Lisa’s faith wasn’t one of those ‘my mom makes me go to church’ deals. She believed that God had given Joseph Smith revelation, that Mormons were the chosen people and that America was the promised land. She had dreamed about meeting a husband in church, or at Brigham Young University, perhaps a returned missionary who spoke multiple languages, had converted a half dozen families and developed a love for the literature of the country he was stationed in along the way. They would go to PG movies together and drink milkshakes afterwards (never coffee or tea; caffeinated beverages were forbidden). They would be married in the Temple and have six children.

Her family would eek by, but be happy. Perhaps they would live abroad for a few years, serve as advisors to young missionaries. When old age came they would welcome the next step, the crossing into the next world, where their Temple wedding insured that she and her husband, and each of their kids when their time came, would be joined together forever.

Instead, she met me, an overly-long, too-skinny Indian Muslim who cussed frequently, enjoyed rated R movies and was acquiring a taste for coffee.

The battle between my Muslim upbringing and my male hormones was resolved by Lisa’s Mormon values. One evening, when Lisa and I were sitting close to each other in my basement, she sighed and said she had to do something. She took out a piece of paper and a pencil and drew a stick figure. “That’s me,” she said. And then she carefully traced a circle over the body, leaving her neck and face, her hands and arms up to the shoulder and her legs from the knee down, outside the lines. “Inside is out of bounds” she told me.

As that aspect of our relationship was limited, we spent our time on other things. I finally had someone to share my secret life of reading with. Lisa and I spent summer days at the park, reading to each other from our favorite books. If we saw a late afternoon movie, we would spend dinner comparing the characters in the films we saw to those in the books we were reading. Her poetic imagination made connections between things in literature and life that I never saw.

First love is infinite in its variety, but singular in its affect. Whether it is a religion, a drug, a book or a person you fall for, you can expect to emerge on the other side nothing less than totally transformed. And so it was for me with Lisa. My life until that point was dominated by an obsession with my own success. And yet, as I watched Lisa excel in class after class, club after club, her intellect and character so clearly superior to mine, I found my heart, in spite of myself, rooting for her. Nobody was more surprised at this than me. Prior to Lisa, I thought I was capable of only competitiveness. But with Lisa, perhaps because of Lisa, I discovered vast regions of love within me.

It was as good a preparation for my future re-commitment to Islam as anything else.

I did not then and I do not now believe much of anything of Mormon doctrine, but I know that Lisa was who she was because of her beliefs, and that I am who I am in part of because of our relationship.

So what do we do when we discover that people whose beliefs we sharply differ with inspire us, and that their kindness and compassion are a result of those beliefs? I don't think it means we have to agree with those beliefs, or hold them to be true or somehow equal to our own. But I think that all kinds of divergent beliefs lead to a set of shared values - hospitality, mercy, forgiveness, cooperation. I know people who think that Jesus is the son of God and people who do not believe in God who hold those values dear and act on them, and call them alternately Christian values or Jewish values or Buddhist values.

I cannot help but consider it a gift from God that it was a Mormon who illuminated those Muslim values for me.