How did I get here?

"How did I get here?" This is a question I stop and ask myself, sometimes more often, sometimes less often. Considering the point where I started from, coming from a conservative Evangelical Christian church, and graduating from a conservative Evangelical Bible School, how exactly did I end up where I now find myself, embracing and knowing what I know and embrace? I certainly wasn't taught this way, and if you had told me that, for example, I would be writing essays defending reincarnation from Scripture 27 years after I graduated from that Bible school, I would have believed you had lost your mind. I thought I had been taught everything I needed to know, and there was nothing about Scripture I couldn't understand based on the doctrine and theology I came home with.
     The truth is, I know the path I took very well. It was certainly not a rejection of Scripture, or Jesus Christ. Nor was it a rejection of the Christian faith. No, the path I took was actually a pursuit of all of these and anchoring myself to Him as a sailor might tie himself to the mast of a ship during a bad squall to keep from getting dumped overboard.
     For me, the deciding factor in this path was that every time I came up against something which contradicted my Evangelical Christian indoctrination (though not my devotion to Jesus Christ), I was moved to head that direction and learn from it. The part of me incited by fear, in particular fear of rejection, would flare up and send up red flags and stresses which would cause migraines. But I would do it anyway, almost as if a spectator, a passenger cooperating with the driver of the vehicle. There were so many times I would be skeptical, but a peace would come over me contradicting the fear, and push me to pay attention and learn. How many times did I pray for the words to speak, or for Him to guide my thoughts and take control of my actions, and then the next thing I know I'm defending past lives, NDEs, quoting the Tao Te Ching, and more which I would never have even dreamed of 27 years ago.
     And the crazy thing which I never could have predicted, I feel closer to Jesus Christ than I ever did as that conservative Christian bible school student, or even the Old Catholic priest almost twenty years ago now. I ask Him to speak through me, to write through me; I ask for these words to be His words, and the next thing I know, things are written which "I" have to go back and read for myself, because it's teaching me too.
     And when those same conservative Christian objections come back up in my mind, they produce only fear, confusion, and doubt, whereas when I just follow where He leads, and let Him take control, it produces peace, love, and a growing sense of wholeness which I didn't have before.
     So, how did I get here? I got here because this is where the Spirit of Christ has led me, against everything I was taught He would way back when. This is where, as St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote, the Spirit of Consolation is strongest, and going backwards is where the Spirit of Desolation resides. It's not what many, if not most Christians would accept, but it is where the fruit of the Spirit is being most productive in my life.