You are 40 correct, is your sister older or younger.
Younger, still 36.. either way.. there's a few differences.
So.. here's kinda what happened. My grandparents on my mother's side .. Grandpa was from a protestant family, Grandma from an Irish Catholic family. When they got together, Grandpa had to officially convert to Catholicism, but he disagreed with Catholicism, so they both ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater to be together. They raised their family without religion and even didn't allow religious talk in the household, even though there were still devout Catholic family members on my Grandmother's side, they just saw religion as divisive and a source of conflict and would split families apart (it's not like Jesus even disagreed with that..). So my mom grew up.. no religion. She married a guy who had just come home from Vietnam, who had gotten into drug counterculture, and eastern mysticism. My dad.. I have no doubts is regretting his beliefs right now, he died in 2005 before the age of 60, but he influenced my mom into eastern mysticism, and new age. One of my only memories I still have of my earthly father, is him teaching me yin and yang. Because both of them were opposed to ORGANIZED religion, seeing it as a source of conflict, they came up with kind of their own belief system, mishmashing Judeo-Christian morality, with eastern mysticism philosophy, and naturalist origins, and new age spirituality.
With my mother it was always mother nature, never God. That's what me and my sister grew up with. As I grew up, I was outspoken with my naturalist beliefs, this painted a target on me for every Christian neighbor and friend we encountered that I had to be saved. Because my sister saw how much I was targeted by religious people, and not all of it was loving, some of it was bullying, and a daycare used to do things like lock me in the basement, she kept her beliefs close to her chest to avoid the same treatment I got. The distrust of organized religion was reinforced by that. Not all of it was bad though, of course I didn't get saved by people who tried to use punishment or bullying to conform me to their beliefs. What ultimately saved me was moving and my neighbors were a good Christian family with children the same age as myself and my sister and of course we became very good friends (really they're like family to me still). It led to vacation bible school, getting saved, going to church, doing community service and key club and campus life and youth for Christ and bible study on wednesday nights with one of my other friend's dads, etc. But my sister was still kind of hedged on her beliefs. They didn't go after her as much as they went after me, she got invited to bible school, and church occasionally, but she just didn't take to it.
For me what was transformative in my belief happened at vacation bible school. When people had tried to teach me Jesus before, they focused on my own works, they taught mostly a works based salvation. To which Jesus made no sense.. if it's about my works, why do I need Jesus? I was almost quoting my mother "I don't need Jesus to be a good person". The eye opener was, you can't be a good enough person to deserve heaven, so you absolutely needed Jesus. I was also taught more about Jesus as a person, and that was something that had been missing from prior attempts to save me. I'd been told Jesus was the Son of God, and our Savior, but then they flip it around and focus on my own works which makes me not understand why I need a savior if it's about how I live my life personally. Just saying He was the Son of God and was glorious also held no appeal to me, I simply don't care about power, glory, or titles, those by themselves don't make me want to spend forever with that person. You can be an all powerful, glorious God who's a colossal cosmic jerk after all.. many pagan gods are seen as such.
What appealed to me was how Jesus was actually as a person. He was compassionate, healing diseases and being merciful to people even to sinners that other people wanted to stone to death. He saw religious hypocrisy for what it was (and this really appealed to me because of bad experiences I had with some "religious" people). He was reaching out to people that "religious" people shunned like publicans and winebibbers. He appreciated humility, picking fishermen and a tax collector as His chosen followers, rather than 'great theologians". To Him the greatest in Heaven was like a little child, innocent, with faith, but not mighty or powerful, and simplicity was preferred over ceremony. The publican's prayer of "God be merciful to me a sinner" being preferred over the Pharisee's self righteous practiced prayer.
So 2 things for me had to click. I had to know why I needed Jesus and why I'd want to spend forever with Him.
Those things haven't clicked for my family yet.
) People tend to recognize they sin even if they pretend not to know. They still know. Deep down we all know. Only when recognizing our sins does Jesus' offer of complete forgiveness through his grace and our faith really resonate. They gotta feel their hopeless sin situation before accepting the solution.
