I just finished a book entitled "Surprised By Truth" by Patrick Madrid. It is a collection of short stories by eleven converts from various Protestant denominations. It had some interesting quotes but my favorite quote is this:
Protestants build a have a great fire but burn themselves with it because they cannot settle on a single fireplace.
One writer suggests that the multitude of Protestants is actually a curse from God for it's "divorce" from the church. The more I think about this, I think this is correct. God did the same thing to the Israelites. When they wanted to worship in their own way, God didn't destroy them. He LET them and they wandered until they became obedient again. It was only then that he allowed them into the Holy Land.
Dan
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Sunday, March 2, 2008
I created this blog out a desire to defend my faith against people who think all Catholics aregoing to hell. I do not dislike Protestants. I dislike closed-minded Protestants who use false doctrine to criticize the Catholic faith. I do not think all Protestants are going to hell. Quite the contrary, I think there will be more Catholics in hell than Protestants because of the sheer numbers of Catholics in this world; over one billion.
I know from Protestants. I was an acting Protestant for over 10 years. I did the typical defection: I married one. She wasn't about to leave the Protestant church and I wasn't a strong enough Catholic to stay so I left. How stupid of me. Here is my story:
My mom and dad divorced when I was 9 years old. During the time my parents were married, I never stepped one foot into a church unless someone had died. Even then, we didn't really go to church. Some preacher usually came to the funeral but I didn't know him. Neither did my parents. I don't think we knew any preachers except the ones on the television. Weekends were for going camping at Lake Lanier in the warm months and deer camp in the winter months. Also, if my parents went to church, they would have had to answer for some of the things they were doing. I'm pretty sure my parents broke most if not all of the commandments.
Life in my house was pretty hard to say the least. I had serious problems. I was full of anger and looking for attention. I ran away a couple of times and pretty much alienated everyone.
My mom would lose her mind if I ever struck anyone in anger. When kids at my school found out they could pick on the biggest kid in class without recourse, my life turned into a living hell. When my parents started the divorce proceedings I lashed out. I would fight anyone, anytime, anyplace. I would fight 3 or four people at the same time. I didn't care. I lost my temper at a Cub Scout meeting and it was me against the entire pack. I never lost a fight after that. I literally beat up the entire Cug Scout pack. I had them all hiding in a huge magnolia tree, scared to make a sound for fear of having to fight me. I was an island, no...I was not an island. I was a boat adrift in the largest sea of lonliness. I had no friends and my parents were too busy fighting to see what it was doing to me.
Eventually, my parents divorced and we sold our house and moved into an apartment complex. We lived in Atlanta but Atlanta was no place for a child in the late 1970's. We had something called the Atlanta Child Murders going on. To top off all of my other anxieties, we couldn't play outside. Police officers escorted us from the bus stop to our homes everyday. My mom was working two jobs and I was being watched by the oldest person on Earth: my eighty-something year old great-grandmother. Talk about scared!
Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom and dad both got married. Mom hit a grand slam but dad struck out on three pitches swinging. His lifestyle never changed but mom married a very nice man. His mane is Luis Almodovar and he was born in San German, Puerto Rico. As most of you know, Puerto Rico a mostly Catholic and so I went to church for the first time in a Catholic church. I say first time because I have no recallection of ever being in a church before then. It was a great church in Carrollton, GA called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. OLPH for short. OLPH was awesome and was led by the most Godly man I have ever met. His name was Monsignior Michael Regan. An incredible man of great faith with a Christ-like personality. A man with a photgraphic memory, he could meet you for a few minutes and ten years later he could see you again and recall everything you had told him during your last meeting. He had books everywhere and remembered everyting he read. In the secular world, he would have been a true success. He was quite attractive in his younger years but always knew what he wanted. I truly hope one day one of my sons turns out just like him.
Father Regan was a huge influence in my life and when I was 12 years old, he baptised me. This is a very important thing in my story as you will see later on. I was confirmed at OLPH by Archbishop Donahue and I very much enjoyed my experience at OLPH.
As I grew older I had one focus and one focus only: the opposite sex. I was girl crazy and I pretty much dropped everything in persuit of girls. I was an above average athlete but quit playing ball because of girls. I was a very bright student but barely passed because my focus was not acedemics. All things I regret immensly now but hindsight is always 20/20. It is because of girls that i quit attending mass and started attending Protestant churches. In rural georgia it is pretty hard to find a Catholic girl and the ones at OLPH had parents who wanted more for their daughters than where I was appered to be heading. So, if I was dating a Methodist girl, I went to the Methodist church. Baptist girl, Baptist church. Assemblies of God girl...you get the picture.
