I grew up in a rather conservative Christian home. I was taught that there was a certain way a Christian needed to pursue a spiritual life, and for a long time I tried to live that way. As I grew up, I started to feel that living that life meant I needed to think negatively of a lot of other people. I wasn't cool with that. I decided to really take time and learn what my faith meant to me and to understand it for myself instead of the way it was passed down to me. Long story short, I came to adopt a much more open view of what my being a Christian meant as I interact with the world. I often say I don't even like being called a Christian any more because I'm so much different from probably at least 95% of the people who call themselves Christians. The interesting part about the whole thing is that I feel my searching has led me to Zen. Zen is so universal and personal and concerned with the other rather than the self. A lot of Christians have a tendency to just lump Zen in with Buddhism automatically, but it doesn't need to be and I feel that when we look at Zen simply as a philosophy/lifestyle that it actually encompasses a lot of what almost every religion teaches about interacting with the world around us.