entered the Catholic religion with the same philosophy that I had once heard Alcoholics Anonymous has, "Bring your body, your mind will follow." I didn't really believe in God, or in the core teachings of the Catholic Church, but I wanted so badly to believe in a power higher then myself, that I went faithfully to mass seven days a week, hoping that somehow I would start to believe. But after several months, I began to realize that it wasn't going to happen, and my mass attendance became a once a week thing, then once a month, until when I was thirteen and met the man who today is my husband and who wasn't Catholic, I stopped attending mass altogether.