It's been several years since I last shared my testimony on how I came to fall in love with Christ. With my becoming Catholic this Easter, six years after my baptism, I feel it is an appropriate time to re-tell the story and include how I came to make the journey from Evangelical Protestantism to what I now consider home: the Catholic Church.
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The story begins as most stories do: my life as a child. I was raised in an atheist home where there was no mention of God nor was there any sense of "spirituality." My mother was raised in a similar situation and continued that belief into her adulthood, at some point deciding for certain that there was no God. My father was raised as a Catholic, but as soon as he began college he left the Church and at some point also decided there was no God.
Despite this, I still recall the moments throughout my childhood where I would stare out my window in the middle of the night and pray.
As I grew older I began to live a life that was what I would consider to be morally bankrupt. I had no real moral guidelines or instruction so I pretty much just did what felt good. At age 11 I was already dating and would sneak around with boys to make out. By age 13 I had already performed oral sex. Some of my male friends would write me notes in class that were pornographic in content. Nobody -- not even my parents or close friends -- would have thought I did those things because I kept up such good appearances. I was a straight A student, extremely shy, and considered by classmates as "the goody two shoes." Yet behind closed doors I was a completely different person.
I was about 13 or 14 when my mother, who knew I had so-called boyfriends at school, mentioned that it would upset my father if I ever became pregnant. She offered to take me to Planned Parenthood and get me on birth control. Embarrassed, I declined.
In high school I started to embrace my formerly hidden self and show it off to the world. I would go to clubs wearing four inch heels, mini skirts, and tight shirts with plunging necklines and I would let any guy on the dance floor grope me. I also started chatting online and became involved in things like "cyber sex." Sometimes I felt like a whore. For the most part, however, I buried those feelings.
It was also during my high school years that I started volunteering at my local Planned Parenthood. My mom had a good friend who ran the facility and my parents gave regular donations to their cause, so I was a natural "in." I was quite proud to volunteer there.
I gave away my virginity the first semester away at college. I used all sorts of methods to try to prevent pregnancy. I remember feeling like I was so grown up because I was buying things like spermicide and condoms. That year was extremely difficult on me. By the end of the school year I had a minor nervous breakdown and couldn't even get up to go to class. I missed a few midterms and finals, bombed a few others, and ended up with something like a 1.9 GPA. I spent a lot of time holed up in my room watching Oprah and began to embrace the new-age spirituality she pandered through various guests. It was a God-less spiritual theology, but some nights when things were particularly bad and I would lay in my dorm room crying, I would find myself pleading with God to ease my sadness.
For my sophomore year I transferred universities. I became obsessed with my looks and started taking diet pills. I also started looking at and reading pornographic content online. One time on a blind date I almost ended up having sex with a guy I wasn't even remotely attracted to, emotionally or physically. I remember feeling especially low after I got home that night. It was probably the first time I actually paused and asked myself, "Who am I becoming?" I felt so dirty. But at the same time I didn't know what to do about it.
That year I decided to take a Buddhism class and in the course of it decided it sounded like a good religion and that I would attempt to be Buddhist. As hard as I tried, I found I didn't have the power to change my interior self. I was still filled with rage, lust, and other heavy weights on my soul. Frustrated and feeling like a failure, I abandoned it.
While this was going on, I was beginning to make friends with a sort of people I had never before befriended. They were Christians. I didn't know anything about Jesus or their faith, but growing up I had heard numerous insults about them and so I too had taken on an anti-Christian prejudice. Consequently my whole life I had avoided being around anyone who made it obviously known they "loved Jesus." However, this particular year at college almost all the girls around me in my dorm hall were Christian. I remember making wisecracks to my parents about how I was going to the most liberal universities in the state, full of hippies and dope smokers and raging Democrats, yet here I was surrounded by Bible thumpers.
But, wanting to make friends more than I wanted to hold to my personal rule of "no Christian friends," I started hanging around these girls. (Funny how that works.) To my surprise, I actually liked them.
I had a long way to go from liking them to liking their God, though. In fact, I was about to go through one of the darkest periods in my life. I didn't realize it at the time, but it would be a defining moment for me on an eternal scale.
Year of the Priest, June 2009-2010
O Jesus, our eternal High Priest, give us truly holy priests who, inflamed with the fire of Your divine love,
seek nothing but Your greater glory and the salvation of our souls. Amen.
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