What Trouble Are Giants?

My Conversion Story

(as brief as I can make it.)

            I cannot remember a single moment or time in my life when I didn’t believe that Jesus Christ came down from heaven to die on my behalf. I’m not insinuating that I always lived this belief, or that I always had even a vague idea about the Doctrine of the Trinity. I was born into Christianity. My family and my Church had always told me that Jesus was God, and that I needed to place my faith and hope and trust in Him if I wanted to spend eternity in heaven.

            I grew up in the Southeastern part of these United States. Surrounded by mountains, hay fields, cattle, and family, Northwestern Georgia has always been home. I come from a long line of farmers. No matter how much I may try to appear otherwise, I’m as country as cornbread; which remains one of my favorite foods.

            My family had last names like Guthrie, Hise, Stoker, and Paradise, to name but a few, and we were a tight-knit bunch. I can remember lots of family reunions, Sunday dinners, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and even Halloween parties attended by my parents, grandparents, brother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I have tons of cousins. I was fortunate enough to be very close to many relatives. Looking back it seems that I knew my great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and second and third cousins as well as many people know their closest kin. Thanks to these arrangements I got loads of Christmas and birthday presents. It worked out quite well for a young man who instinctively loved gifts.

            I was born in 1979 at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The small town where I’ve always lived doesn’t have a hospital of it’s own, so my parents had to go to “town” to have me, though I do remember many tales of my forebearers being born in bedrooms and even corn cribs just a few decades prior.

            Little Matthew was the toast of the town; as far as my family was concerned. On my mother’s side I was the first grandchild for her parents, who had raised two boys and two girls. My father’s parents already had two granddaughters, but they were thrilled with the birth of their first grandson. My spoiling started early and happened often.

            My lone sibling is my brother who is slightly over two years my junior. He and I ruled the woods as boys and continue to be close as adults. Together we learned how to hunt, fish, play sports, and appreciate fried food. We were taught to work for what we wanted, be thankful for what we had, love the Atlanta Falcons, and taught to know the difference between a cow and a heifer, a combine and a cutting harrow, and right and wrong. We were raised by Christians to be Christians.

I was probably already an adult before I ever set foot in a Church that wasn’t Baptist. The Baptist faith was the only flavor of Christianity that I knew; it was part of who I was. We attended Church on Sunday mornings and evenings, and many Wednesday nights. We didn’t bust the doors down to get in every single Sunday, but more times than not during my formative years we were there. 

            The small country Church that my parents were married at and still attended was made up of my friends, neighbors, and kinfolk- mainly kinfolk, in fact. Actually, I’d be willing to wager that I was probably some relation to ninety-percent of that Church’s members during the years that I went there. I suppose that keeps you accountable. If you miss Church, not only would the Pastor call you but so would most of your relatives.

            When I was around seven years old my mother and I sat talking about Jesus in my bedroom. I can remember her asking me several questions about Jesus and explaining certain truths. Toward the end of the conversation she asked if I’d like to invite Jesus to come and live in my heart. This was it! If I believed that Jesus could save me from my sins and place my trust in Him then someday I would go to heaven. I said “Yes,” and we prayed a “sinner’s prayer.”

            Mom called our preacher and told him the great news. We all cried a little. He suggested that I should still come before the congregation next Sunday during the altar call and accept Jesus publicly.

            When I went up before the Church the following Sunday I cried even more. I didn’t feel any different or look any different but, according to the soteriology of my Church, I was now destined for eternal heaven. A few of the other young men went up before the congregation with me. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

            Baptism was to come later. Many ecclesial communities like the one I grew up in will generally postpone baptism until a later date, preferably when there is more than one person to be baptized since many houses of worship, including the one I attended, do not have any baptismal facilities.

            In Fundamentalist theology baptism is not a sacrament. In fact, there are no sacraments. We did believe that people should be baptized, if possible, and we did celebrate the Lord’s Supper on occasion, but we called these things “ordinances” and not sacraments. They didn’t actually do anything; they were merely symbolic of things that had already been done. For us, baptism was generally how we got our name on the membership roster. But it wasn’t long until several of us young people, including my brother, were standing on the banks of a small creek awaiting our baptism.

