"I Am Whole Now"

Here is the beautiful story of two brand new believers from Texas—a husband and wife who embraced the Faith within the same month, but followed their own spiritual journey and conducted their own independent investigation. The wife was the first to declare. She recalls:

When I was 15, I moved in with a relative because of the poverty and abuse I had experienced. I was searching for something to heal me, and I found Christianity—the faith of this relative. Now I'm almost 21, and I don't think Christianity fits my beliefs any longer. So I started searching again.

Earlier this week, my husband told me about a religion that one of his high school teachers had been a member of, called Bahá'í. He told me what little he could remember, but I felt it was exactly what I was searching for. I decided to do some research on it, and found the Bahá'í website where I requested that someone call me with more information. Then, that very same day, someone contacted me! It was like God meant for this to happen. But the day she contacted me was a really bad day—I had just been fired from my job—and I couldn't handle talking to anyone; I barely spoke to my husband that night. So yesterday afternoon she called me back and we discussed the Bahá'í religion.

As soon as she started talking I felt myself changing. When she had finished, I felt like a new person, like a hole in my heart that had been there for so many years had been filled. I joined immediately. I knew that this was what I was searching for.

I woke up this morning feeling like a new person! I won't go back to having that hole in my heart again. I can't put into words how this has made me feel—amazing, ecstatic, loved—all those words do not explain it. I am whole now.

Nineteen days later, there was more joyous news: her husband, who had originally told her about the Faith, also declared! Here is how he described his spiritual transformation:

Since I became Bahá'í, I've have more of a peace about myself. I love it! I decided that Bahá'í is true from researching it through independent investigation. It was all purely logical.

This is a definite transformation for me spiritually for me because I was Christian for so long, and that's one of the major "mutually exclusive" religions since it denies other faiths. Going from a religion like that to one so open as Bahá'í was a significant change, although not a difficult one for me. I always held the belief that all religions were based around a universal truth, but I could never find a religion that actually expressed that, and I was too scared to change my religion due to familial pressures. I tried to change my interpretation of Christianity to suit my beliefs, but it never really worked.

My very first encounter with Bahá'í was during my senior year in high school. My history/psychology teacher told us about her Bahá'í faith, but she never delved too deeply into it. This is understandable of course, as she probably would have been fired very quickly for doing so in a public school system. So I thought, "That's cool," and never really researched it until recently. Once I did, it just made logical sense, plain and simple.