Originally A Reddit Reply: “ why did you change your faith, if you did?”

 TL:DR My testimony in short 

Jesus Christ changed it for me when I was six. I was baptized Catholic and raised Episcopalian, and I therefore had some exposure to the Gospel. All I remember about that day is the Episcopal priest and my mom, talking in the parking lot of the church while I was praying in the cemetery (and I later found out that it’s a Jewish custom in some circles to pray by the graves of those whom were considered righteous). I didn’t know that I am of Jewish heritage at the time, and I certainly was not raised in a church in which salvation by faith and grace alone was taught.

My mom later told me that when I told the pastor to diet that I accepted Jesus, she asked me if I was a good girl, and I told her “It doesn’t matter. He died for me.”

Now that I’ve since learned about eternal security, salvation by faith and grace alone, and my Jewish heritage, what I was able to say on the day has become more profound ever since—especially because I (maybe) believed that one could lose salvation and just get it back (although I could’ve come to accept the concept of eternal security earlier on, and just never had a term to put that), that faith was about me believing and not God choosing me first, and that I was chosen to be regrafted (not just grafted) in to the Olive Tree (Both of my parents are of Jewish heritage; and my father is an Ashkenazi Levite, although both of my parents have unfortunately chosen to not identify with their Jewish heritage—partly because my father comes from Crypto-Jewish families, and most of my mother’s ancestors were gentiles. The most-recent-fully-Jewish ancestors of my mother were, as far as I know, born in the 1700s and 1800s.).

Imagine this supposedly-Polish-and-Irish Catholic-turned-Episcopalian-turned-Presbyterian Christian finding out that she’s a Jewish believer in Jesus and getting kicked out of a Catholic college classroom for confronting the professor’s Antisemitism—that happened!

PS I now attend a non-denominational church and observe the holy days per the Biblical calendar—which the exception of holy days such as Chanukah, as that’s almost impossible to observe in any other way but the Rabbinic calendar. Sometimes, I will observe the holy day per one calendar and acknowledge it on the other per the other. As far as I know, none of my recent ancestors came from Karaite families, anyway.