When COVID hit, and their regular congregations weren’t able to meet, their interest in Chesterton led them to start watching Mass online. They fell in love with the beauty and simplicity of the liturgy compared to the worship they’d been leading for so many years, and they began discerning their way home to the Catholic Church.

Read a written version of Lee’s testimony.

The post Lee and Valiree Sondeno – Former Pentecostal Music Ministers appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

You might consider us “COVID converts.” Looking back on all that led to us leaving our deep-rooted Pentecostal heritage for something we knew absolutely nothing about can only be described as a gift— an outpouring of grace during one of the most troubling and isolating years most of us will ever experience.

During the pandemic, people were scared and living in hopelessness; yet God was at work within our lives. In the middle of the chaos, we would decide to leave the familiarity of our religious heritages, our families, and our friends for the truth we had found in the Catholic Church. It all started with a corpulent early 20th century author from England and a wonderful literary society that wasn’t afraid to shine a light in the darkest of times.

Born Under the Pew

My wife Valiree and I were both “born under the pew” in the Assemblies of God, a charismatic Pentecostal denomination, in which our families have extremely deep roots. We both have aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws who are pastors and missionaries; grandparents and great-grand parents who were preachers and missionaries— with my great-grandfather being one of the first Pentecostal evangelists in Norway. Other family members serve as teachers, musicians and worship ministers, church board members and dedicated lay people. I even ended up marrying a pastor’s daughter! In other words, our families are deeply Christian and very Pentecostal.

Growing up, there were many things my family and the Assemblies of God taught me were important to the life of a Pentecostal Evangelical, always backed up by Scripture: the importance of Baptism (of the Holy Spirit and of water), worship, Scripture, prayer, being a part of a church community, serving in the church, and holy communion (though it was viewed as entirely symbolic). Our childhoods were profoundly Christ-centered and ministry- centered, and our relationship with Jesus and dedication to church shaped absolutely everything we did. I thank God often for the blessing of growing up in such a religious, Bible- based, and Spirit-filled heritage.

It was never a matter of if you would use your spiritual talents and gifts for the church and evangelization, but how and where. Being of a strongly musical family (many of whom could sing every song in the hymnal by heart), and like so many others my age who cut their teeth during the star- studded wonderment that was 90’s Christian Contemporary Music, serving in worship ministry has always been a part of me. I loved it. I felt, and still feel, that God blessed me with that particular gift of service. To live out Psalm 95, playing guitar and singing at every opportunity, was my ministry and calling. Not only did it bring me closer to God through worship, but it also led me to my wife. Valiree and I met on the church stage (she plays piano), and we served together in Las Vegas, Nevada, as worship and youth leaders for many years as part of her father’s pastorate in my childhood church.

Fragmented

A few years into our marriage, Valiree and I left her father’s church in search of our own ministry opportunities. We spent time in many different churches and even other charismatic denominations outside of the Assemblies of God in worship ministry, serving in leadership roles across Las Vegas during our first 15 years of marriage. Being in a town that’s obsessed with showmanship, we were part of a very hip, modern worship scene with rocking music and first-class musicians. We would serve where we were needed, from youth ministries to conferences, new church plants, and Bible study groups. We were raised and wired to serve wherever and whenever we could.

Between 2006 and 2017, we served in seven different churches, all in the same city, all with different interpretations of how to “do church.” The idea that something was wrong with this model started to penetrate me. I witnessed firsthand the type of division that seemed so deeply rooted in the Protestant culture: church splits and dissension over styles of music, styles of preaching, or even styles of management. If you didn’t agree with something, you would simply leave for another church or start your own.

In 2018, we started attending a non-denominational church, refreshed by the verse-by-verse Bible preaching and the focus on the cross, salvation, and winning souls for Christ, which seemed a positive departure from what we had experienced previously. It certainly checked all the boxes for us, and we saw many opportunities for growth and use of our musical talents and leadership from spending all those years in worship ministry.

It didn’t take long, though, for the same issues that plagued other churches in the Las Vegas valley to make their way there as well. Things modernized, got louder, bigger, and “better,” like so many other “seeker friendly” churches. The cross, normally located behind us on stage, was eventually taken down and replaced with black painted walls and new lighting—an attempt at making sure the experience was flashy, but not too offensive to “seekers,” as many Christian symbols can be.

Unsettled by this, 2018 brought about much prayer and personal study to help fill in some of the gaps. We took matters into our own hands, and my wife started homeschooling both our kids more intensively, with a purposeful Christ-centered focus. I remember, during this time, having a distinct longing to study how historical Christianity would view some of these big questions we had about ministry, the church, and our roles in spreading and sharing the love of Jesus through the modern worship experience. What was Christianity even like before the electric guitar?

An Englishman In Las Vegas

Whenever these questions of Christian identity crept into my mind, I would revisit a core group of authors who always had a positive impact on me, from modern influences like John Eldridge and Francis Chan, to spiritual giants like C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and my personal favorite, G.K. Chesterton. I discovered Chesterton when I was just starting out as a freshman majoring in English at the local university in Las Vegas, while flipping through an English 101 book and landing on a short poem called The Donkey. I started looking into who this Chesterton fellow was and discovered that C. S. Lewis was tremendously influenced by him. I was hooked, and I began searching for more Chesterton wherever I could find him. Whenever I felt numb to the modern church experience and needed intellectual reasoning behind my core beliefs as a Christian, I would visit Chesterton to see what he had to say about things. In fact, the first book I gifted my wife before we were even engaged was a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. “Read this,” I said, “it’s the best book on Christianity I’ve ever read.” God bless her, she did read it. It wasn’t until much later that I would realize the role Orthodoxy played in our lives, or the blessing of having a wife so open to her husband’s bouts of zealously sharing what he’d recently discovered about our Christian faith.

Being quite the proud and bookish English major, I followed the American Chesterton Society, regularly visiting the Society’s website over the years. But it was during these challenging times at church I would fondly remember all those late nights I had spent in college, watching a show called The Apostle of Common Sense on a cable TV channel I’d randomly stumbled upon. It was during these years that I found myself longing for those expositions that Dale Ahlquist gave of Chesterton’s common-sense Christianity. There had to be something more to the way we “did church.” My curiosity about how Chesterton saw the world finally got the better of me, and I became a card-carrying member of the Society in March of 2019, receiving my first Gilbert! Magazine and starting to follow the group more intently on social media.

Setting The Stage

2019 was also significant for my ministerial career as a guitar player and worship leader. Not only did I have opportunities to play various conferences and concerts and help in recording original worship songs, but in March of 2019, I was able to travel with the worship team to Mexico City for a large outreach event featuring some big names in the Christian music industr y. I was humbled by the opportunity to minister at such a large event and genuinely moved as thousands of people came down to the stage to ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior, while thousands of Bibles were passed out to new believers during the altar call. This was what we in worship ministry lived for—a chance to impact people through praise and worship music. Yet something gnawed at my heart as I watched the outreach service end and all those people made their way out of the stadium and back to their homes, never to be seen by us again. Was this all just a flash in the pan? Where will those people go to church tomorrow?

What Am I Protesting?

That same month, the Chesterton Society started posting a Chesterton Academy school trip to Rome on Instagram, asking for prayers to be prayed by all the students who were there in Rome visiting some of the most ancient and sacred places of our Christian faith. The thought of this was difficult for me to grasp. People I didn’t even know, praying for me? No secret handshakes? No “if you’re Catholic, we will pray”? No “us vs. them,” but unity—real Christian unity—something I had never felt before in my hyper-localized, competitive turf-wars church reality. I remember responding with a simple request for prayer, and just knowing that members of the Society were praying halfway around the globe for me was unbearably humbling.

If being a charismatic Evangelical taught us anything, it’s how we got it right, and how lost Catholics are, living in the shadows of empty cathedrals now serving as museums. Yet here was a very alive, very Catholic group of young people extending their hand in prayer and fellowship while meeting with other energetic, Christ-filled Catholics in Rome (how many of them are there?!), surrounded by unimaginably beautiful art and historic places. For the first time ever, I felt a real connection to those places as a Christian. Also for the first time, I asked myself, “If I am a Protestant, then what, exactly, am I protesting?” This was the same Jesus that we followed, right? As a Christian, isn’t this part of my history? In those moments, Christendom became real and universal and big—but somehow closer than ever before, and suddenly, everywhere.

Throughout the rest of 2019, I surveyed the Catholic Church, but from a distance. I would research Catholic vs. Protestant, finding as many documentaries as I could about Church history or the Reformation and looking up Christian apologists I admired for their take on Catholicism. I searched with the hope of them possibly talking me off this dangerous ledge, this secret little hobby of mine of being a member of the Chesterton Society, which I now realized happened to be very Catholic—and me suddenly ready to defend their being Catholic. The gap between how we “did church” versus what I was discovering about how Catholics lived the faith continued to grow, and I started questioning more and more why we believed what we did as Protestants.

The Show Must Go On

Then, like a crash of frying pans, a global pandemic hit in March of 2020. Everything screeched to a halt, including our normal worship and music routine. During the chaos of the shutdown, I was called upon quite often from various contacts to help fill in with playing guitar and singing while churches scrambled, deciding who was more at risk or what services would be kept and which would go fully online. Streaming and production quality were now of utmost importance. We had a show to do, after all.

Around that time, the Chesterton Society sent out an update, saying they were going to start streaming the Mass on their YouTube channel from a local parish in Minnesota, as all in-person gatherings were prohibited across the country. Intrigued, I tuned in to watch one day, and what I saw changed my life.

No studio-quality sound, no multi-camera shots and production lighting. It looked like someone was holding up a phone, and live-streaming the event. I had never even seen a Mass before, but it was most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The reverence and care taken, especially while preparing Communion, the beauty of what was unfolding, is hard to put into words even now. I just remember tears falling down my face, wondering what I had witnessed. Was that what actually happened at a Mass?

Suddenly, attending church became important. Being there became important. I wanted to be there! The preaching (I didn’t even know it was called a homily) cut through me because of its absolute hopefulness. I immediately rewatched the whole thing with my wife Valiree, saying, “You need to watch this.” Her reaction was the same as mine: tears filled her eyes.

We couldn’t get enough. Ever y opportunity we had and ever y posting on the Chesterton YouTube channel, we watched—Daily Mass, choir concerts, Easter Vigil, everything. One morning, I remember watching Mass early, and my son, then 5 years old, came down and started watching it with me. He asked why there was a cross, and why Jesus was on it. It broke my heart! We had a wonderful moment talking through the meaning of the sacrifice made for us on the cross. If anyone needs an example of why having a crucifix in church is important, this is it.

What Did We Just See?

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed and surprised at the reaction we had to everything we were seeing, I did what any responsible Protestant would do: I immediately purchased a copy of the Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul’s Are We Together?: A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism. There must have been something I was missing, something that would show me why we weren’t all Catholics, and I was looking to Sproul to help identify it. This project did not have the desired effect. I would read passages from that book out loud to Valiree and ask her, “Do you agree with that?” “Of course I do,” would mostly be her response, to which I would emphatically say, “That’s Catholic!” It seemed like almost everything we learned through reading our Bibles and growing up in the Assemblies of God was in line with what I was reading about Catholicism.
We researched as a family and continued to watch Mass online. While I continued to lead worship and play guitar at our church every Sunday, something didn’t seem right anymore. Something had changed, and it scared me to death.