            We were all plunged into the water and pulled back up by our Pastor who baptized us in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We were given King James Bibles with our names in them as baptismal gifts, not to mention plenty of congratulations from our many family members and friends who looked on wearing their Sunday Best. It was a day that I will never forget. 

            I got older. We continued to attend the same Church up until I was a teenager. If you’ve ever heard people say that there is a Baptist Church on every corner in the South, well, you’ve heard the truth. There are at least seven or eight separate Baptist Churches in the small town where I was raised.  My best friend was a member of another Baptist Church just a few miles down the road, and I was envious.

            His Church, he would tell me, was cooler than mine. They had a bigger youth group, guitar players in the choir, and they went on youth trips all the time. They would go as a group to the movies, to the beach, to concerts, and even to their Pastor’s house just to hang out. Plus, his Church had girls.

            I wanted in. I talked my mom into letting me start attending that Church and joining the youth group in all their festivities. It was one of the best moves that I ever made.

            Doctrinally there weren’t really any differences between my new Church and my old one. The only thing that I remember being different was that my new Church didn’t insist on using only the King James translation of the Bible.

            Most of the kids in the youth group I already knew from school or from the community. The leader and teacher of the youth group, the Pastor’s wife, was one of the coolest people that I had ever met, and I continue to hold her in high regard to this day. Not to mention that she was some more of my “extended family” that I’d see at the reunions I mentioned earlier.

            The preacher at this Church was dynamic from the pulpit. For the first time I remember feeling the Bible come alive as he would deliver his sermon on Sundays. He, like his wife, is someone to whom I still feel I owe a great debt. The leadership of this community turned a rag-tag bunch of teenagers into a family who could pray together, cry together, and enjoy each others company.

            I learned a lot while I was a member of this Church. I found out more about myself, more about God, and more about the Bible than I ever expected to find by driving an extra two or three miles. One of the biggest things that I discovered was something called “Contemporary Christian Music”, which we’ll discuss more later.

            Around the age of fifteen I met the girl who would later become my wife. She wasn’t from our Church or from our youth group; she was from Iowa. We began dating about the time that I started high school.

            Though she did move back and forth between Georgia and Iowa a few times during our teenage years our relationship continued to grow. She joined the Church that I belonged to and I had the joy of seeing her baptized there.

            The youth group just kept getting better. We kept growing in knowledge of God and Scripture, kept going to concerts, and now my girlfriend got to experience all this with me.

Time flew by and it wasn’t long until high school was over. I married my girlfriend when I was nineteen, went to work, and started planning a family.

We ended up becoming members at my old Church again after we married. My mother still attended services there and the membership roster was pretty small. She asked if we’d start coming to Church with her, said they had a new Pastor who was looking to grow the Church and wanted our help. We were happy to oblige them. So, my wife and I, and our firstborn child, a daughter, joined the Church of my childhood.

We immediately fell in love with this Pastor and his wife, too. They were a couple of fantastic individuals, on fire for God and full of zeal to win souls and grow the Church. During my teen years I had told my former Pastor and his wife that I believed God was calling me to be a preacher. It was here, back at my first Church, that I started to take this calling seriously.

My wife and I became very good friends with the Pastor and his wife. I spent a lot of time talking with him about my options in ministry and about which seminary to attend. I was beginning to think that being a full-time Pastor was what God was calling me to do.

The Pastor had a young family to look after just like I did. My wife and I had a son not too long before our Pastor’s wife had their second child, so we all had a lot in common. My wife became active in the children’s ministry, and I began serious Biblical studies in order to become a minister.

I made my first, and last, appearance as a preacher at a Sunrise Service one Easter morning. I loved it, and I looked forward to many more such appearances and eventually to ordained ministry.

Despite my best laid plans, however, our Lord had something more in mind for me.

Remember the whole youth group thing that I talked about in the previous chapter? Remember how I said that one of the greatest discoveries I made at that Church was Christian Music? This is the part where I explain what I meant.

            The choir director would lead the youth group, and the rest of the congregation, in music that mainly consisted of choruses that everyone would join in with and repeat several times. This genre is commonly called Praise and Worship music. The concerts that we would attend were pretty much this same type of music.

            Some of it was pretty good. A lot of it was pretty lame, with no real theological truth. It reminded me of “bubblegum” rock, something that I’ve never had a taste for. But there was this one song that, even after I outgrew the youth group, I could never get out of my head.

