“American Beauty” is a new series in which Yahoo Lifestyle takes a virtual cross-country journey to discover what beauty means — reimagining the American flag through the diverse group of faces that make up the United States of America. For our first installment, we’re focusing on Muslim-American women, highlighting what makes this group unique while showcasing the common threads that bring us together. In this first-person essay, Kaya Gravitter clears up misconceptions about her journey to Islam.

While I was growing up as the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher from Kentucky who started a church in northern Wisconsin, the teachings of the Church were drilled into my brain. But from a young age, I had a lot of questions that most Christians or the Bible could not answer. I asked my Bible teacher at 7 years old, “Why do we celebrate the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25?” (I recently learned that there is scientific evidence Jesus was not born on Christmas.) I also asked questions like, “Why was the Trinity introduced after Jesus died?”

I later left the Pentecostal religion at 10 to be a Lutheran. Aside from my discrepancies with Christianity, I went to church every Sunday, read the Bible (still do), taught vacation Bible school, and sang at church. I even went to leadership camp every summer during high school, where we would focus on the Old and New Testaments.

When I was 16, I had some inclination to start praying directly to God. I was around family, who would say in prayer, “Dear Jesus, thank you …,” I would say under my breath, “Dear God.” I felt upset that people were not praying directly to God. (This is before I knew about Islam or that Muslims don’t pray to Jesus, Mary, or Mohammed but rather directly to God.)

Fast-forward to when I started college in 2011 and I had many Muslim friends. One of them told me that “our religions have the same prophets.” Then I started researching the similarities between the Abrahamic religions. I never told anyone about the research I was doing. To be honest, I wanted to prove that Islam was grotesque and that the media was right about Muslims. My hope was that I would try to get them to convert to Christianity.

In the fall of 2013, after studying the religion for more than a year, I took an Introduction to Religion class, and my teacher, an ordained minister, taught us that the Bible had missing books. It upset me because I had put all my faith in the Bible, but it wasn’t even 100 percent there. I learned that the Quran had never been changed. So my trying to learn about the truth of Islam to convert my Muslim friends ended up having the opposite effect. The more I studied Islam, the more my questions about science, God, Jesus (Muslims believe in Jesus as a prophet, born of the virgin Mary) were answered. One of those was “Could God really create the world in six days or how was the world created if there was nothing?” According to the Quran, God created the earth in six days (Quran 41:9-12) and there’s no mention of rest or the seventh day. Keep in mind one of God’s days is an eon for humanity. (Quran 22:47). Islam teaches that God created the universe out of nothing. I don’t know if that’s the same as the Big Bang.

During the holy month of Ramadan, in which Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, I decided to read an actual Quran (not something from the internet). I asked my convert friend, who invited me to Iftar (breaking of the fast during Ramadan), if I could borrow her religious text. That night, I got home and started to read. My heart became full of light as I read the first sentence. I hid this feeling from everyone because I was scared of how my friends and family would react.

There was not just one thing that made me want to convert to Islam but many things. But the push I needed was when I first read the Quran.

Reading the Quran in English was not enough because to really understand the meaning and its context, it is ideal to read and understand it in Arabic. I decided to take Arabic in college so I could read the untranslated Quran. I can now read it in Arabic, though I cannot understand it all.

View photos When Kay Gravitter began studying Islam, she had hope of converting her Muslim friends to Christianity. But she was in for a profound religious awakening. (Photo: Courtesy of Kaya Gravitter) More