It took me 2 hours to read this whole thread and it was worth every second! Thank you to all of you for your candor and your encouragement. It is good to know that there are so many people who are coming HOME.
My story is a bit more than strange and takes a while to tell. Ill try and be as concise as possible.
I was born into a non-practicing Anglican family. We did church for about 3 years when I was about age 9-12. Church was painfully boring but I still remember the liturgy to this day because of it. I didnt learn much of anything unfortunately. My parents and I were confirmed together and I remember more about the outfit I wore than anything taught to me in confirmation classes. (Pink dress and my first "high" heels...lol)
My teen years were very tumultuous depression, cutting my wrists- not to kill myself but to get attention from my parents; constant collisions with my father and endless attention seeking which ended in me getting pregnant and aborting my child at 17. I became a stripper at 18 to support myself after getting kicked out of the house. The abortion was a turning point in my life after which I buried myself very deeply in dangerous habits to cover the self-hatred I felt.
I did an extreme amount of partying for many years after that; traveled the country headlining as a featured stripper, made and spent a lot of money, married at 23 and remember being driven to the church thinking "this is a huge mistake".
I financially supported my husband the entire time we were married. He and I were major drunks and spent a lot of time insulting each other and physically violating each other.
Around the time I turned 25, I began to have a crisis of identity and spirituality. I became terrified of dying. Certain people I encountered and books they recommended slowly turned my attention to feminism and wicca.
Husband and I separated after the second time he tried to kill me. My subsequent "freedom" was a great excuse to excercise vehement promiscuity. The years in the stripping business were really taking their toll on my psyche and I began to hate men with a true passion. I would use them before they could use me. I also made feminist activism and wiccan spirituality my full time past-times. I dove into these things (along with alcohol) with everything I had for 7 years. I was very much alone in my world.
Fast forward 7 years to a little club in Brantford Ontario.... I parked myself at the bar for the night, exhausted and unwilling to make the rounds for table dances. I sat beside a handsome man named Lloyd who was watching a ball game on tv.
We struck up a conversation and talked with intimate familiarity for 5 hours. He was the first person to tell me about Christ and did it with such love that I couldn't get it out of my head for days. We corresponded by phone for 3 months (we lived on opposite sides of the country...he was only on vacation visiting his mother the night I met him) and he answered my many many questions about Christ and Christianity.
During this time of seeking, I had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit touching me during a Christmas Eve service at the church next to my parents' house. I went alone and cried uncontrollably for 90 minutes. At the end of the service, I heard someone call my name. I turned around to see one of the old managers of a strip club I had worked at standing there with his wife and children weighing a hundred pounds less than the last time I had seen him! It had been 2 years since I had seen him and hundreds of miles away. What was he doing at this church that night? Divine intervention indeed. He told me that Jesus Christ had turned his life around and I KNEW I had to take it all seriously.
Of course there were things happening all around me to turn my attention to Christ, but satan was pulling out all the stops as well to keep me.
One of my major problems was that I was very fearful that being a Christian meant being forever delegated to second place as a woman. I had been very effectively propagandized by the feminist movement; being told over and over about the patriarchy and how the Christian machine was there to keep women in their place blah blah blah
.However, I knew I was hearing the TRUTH for the first time in my life and I didn't care anymore if I DID have to sit in the back seat. Truth was always the most important thing to me and I had always considered myself a seeker. I took the leap.
I asked Christ to be my Saviour on Jan. 26 2003 and everything changed from there. I must divulge that one of the first things the Spirit revealed to me was that women were as precious to Him as men.
Now Lloyd was a lapsed Catholic who had gone to Catholic school but was "saved" as a young adult in a Baptist church. He was hardcore in the church for about a year but fell away to drink and serious partying for over a decade. He always declared Christ Lord however.
I moved in with him and slowly we learned more about our faith. We began to go to an Evangelical Anglican church which was in the middle of breaking away from the Anglican communion in Canada over the same sex marriage issue.
We both quit drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and eventually, pre-marital sex. During this time, and I really can't remember WHY, but it may have been my sweet ignorance about all the denominations and whatnot, I was very interested in both the Catholic church and Messianic Judaism. I felt that the Messianics had the fullness of the faith as they had had Christ's original faith but also KNEW Christ now. At the same time, the pull of the Catholic church was also very strong. I began to come here to CF and visited OBOB often.
Jeffery LLoyd from OBOB sent me a package in the mail with a SURPRISED BY TRUTH book, a rosary, a book called WHAT CATHOLICS REALLY BELIEVE and a bunch of other literature. I dove into it deeply and the TRUTH book really affected me. I instinctively knew that what I was hearing was truth but I was not ready for it. I was afraid that I would be unable to marry Lloyd because I was still not officially divorced from my husband. I was truly tortured by all that divorce stuff in the Bible...I really was. My Anglican minister (divorced himself) assured me it was ok though and ...
