I was raised in sort of a mishmash of faiths. In my early years, my parents did not go to church, but I was baptized by a great uncle who was a pastor, of what denomination, I am not exactly sure. They also allowed our babysitter to take us on Sunday morning with her to a small town Free Will Baptist Church. That is where I “accepted Christ” when I was 7 years old. When my parents divorced around the same time, my mom started going to the Presbyterian Church with my grandma. So for the next several years, I went every other weekend to the Presbyterian Church and every other  weekend to the Free Will Baptist Church. We moved to Houston TX (from S. Illinois/SE Missouri) when I was 13 and I went by myself to a Southern Baptist turned non-denominational “community” church throughout high school. This is where I met my husband who had “accepted Christ” when he was a freshman in college. He was not raised in a faith other than going to church on holidays with his grandparents.

What made me convert to the Catholic faith?  The Holy Spirit, of course! (That’s the short answer.) Here is the longer answer.  When my husband and I got married, we were involved in a “church planting” that was an off-shoot of the church where we had met. We had been close with the youth pastor who was the head pastor of the new church, but after about a
year we had a big disagreement and were basically told “their way or the highway” by the pastor and his wife. We chose the highway. That was the beginning of us searching and finding Catholicism, although we had no idea at the time. We attended a Baptist mega church in Houston for a while where we felt like we could still practice our faith without the problems of the super small church environment. By some strange circumstance, there was a non-practicing Episcopalian priest teaching a Bible study at the Baptist church through which we became interested in the history and liturgy of more mainline denominations. We started visiting different denominations but not thinking of Catholicism. Then one day my husband was searching Amazon.com for books about the Episcopal church when he came across the title “Born Fundamentalist: Born Again Catholic” by David Currie. He bought it just out of curiosity because we had honestly never heard of anyone converting to Catholicism as an adult. Well, he read it and was thoroughly convinced and, as they say, the rest is history. I had a little more resistance to it at first, but eventually took the leap of faith. The understanding of the Eucharist was the most important factor. It came down to, either Jesus founded the Catholic Church with the fullness of faith which the gates of hell cannot prevail against and is truly present in the Eucharist, or Christianity is a false religion. If the Catholic Church is not true, then none of it is true.

I cannot imagine not being Catholic!