            Several years later, while I was working at an insurance company, a Christian friend asked me if I liked Christian music. I said that I did, at least some of it. She handed me a tape that would forever change my life.

            The singers name was Rich Mullins. On the first listen I immediately recognized the song that had stuck in my head for years. It was called “Sometimes by Step”. I was only familiar with the chorus of the song, but once I heard the verses I felt a little like Saint John must have felt when he was taken up into heaven.

            Only two people who are not my God or my wife have had this profound of an effect on my life, Rich Mullins was one of the two.

            I became a huge fan instantly. I horded his music and to this day I still remember the words to most of his songs. I have never found anyone who could convey the True, the Good, and the Beautiful with the same power that Rich Mullins could.

            Here was a man who could be my hero, my inspiration, and a solid role model for a young man to follow.

            Sadly, shortly after I discovered Rich Mullins I found out that he had died tragically in a car accident. Rich was gone. Gone before I ever had the chance to meet him or see him perform live. Thankfully, he’s left us with powerful music, moving prose, and an everlasting witness to the love of God.

            My brother had a book, given to him as a birthday present by the lady who led my former youth group, which was written about the life and faith of Rich. He let me borrow it and I believe that I finished it the same day. Shortly thereafter I read it again.

            The story was as powerful and meaningful as the lyrics. I learned a lot about the private side of the man and about his personal walk with God. But something in the book troubled me deeply.

            The man who I had thought to be a guide on the path of Christ, the man who had so changed my life and rekindled my zeal, the man who I would not hesitate to call a Saint was… a Catholic!

            Ok, it wasn’t official. Rich had attended a Catholic Church for many years prior to his death. He was taking the final steps to come into full communion with the Church of Rome.

            You cannot understand how much this shocked me unless you come from the same background that I come from. This made Rich Mullins the only Catholic I knew.

            I was a life long Baptist. Most of the people that I knew were Baptists. I came across the occasional Methodist or Church of God member but, to me, Catholicism was entirely different.

            I always thought that other Christians could go to heaven, but many of their teaching were wrong. The Methodists baptized babies, who were incapable of personal faith, and I’d even heard that some of their preachers and members drank beer or wine openly, which we thought was wrong. Pentecostals screamed too much, pretended to talk in tongues (and linked that with their salvation), and jumped around a house of worship like it was a playground. Presbyterians were strict Calvinists, who believed that God predestined people to hell. I had no idea what Episcopalians believed, but I had always heard their religion referred to as “Catholic-Lite”, and that was enough for me.

            We always classified Catholicism along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, as religions that only operate under the guise of Christianity. In fact Catholicism was worse, far worse.

            Catholics worshipped Mary and the Pope. They worshipped statues and bread. They worshipped the dead and didn’t even believe in the Bible! Catholics went to hell.

            How could someone like Rich Mullins become so deceived? How could someone who knows the Bible well enough to write entire songs about particular verses, as theologically deep as most Biblical commentaries, worship with pagans? How could God allow someone who obviously loved him so much and served him with such a powerful music ministry to go to hell?

            These questions need answers so, thanks to the power of the internet, I set out in earnest to prove Rich Mullins wrong. I was a one man army with a single and pivotal mission: I was going to show the world that the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon, just as I had always been taught.

            The first thing that I did was go online and Google the word “Catholic”. This led me to www.Catholic.com. I noticed right away that these Catholics took their faith seriously. I found volumes of books, tracts, audio, and every other form of media that they used to defend their Catholic faith. I quickly left the website. I wanted to be sure that I had my “facts” right before I began any debate or read any Catholic propaganda.

            I visited all the various anti-Catholic sources. They not only confirmed what I had always heard, but presented the Catholic Church as even worse than I had at first thought. I figured I’d better read up.

            I learned many new words those first few days. Words like Eucharist, which was similar to our “Lord’s Supper” service, but the Catholic Church did it everyday and worshipped the bread! I learned about the mass and how it claimed to resacrifice Jesus daily on their altar. I learned that we Baptists were part of a broader group of Christians known as Protestants, and particularly as Fundamentalists within Protestantism which consists chiefly of us Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Anglicans. But the vast majority of the anti-Catholic material that I read was put out by my fellow Fundamentalists. I spent a few weeks “sharpening my blades” before diving in head first into all out theological war.