I Can’t Be a Catholic!

Still skeptical, I thought maybe there was something in the Catholic Catechism that would be my “Gotcha!” moment to dispel these beliefs. What a mistake that was! Not only was I agreeing with Catholicism as outlined in the Catechism, I found myself mentally defending their beliefs when I compared it with things I would hear or read regarding things like the “whore of Babylon” or a lack of a “personal relationship” with Jesus. I knew it wasn’t true, because I was actually reading what Catholics believe. I also knew what I had read in the Bible, and those two things lined up!

As I continued to research, enthusiastically sharing everything I was learning with my wife, I kept thinking over and over, “But we can’t be Catholic.” Who has ever heard of such a thing—Pentecostal, spirit-filled believers leaving the religion of their family and giving up all they’ve ever known? I remembered Chesterton and The Apostle of Common Sense show I used to watch. What channel was it? Some religious one with a nun. Maybe I can get my fill of Catholic teaching on the side, tuning in occasionally to fill in some of the gaps I was feeling with our own church.

Then, after work one day, in the late spring of 2020, I tuned in to EWTN on satellite radio, just to see if the content was similar to that of the Chesterton show I used to watch. As if on cue, I joined in the middle of a program called The Journey Home. “Wait,” I thought, “Did they just mention they were former Protestants who converted to Catholicism?!” I wish now I could remember who it was that was being interviewed, but I was floored. These people do exist! Converts from Protestantism do exist! It became a normal dinnertime listen on Monday nights for months as my wife and I talked through, and related to, the interviews of others who had “crossed over the Tiber.”

We continued opening the door a little more. Over the summer, we would watch Mass as much as we could online, and like any good virtual parishioner, signed up for Catholic content providers like FORMED and others, using our “virtual parish” to sign up. All the kids wanted was to be part of it. They begged us to be baptized and to receive real Communion like they saw others doing during online Mass. They hungered for it, and I envied them. What was once the simplest and most forgotten part of my church experience had now become the one thing they wanted most at church.

I Will Be Catholic No Matter What!

It was then we realized that to be a Catholic was to be fully Christian. How could we not do this? We needed to do something about it. I tried to recall what that Catholic parish it was that we used to drive by when I was a kid, when we’d joke about all the Catholics trying to hurry to get to Mass, causing a traffic jam at the stop sign. We looked it up online, and I found the priest’s email address. If anything, the process of discovering Catholicism and becoming increasingly excited about finding this “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45–46) does make you bold—bold enough to knock on every door you can find.

During this time of COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2020, churches were just starting to open back up with extremely limited reservations-only style online ticketing, with temperature checks at the door. Though the website said it was restricting in-person attendance to current parishioners only, we didn’t care. We had to see a Catholic Mass in person, and I would register us as quickly as slots became available for that week so we would not miss out. I emailed the priests (all of them on the contact list; I didn’t know the differences or why there was more than one at this point), explained our situation a bit, and asked for a meeting.

What we heard back was not entirely encouraging: “Please call the office to schedule a meeting.” Upon calling, the main priest had availability a week or so later, so we put that on the calendar. In the meantime, we kept attending in person as much as possible, and we began observing all that was around us: why do they kneel? When do they kneel? Googling “What to do at your first Catholic Mass,” we mostly sat toward the back to not look too out of place.

When the time came for our first meeting with the priest, we shared our story…and he hesitated. He said, “I’ve heard of people like you, but I’ve never actually met one. Why would you want to be a Catholic now? Are you sure you want to do this? You’ll create absolute chaos in your family!” I responded quickly, “Because it’s the truth!” I’m sure my face said, “Duh!” Unfortunately, this was one of many encounters on our journey over the years with priests that didn’t quite know how to handle us or the situation we found ourselves in. We were somewhat demoralized, but this was counterbalanced by a wonderful RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) instructor who had heard about us and would sneak us into Mass whether we had a reservation or not. We wanted it so badly, and she knew it. She was more than happy to go out of her way for the four of us.

After a few months of RCIA and absorbing everything we could, Valiree and I were confirmed in the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday (the Sunday following Easter), April 11, 2021. My kids, eager to move past just receiving a blessing in the Communion line to fully receiving the Eucharist themselves, asked us both with excitement and wonder after we received our first Holy Communion, “What was it like?” “Home,” I said. It tasted like I’d come home.

Our kids finished up RCIC (Rite of Christian Initiation for Children) while Valiree and I both served in the RCIA class helping other converts learn about the Church. We also began volunteering in various other ministries at our parish, helping out wherever we could. Then, on Easter Vigil in 2022, my son and daughter were both baptized, confirmed, and received their first Holy Communion, something they both were anxiously awaiting.

His Ways Are Higher

For many, the pandemic brought out the worst in people. But even years before, something much darker was making its way through charismatic Protestant circles. Genuine men and women of God were starting to turn their backs on their faith in large numbers as praise and worship artists, Christian authors, and popular pastors we grew up with and learned Christianity from in the 90s were suddenly renouncing their faith. This startling trend was made worse by the church shutdowns of 2020, and sadly, to this day I still hear of those I served with who haven’t returned since, their disenchantment with religion reaching a boiling point.

Yet here we were, somehow able to find the deeper truth instead of abandoning it. It has been incredible to reflect on the people and the connections God has sent us along this journey, and how everything unfolded over the last few years. There were challenges, and I had my apprehensions, wondering to myself many times, “How could this be?” But here we were.

During our first RCIA classes in the midst of the pandemic, only a few of us met together, masked up and six feet apart. After one session, I went up to our instructor (who knew our background at that point) and asked him fervently, and maybe even with a little bit of fear, “Why me? Why my family? Why now?” He then looked me in the eyes, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Because you listened.”

Even now, as I reflect on the circumstances that led to our conversion, I am in awe at the hand of God gently guiding me, nudging me, and showing me a closeness to Him and His Son that, even growing up in a very charismatic tradition, I had never felt before. For us, it wasn’t about leaving anything. It was about entering into the fullness of Christianity—the same Christianity that was handed down to me from my parents and grandparents, just made complete in the Catholic Church.

The post Chesterton, COVID, and the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Courtney has also shared a written version of her testimony: read it here.

The post Courtney Comstock – Former Pentecostal appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

As the opening line of the Rule of St. Benedict states, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” I’m writing this on the Memorial of St. Benedict, a fitting time to reflect and be thankful. So get ready for “lift-off” as my journey home into the fullness of the faith and service in the Catholic Church takes flight.

The Early Years

I was born in 1957, at the dawn of the “space-age,” when the Russian satellite Sputnik set the Space Race in motion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just south of Seattle, WA, where my brother, sister, and I were born, my father was employed as a Boeing engineer working in Space and Defense. This meant he worked on many projects related to Cold War issues and directly on the Saturn V main stage rocket, which eventually sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon and safely home. Because of my father’s work, we moved wherever Boeing sent us — from Seattle to Huntsville, back to Seattle, down to Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, and then back to Seattle for good. My childhood was shaped by NASA and Boeing, interest in beauty and the arts, and the great outdoors. This background would help shape an unexpected pilgrimage into a strange, yet beautiful, world of grace, love, and wonder for me as an ex-Evangelical Protestant pastor, for my wife Diane, and our two teenage girls.

My memories of church life during my early childhood, mostly at a small Missouri Synod Lutheran Church in Huntsville, AL, are vague but important memories of loving people who treated both my siblings and my mother with kindness. (My father rarely attended.) My mother did a good job giving us a knowledge of God’s existence and basic Christian morality formed from the Ten Commandments. Flannel graphics were a favorite of mine, especially before Sunday school classes began depicting rocket launches and safe re-entry instead of religious principles. One significant event from this time occurred on a Sunday after church, as I was watching a weekly program on a Christian television station. I remember this episode had to do with a family tragedy, and as I watched the program, the thought ran through my mind that, as an adult, I would like to be helping families with hardships and challenges. This experience still guides me.

As I grew older and began high school, my family’s involvement in church waned. I became enthralled with the NFL and Sunday football. In short, we soon became “Christmas and Easter Christians” and neglected church life in general. If I had to describe where I was in my spiritual life at that time, I would say that I was a believer in God but didn’t see how God could be interested in my life. I did believe Jesus was the Son of God, but I had no concept of what that meant or why it mattered. As for the Holy Spirit, somehow, He was part of this, but how, I had no clue. In fact, my life after high school was rather confused and unguided. I had no idea where I was going or how to formulate a plan to get anywhere. Boeing and engineering didn’t interest me; working at Boeing in any capacity didn’t interest me; a career in business didn’t interest me either.

For the first time in my life, I began to search for a purpose, a deeper meaning in life, and goals to pursue. College sounded like it could help provide an answer to these questions, so I effectively rolled the dice and wound up at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. I had no idea what I was going to study, but I was drawn to psychology and sociology.

Ora et Labora — Prayer and Work

In 1978, I arrived at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, just south of the Canadian border and north of Seattle, in the afterglow of the “Jesus Movement” of the late 60s and early 70s. I quickly became involved in campus ministry, previously unaware that such a thing even existed on college campuses. In the dormitories were numerous posters recruiting students to any number of secular and religious group meetings. One of those was for Campus Crusade for Christ, which I visited and became involved in for a short time with a friend I met on the crew team. Here I was introduced to the Four Spiritual Laws, and even helped my teammate lead people to Christ. One day, this same friend asked if I had ever visited a monastery. I had not, so he invited me to visit a Benedictine Abbey, just across the border in Mission, British Columbia, Canada, named Westminster Abbey. Here, I was introduced to a new world of beauty, peace, and prayer which would begin my long journey deeper into Jesus’ heart and eventually into the Catholic Church.

The beauty of the monastery was stunning. Overlooking the Fraser River, with a north side view of Mt. Baker in Washington State, bald eagles flying overhead, and big timber all around, the impact of this first visit still remains with me many years later.

In fact, I have visited this monastery many times over the years and have brought groups up for retreats and study. Yet it was the beauty and artistry of one of the monks’ works displayed in the chapel and around the monastery that focused my attention on God’s creativity through human genius. The monk’s name was Father Dunstan Massey, OSB, and he was quite well known as an artist around the Fraser River Valley. He specialized in concrete reliefs and frescos, and his artistry speaks to me of God’s wonder. Indeed, his work was his prayer.

Father Dunstan, the grandeur of creation, and other encounters with God through beauty became a gentle path deeper into His love and compassion, which would prove to be of immense consolation in the storms of life to come. The Benedictine Rule would become a huge influence on my life. St. Benedict’s 12 Steps of Humility and their impact on the shaping of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous became patterns within the development of my ministry over the years. The Benedictine motto, “Ora et Labora” (prayer and work), is a simple and profound way to live and learn a life of prayer and devotion “one day at a time.”

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and learned that, while I had become a good listener and loved to minister on the streets, in jails, and occasionally on campus, this was not the most employable degree. As a result, I spent a year doing carpentry with a friend. After this time, I was invited to intern with an Assemblies of God campus ministry (Chi Alpha) with the hope of being equipped enough to pioneer a campus group on a college campus that had a supporting church nearby desiring a new chapter. We studied from well-known works of Protestant Evangelical theologians, occasionally mixed with an Anglican and, very rarely, a Catholic spiritual perspective. We conducted street dramas, traveled to different parts of the western United States to help other campus ministries, led small groups, raised our own funds, and generally became confident that we could pioneer a campus group anywhere we were called. Soon, I would indeed be called upon to begin a new campus ministry, but I needed a partner to go on this adventure with me. Diane would become that partner.