Lloyd and I married in 2005 and had our amazing baby girl Meaghan in 2006. This obviously changed my life more than any other prior event save my conversion. It taught me how truly selfish I am. Nothing makes you have to be more like Christ than having a child, imho.
We settled into our church life and loved our Christian family very much. Lloyd became a warden and I was on several committees. We were the young family for a long time even though were both in our late 30s. Christ helped to heal me of many things during this time including the pain and guilt of having aborted my baby almost 2 decades prior. This actually put me on the page with a lot of Catholics again as well and had me looking in that direction.
There were always questions that never seemed to get answered at my church, and the issue of authority and the lack of it sounded loud and clear in our parish and in the Anglican Communion around the world. Our church split from the Anglican Church over the issue of same sex marriage and the interpretation of the bible. It really made me think about how many splits there were, why they happened and where the original church was! It really hit home because of the endless problems in our church. (We had our church building confiscated by the Anglican Church and have spent hundreds of thousands to buy a new piece of land and new building. I feel that we have become preoccupied with this whole process and have forgotten about the widows and the poor.)
Earlier this year I got pregnant again but tragically, we lost the baby and I almost died from an undiagnosed tubal rupture. I had to be airlifted to Vancouver for emergency surgery and was told later that I had no business being alive at that point. I lost over half my blood that night.
The loss of the baby was devastating. I am still dealing with it. (I was also told that I couldnt have any more children and Lloyd and I always wanted more) The brush with death affected me deeply also. I was coldly afraid as I was on the operating table. I knew that I was a sinner in BIG TROUBLE - I just knew it. I knew that God is merciful but I knew I didn't deserve his mercy. I lived through it obviously but things began to change in my heart and mind. When I look at it now, it is beginning to make more sense to me but at the time I didnt understand why I didnt have more peace during that very frightening time. The only thing I knew to do was say the Lords Prayer and I said it three times that night. I asked for God to have mercy on me, a sinner. I also almost asked for a Catholic Priest then as well....just in case. It was instinctive.
I also read the book the Robe during my time in the hospital and it got me to thinking about the early church Fathers. It also deepened my understanding for Christ as man.
My husband Lloyd watches a lot of EWTN and he LOVES Father Corapi and the Journey Home show. Ive been watching with him for about a year now and although I started out critical (in the short time I have been an Evangelical I picked up the anti-Catholic bias) I have I been really drawn in by what these people are saying. There is so much sense in it. I cannot refute it. There have been Catholic people in my life that have been such loving and genuine people and I thank God for putting them in my path. I have to say that Shannon McCatholic has been a big part of this even though she doesnt know it. Just the way she loves and lives has been a huge witness for me.
Recently there was a wonderful round table show on The Journey Home with 3 Hebrew Catholics. The similarities between Judaism and Catholicism made so much sense! I finally understood why I felt the way I did about Messianic Jews. Things continued clicking into place for me. It was so exciting!
I also need to mention the surprising (to me anyway) vehement anti-Catholic sentiments that we have encountered in our Protestant friends. They always seemed afraid whenever Lloyd mentioned something remotely Catholic; like they were watching him handle a bomb or something. I mentioned earlier that I DID pick up some of that anti-Catholic bias but my late entrance to the church and subsequent ignorance about church history (and that as a good Protestant I should hate Catholics {tongue kind of in cheek}) was a blessing for me.
We recently bought a Catholic Bible, a Catechism, some Catholic history books and I also began to re-read that stuff that Jeffery Lloyd gave me 4 years ago. More informed and more mature now, I know that I am going in the right direction.
One of the things that I love most about this journey is the love that Catholics have for Mary. One of the things that has hurt my heart in the past is the lack of female veneration of any kind in the church. The love that is shown Mary fills a very big hole in my heart that has been there for a very long time. The issue of Papal authority and infallibility is no longer a question in my mind and neither is Purgatory. These were my biggest stumbling blocks as well as the whole bible as the only authority issue. Seeing that the Bible stated this nowhere was like the V8 commercial- smack me in the head for missing the obvious.
I have contacted our local Catholic Priest and I want to become a Catholic as soon I can. My questions are being answered. I cant tell you what a relief that is. I know I have the full truth which I have been seeking all my life. I am eager and full of gratitude. I love Jesus more than ever. I feel like we are starting all over again but this time I'm wearing my glasses.
My only concern at this point is the hurt that my church family is going to feel at our "desertion". We will be leaving our very vulnerable church at a crucial time. I know people will be hurt and I know some of our friends will be afraid for our salvation. We hope to be able to help them understand what God has revealed to us.
We will be praying for them.