            My head first dive was one I quickly regretted. The Catholic Apologists I found online were far more knowledgeable than I was. I needed more ammo. I reloaded and went back into debates at various websites, but I really felt that I wasn’t achieving anything. Every time I’d ask something easy, for instance: why do Catholics worship Mary or why do Catholics think that purgatory is a second chance for sinners, they would respond quite simply that they didn’t do or believe these things.

            I became so frustrated that I thought about giving up completely. But I couldn’t just drop the issue, Rich Mullins meant too much to me and I had to know if he was in hell. So I took some time off from debating and began reading more about Rich Mullins.

            The more I read about Rich Mullins the more the word “Catholic” kept coming up, this was unbelievable. I also noticed that something else kept popping up. This something else was the title of a book, a book entitled “Orthodoxy” by a man named GK Chesterton. Judging by the title I figured that this would probably be the most boring, tiresome treatise ever written, but if it meant so much to Rich I thought that I’d give it a shot. 

            I went to every Christian bookstore that I could find looking for a book called “Orthodoxy” by a man named Chesterton, and no store had it. I didn’t think of visiting a regular bookstore because I figured that this must be some huge reference book on Christian doctrine written sometime in the 1980’s or 90’s, not something you’d pick up at Barnes and Noble.

            I learned that none of the local “Christian” stores carried Orthodoxy because GK Chesterton was a Catholic. So I ordered a copy off of the internet.

            When the book arrived I was surprised to see how small it was. Once I cracked the book open my world turned upside down, or rather, right side up. I couldn’t get passed the Introduction without laughing out loud and realizing that I was in for quite a ride.

            I’m not going to tell you what Orthodoxy is about, or give any details, because you really need to read it for yourself.

With Chesterton, as with Mullins, I had found another man with whom I completely agreed.  I have read the book multiple times and many, many more books by Chesterton (not only did he write brilliant defenses of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, he also wrote detective fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and thousands of news paper articles and essays).

I became a sort of addict, a knowledge addict. Reading Chesterton is an education unlike any other. I started looking for other people who enjoyed Chesterton’s wit and rhetoric as much as I did. I found them. And they were all Catholics, too. I began to suspect a plot.

Chesterton wrote in “The Catholic Church and Conversion” that there are three steps to converting to the Catholic faith: patronizing the Church; discovering the Church; and running away from the Church. By reading him I learned my first lessons on Catholicism from the inside, from a Catholic. 

I had come to suspect that all the horrors that I had heard about Catholicism may not be entirely true. I simply could not believe that men of faith like GK Chesterton and Rich Mullins were in hell. I decided that I would let the Catholic Church speak for herself.

 “The convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached . . . that of the young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of Rome. He wishes to do it justice; but chiefly because he sees that it suffers injustice . . . I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals . . .”(Chesterton – The Catholic Church and Conversion)

            I had no plans of converting. It was just that, after witnessing this man’s peculiar genius, I didn’t feel that I was being very fair to the Catholic Church. If their teachings were so obviously wrong, so unbiblical, how was it the Rome had duped this great intellect? So I started digging around for some Catholic sources from which to glean information.

            I figured that this was the only civil way to settle the argument. I had heard what all those who hated the Church said. I had even mastered their arguments. If I were doing research on, let’s say, Chevrolet Trucks, I wouldn’t gather all of my information from Ford dealerships. No, eventually I would have to go to the source. I was going to have to find out about Catholicism from Catholics. If I was right about Rome being wrong my job should be easy, their own words would condemn them.

            So, I read and I researched. If I read more than a thousand articles and essays, or more than several dozen books that first year, I would not be surprised. I found some of their arguments pretty convincing. I began offering these books and articles to other people; looking for anyone to refute them. I mean, Catholicism is obviously wrong (right?), I just couldn’t figure out how. And this scared me.

           Many people, when I handed them a book, wouldn’t even read it. “You know this is wrong,” they’d say.  “Well, of course it’s wrong.” I’d reply. “I just need help finding the hole in their argument.”

            Others may thumb through a few pages, but no one was overly interested. My wife figured it was just a phase I was in; a phase that would pass. But it would not pass easily.