Diane and I met when we were both college students. I didn’t know her well in those years, but during this year of internship, our relationship began to flower. I admired her faith in Jesus, her prayer life, and her willingness to step out of her comfort zone in teaching, street ministry/drama, and planning outreach. Of course, I also thought she was cute.

At the end of our internship year, we were teamed up to start a campus group in Kearney, Nebraska at what was then known as Kearney State College. We set out on a cross-country adventure to another culture amidst the cornfields and hog farms of south-central Nebraska, right along the Platte River. Here, our relationship would be tried in the difficult circumstances of a new culture, an unfamiliar land with intense winters and springs, and of a longing for the big timber, mountains, and flowing water of the Pacific Northwest. Despite the difficulties, our two years spent in Nebraska were fruitful. The campus ministry grew, and Diane and I grew closer. We were engaged in Kearney. Then we said good-bye to our Nebraska friends and headed back to the Evergreen State to start our new life as a married couple.

During our time in Nebraska, we had become acquainted with many campus pastors from different denominations, all of whom were very helpful to us. What Diane and I quickly discovered, however, was that our internship in campus ministry fell short in equipping us to converse with them in matters of church history, theology, and much of pastoral ministry. As a result, I desired to go to seminary and learn about these different subjects. We needed to earn money for that to happen, though, so off we went to Alaska and Yukon to drive tour buses in the Great White North for two seasons before I took the plunge into seminary.

I began my studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, an interdenominational seminary begun by two Anglican Professors from England — J.I. Packer and James Houston. This was a marvelous place to learn (and I must say that many themes introduced to us here eventually found their fulfillment in the Catholic Church). Over a four-year period, we learned about Church History, Christian Spirituality, Systematic Theology, Preaching, Pastoral Care, Greek, Hebrew, and most important to our journey, the Early Church Fathers and beauty. The Early Church Fathers introduced to us an intriguing world of commitment to the Eucharist, prayer, and tradition, aspects of the Church we would later come to understand in a truly Catholic perspective instead of a curious, but still Protestant, worldview. All this we received as God’s gifts in our lives. It was a wonderful time of reception — a time of filling.

Memento Mori — Remember that You Will Die

As I worked toward the completion of my Master’s Degree in Theological Studies, I concentrated on Pastoral Care and Family Ministries. At this time, I was working in an addiction recovery center for adults and teens, helping families deal with recovery issues and treatment plans. Diane was working at a local nursing home and caring for a neglected population of elderly people. After graduation from seminary, I was eventually hired as an associate pastor with a large, local Assemblies of God church which functioned more like an Evangelical community church. This was the same church that sponsored the college campus group where Diane and I had interned. It was quite familiar to us and was an honor to serve on staff. My duties included running counseling services and recovery groups, developing internships in pastoral care, expanding our local food pantry into a food bank, and partnering with community services in the county to help families. I enjoyed this work and felt called to care for people in distress. However, during the 16 years I worked at the church, there were three experiences, all having to do with personal trauma and loss, which drew us into a search for consolation and care which only the Catholic Church was able to provide.

The first of these experiences was the discovery of our infertility as a couple. Anyone who has been part of this journey knows what a loss and burden it can be for a couple totally open to children and wanting to raise a family. In this struggle, we found there really was nowhere we could turn to find comfort or solace. We knew of no groups, no people to talk with, and no support. We were alone, and our church had no resources to help us. Diane and I spent five years praying for God’s direction amid this suffering. Were we to have children? Should we utilize artificial means to conceive? Is adoption for us? Where and how do we proceed with adoption? How are children to be part of our lives? These questions drove us deeper into prayer and into intense listening for God’s guidance.

The Lord did indeed guide us and grant us comfort during these difficult years. We came to the firm conviction that the Lord wanted us to pursue adoption overseas in China. We were in the early wave of North Americans adopting Chinese orphans. Due to the one-child policy instituted by the Communist government, many “unwanted” female babies were either aborted, victims of infanticide, or sent to crowded orphanages where they were cared for as well as they could be by the staff. Describing the adventures of this adoption experience would require an additional story; suffice it to say we traveled to China without a child and two weeks later came back with our eight-month-old daughter, Amy. Two years later, we would head to Vladivostok, Russia, to adopt our youngest daughter, Anna, also eight months old. As we settled into life as a new family of four, we were surprised that the pain of infertility was overwhelmed by the joy of adopting our children. Every family is a miracle; ours is no exception.

As the years passed, we nurtured our family and our ministry, building a community of care and outreach in the church. In time, the mission of the church became obscured, and growing a church in numbers became the top priority. In the midst of this change, the second of three losses occurred in our lives — the sudden death of my mother due to cancer. She was the hub of the family, and her death brought about profound changes in my extended family. This was a time of confusion and deep grief. Coupled with the changes in the church, we found ourselves longing once again for solace and community, but found none. We were searching intently for a deeper meaning and purpose of the people of God and church worship.

This search steered me into a doctoral program in urban leadership and spiritual formation at Bakke Graduate University (based in Seattle at the time, now based in Dallas). In this program, we learned more about the spirituality and leadership of serving the needs of the poor in urban settings, of creating communities of care and outreach, and of diving into the mystery and majesty of human interaction in the act of ministering care in God’s compassion. I would often pray in the St. Ignatius chapel at Seattle University and found this space compelling, drawing me toward beauty and prayer. Here, I discovered many more contemporary Catholic authors and people who became heroes to me. Diane and I were also drawn to Celtic Catholic spirituality and the “thin places” of the world, those places where heaven and earth are thinly veiled to one another. We had no idea that this would be the perfect description of the Catholic Mass, but the journey was beginning to take on new dimensions for us. It was also here that I came across a wonderful quote from G.K. Chesterton in his masterpiece, Orthodoxy, giving us insight to the Christian life.

“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.… Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. p. 239.)

In 2007, I graduated with a Doctor of Ministry in Transformation Leadership and Spiritual Formation and soon after discerned that my time at the Assemblies of God church was coming to an end. Through a series of many staff changes and circumstances, Diane and I knew that our hearts were being pulled somewhere else, though where that would be, we did not know. We knew our view of the Communion service was changing, that the Lord was somehow present in ways we couldn’t articulate.

Our view of Mary was changing also. We knew that Protestants didn’t understand her or her role in salvation history. They could not help us answer the question of what her role was, and what our relationship with her ought to be. We knew it had to be more than a casual appreciation for her at Christmas.

One final issue that we could not resolve was the issue of authority. With so many opinions about Holy Scripture, what or whom were we to trust, and why should we trust them?

I resigned my position, which for a career pastor can be devastating, with the loss of income, an uncertain future, the disappearance of community and friends, and vanishing support networks. This was the third of the losses that would send us into a “desert wandering” for five years, until one Christmas Eve when our world was turned upside down.

My family loves Christmas. As part of our Christmas tradition, we would attend a Christmas Eve service somewhere in the county. Diane thought we needed a new experience of Christmas Eve as a family, so in her wisdom and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, she suggested we attend Children’s Mass at Sacred Heart Parish, just up the hill from the church where I used to be employed. This sounded like a good idea to me, since I had been in the parish church occasionally to pray and look at the beauty of the sanctuary, statues, and candles. So, off we went to Children’s Mass. We had no idea what to expect, but knew the kids would be cute, Christmas carols would be sung, and hopefully English (and very little Latin) would be spoken. We were right! The kids were cute, Christmas carols that we knew were sung, everything in the church was decorated beautifully, and very little Latin was used. We were stunned!

We left that Mass wondering what the Lord was doing. While there, my eyes became fixed on the crucifix in the front of the church. It seemed that Jesus was speaking directly to me, saying that He knew the pains and sorrows of humanity, and more than that, the pains and sorrows my family and I had endured. He was saying that here, in the Mass, in the Catholic Church, our search for deeper meaning and purpose would find its answers. Here, Mary would be our Blessed Mother. Here, living water would finally quench our thirst.

We stayed away from the church, and from Mass, for two weeks trying to sort it out. We were a bit numb, but Diane and I were convinced that God was ushering us into full communion with the Catholic Church. We asked the girls if they desired to attend with us, and even if they desired to explore the possibility of becoming Catholic; they were game to try. So that we could become better prepared for this further adventure, we felt the need to find out more about the Church, if we could. We went to our local Barnes & Noble and found a book which became incredibly helpful to us, Catholicism for Dummies. We still refer to this book from time to time! Eventually, we were introduced to the parish priest. We invited him over to our house to pepper him with questions, attended RCIA, and prepared to enter the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2012.

Entering into full communion with the Church has been an oasis for us. Our journey has not been so much a wrestling with doctrine and tradition as it has been discovering where consolation, beauty, and joy manifest Jesus’ love on earth in the most deeply personal and authentic way. We have been overwhelmed by Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist, the love of our Triune God and our Blessed Mother, and the wonder and beauty of the Church unfolding before us.

Why enter the Church in this time of trial and scandal? Perhaps it was precisely because of these wounds that the Lord led us here, to help tend to a Church that needs renewal, strength, and care.

A few years after our entrance into the Church, I started inquiring into the Diaconate upon the encouragement of our parish staff, not knowing what that entailed. It was a whole new world of potential pastoral involvement, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was up to the challenge. I told Diane, my wife, that unless someone approached me at coffee and donuts after Mass, I would forgo the honor. As I sat enjoying my donut and coffee after Mass, our parish priest made a beeline to me, telling me I needed to apply. I felt this was the Lord’s prompting! So I applied, was interviewed, along with Diane, and entered the formation process, which was quite challenging on every level.

In the second year of formation, we were graced with attending a Coming Home Network retreat at the Archbishop Brunett Retreat Center in Federal Way, WA, which was our home for formation throughout the years. The retreat was wonderful and life-giving, thanks to Jim Anderson, Ken Hensley, and Monsignor Steenson! On December 19, 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I was ordained a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church. It had been quite a journey!

In the years since my ordination, I have been impressed with the immense prayerfulness of God’s people and gained a growing love of the saints, especially St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother. I am filled with wonder as I serve the Mass and am thankful for the Divine Office, praying for the profound needs of the Church worldwide. I have also become a regular follower of On the Journey with Matt, Ken, and Kenny on the CHNetwork website, finding their insights helpful in the challenges of the diaconate.

Greater than those challenges, though, the diaconate has brought me fulfillment. Along with preparing and preaching homilies at Mass, it is one of my joys to pray for those who have died and to help those who struggle with loss to find a way home. My current role offers many opportunities to minister to bereaved families and pray for the souls of the dead as they are committed to God’s good earth, one of the corporal acts of mercy. This work brings me back to St. Benedict. One of the disciplines of the Benedictine Rule is to remember that we all will die, Memento Mori. It is not a morbid preoccupation with death, but a daily discipline to remind ourselves that our lives are short and need to be filled by the Holy Spirit with virtue, humility, and fortitude — the love of God.

Blessings to you on your own journey home! Kyrie Eleison!

