This Month, we are lucky enough to be on the island of Penang, Malaysia. This city is amazing, and I feel close to home because quite honestly, this city reminds me a lot of New York. We have everything we could ever want right here at our fingertips, and the culture here continues to amaze me almost on a hourly basis.
Here in Malaysia, and especially in Penang, there are several main groups of people: The Chinese, who are usually Buddhist, the Indians, who are usually Hindu, and the original Malay people, who are usually Muslim. Then there is a small percentage of Christians which includes some from each of the three ethnic groups, as well as the majority of Westerners who call Penang home. Malaysia is a semi closed country, which pretty much when it comes down to it, means that it is illegal to convert the Malay people who are Muslim over to Christianity. In the week that we have spent here so far, we have had a few discussions with people about the religious differences in Penang, and how they effect the life here. From those discussions, I have come to understand why Muslims do not convert to Christianity, and been given an entirely new outlook on how the world as a whole views our religion.
The first realization that I came to when we begun to learn about the people here, is that Muslims assume that if you are a white westerner, that you are a christian. I guess I probably should have seen that one coming, but for whatever reason, I didn’t, and this was the first part of our conversation that blew my mind. They assume that every single actor, athlete, and tourist that shows up on their island, is in fact a bible reading, Jesus following Christian. What they see, then, is these ‘Christians’ in tiny swimming suits on their beaches, getting drunk in their restaurants when they are here on vacation. They see these ‘Christians’ having premarital sex in every single movie coming out of Hollywood, and they see these ‘Christians’ like Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus shaking their half naked bodies on stages for the world to see. This, then, is the image of Christianity that is portrayed to the Islamic community. We preach the necessity of being a Christian in order to get into heaven, but our actions don’t match our words.
Here in lies the problem, and here in also lies a whole new outlook on how we as western Christians are actually preventing others from gaining salvation simply by the way that we present our lives to the outside world.
During this conversation, I came to learn a lot about Islam. Again, I probably should have known a lot of this, but for whatever reason, I didn’t really have much of an idea about how Islam worked. I was shocked to learn, that it is actually fairly similar to what Christianity should be. They believe in prophets, God and heaven and hell. The one crucial difference: They do not believe that Jesus Christ is savior, they believe that he was only another prophet. Because of this, Muslims spend their entire lives trying to please God, where as Christians know that once we accept Jesus as our savior, we automatically have salvation and eternal forgiveness because of the sacrifice of Jesus. Muslims however, because they do not believe in automatic salvation, see these ‘Christians’ living their lives in ungodly ways, and believe that because of this, they are all going to end up in Hell. MIND BLOWN. Why, then, if all these people see is bad behavior that leads to eternity in hell, should they want to be a Christian? Honestly, if I had been raised in an Islamic family, and I was exposed to ‘Christians” in the same way that these people are, I guarantee you, I wouldn’t want to be Christian either.
Think on these things.
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