My name is Aliza.  I am no different from any of you, but many would say I have experienced some extraordinary things.

In my life I have studied at some of the worst schools and also the best schools in the world, had the chance to travel to more than a dozen countries, worked in jobs as varied as you can imagine – from a waitress to a member of senior corporate management, an in-demand model to a military interpreter.

I would say that I have had quite a life sprinkled with interesting pockets of struggle, adventure, hardship and a bit of glamor.  In fact, I was on the cover of at least two magazines and the main feature in another three or four.

But this year is very different.

For the past months, I purposely stayed away from the media and from industry functions; kept to myself in order to find myself.  Although much of my work is still in high rotation on TV, my name is fading from the magazines, from the media and from invitation lists.

This year, I am surrounded by friends instead of cameras.  This year, my heart has more peace than it has ever had.  Why?  I have found grounding, truth, sincerity and tranquility in religion.

The Search for Peace

In many ways the events of my life are a blur. And it is a blur in my memory for good reason – to keep away pain, sadness and a bad cycle of self destruction… I fell into a period of clinical depression due to the conditions I lived in, the experiences I had to endure year after year; and when I thought I was about to recover, I made some bad life decisions that derailed my life for several more years.

I often pretended to be happy and confident to maintain status quo so no one would ask me anything and I would not have to think about what haunted me.  All of this is of course a formula for emotional disaster.

But there was one thing – the only thing that I could always turn to for grounding, to calm myself and to refocus so that I could at least function at work and in life. Religion. I always had God.

The beginning of last year began rather bright for me. I felt a newfound freedom because I was finally making progress in resolving some personal and family issues and was looking forward to starting over on many levels.

My career in media was going well with both local and international assignments so I felt like I wanted to experience new things and try out a different lifestyle.

I was living a rather private, quiet and humble existence doing my work and spending time at home till then, but because of a lifted burden, I tried being more outgoing, more social, found some hipster friends, started making rounds at the many events and parties around town, and even dabbled a bit in artistic photography where I showed more skin than I had ever before. I felt free and alive but somehow still empty.

Perhaps because the life I was trying to live was so foreign to me and very much not for me, I regretted.

As the emptiness grew, the parties became dull, I got stuck with a sexy image and the hipster friends did not bring out the best in me, to say the least. I began to hate who I was becoming in those short months and I was back to feeling lost, hopeless and confused about the world. I wanted my usual, quiet, boring but wholesome, private life back. So, I cut myself off completely and returned to the one thing that has always grounded and refocused me.

After stopping everything, I promptly turned towards God in hopes of finding the true peace I craved for. And so my journey began…

The Truth That Found Me

This was not the first time I sought God’s assistance to calm myself and refocus, but somehow I really wanted it to be the last time. The other times I would refocus just enough to survive my life but this time, I wanted God to be and remain the guide of my life. I wanted religion to be a lifestyle choice for me; not just an element of my life.

As an undergraduate student I studied at a Jesuit college where there were still brown robed monks teaching and tending campus grounds. It was mandatory for students to take up Christian theology classes as part of the curriculum.

In one of those classes, the Jesuit who was lecturing taught something that I never forgot. The Bible was put together by a pope. Later on I found out that the chapters of the Bible were also chosen or rejected and there were many conflicting versions.

If the Bible was put together by a man or a group of men and different versions conflicted, then what about the religion itself? I had to know. I wanted to know because I wanted to be a good Christian who follows God’s commands not what was chosen by a man or a group of men sometime in the past.

At this point, I want to give my utmost respect to my dear Christian friends and family members who may be reading and let you know that I know how beautiful some of the Christian teachings are. I am very proud of the Christian upbringing I received. I am grateful for the values and ideologies Christianity has instilled in me. And, I still love the teachings and life of Jesus till this day.

However, the further I looked into history, the more I understood that Christianity and the theories and belief we now hold were put together by a group of men.

The more I learned about how much struggle there was to get some concepts like the Trinity approved and accepted shows me that it was just simply that – a concept (and in fact, it has been proven to be a theoretical creation and has been taken out of most reprints of the modern Bible). The more I found out about Paul or Saul, the supposed author of the New Testament, the more compelled I felt to keep researching and searching for the truth.

After some time, I concluded that what I needed to do was take a look at the religion that was practiced by Jesus, David, Abraham, Moses, Noah and so on.

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