A Crisis of Faith

When I was younger, I had a crisis of faith when I had to make an important decision that involved my religion. In Elementary school my class was having a class survey on what religion we were. I had no idea what my family believed in and I forgot to ask my parents the previous day so I had to take a guess. We were going around the class asking everyone what their religious beliefs were and my teacher was writing down what we told her because she wanted to see how much students were Buddhists, Christian, Catholic, etc. So when it got to me I said I was a Buddhist hoping that I guessed right. She tallied up the number of students in each religion and we found out which religion had the most supporters in the class. I din,t think it was that big of a deal if I got it wrong because we were probably not going to think about this ever again. But I was wrong she assigned us a huge essay on our religion explaining what we ate, what we did in our churches, and other stuff. Now I was scared and I really hoped I got it right.

I planned to go home, ask my mom if we were Buddhists. So when she got home from work, I asked her and she said we were Christians, surprised I thought we were Buddhists. She asked me why I thought that and I explained. I was furious about what had happened today and because I was shy, I didn't want to tell my teacher I made a mistake thinking that I was going to get in trouble. So I was stuck, I was either going write and essay about a religion I had no knowledge about or tell my teacher the truth not knowing what consequences I may receive but having more information to write my essay. Obviously, I now know that it is not that big of a deal to tell your teacher you made a mistake but I thought it was a huge deal. It is wrong and disrespectful to lie about your religion but I didn't want to tell my teacher. So I decided to write about Buddhism making up information as I was writing. I turned my essay in and hoped that anyone else who was Buddhists wrote about the same things I did.

I don't think anyone else was a Buddhist in my class but my teacher still found out because what I wrote about had nothing to do with that religion. So my teacher asked me to stay after class to talk about what I should do. I was scared out of my mind because I knew I was going to get a long lecture that might be bad. When school ended, I stayed back as my teacher ordered me to hoping she would take it easy. It didn't end up too bad, she just told me that it was bad to lie about your religion and told me what I really believed in and I said I was a Christian. She just told me to write another essay and she would accept it for full credit. I was glad that she let me go easy after all the stunts I pulled but I learned a couple of lessons about the importance of respecting your religious beliefs.