            “The second stage is that in which the convert begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth . . . It consists in discovering what a very large number of lively and interesting ideas there are in the Catholic philosophy . . . This process, which may be called discovering the Catholic Church, is perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business . . . It is like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals, which is at once wild and hospitable . . . It is these numberless glimpses of great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted .”(Chesterton- The Catholic Church and Conversion)

            I was reading books by authors like Scott Hahn, Steve Ray, Pat Madrid, Jimmy Akin, Pope John Paul II, Thomas Merton, John Henry Newman, St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, and even The Catechism of the Catholic Church. I was listening to audio from men named Tim Staples, Mark Shea, and John Martignoni. I would stay up all night, spending hours on www.Catholic.com, asking questions and reading what others had to say.

            If nothing else, Catholicism presented a coherent whole. Here I found a unity of Doctrine that could only be woven together by Divine Threads. I found a new love for the Scriptures. Bible Verses that had always confused me as a Baptist, because I couldn’t see how they fit in with Baptist theology, were becoming crystal clear.

            I discovered the Early Church Fathers, people I’d never heard of in any of my previous communities. These were the very first leaders of the Christian community established by Jesus. Many of them were Bishops claiming to hold “Apostolic Authority” through an unbroken succession from the original Apostles. Several of these men actually knew the apostles and were ordained by them. Most of these men’s lives ended in martyrdom.

            I had always fancied that the first Christians were just like me. People who read the Bible, went to Church on Sundays, tried to live like Christians, and believed basically the same stuff that I did. I was wrong. For one thing, the first few centuries of Christians didn’t even have a Bible to read!

            When reading the writings that these men left us one fact is immediately obvious: these gentlemen are not Baptists. The talked a lot about the Catholic Church, the Church of Rome, the Eucharist, bishops, priests, sacrifice, penance, confession, Mary, and many other things that I had been taught were invented in the Middle Ages.

            This “phase two” of my undesired conversion lasted for a couple of years. I learned so many things, so many truths. I spent a lot of time in prayer. I visited a couple of Catholic parishes during this time as well. Just a year earlier I had no idea that we even had a Catholic Church in my part of the world.  I didn’t know what to expect, and my fears were quicly quieted. Instead of finding pagans worshipping idols and piling abomination upon abomination, I found the Bible come alive.

            In the mass I saw an earthly version of the Heavenly Liturgy described in Revelation. I smelled incense, heard community prayer, stood, sat, kneeled, and sang. I learned the Creeds. As a Baptist we had always had a catch phrase, “No creed but Christ.” But these Creeds didn’t take anything away from Jesus or away from the Gospel. Rather, they magnified these truthes. To recite the essentials of the Christian faith in a few lines with an entire congregation of people is a moving and unifying experience. I recalled Christ’s words in Scripture, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). At mass, we recited or sung “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”, as one body with one mind.

            Enter phase three:

            “The third stage is perhaps . . . the most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying not to be converted . . . He is filled with a sort of fear . . . He discovers a strange and alarming fact . . . a truth that Newman and every other convert has probably found in one form or another. It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it . . .

All steps except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in the truth . . . I for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears. Before that final delay I had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind . . . I had no doubts or difficulties just before. I had only fears; fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide . . . It may be that I shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as I had when I made my last effort to deny it . . .

At the last moment of all, the convert often feels as if . . . he is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside . . .

There is generally an interval of intense nervousness . . . To a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding . . . He wonders whether the whole business is an extraordinarily intelligent and ingenious confidence trick . . . There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe . . . That anything described as so bad should turn out to be so good is itself a rather arresting process having a savour of something sensational and strange . . .”(Chesterton- The Catholic Church and Conversion)

            I knew that Catholicism was true. Like Chesterton, I had long since stopped doubting. I was simply terrified of it all. Without a doubt I have never before felt so overwhelmed as when I realized, over the course of these past few years, that Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church. In His providence He had given us a Church, both visible and invisible, to be His sacrament of salvation to the world.

            I ran far and fast. I felt as if I had been lied to all my life. Not only was I told lies about Catholicism, I was only given half-truths by the Baptist Church. Sure, there are many true, good, and noble ideas in the Baptist faith. But there is not the whole truth, or the “fullness of truth”. In becoming Catholic I was not turning my back on my past, not rejecting my upbringing. Rather, I was becoming a fulfilled Baptist, a complete Christian.

