I think everyone is unique because of their story; what they survived, what broke them, what found them, and what finally brought them home.
Mine was chaos for most of my life. A downward spiral. A wreckage. A long season of self-destruction that felt like it would never end.
And yet tonight, somehow, I came full circle.
Tonight, I took an oath to become a Eucharistic Minister.
Even writing that sentence feels unreal.
I am not going to hide the fact that I am a proud Catholic. In fact, part of the reason I am so unapologetic about it is because of my Muslim heritage. I know the difference now between a faith that made me feel constantly watched, measured, and punished, and a faith that met me in my ruin and loved me anyway.
That is my truth.
I spent my whole life feeling punished by Allah; for every desire, every rebellion, every time I tried to use my voice, every time I dared to want something beyond obedience and fear. But I will say this as plainly as I know how:
Allah didn’t find me on the floor of that jail cell five years ago. Jesus did.
I know the difference because I felt Him.
I called for Him.
I begged for Him.
And there, in the filth and the collapse and the absolute end of myself, I told Him I would never drink again. I vowed myself to Him.
And what I felt back was not condemnation.
Not disgust.
Not punishment.
Just this:
“Follow Me.”
After that, things became very black and white.
Before then, Christianity had mostly come to me through movies, books, and Christian friends. I never knew what church I would choose if I ever became Christian. But once Jesus came for me, it became strangely clear. I didn’t hesitate. I joined the Church He told His apostles to build. I chose the Church that traces itself directly back to them. I chose to be Catholic.
And for a woman whose life has always loved mathematics, precision, and things adding up, the calculations made perfect sense.
That doesn’t mean it was easy.
When I spoke to Father, he asked if my family would be okay with it; almost like he was quietly wondering whether I’d be disowned, or worse. And honestly, if I were living in an Arab country, maybe that fear wouldn’t have been dramatic at all. But I told him what I know to be true: West Indian Muslim culture is often far more Americanized than the most traditional Arab expressions of Islam. And besides, I only really cared what my mother and father thought.
My mother came and supported me.
My father made the trip too, even though he couldn’t quite bring himself to walk into the Catholic church. He stayed in my apartment. But the fact that he came that far, that he came at all, meant everything to me. That was love, too. Imperfect, complicated, but real.
This Easter marks the anniversary of my baptism. And what has happened in just one year is nothing short of a miracle.
I don’t use that word lightly.
So many doors have opened. So many things I thought were dead in me came back to life. I now have a real chance to tell my story of redemption and salvation out loud; the whole ugly, holy thing. The story of how every Easter for fifteen years, I ended up thrown into psych wards in some manic unraveling. How I drank with my pills for over a decade and did nothing with my life except become a burden to my parents. How I sat in sex chatrooms online, showing my body to any man who would give me five minutes of attention, hoping that maybe one of them would stay and save me. How my life split wide open when I married my husband and went on a drug-fueled crime spree that landed me in jail. How that relationship was steeped in abuse. How he introduced me to crack and literally put the crack pipe in my mouth because I refused to touch it myself.
That is part of my story.
So is the shame.
So is the mania.
So is the degradation.
So is the pain.
I am not cleaning that up for anyone’s comfort.
There was anguish for so many years. So much suffering, so much self-hatred, so much wandering around like a ghost in my own life. And all that time, strangely enough, the Catholic Church was just… there. Quietly in the background. Waiting.
There was a church off the main road near the place I went for therapy. I used to go there after drinking an entire carafe of wine, completely numb, trying to sedate myself out of existence. I would sit outside in the garden near a statue of Mary and tell her how ashamed I was; how I felt like I was a disgrace to women everywhere.
Then one day, a verse I had come across somewhere came back into my head:
“Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.”
So I did.
I walked up those church steps for the first time in my life, a complete sinner, and I knocked on the door.
No one answered.
Well, maybe not no one.
The door was open.
And He was there waiting for me.
I walked inside and sat in those pews and cried for an hour. I was in complete awe of what I was feeling, what I was seeing, what had found me there. That was the first of many times I returned to that empty church, carrying all my wreckage with me.
And now?
Now I am living a life that would have been unimaginable to the woman I was back then.
Tomorrow, I begin at a local radio station doing broadcasts for the blind. Every Monday at Mass, I stand at the podium and read Scripture aloud to the congregation. My voice carries now, the same voice I once believed was sinful for a woman to use too proudly, too boldly, too loudly.
And tonight, I was ordained as a Eucharistic Minister.
It is now my privilege to bring Communion to the sick and the homebound, to carry the Body of Christ into places of suffering and loneliness, to do in some small way the work Jesus Himself pioneered.
What an honor.
What a sentence.
From the floor of a jail cell…
to hands that now hold the Body of Christ.
That is my story.
That is what makes me unique.
Not because I am special in some glamorous way. But because grace reached all the way down into a life like mine and pulled me up anyway.
It makes me unique.
It makes me redeemed.
It makes this a story like no other.