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A Faith of My Own

Born in 1951 and growing up in Seattle, Washington, I had been a Christian all of my life. Our family was Lutheran, so I was baptized as a baby, attended Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and church camp. I was confirmed when I was 14 and active in Luther League in high school. I had faith in God, but it was more my parents’ religion than my own. There was a short period in college when I walked away from my faith and turned my back on God. When I returned to faith in 1971, it was during the Jesus People movement, and I became a charismatic. Suddenly, God was no longer just someone I believed in. It wasn’t just about going to church on Sunday to give Him that slice of my life. Instead, He became integral my whole life, and I had a living, daily relationship with Him.

In the early years of the charismatic movement, the late 1960s and early 1970s, charismatic worship was new and fresh. We sang scriptural songs accompanied by guitars. We learned a lot about the Holy Spirit, His workings, and His gifts. After college I spent a couple of years in California at a Christian organization called Youth With A Mission, a worldwide organization that trains people to become missionaries and work around the world. These missionaries emphasize the need to cultivate a deeper relationship with God. As I had no money for the training, I volunteered in their office in California and learned much through exposure to visiting speakers, listening to teaching recordings, and having conversations with many students and leaders who were there.

On February 8, 1976, I flew from Los Angeles to Anchorage, Alaska, to be a bridesmaid in my college roommate’s wedding. I went from temperatures in the 70s to 30 degrees below zero! This was a pivotal point in my life. I liked Alaska and was looking for an adventure, and my friend’s parents invited me to stay with them for a while. I found a job and never left Alaska. I met my husband, Willy, there. We were married in 1977 and now have three grown children and four grandchildren.

During the time we were raising our children, our family attended a local Assemblies of God church, where our children flourished in their faith through the many ministries the church offered. Despite the busyness of raising three children, I always felt that God had a purpose for my life beyond that, but I didn’t know what it was. From 1989 to 1999, I was involved with the music in our church, singing in the choir and playing piano for the worship services. This did not become the lifelong purpose it may have seemed to be during those ten years.

He Leadeth Me… Through Pain and Confusion

In the late 1980s, I became involved with an interdenominational charismatic group for women called Aglow, where my faith flourished and I grew spiritually. Aglow was a large part of my life for many years, and I started by serving on a local board and continued until I was the State Prayer Coordinator, then the State Leader.

During my time with Aglow, we went to many Alaskan Native villages, where we had vacation Bible school for the children during the day and ministry services for the adults in the evening. Through the local and state gatherings, national conferences and the village trips, I made many friends in Aglow in my state and across the nation.

In 1999, the door to music ministry closed for me, and it was a difficult and painful time coming to grips with the circumstances that led to a change in how and where I served God.

It was at this time that I went to the Aglow Conference for the first time in Orlando, Florida. Women came from all over the world! We had wonderful speakers, we enjoyed worship that brought us into the presence of God, and my experience there brought me into a new intimacy and closeness with God that I had never known before.

My husband retired in 2011, but in 2014 he took a “retirement job,” where he worked Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays; so he was unable to attend church. Things changed again. I started going to a church in Anchorage, but after about three years, I grew weary of making the 35-minute drive alone, then sitting alone through the services. Because of the distance, I didn’t get involved in the church or make friends. I also had grown weary of the style of worship in the charismatic churches I was attending. Many of them reminded me of rock concerts with darkened rooms, flashing lights, the worship team front and center, and very loud music. There were also things happening in Aglow in our state that were difficult for me, and I found it very hard to move forward as a leader. November of 2017 was marked by snowfalls, especially on the weekends. I stopped going to the church in Anchorage because of the weather.

About this time, a good friend of mine, and one of the very few Catholic friends that I had, moved to my area. It was November, and I was thinking about Advent and Christmas. Growing up in the Lutheran Church, we always had an Advent wreath and candles, and I always loved the anticipation of Christmas and of celebrating the birth of Jesus. Most of the churches I had gone to all my adult life had not had an Advent wreath. Out of the blue, one day I said to my friend, “I just want to go to a church where they have an Advent wreath and watch them light the candle.” She said that she needed to connect with the local Catholic church, and the following Sunday would be the start of Advent, and there would definitely be a wreath and candles, so why not go with her?

My heart sank. I was thinking, “WHY go with her — to a dead, ritualistic boring church service?” Nevertheless, I said yes. What else could I say? I couldn’t tell her how I really felt about the Catholic Church. Up until this point, my only experience with the Catholic Church was a wedding and two funerals, besides the things I had learned from other Protestants.

The Father Ran to Meet Me

This was the beginning of God’s great set-up for me. I was not looking forward to going to Mass, but I went. As we walked through the door to the nave (what we Protestants called the sanctuary), I was immediately taken aback. While I have always loved the Trinity, I have always had a special relationship with God the Father. In the churches I attended over the years, they would do just about anything to get the Holy Spirit to move. I was used to that, but encountering the presence of God the Father was a rarity. I always recognized the presence of the Father by the fact that — how can I describe it — His presence is heavy, weighty. I recognized it in that church by how I felt when I visited Jewish synagogues. As we walked through the doors of St. Andrew’s, I was hit with the heavy, weighty presence of God the Father, and I was stunned by it.

Then the priests came in, and suddenly, I did not see what happened next as a “ritual.” Instead, I saw how they revered the holiness of God so much that they approached Him with… protocol. That was something I would never see in my churches — a love and reverence for the holiness of God — and I loved it. When we started singing the liturgy, I almost melted! I was so touched by the beauty of the music and the words we were singing that I was moved to tears and kept on crying. The music sounded like something one might expect to hear in heaven.

A Brush With the Son

When it came time to receive the Eucharist, not knowing anything, I jumped up and followed my friend to the front. The woman gave me the host, but then she knew I shouldn’t have received it, and let me know it. Busted!

When we left the church, I was in shock. I knew something profound had happened to me, but I didn’t know what to do because I was NOT going to become a Catholic! But I decided I would attend there during the Advent season. This far I would go, but no farther.

The next part of God’s master plan was the third time my friend and I went to Mass together. In the church foyer, they had set up a book fair. After Mass, my friend was talking to people, and since I didn’t know anyone, I amused myself by walking around, looking at the books. I had never seen books like those. They were alien to me, with strange words and pictures. Then suddenly, I saw a book that stopped me dead in my tracks. Its title was Rapture: The End Times Error that Leaves the Bible Behind, by David Currie. I had spent my whole adult life in churches that espoused the Rapture teaching; still, I had had serious issues with it for years. The few times I heard someone teaching about the Rapture, I ended up with more questions and confusion than anything else. Unfortunately, there was no one to whom I could ask my questions about the Rapture, because everybody in attendance all agreed with it, whether they understood it or not. Here, for the first time, I was staring at a book that might have some answers! I didn’t have any cash, so I went home and immediately downloaded it onto my tablet and started reading. David Currie’s book was a turning point for me. He was knowledgeable and thorough and went through all the Bible prophecies, explaining how most of them have already been fulfilled.

Christmas came, and I still didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to become a Catholic, but I was so drawn to the Catholic Church that I couldn’t stay away. Then there was another step in God’s set-up. Back in 2001, one of my friends, who is a Bible teacher, was invited to speak for two weeks at a Bible school in Magadan, Russia, and she invited me to come with her. Before I left, an Aglow friend who is Catholic told me about Father Michael, a priest from Alaska who was pastoring a church in Magadan. She told me what a wonderful priest he is, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to meet him!”

We were in a foreign country, I speak no Russian, and I had no idea where the Catholic parish might be. But we would see!

The Holy Spirit Makes a Move

One day in Russia, we were walking through a building to go to a meeting, when the person leading us pointed to a door in the hallway and said that that was the Catholic church. I immediately thought of Father Michael — and just then, the door opened and out walked a man in a long brown robe. I asked him if he was Father Michael. He said yes, and we had a short conversation. The Sunday following Christmas, who should come to celebrate the Mass and preach the homily, but Father Michael! I couldn’t wait to go, and I was not disappointed.

Father Michael shared about a little five-year-old girl who would come to Mass in Magadan by herself, because her parents were not church attenders. Being so young, he didn’t give her the Eucharist. One Sunday after Mass, she came to him and said, “Father Michael, why won’t you give me Jesus? I just want Jesus!” Father Michael gave her Jesus.

What About Me? What Do I Want?

I thought about that incident, and I realized that I wanted Jesus, too! I had loved Jesus all my life, but I wanted Him more fully in the Eucharist. Then he talked about the Gospel passage of John 6:53–68, where Jesus told his followers that they must eat His body and drink His blood, and everybody but the Twelve left. Then He said to the Twelve, “Are you going to leave too?” Peter said, “Lord, where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Suddenly, those words sank deep into my heart, and it was at this point that I knew there was nowhere else I wanted to go — that this is where I belong, where God — Father Son, and Holy Spirit — was calling me and where I would find the Truth.

I was still reading David Currie’s book, and one day I started reading about him and was surprised to learn that he had converted from the Presbyterian Church. He was the son of a Presbyterian pastor; his parents were teachers at Moody Bible Institute. I also discovered that he had written another book, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic. I couldn’t wait to get that book, too. I immediately downloaded it and started reading. It was the perfect book for me to read at that time, since I still knew nothing about the Catholic faith and had many questions.

Currie wrote this book to explain to his Protestant friends and family why he became a Catholic. His reasons were presented clearly and systematically in a way a Protestant would understand — the perfect book for me to read at that time. He addressed subjects that separate Catholic and Protestant beliefs, including the Pope, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary. As I read his book, I slowly came to understand what Catholics believe, and for the first time, it made sense to me. There were still many things I didn’t understand. I started reading other books as well, because I craved learning about Catholicism. I read Scott Hahn’s conversion story and loved it. I read The 7 Secrets of the Eucharist and The 7 Secrets of Confession by Vinny Flynn. I picked up CDs about Catholicism in the church foyer and listened to them.

One of the things that I didn’t understand was the relationship Catholics have with the Virgin Mary. In the churches I went to, we talked about Mary once a year at Christmas, and that was about it. I had an experience that changed all that.

In Alaska we get earthquakes. Once or twice a year, the house shakes a little for a few seconds, our hearts skip a beat, and then we go about our business. On November 30, 2018, we had an earthquake around 8:30 in the morning, when it was still dark in our far northern latitude. That earthquake registered 7.2 on the Richter scale — a big one! For a full minute, our house pounded up and down, the lights went out, things fell off shelves and crashed to the floor, and I had to hold onto the counter to keep from falling. When the earthquake stopped, the aftershocks started. Already traumatized, every 20 to 40 minutes, we would hear a deep rumble, the house would shake again, and fear close to panic would return. That night, I was lying in bed, exhausted. Every time I would start to relax a little, another rumble would come, the house would shake, and my heart would pound. I thought of all the people in south-central Alaska who, like me, were lying in bed with their clothes on, in case they had to leave the house suddenly, thinking, “We are all in this together!”

First the Blessed Trinity, Then the Blessed Mother

I tried to pray, but could not. I didn’t know how to pray the Rosary, but I could say a Hail Mary. So I started saying Hail Marys, and pretty soon I started drifting off to sleep. I wasn’t awake, but also not fully asleep, when I audibly heard a woman’s voice say to me, “I love you.”