After I graduated high school and flunked out of college, I went to work in the automotive business. My patterns of behavior pretty much were the same as high school. If my current girlfriend wasn't a church goer, I didn't attend. I spent my time at the lake. It wasn't that important to me.
When I was twent four years old, I met a girl through her father, who worked with me at a Chevrolet dealership whre I was selling cars. She was recently divorced and I was recently single. She was originally from Mississippi and looked very much like the typical Southern Belle. Blonde, curly hair, tanned and beautiful. A million-dollar smile. we had a whilwing romance and I asked her to marry me. Huge mistake. I knew it about 15 minutes after we left for the honeymoon. We were married by her parent's pastor who bragged that he had never performed a marriage that ended in divorce. Well, Sparky...I fixed that little record for you, didn't I? We lasted 18 months. 17 of those, we were fighting. After that I was a confirmed batchelor. I was divorced in 1997 and did not have a steady girlfriend (meaning BOTH of us were dating exclusively) until I met my wife in 2001. It was then I met Leah Davidson..well, I had met her before but she was someone elses wife then and off limits.
Leah was married for ten years before she dicided she'd had enough. Legally, I probably shouldn't get into the reason she divorced or what kind of person he was/is but suffice to say we aren't golfing buddies.
Leah absolutely rocked my world. She was beautiful, very domestic and had a quiet confidence that no other woman I have ever dated had. She had an adventurous spirit that drove me crazy and she had one other thing: well, four other things. Four children. one boy and three girls. My dad told me to run as far away from her as I could. "Are you crazy?" was a question I had heard from my friends and family members on more than one occasion. On the flip side, I was no angel and my reputation had preceeded me and she had the same thing going on with her family and friends. She had moved up to Georgia from Florida and wasn't yet divorced when we started seeing each other. The day after her divorce was final, we were married. Now, that sounds like a recipe for disaster but it wasn't. I really hate this word but I'm gonna use it anyway: she is my soulmate. There. I said it. Now I feel like I need to join Oprah's book club. Anyway, I was still a Catholic and she was raised in the Pentacostal/Fundamentalist movement. Her parents have kind of hopped from church to church to church. My parents, however, have gone to OLPH since forever and I still had that church home, althoug hI didn't go much.
Leah was not going to step foot in a Catholic church. I wasn't very grounded in my faith so I had no problem joining her at whatever church she wanted to attend. First, we went to a Southern Baptist church. I hated that. Then we went to a Community Church. One of those seeker sensitive churches. We liked that but soon some rift of somekind made us stop going there. Then we went to a Christian Church. On the third Sunday we were there, the revelation was made that the senior pastor had been in some sort of inappropriate situation with the associate pastor's wife. That led to a kid of about 23 leading the church and pretty soon we were outta there!
Next, we went to another affiliated church of some sort. It was an Assemblies of God church disguised as a Community Church under the umbrella of Ted Haggardly. We liked that one ok but then we moved and shortly after, found that that church had some sort of schism and who knows what happened.
We moved about an hour away to be closer to my work and to Leah sister and we started going to another Baptist church. It was great but the music minister sounded like an 80 year old woman and I couldn't take 30 minutes of his singing every Sunday so we tried another Baptist church down the street. We liked it allright but when we tried to get involved, noone would call us back. So we left there and tried a few other churches here and there and never really settled anywhere. We finally went to a huge mega-church. 17,000 members! WOW! They must be doing something right, huh? So we go and I'm just not really into it. Just like all of the other churches, I just don't fit in. We attend off and on for about two years then my wife, who loves to be involved, get's into a controversy while trying to do the right thing. Pretty soon, it gets uncomfortable there and we leave. We were on the verge of trying another mega-church when a miracle happens.
My wife and I had been married six years when the Miracle happened. I had felt the tug of Rome for the entire time we had been married but I never once said a word to Leah. I knew she would never go to a mass. She was constantly saying things about the "crazy beliefs" of my mother. She was raised in a strict Protestant home and her parents would have a cow if she went to mass. In her family were lifelong missionaries, pastors, elders and just plain die hard Protestants, some who have spent thier entire lives on a mission to convert Catholics to their brand of Christianity. Heck no, I had never mentioned it. It wasn't a fight I was going to win so why get bloodied up? I loved my wife more than anything. I saw the schism Martin Luther made when he nailed his manifesto to the door of the church. I wasn't about to split my marriage and family up for the sake of an arguement I couldn't possibly win.
