On A Way Exciting Life: Encountering Different Religions in Dallas

If her blog is any indication, Rachel from Waco is a person with a kind and radiant heart who always wears a smile. She went on a field trip for her Living Religion Class and visited six religious centers in Dallas. -gw

Rachel (on the right) and a friend

So this weekend was sooo busy!! It definately wore me out!! :)
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So to start it off, I left Thursday afternoon and drove to Dallas for a field for my Living World Religions class. It was such a great experience. It made me realize a few things that I think we, as Christians could do a little better. This trip just really opened my eyes to a lot of things. I mean some of those people I feel like I could have run into them like in the grocery store or they could be my neighbor or something. ...
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The first place that we went to on Friday morning was a Hindu temple....
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After we got done there we went to Soka Gakkai Buddhist place. It was very interesting also.... They did their chanting for us. It was definitely something that I have never experienced before. They were soo nice though. They had cookies and bottled water for us after we watched a video and they talked to us.
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Then after we got done there we went to a Sikh place. This was so different. We all had to wear head coverings and take our shoes off. They also fed us Indian food while we were there. It was soo good too!! I love spicy food, so it was great! We had a snack first of like some fried vegetables...with this sauce that was good. Then we went into the room where the book that they worship is and we watched the service. ...three guys played their instruments and sang for like 2 hours ...it was kind of gross from having to walk around barefoot a lot.... After the service was over we at the actual meal. It was really good. It was all vegetarian, so thankfully it was very flavorful. They gave us this good soup, and a mixture of potatoes, peas, broccoli, that was all mixed together with this really good sauce seasoning stuff on it. And they eat bread, that almost tasted like the mis between a corn and a flour tortilla. I loved that! Tortillas are my favorite! Then for dessert we had rice pudding. Which I'm not a big fan of puddings with weird textures....but once I got over the rice being in there, it was pretty good!!!

Anyways....

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Friday was a long day. We were gone from about 8am until about 10:30 or so. ... Saturday we went to Jewish Conservative Synagogue at like 9am. The service lasted for 4 hours! We were there until noon! It was crazy. It felt more like our church than anything else we went to though. It's just that everything they did was in Hebrew. I did discover that chanting/singing in a different language makes me soooo sleepy. It was also a boy's bar mitzvah so he read a lot.
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After that my parents came up and ate lunch with us, and then went to the mosque with us. The mosque was interesting. Several people told their stories of how they converted and they also gave us a lecture on their religion. We also got to tour their mosque.
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After that we went to this Baha'i center. That was interesting also. They fed us sub sandwiches. It was delicious.
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Everyone we met was so nice to us. It was just really neat how accepting they were to us. It had to make them nervous with like 70 something christians sitting in their place of worship. I really hope that we left a good impression on everyone that they met.
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One of the things that saddened me the most about this trip was that at every place we went there was at least one person that used to be a Christian that converted to whatever religion of what place we were at. It just made me feel like some of the things that we disagree about it in the church of christ as well as things we don't agree with the baptist and methodists just seem so stupid when there are christians out there that have converted to a completely different religion.
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Ok well that is all I'm typing tonight. I'll put a post about my formal tomorrow!! Night!
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Rachel, "What a Weekend!!!" Rachel's Way Exciting Life!
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{Re-posted with permission}