My eyes flew open, and I thought, What was that?! It wasn’t a voice that I recognized. Then it dawned on me. I had been saying Hail Marys, and she came to comfort me!

In September of 2018, I started RCIA. I cannot say enough about what a great experience it was! We had excellent teachers, and I learned so much about our Christian faith, what they believe, the sacraments, and all the wonderful things Catholicism has to offer. I especially liked the teaching about the Eucharist, which is one of the things that really drew me to the Catholic Church. In all my years as a Protestant, I knew there were deeper things to communion than what I understood, but I could never really grasp what they were.

When it was fully explained, I was thrilled to finally discover what Holy Communion really is and what it means to us as Christians. When I was a Protestant, we hardly ever talked about sin. Holiness is essential, but I didn’t understand how to become more like Christ and deal with my sins. In learning about the Sacrament of Reconciliation, I began to understand the importance of confessing our sins to the priest. I didn’t understand the necessity of penance until after my first confession, when I forgot to do it. When I went to Mass the next day, I could immediately tell something was wrong, and then I realized that I hadn’t done the penance I had been assigned! It is a very important part of confession. I still struggle with understanding purgatory, something I didn’t know about at all before. I recently took an online class from goodcatholic.com about what we believe, and I encountered one of the best explanations of purgatory that I have ever heard.

On April 20, 2019, at the Easter Vigil, I was confirmed at the age of 67. The confirmation name I chose was Anne. St. Anne, the mother of Mary, is the patron saint of seamstresses, of which I am one. St. Anne was the grandmother of Jesus and a name that has been given to many in my family.

I have been a Christian all my life, but becoming Catholic feels like coming home. St. Andrew is a wonderful parish, and I sing in the choir, go to weekly Adoration (where we pray before Jesus in the Eucharist), attend weekly Rosary prayer, and attend Bible studies. I figure I will be learning about God and our relationship to Him for the rest of my life, and that thought makes me very happy.

My husband has now retired again and attends a Protestant church in our area. He doesn’t mind that I attend Catholic Mass, but he prefers to remain a Protestant. I join him at his church about once a month. I am the only Catholic in my family of Protestants, and my prayer is that someday I will have others in my family join me. Even if they don’t, it is okay because they are Christians and accept the choice I have made. Even so, Father, make us one (John 17).

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I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. (Jeremiah 24:7)

As one of five sons of an Assemblies of God pastor, my family was always the first to arrive at the church and the last to leave. I have always understood that Jesus loves me and wants to have a close relationship with me.

To Be a Pastor’s Son

I have a vivid memory from 1963 of being at the Grand Ledge, Michigan, Assemblies of God Church. I was a nine-year-old, and my older brother was twelve. After the sermon, I went up to the kneeling rail with those who “wanted to have more of Jesus in their lives.” It was then that I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, although I barely knew what that meant. My older brother, Dale, had not yet received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I heard him praying and pleading with God that if Terry, his little brother, was loved enough to receive this gift, that he ought to receive it, too.

The Assemblies of God does not believe in infant baptism. The denomination dedicates babies and only baptizes with water much later when one has had a personal encounter with Jesus and has accepted Christ as Lord and Savior. For this reason, I was dedicated to the Lord as an infant.

To Sin or Not to Sin

After receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit at nine years old, I asked my father if I could be baptized with water. He told me that I was too young. My youthful brain reasoned with him that if I was not too young to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, then I wasn’t too young to be baptized with water. I told him that God had accepted me and was living in me. This was an argument my father could not dispute, and he decided to allow me to be baptized with my older brother.

As a member of the Assemblies of God, I was taught that you could tell Christians by their deeds. However, it was not so much what they did that identified them, but rather what they did not do. I was taught that Christians did not go to movie theaters, did not play cards, did not smoke, and did not drink alcohol. Christian women did not use makeup and did not wear pants. Another prohibited activity was dancing of any kind. When I was in 8th grade, I was voted vice president of my class, and I was expected to attend my grade’s school dance. My father reluctantly gave me permission to go after I promised that I would not dance. I would just hang out by the snacks and talk with my friends.

While at the dance, I saw a girl who went to my church that I thought was rather cute. I was really surprised when she walked up to me and invited me to dance with her. I explained that if we danced, it would be a sin, and we would go to hell. She retorted that it wasn’t true, that dancing was not a sin, that it was a lot of fun, and that God hadn’t struck her down for doing it. She was so convincing that I decided to accept her invitation. And it was fun! When the song was over, I was still perfectly alive and did not feel the least bit separated from Jesus nor convicted by the Holy Spirit that I had sinned grievously. I realized then that what I had been taught about dancing was not true.

That experience drove me into a period of trying to figure out what really was a sin and what wasn’t. I concluded that the Assemblies of God did not have all of the answers. I realized other Christians did not believe certain things I had been taught. Rather than causing me to rebel against Christ, my search brought me closer to Him. I studied the Bible more than ever as I tried to figure out what really pleased Christ, as well as what truly displeased Him. I was hungry for the truth!

At that young age, I started to believe that there was no real body of Christ on earth. Rather, this was only a metaphor for a universal group of people who had similar experiences concerning Jesus. While it seemed like Christians espoused different beliefs, since we belonged to different denominations, I realized these variations were like the parable of the three blind men who are trying to describe an elephant. The one who felt the trunk believed that the elephant was like a snake. The one who felt the legs believed that the elephant was like a large tree. The one who felt the tail believed that the elephant was like a rope. I figured that the Holy Spirit would have to sort everything out regarding the full picture.

Around this time, I remember trying to speak to a drunken man about Jesus. He told me that he was a Baptist. He said that the Baptist church was the true church because it was the very first church. This puzzled me since I knew that the Baptist church was formed after the Reformation, so I questioned him about it. He said the Baptist church was formed by John the Baptist, and since John was born before Jesus, the Baptist church was the first and true church. I didn’t argue with the man since he was drunk. Besides, according to my upbringing, being drunk proved he wasn’t a Christian at all. But I did find his reasoning quite amusing.

To Be Loved and to Love

Somewhere along the way I picked up on the teaching of “the total depravity of man,” although at the time I did not understand what it was called. I thought that if this were true, then I was completely incapable of pleasing God. This was depressing. I asked my oldest brother, who had just returned home on a college break, what I should do about my problem. His exact words were, “Man, I don’t know what to tell you. Just read the Bible!” I opened up my Bible and started reading the book of Romans. I will never forget what happened when I got to the passage that said, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). I heard the voice of Jesus speaking in my heart, telling me that He was so powerful that He could make even the wrong things that I did turn out for good if I gave them to Him and asked for forgiveness. I told Him, “If you really are that powerful, then you are my God, and I will serve you the rest of my life.” I finished reading the book of Romans and realized I was completely at peace for the first time in many months.

My church decided to start a study group on cults. I helped teach the class on Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, and Catholics. Why these groups? We believed they were cults and that we needed to know what they believed and how they were different from us. These groups believed that Jesus had started each of their churches, rather than our supposition that Jesus had formed the idea of people coming together and creating communities of faith. I was taught that the Church of Rome was the whore of Babylon and that the Pope was the Antichrist, and I then taught these misconceptions to others. My grandfather used to call the tail end of a turkey “the Pope’s nose,” and when a cousin, whom I loved dearly, told us she was marrying a Catholic, my grandmother told her she would rather see her dead. We had all inherited a bias against Catholics.

One Sunday, when I was 16, I was reading the religion section of the newspaper. There was an article about a group of Catholic charismatics that were meeting at a place that eventually grew to become Christ the King Catholic Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This completely puzzled me because, as I shared earlier, I had been taught that the Catholic Church was a cult. I felt convicted that I needed to see what was going on there for myself. My father gave me permission to drive to Ann Arbor, which was only about 45 minutes away from where we lived, on one condition: that a board member from our church accompany me. The board member that my dad chose was a former Catholic who had been “saved” from the Catholic Church. When we arrived at the meeting place, I could not believe my eyes and ears. I saw priests and nuns and men in monks’ habits. I saw guys with beards and blue jeans and girls with long hair and love beads. Everyone was singing the same praise music that I sang in my own church. They were worshiping Jesus just like I did. This was a Cornelius experience in reverse for me. I knew in my heart and spirit that these people loved Jesus, and I also understood that the Presence of Jesus was in the Catholic Church, in a thing that looked like a little box.

I came home from Ann Arbor and reported what I had seen and heard to my parents. They became very excited, believing that all of these people could now leave the Catholic Church and be free from the “cult” — since they had obviously truly experienced Jesus. My response was quite different. I realized, once again, that I had been taught things that were not true. I concluded that Christianity did not begin at the Azusa Street Revival in the early 1900s, but that it started in 33 AD on the day of Pentecost and continues to this present day.

I became acutely aware that Christians who loved Jesus and claimed to hear from the Holy Spirit were interpreting passages from the Scriptures very differently from the way I had been taught.
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After my encounter with the Catholic charismatics, my worldview changed completely. I became acutely aware that Christians who loved Jesus and claimed to hear from the Holy Spirit were interpreting passages from the Scriptures very differently from the way I had been taught. How could we both be right? How did I know whose understanding was correct?

To Be Deep in History

Consequently, I became a student of Church history and the early Church Fathers and was introduced to Marian theology, the treating of the Theotokos, Mary, the Mother of God. I discovered that the Theotokos was accepted by all Christians even before the theology of the Trinity was formulated. I also realized that, in the beginning, all Christians believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. It has been said that if you do not want to be led into the Catholic Church, then you should not study the history of the early Church. Of course, I didn’t know that when I started studying the early Church Fathers, but I quickly discovered that this statement is true. A serious, open-minded, open-hearted study of the early Church will eventually bring you to the Catholic Faith. For 40 years, I wandered in the wilderness, searching to find the Promised Land, the Church that Jesus said He would build, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Matthew 16).

A serious, open-minded, open-hearted study of the early Church will eventually bring you to the Catholic Faith.
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In the church I grew up in, we had a memorial communion service. They did not teach the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine. In my reading, I discovered that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ — the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus — in the Holy Eucharist, from the very beginning. So, now, called to the Church as an adult, I began to sneak into Catholic Masses on Sunday mornings before my wife and children were ready to go to our Protestant church. This went on for a long time.

I thought, any girl with guts enough to wear that kind of dress to an Assemblies’ tent revival was a girl I had to get to know!
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I had met my wife, Renee, at a revival meeting when she was almost fifteen. She had sauntered into the revival tent wearing a polka-dot halter dress. That was a bit scandalous for the Assemblies of God; however, her long hair made it almost impossible to detect her problematic clothing. I thought, any girl with guts enough to wear that kind of dress to an Assemblies’ tent revival was a girl I had to get to know! We became childhood sweethearts and, eventually, husband and wife.

To Serve Abroad and at Home

Renee and I became medical missionaries in Kazakhstan in 1997. After three years of ministering in Kazakhstan, I became the missionary medical director based in the US (Michigan), traveling frequently around the world. We worked in missions for a total of seven years, and afterwards, I returned to practicing internal medicine in Michigan. This time, I was offered a position in a Catholic hospital. I soon became the primary doctor for a group of retired nuns, some of the active priests, and even the bishops of the diocese. This gave me wonderful opportunities to talk with them about the Catholic Church. I would often listen to EWTN and, in particular, The Journey Home program with Marcus Grodi.

