Peace be with you. My name is Teddy Marcum and I am a relatively new convert to Islam. I would say that my religious journey was quite difficult. I have struggled with the questions of God since I was a child. Around the age of 12 I became an atheist until about 2 1/2 years ago, I am soon to be 22, when I had a profound shift in my thinking and way of viewing things. I felt that God was calling me back to him. I tried various brands of Christianity but none of them ever seemed to fit or feel right, mostly because of the doctrine of the trinity, which led me to study various forms of Judaism which was closer to what I believed except for the fact that I did accept Jesus as the Messiah. I stayed away from Islam because all I knew of it was it's Sunni and Shi'a forms which immediately turned me off. However, even after I discovered Islam by way of Qur'an alone I still struggled with what to believe, bouncing back and forth between different religions. Recently I have had multiple personal encounters with God, nothing extreme or "new agey", but little things that I believe God is leading me towards. I have become convinced that the Qur'an is the true word of God, free come corruption or error, and that his message will live on until the last Day.