The controversy that made us leave the mega-church was harder on my wife than I knew. She was not sleeping because of it. My wife is a very Godly and spiritual woman who trusts the Lord with all of her heart and it pained her that I always seemed disinterested in church. It pained her as much as the fact that she was making friends at the mega-church and we were leaving yet another church to find another church home. What my wife didn't know was that I wasn't disinterested in church. I was just disinterested in the Protestant church. Everytime I went to a Sunday School class, someone asked me about my church upbringing and when I told them I was Catholic, they would say something stupid like, "Oh...I used to be Catholic. I'm so glad I got saved." or "I have a cousin who is Catholic. I just hope he gets saved before he goes to hell." and other ignorant stements like that. I would just smile and nod my head and think nasty thoughts about the morons.
When the miracle happened, I was in my bed reading a book and my wife was sitting beside me. I know it was a miracle because it went just like this:
Leah: Honey?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Leah: I want to go to the Catholic church.
Me: (knocking he wax out of my ears) What?
Leah: I want to go to the Catholic church.
Me: (still not hearing right) You want me to take you to mass?
Leah: No, idiot. I want to join the Catholic church.
Me: Are you drunk?
Leah: Shutup, dummy. I said I want to join the Catholic church.
Me: (still thinking I'm dreaming) Are you SURE?
Leah: (obviously not amused with me, on her elbow looking at me with the "one more smart comment and you're gonna die" look) Yes, I'm sure.
Leah and I had been church hopping so much that she figured that she might as well try something new. Like a lot of Protestants with doubts, she was tired of running from Rome...it was time to run to Rome. She knew it in her heart.
For the next few months Leah has been a sponge. She knows more about the Eucharist, the Litturgy, confession, the Mass and other aspects of the Catholic faith than I do. She has absorbed Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Tammy Bundy, the works of Pope John Paul II, Oscar Lukefahr, Patrick Madrid, Marcus Grodi, and Paul Thigpen. She has gone from thinking that the Rosary was the most idiotic thing she has ever seen to praying it daily. She has several. We have an oil painting of Pope John Paul II in our bedroom and a bust of Madonna and Child on our mantle. I have never seen my wife like this. we are both very sad during the Eucharist because we cannot participate. Her because her marriage is not anulled and me because I married her.
Through this conversion, we have been extremely happy. There are problems, though. Her parents are not happy and they have been sending her emails and article from people like Jack Chick trying to dissuade her from converting. They play head games with our children (we have seven now!).
None of this has stopped her, though. The woman I affectionately refer to as the Fantasy Goddess is also a stubborn woman. She has crossed the Tiber and will never look back. The good news is that I also am able to return home to Rome. My wife has seen a change in me and I actually enjoy going to church again.
The purpose of this blog is to maybe be of some help to those who are going through the same thing Leah and I are going through.
Thanks you for taking the time to read this.
God Bless You,
Dan Adams
I know from Protestants. I was an acting Protestant for over 10 years. I did the typical defection: I married one. She wasn't about to leave the Protestant church and I wasn't a strong enough Catholic to stay so I left. How stupid of me. Here is my story:
My mom and dad divorced when I was 9 years old. During the time my parents were married, I never stepped one foot into a church unless someone had died. Even then, we didn't really go to church. Some preacher usually came to the funeral but I didn't know him. Neither did my parents. I don't think we knew any preachers except the ones on the television. Weekends were for going camping at Lake Lanier in the warm months and deer camp in the winter months. Also, if my parents went to church, they would have had to answer for some of the things they were doing. I'm pretty sure my parents broke most if not all of the commandments.
Life in my house was pretty hard to say the least. I had serious problems. I was full of anger and looking for attention. I ran away a couple of times and pretty much alienated everyone.
My mom would lose her mind if I ever struck anyone in anger. When kids at my school found out they could pick on the biggest kid in class without recourse, my life turned into a living hell. When my parents started the divorce proceedings I lashed out. I would fight anyone, anytime, anyplace. I would fight 3 or four people at the same time. I didn't care. I lost my temper at a Cub Scout meeting and it was me against the entire pack. I never lost a fight after that. I literally beat up the entire Cug Scout pack. I had them all hiding in a huge magnolia tree, scared to make a sound for fear of having to fight me. I was an island, no...I was not an island. I was a boat adrift in the largest sea of lonliness. I had no friends and my parents were too busy fighting to see what it was doing to me.
Eventually, my parents divorced and we sold our house and moved into an apartment complex. We lived in Atlanta but Atlanta was no place for a child in the late 1970's. We had something called the Atlanta Child Murders going on. To top off all of my other anxieties, we couldn't play outside. Police officers escorted us from the bus stop to our homes everyday. My mom was working two jobs and I was being watched by the oldest person on Earth: my eighty-something year old great-grandmother. Talk about scared!
Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom and dad both got married. Mom hit a grand slam but dad struck out on three pitches swinging. His lifestyle never changed but mom married a very nice man. His mane is Luis Almodovar and he was born in San German, Puerto Rico. As most of you know, Puerto Rico a mostly Catholic and so I went to church for the first time in a Catholic church. I say first time because I have no recallection of ever being in a church before then. It was a great church in Carrollton, GA called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. OLPH for short. OLPH was awesome and was led by the most Godly man I have ever met. His name was Monsignior Michael Regan. An incredible man of great faith with a Christ-like personality. A man with a photgraphic memory, he could meet you for a few minutes and ten years later he could see you again and recall everything you had told him during your last meeting. He had books everywhere and remembered everyting he read. In the secular world, he would have been a true success. He was quite attractive in his younger years but always knew what he wanted. I truly hope one day one of my sons turns out just like him.
Father Regan was a huge influence in my life and when I was 12 years old, he baptised me. This is a very important thing in my story as you will see later on. I was confirmed at OLPH by Archbishop Donahue and I very much enjoyed my experience at OLPH.
As I grew older I had one focus and one focus only: the opposite sex. I was girl crazy and I pretty much dropped everything in persuit of girls. I was an above average athlete but quit playing ball because of girls. I was a very bright student but barely passed because my focus was not acedemics. All things I regret immensly now but hindsight is always 20/20. It is because of girls that i quit attending mass and started attending Protestant churches. In rural georgia it is pretty hard to find a Catholic girl and the ones at OLPH had parents who wanted more for their daughters than where I was appered to be heading. So, if I was dating a Methodist girl, I went to the Methodist church. Baptist girl, Baptist church. Assemblies of God girl...you get the picture.
After I graduated high school and flunked out of college, I went to work in the automotive business. My patterns of behavior pretty much were the same as high school. If my current girlfriend wasn't a church goer, I didn't attend. I spent my time at the lake. It wasn't that important to me.
When I was twent four years old, I met a girl through her father, who worked with me at a Chevrolet dealership whre I was selling cars. She was recently divorced and I was recently single. She was originally from Mississippi and looked very much like the typical Southern Belle. Blonde, curly hair, tanned and beautiful. A million-dollar smile. we had a whilwing romance and I asked her to marry me. Huge mistake. I knew it about 15 minutes after we left for the honeymoon. We were married by her parent's pastor who bragged that he had never performed a marriage that ended in divorce. Well, Sparky...I fixed that little record for you, didn't I? We lasted 18 months. 17 of those, we were fighting. After that I was a confirmed batchelor. I was divorced in 1997 and did not have a steady girlfriend (meaning BOTH of us were dating exclusively) until I met my wife in 2001. It was then I met Leah Davidson..well, I had met her before but she was someone elses wife then and off limits.
Leah was married for ten years before she dicided she'd had enough. Legally, I probably shouldn't get into the reason she divorced or what kind of person he was/is but suffice to say we aren't golfing buddies.
Leah absolutely rocked my world. She was beautiful, very domestic and had a quiet confidence that no other woman I have ever dated had. She had an adventurous spirit that drove me crazy and she had one other thing: well, four other things. Four children. one boy and three girls. My dad told me to run as far away from her as I could. "Are you crazy?" was a question I had heard from my friends and family members on more than one occasion. On the flip side, I was no angel and my reputation had preceeded me and she had the same thing going on with her family and friends. She had moved up to Georgia from Florida and wasn't yet divorced when we started seeing each other. The day after her divorce was final, we were married. Now, that sounds like a recipe for disaster but it wasn't. I really hate this word but I'm gonna use it anyway: she is my soulmate. There. I said it. Now I feel like I need to join Oprah's book club. Anyway, I was still a Catholic and she was raised in the Pentacostal/Fundamentalist movement. Her parents have kind of hopped from church to church to church. My parents, however, have gone to OLPH since forever and I still had that church home, althoug hI didn't go much.
Leah was not going to step foot in a Catholic church. I wasn't very grounded in my faith so I had no problem joining her at whatever church she wanted to attend. First, we went to a Southern Baptist church. I hated that. Then we went to a Community Church. One of those seeker sensitive churches. We liked that but soon some rift of somekind made us stop going there. Then we went to a Christian Church. On the third Sunday we were there, the revelation was made that the senior pastor had been in some sort of inappropriate situation with the associate pastor's wife. That led to a kid of about 23 leading the church and pretty soon we were outta there!