One day, Bishop Paul Bradley, the diocesan bishop and one of my patients, point blank asked me what was keeping me from becoming Catholic. I explained to him that the obstacle was my family. It would be especially devastating to my 80-year-old father, who was a high-ranking Assemblies of God minister. I told him that Jesus knew my heart, but I felt I couldn’t come into the Catholic Church while my father was still alive. Bishop Bradley agreed that, out of respect for my father, I should wait until he passed away. As my father aged, he never gave up his ministry, and until the very end of his life, he was still teaching Bible classes to older adults. After my father’s death, I went to Bishop Bradley and told him I was ready to enter the Catholic Church.

To Be Ready When Your Wife is Not

My dear Renee was not ready to enter the Church with me, nor was she even interested in learning about it. Bishop Bradley assured me that I could attend Mass on Sundays and could also continue going with her to our Protestant church so that we could worship together. He then assigned me a spiritual director who would be my mentor. At one point, my spiritual director asked me, “Why do you really want to enter the Catholic Church?” I explained, “It’s not because you have better preaching. It’s not because you have more lively music. But where else can I go to receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist?” Then he said to me, “You’re ready. Welcome!” After that, I was joyously able to go to my first Reconciliation and receive my first Holy Communion and Confirmation.

The year I came into the Catholic Church was the year that Easter landed on my birthday. When my mother asked me what gift she could give me, I told her I would like her to attend the Easter Sunday morning Mass at our cathedral with me. To my great surprise and joy, she did so. When Mass was over, my mother was amazed. She didn’t understand exactly what had happened, but she thought it was beautiful. She had a definite “softening of the heart” toward Catholics after her experience of the Mass. Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s famous quote sums it up well: “There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing” (Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, “Preface”, 2015). I am thankful that my mother had a glimpse of the beauty within the Catholic Church.

My coming into the Catholic Church would have been even more joyful if Renee had joined me, but she was not even close to being ready. She insisted I attend Mass out of town so nobody would recognize me. She did not want my conversion to the Catholic Church to fuel gossip in the rumor mill. Occasionally, she would attend Mass with me, and I would try to make her “cheat sheets” so she could follow along. I eventually discovered a wonderful publication called Magnificat, which made it easier for her to understand what was going on during the Mass. To the eyes of many Protestants, Catholic worship appears foreign and exclusive. Protestant culture places a high emphasis on welcoming the unchurched, while Catholic culture is focused on the members they already have. Catholics are not expecting non-Catholics to attend Mass. My observation is that this results in the Protestants excelling in evangelization, but not in discipleship, and the Catholics excelling in wisdom and sound teaching, but not evangelization. Many, especially converts, are working to fulfill the New Evangelization, the call by Pope St. John Paul II and others to begin a new approach to sharing the Faith with those outside the Church, as well as those who may be asleep inside the Church.

As for Renee, I knew it would have to be the Holy Spirit that drew her to the Catholic Church. I focused my efforts on simply praying for her. While practicing medicine, it became a habit to relax in my hot tub at the end of a busy day. I would spend up to an hour in prayer as I let the cares of the day melt away. After becoming Catholic, I would spend my “hot-tub time” praying the Rosary for my wife, asking the Holy Spirit to lead her to the Catholic Church.

Eventually, the news began to get around that “Dr. Terry has become a Catholic!” So Renee and I decided we should probably meet with the pastor of our Protestant church to explain our situation to him in person. I told him that I was, indeed, now Catholic and attending Mass. Yet I was also attending the Protestant church with my wife so that we could worship God together. He was so completely taken aback that he exclaimed, “… I don’t have any idea what to do about this!”

To Be Rejected in Order to Be Accepted

A few weeks later, the pastor decided that I was no longer welcome to participate in worship with my wife at their church. This shocked Renee and our friends at the church. This pastor was eventually dismissed from his position, perhaps in part due to his mishandling of my situation.

*****

I’ll let Renee pick up what happened from here:

I had understood for quite a long time that Terry had an interest in and, eventually, a real love for the Catholic Church. This was very foreign to me because it went against what I had been taught growing up. However, I knew that God was in this situation. For nearly forty years, I had trusted my husband as a wonderful partner and guide, and now I had a hard decision to make. Could I continue to trust him? It was at this point that I had an understanding, while praying, that not to follow Terry and not being united with him in this decision would be displeasing to Jesus. That understanding made a real impact on me! I prayed, “Lord, if this is really you encouraging me to come along with Terry, please make it very clear. Please, Jesus, make my eyes see what I have never seen before, make my ears hear things I’ve never heard before, and may it all be the truth!”

I then called St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Richland, Michigan, where Terry was a member, and asked when their next RCIA classes were. The woman who answered the phone said they would start next week! That was my first sign. I asked her to put my name on the list, and she was very happy to do so. I found out at my first class that there was only one other person in the class besides me. That made for an intense, almost one-on-one, learning experience with an amazing RCIA teacher. I then discovered that my classmate was a woman who raised alpacas. Terry and I had also once raised a herd of 22 llamas (before we left to become medical missionaries to Kazakhstan), so my new friend and I had much to discuss: llamas and Jesus!

But God wasn’t through with my surprises! When I had a chance to get to know the priest at St. Ann’s, I discovered that he had been baptized a Catholic as an infant, but then his family left the Catholic Church and joined the Assemblies of God! He had even attended an Assemblies of God school. But after his graduation, God led him back to the Catholic Church. From there, he eventually discovered his vocation as a Catholic priest, and his family also returned to the Catholic Faith. The Lord, in His goodness, had “hand-picked” this priest just for me! Father understood my background and was a real comfort to me.

And then I found out that the deacon assigned to St. Ann’s was a man that I had been on a double date with many years ago! My best friend had gone with him, and I had gone with his younger brother. What a small world! He and I were both surprised, and delighted, to reconnect.

Another surprise was the moment I remembered I had been a bridesmaid in a wedding at St. Ann’s some 40 years earlier. Terry and I had been looking through some old photo albums, and he found a picture of me wearing a bridesmaid’s dress at a church wedding, standing next to a statue of Mary. “That’s the same statue at St. Ann’s!” he exclaimed. When I saw the picture, it all came back to me. That wedding at St. Ann’s was the one and only time in my life that I had set foot inside a Catholic Church… until I first went to Mass with Terry.

God had many such surprises planned out just for me. He perfectly tailored every single detail of my journey into the Catholic Church.
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God had many such surprises planned out just for me. He perfectly tailored every single detail of my journey into the Catholic Church. I guess you can say I have come full circle in my worship. I never understood how someone could worship God quietly. Worship to me had always meant praising God with my hands raised high and singing lively, heartfelt songs. While that is good and pleasing to the Lord, there is another way that is the highest form of worship. It is in the context of the Mass or in quiet Adoration. When I walk into the Catholic Church in the town where I now live, I experience a sense of great reverence. The quiet lends itself to my anticipation of receiving my Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. He is worth everything that I have ever given up. He is the Pearl of great price.

The quiet lends itself to my anticipation of receiving my Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. He is worth everything that I have ever given up. He is the Pearl of great price.
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The post To Love Him and Make Him Loved appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Music has always been an essential part of my spiritual life. I was born into a heritage of Christian faith that goes back many generations. Magnificent hymns, such as “Great is Thy Faithfulness” and “It Is Well With My Soul,” carved their way into the heart of my family culture. As a child and teenager, I spent many hours listening to music, singing and dancing with my grandfathers, both of whom were talented musicians. I danced when my maternal grandfather played “I’ll Fly Away” on his banjo and listened with wonder as my paternal grandfather introduced me to Handel’s “Messiah.” Both my mom and dad came to a place in their lives where they had made their fathers’ faith their own, and they passed that faith on to me and my two younger brothers.

Unlike many Protestants, I never had a specific moment when I said a sinner’s prayer and became saved. I’m sure there were times in junior high when I went to the front after an altar call at youth camp, but from a very young age, I have had faith. I was given the incredible grace to have loved Jesus ever since I could sing or say His Name. We grew up in a very tight-knit family unit, with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins all attending our conservative Baptist church on a weekly basis. We were all involved in children’s and youth programs, while the adults assumed leadership in the church.

As a youth, my dad had a subscription to a magazine called Christian History, and he would read stories to me about missionaries and historical figures who traveled to distant places around the world, spreading the gospel and changing history through courageous acts. This is where I heard about Jim and Elisabeth Elliot for the first time. I heard of their incredible acts of sacrifice to bring the gospel to native people in Ecuador and was transfixed. Throughout junior high and high school, I spent many hours reading their stories and others like it.

All those lives you changed by giving such a joyful answer to your faith, that’s what I’m going to do, Grandpa!
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When I was 17 years old, I was called out of class one day and told that my parents were taking me to see my Grandpa Bell one last time. He was a pastor and minister to international students in local universities. The work my grandparents did with students and the care they provided to those under their wings had a huge impact on me. At almost every family event, there were people from many parts of the world, including Egypt, China, and Germany. I saw the joy on his face when he talked about Scripture and sang his favorite hymns. As he lay dying of stomach cancer, the last thing I said to him was, “All those lives you changed by giving such a joyful answer to your faith, that’s what I’m going to do, Grandpa!” That was the beginning of a call to ministry that God had placed on my life, and it sparked a flame in my heart to seek out ways to spread the good news, just as my grandpa had done.

Anywhere With Jesus, I Can Safely Go

After I graduated from high school in 1995, I already had three international trips under my belt, including two short-term mission trips to western Europe. My calling for missions and enthusiasm for travel were in full bloom as I entered a Christian university about an hour away from where I grew up. I had the expectation that, as soon as I said “Yes” to the call God had placed on my life for missions, I would just show up to college and it would all be laid out for me. What classes I should take, what major I would choose, what kind of work I would obtain, it would all just somehow magically appear. It seemed so easy for all those missionaries that I had read about! But it wasn’t as easy as that. The school I chose to attend was, at the time, still a very traditional Assemblies of God institution, which is Pentecostal. From the beginning and until the very end of my college career, in class or in chapel, I constantly heard about receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit and how speaking in tongues proved that one had received the Holy Spirit.

The first problem I had is that I came from a church culture where even the raising of hands in worship was frowned upon. Secondly, I had absolutely no clue what speaking in tongues looked like in a modern-day church. I had always been taught that speaking in tongues was for the Apostles only, and only on the day of Pentecost. This private prayer language thing was a complete mystery to me. Thirdly, as a Baptist, I believed in “once saved, always saved.” Whether or not it was the official doctrine of the Assemblies of God at that time, I don’t know. What I heard as a naïve, idealistic college kid is that if I had not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I was not saved. I would have to walk this tightrope of salvation until I received that baptism. Then, and only then, would my eternity be secure.

The first two years of college, I wavered back and forth on my major. I spent many hours in chapel or in my room, on my knees or with my hands in the air, begging, pleading to God to give me that baptism of the Holy Spirit. I can remember crying out to Him, saying, “If this is what it means to be saved, then save me! That is all I want!”

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I took a compulsory class called Pentecostal Doctrine. I was hoping that, somehow, I would find the answers that I had been seeking for those two years. I was terrified that the question of my salvation would still be up in the air. I sat in the front the whole semester, peppering my professor with questions that he couldn’t seem to answer. I walked away from that class more confused than ever, asking two very important questions that marked a turning point in my faith journey. These questions would eventually lead me out of evangelical Protestantism.