            I realized that I could no longer be Baptist. The first doctrine that the Catholic Church proved to me to be true was that of the Eucharist, and we Baptists had the Lord’s Supper only rarely. Perhaps, I thought, I could become Methodist, or even Anglican, anything but this.

            In the end I could not compromise. I had come to believe in the Papacy and the authoritive nature of the Bishop of Rome. Pope John Paul II, through my reading of his encyclicals and my study of his life, had proven that popes weren’t tyrants as I had always been taught.

            Nonetheless, I remained afraid. I had always felt called to be a Baptist Pastor and I couldn’t become a Catholic Priest. What about my family and friends? What would they think? I imagined being disowned by beloved family members. I also heard again our Lord, “But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law” (Matthew 10:33-35).

            As a last ditch effort to avoid conversion I attempted to contact some individuals and organizations to talk me out of Catholicism. I called 1-888-Need-Him. I remembered seeing it on a billboard. No one there could help me. I called the Billy Graham ministry and spoke to someone there, still no help. I even exchanged several emails with a famous Christian singer/songwriter who I begged to change my mind. But try as he might, he could only give me the same arguments that I had always heard, and that I had already answered years before. I even went back to my old anti-Catholic sources. Only this time I laughed at the absurdity of their charges and deeply lamented their lack of charity and good will. I watched hours of Catholic-Protestant debates, and the Catholic side came out on top every time. I didn’t ask any of my previous Christian teachers about Catholicism, they didn’t know anything about it. Everything that they thought they knew was wrong. They believed the same horde of lies that I grew up believing. 

            I could find no one to deter me. Finally I could no longer justify delaying my official entrance into the Catholic Church. I felt that doing so was a purposeful denial of God’s leading and a refusal of the grace He desired to give me.

Joining the Catholic Church is nothing like swapping Baptist Churches, which we called “moving our letter”. The normal path someone takes in becoming Catholic involves attending classes starting in late September and culminating with Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist at the next year’s Easter Vigil.

            Coming from a background of zero Catholic friends or acquaintances, the RCIA classes were a great opportunity to meet the people I would now be worshipping with. Not to mention another great opportunity to learn even more about my faith.

            The Church is very wise here, as she is elsewhere, in making sure that the people becoming Catholics have a firm grasp on exactly what it is to be Catholic, before officially joining the Church. The Church wants people to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ. She wants people to appreciate the Doctrines that so many Saints have died to protect. To be Catholic means to fully agree with the assent of faith everything that the Church teaches, and this requires much learning. The Church doesn’t want people to convert thinking that Catholicism is just another denomination, or just to get tuition discounts at Catholic schools by being Catholic. No, she wants everyone to understand that “no man can have God for his Father unless he has the Church for his mother.”

            That next Easter I stood before the Church. I stated my faith, received my Confirmation, and received my first Eucharist. Any remaining fears melted away from the fire of God’s love. I knew exactly what I had done. I had become a real Bible-Christian. I had joined the Church that gave us the Bible. I had joined the Church that determined, through the Holy Spirit, the great Dogmas of Christianity: the Trinity, the person of Christ, fully God and fully man, the Canon and inerrancy of Scripture, and on and on. I had joined the Church that was just that, THE CHURCH, for their can be no other.

            I stood, as it were, surrounded by the mighty cloud of witnesses that the book of Hebrews refers to. Centuries of Saints, multitudes of angels, all joining me in the Divine Liturgy that is the mass.

            When I received my first Eucharist, I received Jesus Christ; body, blood, soul and divinity, into my mouth, into my stomach, and into my heart. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drank His blood you have no life in you” (2 John 6:53). Talk about accepting Jesus personally as Lord and Savior! Here was Jesus, the eternal Word of God, not merely a symbol, but the second person of the Trinity humbling himself to become our spiritual food. I had no more fears, no more doubts, and yet again I was overwhelmed: overwhelmed by His Grace.

            Truly, as it is written, “Eye has not seen. Ear has not heard. Nor has it entered into the hearts of men: what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

            I sang all the way home. In fact, I’ve never stopped singing His mercy.