Next, we went to another affiliated church of some sort. It was an Assemblies of God church disguised as a Community Church under the umbrella of Ted Haggardly. We liked that one ok but then we moved and shortly after, found that that church had some sort of schism and who knows what happened.
We moved about an hour away to be closer to my work and to Leah sister and we started going to another Baptist church. It was great but the music minister sounded like an 80 year old woman and I couldn't take 30 minutes of his singing every Sunday so we tried another Baptist church down the street. We liked it allright but when we tried to get involved, noone would call us back. So we left there and tried a few other churches here and there and never really settled anywhere. We finally went to a huge mega-church. 17,000 members! WOW! They must be doing something right, huh? So we go and I'm just not really into it. Just like all of the other churches, I just don't fit in. We attend off and on for about two years then my wife, who loves to be involved, get's into a controversy while trying to do the right thing. Pretty soon, it gets uncomfortable there and we leave. We were on the verge of trying another mega-church when a miracle happens.
My wife and I had been married six years when the Miracle happened. I had felt the tug of Rome for the entire time we had been married but I never once said a word to Leah. I knew she would never go to a mass. She was constantly saying things about the "crazy beliefs" of my mother. She was raised in a strict Protestant home and her parents would have a cow if she went to mass. In her family were lifelong missionaries, pastors, elders and just plain die hard Protestants, some who have spent thier entire lives on a mission to convert Catholics to their brand of Christianity. Heck no, I had never mentioned it. It wasn't a fight I was going to win so why get bloodied up? I loved my wife more than anything. I saw the schism Martin Luther made when he nailed his manifesto to the door of the church. I wasn't about to split my marriage and family up for the sake of an arguement I couldn't possibly win.
The controversy that made us leave the mega-church was harder on my wife than I knew. She was not sleeping because of it. My wife is a very Godly and spiritual woman who trusts the Lord with all of her heart and it pained her that I always seemed disinterested in church. It pained her as much as the fact that she was making friends at the mega-church and we were leaving yet another church to find another church home. What my wife didn't know was that I wasn't disinterested in church. I was just disinterested in the Protestant church. Everytime I went to a Sunday School class, someone asked me about my church upbringing and when I told them I was Catholic, they would say something stupid like, "Oh...I used to be Catholic. I'm so glad I got saved." or "I have a cousin who is Catholic. I just hope he gets saved before he goes to hell." and other ignorant stements like that. I would just smile and nod my head and think nasty thoughts about the morons.
When the miracle happened, I was in my bed reading a book and my wife was sitting beside me. I know it was a miracle because it went just like this:
Leah: Honey?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Leah: I want to go to the Catholic church.
Me: (knocking he wax out of my ears) What?
Leah: I want to go to the Catholic church.
Me: (still not hearing right) You want me to take you to mass?
Leah: No, idiot. I want to join the Catholic church.
Me: Are you drunk?
Leah: Shutup, dummy. I said I want to join the Catholic church.
Me: (still thinking I'm dreaming) Are you SURE?
Leah: (obviously not amused with me, on her elbow looking at me with the "one more smart comment and you're gonna die" look) Yes, I'm sure.
Leah and I had been church hopping so much that she figured that she might as well try something new. Like a lot of Protestants with doubts, she was tired of running from Rome...it was time to run to Rome. She knew it in her heart.
For the next few months Leah has been a sponge. She knows more about the Eucharist, the Litturgy, confession, the Mass and other aspects of the Catholic faith than I do. She has absorbed Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Tammy Bundy, the works of Pope John Paul II, Oscar Lukefahr, Patrick Madrid, Marcus Grodi, and Paul Thigpen. She has gone from thinking that the Rosary was the most idiotic thing she has ever seen to praying it daily. She has several. We have an oil painting of Pope John Paul II in our bedroom and a bust of Madonna and Child on our mantle. I have never seen my wife like this. we are both very sad during the Eucharist because we cannot participate. Her because her marriage is not anulled and me because I married her.
Through this conversion, we have been extremely happy. There are problems, though. Her parents are not happy and they have been sending her emails and article from people like Jack Chick trying to dissuade her from converting. They play head games with our children (we have seven now!).
None of this has stopped her, though. The woman I affectionately refer to as the Fantasy Goddess is also a stubborn woman. She has crossed the Tiber and will never look back. The good news is that I also am able to return home to Rome. My wife has seen a change in me and I actually enjoy going to church again.
The purpose of this blog is to maybe be of some help to those who are going through the same thing Leah and I are going through.
Thanks you for taking the time to read this.
God Bless You,
Dan Adams
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