The first question had to do with authority regarding correct interpretation of Scripture: Is there any one person or denomination who has more authority than all others to interpret Scripture correctly?
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The first question had to do with authority regarding correct interpretation of Scripture: Is there any one person or denomination who has more authority than all others to interpret Scripture correctly? After all, there were huge differences between my Baptist upbringing and the things I was learning at my Assemblies of God school. The second question had to do with salvation, and it got to the heart of the matter for me: Who has the right to tell me that I’m saved or not saved? By what standard might the status of one’s salvation be determined?

The second question had to do with salvation, and it got to the heart of the matter for me: Who has the right to tell me that I’m saved or not saved?
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At the beginning of my junior year, I was fortunate enough to make friends with people who had similar questions as I did and who were willing to talk about those questions openly. Somehow, we discovered a book by Mark Shea, called By What Authority? While reading that book, I learned about problems with sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), and it was the first time that I thought about the origin of the Bible. I was convinced that Mark Shea was on the right track, but it didn’t change the trajectory of my life over the next several years. I was determined to be a world-changing missionary like I promised my grandpa. Despite the lingering questions, I pursued my dream and graduated with a Bachelors in Ministry and Missions in 1999. My senior project was a paper about my strategic ministry aspirations to travel to Paris and convert Catholics in that city! After two years of traveling and discerning, I became the first full-time, home-grown missionary from my home church, commissioned and sent to spread the gospel in Latvia and throughout north central Europe. I spent several summers there directing camps and mentoring college kids in leadership. Eventually, I moved to Latvia full time.

When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll

After living in Latvia full time for about a year, I received a letter from the government. My request to stay and live there was denied. I had two weeks to get out of the country, and I couldn’t return to Latvia for two years. I packed up all my things and said goodbye. About two weeks after moving back to the US, I received a call from my home church stating that they could no longer support me financially. I was crushed, absolutely grief-stricken. I was 26 years old, living in my parent’s house, my lifelong dream of being a missionary taken away from me, and my home church — the church that I was raised in — didn’t feel like home any more.

After a few months, still reeling from grief at the loss of a vocation, I enrolled in Fuller Seminary’s satellite school in Seattle, near my place of residence at the time. I wasn’t sure what I was going to accomplish, but I was hoping for the opportunity for more time to discern what my next step would be. I didn’t realize that the questions I’d had in college were going to return full force.

I studied systematic theology and church history concurrently, three terms in a row. The theology classes were simply surveys of different Christian systems of the meaning of faith. The initial question of my personal salvation, whether secured or not, became much more convoluted and unclear, and it was difficult to see how I could love Jesus and find a church where I was comfortable with their theology. It also seemed like my question of authority in interpreting scripture was never going to be resolved, because every denomination and denominational head had a different answer! Luther had his answer; Calvin had his. The Baptists had their own set of ideas!

By the end of 2005, I could feel my faith going into a tailspin. I loved Jesus, and I had made that promise to my grandpa, but I still had no answers on how I was going to fulfill my promise. I had a multitude of questions — questions I wrestled with, questions I tried to ignore, questions I tried to overlook, but just couldn’t. I walked away from that year angry. I was angry with God for taking my vocation away. I was angry at myself for being so naïve and idealistic, and I was angry with the church. Studying all those different systems of belief made it clear to me how, as a Christian, one can walk through the cafeteria of Christian beliefs, pick and choose whichever part of whatever system happens to soothe the soul or be relevant at any given moment. Then that person can do the same thing again the next day and choose something different. I knew that I had been guilty of doing that. Was there a remedy to subjective Christianity?

I walked away from my work in the Christian world. I started working for our family business again and gave up my quest to find answers to my questions. I was tired, I was depressed, and I was angry at everyone and everything. I spent the next few years wandering in and out of different churches and faith communities, never finding what I was looking for. I was done with Evangelicalism. I finally just adopted a “Jesus and me” mentality and wandered even further into the abyss of my own sin and darkness.

The song “Draw Me Close to You” by Michael W. Smith was one of those songs that I had sung over and over again at camps as a young adult in the mission field, in church, with the radio, even with my Walkman! It encapsulated that time in my life so well because it expressed my earnest desire to love and serve God with my whole heart and my sincere hope of finding the answer to the question of my salvation. But the song also came to me in the middle of the night, in my darkest times, along with all those old hymns I learned from my grandfathers. When I was at my worst, crying on the bathroom floor, the phrase, “You’re all I want. Help me know you are near…” played on repeat in my head, becoming a tiny, feeble prayer. I held on to that little scrap of love for Him which seemed to exist only in that song. I couldn’t sing the first part though, “Draw me close to you, never let me go,” because I had fallen so far from Him. I was so ashamed of my sin that I didn’t dare ask Him for that. I was still single, now in my early thirties, and it seemed as if those times as a college student and young adult when I had fervently raised my hands in the air, singing, “I lay it all down again, to hear you say that I’m your friend,” had all come to naught. I didn’t know if Jesus would ever answer my prayer, “draw me close to you.” I spent a few more years working and living in a deep depression.

Draw Me Close to You; Never Let Me Go.

On June 28th, 2010, I met my husband. One of the first questions I asked him on our first date was, “What do you do for fun?” In what I found to be an adorable Mexican accent, he said, “On Saturday night I go to church to visit with my God.” I was delighted to find a man who actually wanted to go to church but dismayed to discover that his church was Catholic! Still, the way we met was such divine intervention, we both knew from the beginning that this was it. For that reason, we decided that we should find a church to attend together. We cycled through a few of my old Protestant churches from years before, but those just weren’t the right fit.

Fernando took me to his Spanish Mass on a Saturday night, about three months after we started dating. I had never been to a Mass before. I didn’t know Spanish. And I certainly didn’t understand all the holy aerobics! Even though I didn’t understand the language or what the Mass was about, Jesus met me there, and I experienced Him in a way that I never had before. Since I am short and vision impaired, I like to sit near the front so I can see what’s going on. What I didn’t realize until much later is that I was sitting right next to the Tabernacle, where the Real Presence of Jesus resides! Over the next year and a half, we dated and eventually became engaged. During this time, we attended Mass regularly together, and I began to do some research into the Catholic Church. My experience of sitting next to Christ in the Tabernacle every week began to break down some fortifications I had built up in my heart, and I began to hope that He was, in fact, drawing me closer to Him. By the time we were married, I was ready to take the next step. The day after we returned from our honeymoon, I entered RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults).

I am short and vision impaired, I like to sit near the front so I can see what’s going on. What I didn’t realize until much later is that I was sitting right next to the Tabernacle, where the Real Presence of Jesus resides!
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Over the next several months in RCIA, I felt that I had completed one of the most important legs of my intellectual journey into the Church, a journey that had begun many years earlier. My questions about the nature of salvation, Church authority and the role of Scripture in the scope of the whole of Divine Revelation was answered in those sessions. I began to understand the need for Tradition and apostolic authority to preserve correct interpretation of Scripture. I made the wonderful discovery that there are thousands of saints and witnesses that have gone before me, saints who struggled with the same kinds of questions that I had.

I began to understand the need for Tradition and apostolic authority to preserve correct interpretation of Scripture.
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My cousin, Shannon Kurtz, appeared on the Journey Home right around the time I entered the Church. I had had a candid conversation with her a few years before about my questions when she was visiting from Illinois. Then, not having spoken to her for a few years, she randomly sent me an e-mail with a link to her show, about a week before I entered the church. We immediately connected via phone, and we both cried many happy tears! Since then, The Coming Home Network International and its The Journey Home television program on EWTN have always had a special place in my heart. This apostolate demonstrates that conversion begets conversion.

Benedictus Fructus Ventris tui, Iesus.

About this time, my sponsor introduced me to the prayer known as the Rosary. It was during the last weeks of Lent that I asked the Lord about it, and I expressed my hesitation about praying to Mary. The message I received was, “Why don’t you talk to her and find out for yourself?” So that’s what I did. I started out slow, one Hail Mary at a time, and it wasn’t long afterwards that I learned to love Mary and pray the Rosary often. In fact, it was at this time that I realized that she had answered a prayer that I totally forgot that I had prayed! When I was taking voice lessons in high school, my voice teacher wanted me to learn how to sing in Latin to practice my technique. As soon as she introduced me to it, I loved it. I went to the music store to find all the chant and polyphonic music I could find.

One CD that I found had Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on it. The first time I heard it, it made me cry, and after that I couldn’t stop listening to it. I memorized all the words, and even though I didn’t understand the full meaning of the English translation, I knew that it was probably sacrilegious and wrong for a little Baptist girl to be singing Ave Maria! But I couldn’t stop myself. For a period of several months, every time I was alone in the house, I would lock myself in the bathroom, turn the shower on full blast and sing at the top of my lungs! It was in those last days before I entered the Church that I realized Mary was there all along, drawing me in, protecting me, so that the deepest cry of my heart would be answered: to draw close to Jesus and know His salvation.

Teach Us Through This Holy Banquet, How to Make Love’s Victory Known

The night I took my place at the holy banquet finally came at the Easter Vigil, March 30th, 2013. At the beginning of the three-hour vigil, I began to feel very thirsty, and as the night went on, even after I was baptized, it felt like I had a mouthful of cotton, and I was quite uncomfortable. Finally, the moment I had been longing for — my first Eucharist — arrived. I received Jesus for the first time in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Not only did He draw close to me in a spiritual and emotional way, but He was physically there — I didn’t just see Him raised up at the Consecration, but actually consumed Him! It was amazing, but I was still thirsty. Then I received the Precious Blood from the cup. In that very moment, my terrible thirst was gone. I knew that if I kept coming back to this place, to this Eucharistic banquet, I would never be thirsty again. All my longings, all my questions, all my hesitations were gone.

After I received the Sacraments at the vigil, I was left with a fire in my heart. There was a physical, Emmaus-Road burning in my chest, and I was thirsty for more knowledge, more understanding, so I picked up the dictionary-sized Catechism of the Catholic Church and read the whole thing in less than three months! There was something extraordinary about reading what you already know to be true, and yet the Holy Spirit confirms it in the pages of a book. All the answers to my difficult questions were given daily while reading. It was also around that time that my ache for knowledge included a desire to re-read the Scripture from a Catholic point of view. In 2014, I started my Master of Arts program in Biblical Theology at John Paul the Great Catholic University online. It was the perfect place for me; it assuaged the burning in my chest, and I fell in love with Scripture again.

Despite my new love for the Catholic faith and my theological studies, in 2016, at the age of 40, symptoms of my undiagnosed mental illness became difficult to control during a stressful time in our marriage. By God’s grace and Mary’s intervention, I was able to find a doctor who would give me some official diagnoses and a plan to get healthy again. Unfortunately, part of this plan meant that I would have to come to grips with abuse from my past. Again, I found myself on my knees on the bathroom floor, singing that song, “Draw me close to you, never let me go…” But this time, I had the grace to get up and run to that banquet table, and Jesus answered my prayer with the gift of His Body and through the lyrics of a song, “I lay it all down again, to hear you say that I’m your friend.”

During this difficult time, a priest was kind enough to administer the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick before I started my intense EMDR treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it was life changing.

