He Who Takes No Chances Wins Nothing…

Ah ha! I was hoping you’d come back! I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for choosing to read this article and joining me for the third installment of my story as I take you through my journey home to The Catholic Church.

Please know, dear reader, that in these first articles, I’m only attempting to describe my journey and internal struggles to you… You may read some things that you disagree with, and that is okay. Once I am finished with the story of how I came to be in my spiritual walk today, I will expound on the actual theology of what I have learned in my four years of study thus far and as my journey continues into the future.

Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.     John C. Maxwell

Okay, so where did I leave off the last time we were together? Hmmm… Oh YES! Those beautiful, yet rather direct, words of Jesus from Matthew 16:15 when He is talking to Peter… “…Who do you say that I am?”

I do not remember what the exact date was that my journey began… But I remember a pleasant fall Sunday in 2014 during a celebration of “The Lord’s Supper” at our Baptist church when God spoke to me through His holy word…

After all the trays of wafers and grape juice were handed out, the pastor started to quote from 1 Corinthians Chapter 11… “…the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This represents my body that is given up for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup represents the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink of it, in remembrance of me.'”

At that moment my conscious screamed: “WHOA! STOP! HOLD UP JUST A SEC!”

I struggled to repeat in my mind what the pastor had just said… “…this represents my body…” Hmmm… I thought for a moment. Something didn’t seem right at all! I remembered from my days as a practicing Catholic that Jesus NEVER said anything about the bread “representing” His body… He said “…this IS my body…”.

I had already, for several months prior to this moment, been experiencing some doubt about several points of doctrine at the church I was attending that made me ask myself “what is the truth about Christianity?”; however, up to this point I had kept my doubts to myself and I was still, for the most part content with the status quo. I just didn’t have the motivation to do any research on my own up until that particular point.

But on this particular Sunday, this was the last straw… Here was this pastor, misquoting scripture, in a church that claimed to be built on the principle of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone)! It was as if I’d had an epiphany in that moment… What I was holding in my hands was just bread and grape juice… Nothing but a symbol. After this moment in the service, I didn’t pay attention to anything else…

Instead of listening to anything else during that service, my mind started racing between and around two verses of scripture that had become stuck in my head… I didn’t remember their location in the Bible at the time, but the words themselves rang clearly in my mind.

The first was:

“Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.'” – John 6:53-56

And secondly:

“‘…Who do you say that I am?'” – Matthew 16:15

Now, at the risk of sounding dramatic, it really felt as if Jesus was speaking to me! At the time, it was as if I knew what I had to do… I had to know the truth… What was it that Jesus was saying to me? What was it that he wanted from me?! I don’t think I breathed a word about my thoughts to anyone that day…

We speak to God when we pray; we listen to Him when we read the Scriptures.     Saint Ambrose

Later that night, after my wife and child had gone to bed, I prayed over everything that had happened earlier that day… and then for some reason I couldn’t shake the words of Jesus from Matthew 10:34-38… It reads:

“‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace, but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.'”

I already knew where this journey was likely going to take me… No problem, I’d been a Catholic before. I just needed to get some questions answered so I could be sure… Then it hit me… “Wait… What about my wife?” I thought to myself. Here I am… married to a Baptist woman, we had a child and one on the way and we were going to the church that my in-laws attended which was where my wife had essentially been raised and attended most of her life! And here I was… About to put all that in danger over a couple of Bible verses… At that moment of realization, all I could think was “Uh-oh”…

In the name of familial stability I fought taking on this journey… I DIDN’T WANT to go down this road… I prayed, I prayed and I PRAYED for this “nudge” from God (if you want to call it that) to go away… I wanted the Lord to take this from me, but I remembered that I had to add to that prayer for His will to be done… Just as Jesus had prayed in the garden of Gethsemane.

I think it’s safe to say that my wife, when I told her what I was going through, didn’t really have a solid opinion one way or another on the matter. She had never been outside of the Baptist denomination and so she was comfortable with where we were at. She didn’t have the types of questions I had and had no reason to ask questions about her faith. She honestly thought that the matter would be concluded in a very short time, so she dutifully supported her husband as best she could to the limits of her own understanding at the time. I have to give that woman credit for her patience though… What an angel of God!

When I started telling a few people about what I was going through, I had several friends and close family members who tried to discourage me from going down this path… They told me it was unfair to my wife and to the church I was currently attending. They said that I just needed to “stay put” because there was no difference where salvation is concerned between our church and The Catholic Church. Some of them even “cornered” me with that question, asking me if I thought there was any difference when it came to salvation.

At that point in my journey, I didn’t have an answer for them, so of course I answered with “no” which is what they wanted to hear. As I stated in my last article, I didn’t know how to defend my faith… And the last thing I wanted to do at this point of confusion in starting out in my journey was to get into a theological debate with someone close to me and without knowing what to say…

Putting all of my own concerns and the opposition I was getting from others aside… I HAD to know… Jesus wanted me on this journey for a reason. My LORD was giving me a clear sign that SOMETHING wasn’t right… I had never felt so sure about ANYTHING in my life! And as the spiritual head of my family I HAD to do the legwork to find out the answer to my question… Who do I say that Jesus is?

“For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”     John 6:55

It was as if I could see the road ahead clearly… Either God showed me, for a brief instant in my mind, so that I would be prepared for the difficulties that lie ahead on this path I had chosen… Or the devil opened my eyes into the future for just a fraction of a moment in order to discourage me…

I saw there would be fights, there would be tears, there would be suffering within my house… But I was convinced that for the sake of my house, that it was my cross to bear and that Jesus wanted me to take that cross… His will alone was my goal… I had to know the truth. No matter what the cost might be…

I decided to take a chance to risk it all in a serious leap of faith to see where Jesus was going to take me…

Until next time dear reader…

Your Servant In Christ,

William