Dear Listener,

In forty-five years, Muslims are expected to make up more than three-in-ten of the world's people. If demography continues on its current path, Christianity will lose its long reign as the world's largest religion during your lifetime . . . Crazy, right?

I sat in a mosque this afternoon with Imam Arshad Anwar of Roswell Community Masjid, trying to reshape my previously narrow view of the world's fastest growing religion into truth, into a tangible sense of how more 1.8 billion of God's children perceive His earth. After struggling to come up with every possible parallel between Islam and the religion in which I was raised, I accepted the fact that I couldn’t. I may never feel what Muslims feel, which infuriates me. We know the same God, read the works of the same apostles, wonder about the same Heaven . . .

But here’s the thing: I’m not supposed to. God placed me and you in one part of His story, and He gifted us with the presence of others. Whether your Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or atheist, the gift of experiencing other cultures is yours. Islam gains our attention for reasons other than what it is, but if we view the religion through a theological rather than social or political lens, I assure you that you might find hope instead of fear, for we’re way more alike than our differences can fight, and this gives us the ability to restore the goodness of God’s earth. And while this is a challenge we may never defeat entirely, if we can accomplish a mere piece of what God enabled us to do, I can’t imagine how beautiful life would become.

See you soon,
Sarah