My painting art allows me to fulfill the promise I made to my grandfather that day, to change the world by giving a colorful and joyful answer for my salvation.
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Over the next few years, I would make strides in my own healing by growing in my Catholic Faith and my artistic expression. After many stops and starts, I graduated from John Paul the Great in 2018. My painting art allows me to fulfill the promise I made to my grandfather that day, to change the world by giving a colorful and joyful answer for my salvation.

I can also say with confidence and faith that Jesus continues to answer that deepest song-prayer of my heart:

[Draw me close to you, Never let me go
I lay it all down again, To hear you say that I’m your friend
You are my desire, No one else will do
Nothing else can take your place
To feel the warmth of your embrace
Help me find the way, Bring me back to you
You’re all I want, You’re all I’ve ever needed
You’re all I want, Help me know you are near

(Smith, M. W. (Performer). (2001). Worship. Reunion Records, Franklin, Tennessee, USA)]

 

The post When Lyrics Lead appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

My mom eventually settled on an Assemblies of God church. By then, I was tired of going with her on Sundays. I fought her every week. Sunday school was boring, and I did not see the point in going at all. Eventually, my mom stopped asking me to go with her.

In high school, around 1998, I began dating a Catholic boy. He was not on fire for his faith, but he did invite me to Mass once. It was totally different from anything I had experienced. Afterwards, he gave me one of the plastic rosaries they had laying out on the table in the back. I was not sure what to do with it, but it intrigued me. When I got home, I was excited to tell my mom about my experience. I thought she would be thrilled that I went to church. Her reaction was just the opposite: she was upset! She told me Catholicism was bad and unbiblical, that Catholics worshipped Mary and statues. She told me that it says in the Bible not to worship graven images. Her anger blindsided me. I had no idea what to say, so I dropped the conversation.

Fast forward to my early twenties. My mom invited me to attend a Foursquare church with her. I enjoyed the sermon, and the pastor and his wife were lovely people, so I attended there sporadically with my mom.

In 2004, at the age of 21, my boyfriend proposed, and we married at that church. It was a long-distance engagement, so marriage prep with the pastor was done individually. My fiancé was a believer, but he did not attend church. God was not a big part of our marriage. After almost two years of emotional and verbal abuse, that marriage came to an end.

So here I was, 23 years old and going through a divorce. I decided to live in Iowa with my best friend and her uncle. I would finish up my teaching degree while licking my divorce wounds. The divorce itself was ugly, and I had a few tough days. I was crying one day when my friend’s uncle came home from work. He presented me with a gold crucifix necklace and told me to lean on Jesus for help. He was not Catholic, but Lutheran. Regardless, his kindness touched me deeply.

That Christmas, I flew back to Arizona for a visit with my parents. I was wearing the necklace when they picked me up from the airport, and as I went to hug my mom, she stopped, stared at the necklace and asked me angrily what was this thing I was wearing. I told her it was a gift. She scoffed and said Jesus is risen; He is no longer on the cross. I was crushed. The necklace had meant a lot to me.

I went to hug my mom, she stopped, stared at the necklace and asked me angrily what was this thing I was wearing. I told her... She scoffed and said Jesus is risen; He is no longer on the cross.
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For the next handful of years, church and religion again went by the wayside. I began my teaching career, giving no thought to God and his teachings. Around 2009, I reconnected with an old boyfriend, Kenny. We married in 2011, and I moved to New Mexico, where he was stationed in the Air Force. By 2012, I was pregnant with our daughter, Cameron. Being thankful for my part in bringing a new life into the world, I finally began to wonder about a higher power. Surely God had something to do with that.

I thought back to my experiences with my mom and her anger towards Catholicism. I contacted a Catholic friend of mine, Rachel, back in Arizona. I asked her why there was so much animosity towards Catholics. There are billions of Catholics; surely they can’t be all that bad? How can so many people be wrong in their beliefs? She chuckled and told me that Catholicism is extremely misunderstood. She recommended I do some research of my own. She suggested I read, Why Do Catholics Do That? by Kevin Orlin Johnson. That book was a turning point; it sparked a fire. It explained everything so concisely, with Scripture passages to back it up. There was a biblical explanation for everything from the crucifix, to genuflecting, to Mary, and it all made sense! I knew I had to learn more. For the next two years, I read tons of books and inundated Rachel with questions. Then I went back and reread that first book and highlighted, underlined, and dog-eared the pages.

In 2015, my husband left the Air Force, and we moved back home to Arizona. Rachel invited me to Mass at St. Germaine Catholic Parish. Although I could not keep up with all that was going on during the Mass, I enjoyed myself and continued to attend with her and her family.

Rachel gifted me a copy of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, by Bernard Bangley. Each day I would read about a new saint. The saint on October 12th was St. Cyprian of Carthage. Like me, he came to the Catholic Faith later in life. He devoured books by Christian writers and became a bishop. He guided his people with hundreds of letters, in which he explained the Faith. Something compelled me to learn more about that man. I found his complete works, and it took me a year to read them all. His treatises helped me decide to convert.

After I shared my decision with Rachel, she gave me the phone number of the RCIA instructor. I met with him and gave him a quick rundown on my background and why I wanted to be Catholic. (Because it’s the truth, and I could not deny the truth!) As the RCIA instructor was signing me up for class, he mentioned I may need an annulment. I thought, what is that? Come again? He explained that, since I had been divorced, I would need that marriage annulled and my current marriage recognized by the Church before I could become Catholic. He gave me a number for the deacon in charge of the Nullity Ministry. I was thoroughly confused.

I called the deacon the next day, and we set up a time to meet. He went over the Church’s teachings on the indissolubility of marriage. According to the Bible, I was technically practicing adultery by divorcing and remarrying. Since I had never heard anything like that elsewhere, I had an extremely tough time accepting that. He walked me through the process of obtaining a Decree of Nullity and told me that the tribunal at the Diocese of Phoenix was taking 18 months to two years to complete it. My heart sank. I wanted to be Catholic so badly, and now I had to go through the process of revisiting this extremely painful part of my past. I struggled with having to dig up and expose my history to this man I barely knew. I did not want to relive it, and I felt it was unfair and not healthy for my mental well-being. I had a long list of questions and objections for the deacon and my RCIA instructor. Fortunately, they allowed me the space to vent and rant during those difficult days. Overall, I was beginning to wonder if I was doing the right thing in converting.

My heart sank. I wanted to be Catholic so badly, and now I had to go through the process of revisiting this extremely painful part of my past... . Fortunately, they gave me space to vent and rant during those difficult days.
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I began RCIA in the fall of 2017, with Rachel as my sponsor. I also began the annulment process. During this time, I found out that my husband also needed an annulment, since he too had been married before. I did not understand this at all, since he was not religious and had no desire to become Catholic. Why should he have to go through the process as well? It felt like the setbacks kept coming. Thankfully, Kenny agreed to go through the annulment process, so long as I did not pressure him to become Catholic or do anything he did not want to do. Deal!

I found out that my husband also needed an annulment, since he too had been married before. I did not understand this at all... . It felt like the setbacks kept coming.
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He even agreed to have Cameron baptized Catholic. I invited my family and closest friends. Not surprisingly, when I invited my mom and her side of the family (grandparents, aunts, and uncles), all refused to attend. However, many of my friends, and even my father, came to support us when Cameron was baptized in August of 2017.

A few months later, I knew the time had come to tell my mom that I was converting. I took a deep breath and made the call. My confession was met with silence, then stuttering disbelief. She went on a tirade against Catholicism and its “evil ways.” I cried. We ended the conversation there, since continuing would accomplish nothing. My heart was broken. Was converting worth all of this? Was I doing the right thing?

Nearing the end of RCIA, and with the end of my annulment nowhere in sight, our class went on a spiritual retreat. I was feeling disheartened and unsure of my decision to become Catholic. I could not find solace in the Rosary, as so many had counseled. During the retreat, our class was told to disperse and have some quiet time. We were out in the wilderness, on a makeshift farm. There was a path leading away from the buildings, out into the trees and fields. Several of us made our way down the path in quiet contemplation. I had not gone far when I spotted a large rock. I sat down on the rock and proceeded to cry silently, asking God why I was feeling this way. Why all this turmoil? I closed my eyes and let the tears fall.

Then I opened my eyes and looked up. There, about ten feet in front of me was a horse. I had not heard it walking up to me. I looked around for my classmates but saw no one. I was completely alone. Then a second horse walked up and stopped behind the first one. Then a third horse came up behind the second one. All three were staring at me. We all stared at each other for a couple of minutes. My tears stopped, and I said hello. I felt calm. Finally, the horses slowly moved on. I looked all around me, expecting to see at least one other person, but no one was there. It was as if the Holy Trinity had come to ease my fears and confusion. As a result, to this day I have a special place in my heart for the Trinity.

Easter of 2018 came and went, with me watching my classmates getting baptized and confirmed without me. A few months later, in July, I finally received my annulment. I felt a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. However, Kenny’s annulment was still being processed. Still more waiting, with my patience growing thin. I continued to attend Mass in the meantime, anxiously for the day when I could finally receive Jesus in the Eucharist.

On March 30, 2019, Kenny’s annulment was granted. I immediately called my pastor and asked if I could be baptized that Easter, just a couple of weeks away. He said I might have to get my marriage convalidated, and he was not sure there would be time before the Easter Vigil. I felt deflated. Please, God, do not make me wait any longer! My pastor said he would call the tribunal and ask what we should do next. In the meantime, he suggested I pray for the intercession of Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. I went through my days imploring Our Lady to untie this seemingly never-ending knot in my life.

I went through my days imploring Our Lady to untie this seemingly never-ending knot in my life.
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Later that week, my pastor called to let me know that I was all clear to be baptized at Easter Vigil. No convalidation was needed! My heart soared. On Easter Vigil, April 20, 2019, I was baptized and confirmed. I chose the confirmation name of Cyprian. St. Cyprian was a big part of my intellectual conversion. That evening, Rachel was there next to me, along with my dad, Kenny, Cameron, and several close friends. They had come to watch my years-long desire be realized. I was sad my mom was not there, but the topic of my faith is a toxic one between us. We have agreed to disagree on this point, and we do not discuss it.

Once I had officially entered the Catholic Church, I volunteered to be a teaching assistant in the religious education program. I worked with second graders, preparing them for their first confession. Later on, I was approached by the deacon who had worked with me on my annulment. He asked if I would be willing to consider becoming a nullity minister at the parish. I accepted the position. I completed my training through the Diocese of Phoenix Tribunal, and I now help others who were once in my position, needing to get their marriage in alignment with the Church’s beliefs. It is ironic that, considering how much I railed against the process in the beginning, I should now be on the other end of it, but I believe that my experience uniquely qualifies me to help others in this regard.

I now help others who were once in my position, needing to get their marriage in alignment with the Church’s beliefs. It is ironic that, considering how much I railed against the process in the beginning... .
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Cameron had her first confession last year, and she is currently preparing for her First Communion and Confirmation. I am thankful that God has led me home and that I can help my daughter grow spiritually, as well. Kenny is not Catholic, nor is he interested in converting, but I believe there is still time for God’s grace to function in him. After all, it took God thirty-plus years to get my attention. Thanks be to God that He did.

The post The Courage to Convert appeared first on The Coming Home Network.