It didn’t take very long for me to start being convicted about all sorts of ways I was living my life for me instead of for God. The clothes I was wearing, the music I listened to, the movies I watched, the binge drinking. I was seeing my life through a whole new set of eyes. My family, who is still to this day largely non-religious, definitely noticed, but they weren’t very pleased. They thought I had been brainwashed.
Around this same time, God began moving in new ways in my life. A long-distance friend of mine came to me one day and asked me if I could help a friend of hers out. Her friend lived in Jacksonville, ran a Street Ministry Team for the homeless downtown, and needed someone to come along with his group that weekend to take photographs. I am certainly not a professional photographer, but I agreed to help in any way I could. Again, I put myself in a situation that is terrifying for me – going somewhere new and meeting all new people by myself, but I knew that God’s hand was all over this. I went that day intending to be a passive spectator, but He had other plans. I saw God in the faces of the dozens of homeless people we met, talked to and prayed with that day. I was hooked. My new friend’s church was all the way over on the Westside, near where I was working, but I started attending services there on Sunday and helping out with the Street Ministry Team and the Youth Group. It felt great to be serving in a community, and I thought I had finally found my church home.
As much as I loved being of service in that church, I found myself missing something each Sunday morning. The music was beautiful and touched my heart, the people brought me in like I was family, but it still didn’t feel like enough. I felt like I was missing out on something deeper. I went back to my books and to the internet and starting researching all the denominations all over again. I was so hungry for the truth I could taste it. But nothing seemed to fit. Nothing resounded within my heart with any real certainty. At this time, around the beginning of 2009, I had been dating a good friend of mine for a few months. We shared a deep faith in God and he was my best friend. He was Lutheran and tried gently leading me there, but again, it just didn’t sit right with me. Finally after exhausting nearly every possible Protestant denomination, I felt hopeless. He suggested that I look into the Orthodox Church. I dismissed him right off the bat because it seemed so foreign to what I was used to. Then he said something that has forever changed my life. “Well, why don’t you just become Catholic?” Catholic? I couldn’t be Catholic. They worshipped Mary and prayed to dead people and thought Jesus was present in their communion. I could not, would not, be Catholic.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, on your own intelligence rely not; In all your ways be mindful of him, and he will make straight your paths.
Proverbs 3:5-6
