06/07/21 Nick De La Torre

[Music] well hello and welcome back to the journey home program i'm your guest host john mark grodi and i had this great opportunity to bring to you another story of what god has done in the life of another another christian brother of ours tonight we're joined by a good friend and colleague of mine actually nick de la torre who's a revert to catholicism and a former unitarian we'll hear more about that later but nick welcome to the show john brother good to see you pleasure to be here thank you always an honor to be in your presence yeah well likewise you know we'll maybe we'll get into some of the bits and pieces the connections of our stories later on college buddies our families are good friends and so i was delighted to have this opportunity to uh guest host this particular interview tonight so thanks for coming out man yeah thanks for having me yeah so let's let's go back right at the beginning all right where did this all begin well there was a point in time where my parents were looking at each other and they were like let's let's uh let's make another human and so uh that's that that was the beginning of me um but no i grew up in a cuban-american household very loving um we we were brought up in the catholic faith attending catholic schooling um and you know uh my parents were very religious they were super into their catholic faith they would give lectures uh in front of audiences about how you know i'm gonna skip forward very quickly in the story here um they would they give lectures on how the word divorce is a four-letter word and how marriage is so you know beautiful and important and and then uh the summer after my fourth grade year they got a divorce um so that was a huge uh for me and my siblings it was a major upheaval and paradigm shift that just nobody saw coming um they were very private about their struggles and stuff so it was very unexpected we were going to have moved to south florida as a family were it not for the divorce uh because of the divorce we ended up staying where we were being brought up in northwest ohio and i continued going to catholic school and essentially being brought up in two different versions of catholicism two different uh ideas of what is good true and beautiful neither one of them was being executed perfectly neither one of them i think they were both they had their their right elements and their wrong elements in different aspects um but ultimately between that and uh my catholic schooling was very interesting it was a very small tight-knit class uh we graduated with a total of 12 students um in eighth grade and so very intimate uh like almost a sibling relationship with my classmates but through my catholic schooling you know i learned a lot that i was i was formed in a lot of uh the knowledge of the faith the learning about the history the old testament the new testament um but what i didn't really encounter was like the person of jesus and i think that part of why that was was a lack of witness uh in whether it was the faculty or um my even my parents i mean you know especially with the divorce like the custody battles in our family literally didn't end until it was irrelevant anymore because i turned 18. yeah and that was that began the summer after my fourth grade so that was a long childhood of a lot of turmoil between um you know the custody battles the constant you know living out of a duffel bag week to week uh switching houses and and then um so my parents were caught up in a lot of the turmoil of what that would mean and i can't even imagine to be in their position for that um and my siblings and i were caught up in that living like nomads and then attending catholic school where like for me and my um my classmates uh i'm not gonna speak for my siblings or their classmates but for me and my classmates like you know we we saw religion class like another history class like it wasn't something that was about our lives it wasn't something that was about a living breathing god and they may have taught the words that god is alive but like it it wasn't communicated in a way that was internalized in a meaningful way and so essentially by the end of eighth grade like we got confirmed and we were ready to be done with the whole religion thing on some level you know we went to high school i went to a public high school and that was my first kind of exposure to public schooling i found out not everybody's catholic that was an interesting revelation and you know we did have one jewish student in my class and he's awesome his family's awesome but that was basically the only exposure i had to non-catholicism sure growing up but yeah so we went got to high school public high school and i started getting exposed to these new ideas and these new behaviors and these new examples of what it could look like to exist and um you know i started attending whatever church a girl i was chasing at the time was attending and joining that youth group for a couple weeks and i was exposed to a lot of different versions of christianity just by you know virtue of or lack of virtue of you know my uh conquests my pursuits yeah um you know in retrospect that has been so beneficial yeah uh not recommending it but uh so by the end of high school uh i was ready to kind of make that move that we were supposed to have made when i was a child i decided to move to south florida uh number one moving away from your family uh to south florida makes it a lot easier to make bad choices so that's a huge incentive uh don't do it um but number two uh it was it was something that i just always wanted to live there like it was almost like i understand now it was almost uh there was an element of it that like it was almost redemptive because that was where my family went astray in my in my childhood eyes right and and so by going there was almost like i was completing a part of the journey that was supposed to have happened in my time in south florida by the time i was there i had visited all of these different christian nominations throughout high school so i was really not like swinging for the catholic team like it was not a big priority to me what was your so your sense of god your sense of uh christ your sense of the catholic church like where was your your allegiance and your relationship with any of those was there anything there you were still attending churches from time to time so what was in your heart um i think that there were throughout that time there was always an underlying understanding of there being something there that my soul wasn't done with uh but that intellectually or or just in my social dynamics mattered less to me but like something wasn't letting go of that um you know why would it be that each of the girls i was chasing happened to be christian or whatever you know um so uh before i i skipped one important step here and that was that uh in my senior year of high school before i moved to south florida i met and started dating a woman who is now my wife uh we met in high school this uh we met our junior year started dating our senior year she was this wonderful christian girl uh very protestant protestant like catholics are going to hell the pope is the antichrist all that jazz uh you know that old chestnut yeah uh and so i was this you know heathen that was wearing the catholic label and that just drove home for her like yeah catholics are bad um and so i kind of brought all of my yuck into that relationship um but we just like loved each other very quickly like we there was something there that god was doing um so despite that i ended up moving to florida like i said after high school and uh while i was there i was given an opportunity to sing at a a christian church uh it was not communicated to me that it was a unitarian church now had it been communicated to me that it was a unitarian yeah uh i probably still would have done it that probably didn't mean that much to you it wouldn't have meant much yeah um and so basically i started going and i started singing in the choir had a few singing opportunities and like i'm i'm a musician i have been for my whole life really uh and a performer loved being in the spotlight you know you take nick you pull out all the virtue if i have any uh god we hope and then uh you pull out the virtue you pull out like a desire to please god and serve god you pull out you know a genuine love for others and you basically just are left with a super selfish and just gross nick and that was the nick that was operating at that time and uh i jumped at the opportunity to be in the spotlight you know and so i spent time at this unitarian church and um there was a lot of there was a lot of really provocative uh ideas there were many provocative ideas being presented there about self-empowerment and um you know so much of it is founded in the new age movement so much of it is founded in like eastern traditions and i don't mean in the good like catholic sense christian sense i mean eastern like you know somewhere between hindu and just buddhism and all kinds of stuff um you know i i was drawn to the idea of the power that they were proposing we could have because there was something in me that since childhood i was always just so intrigued by like the idea of superheroes and superhuman power and like the ability to be more to rise above what we are now and i always wanted to mean more than i did you know and i think that some of that could even stem from the custody battle some of that could stem from how distracted even though my parents loved my siblings and i dearly uh and did the best they could inherently in the challenges of those divorce dynamics like it's gonna be hard to like really give your kids everything that they need from a relational standpoint unless you're super intentional about that and my parents did the best they could but regardless like whatever it was i always was just drawn to this idea of like ascending in a sense uh not in the sense that jesus ascended but in the sense of like leveling up like like becoming more than i was mattering more than i did is the now maybe you might want to just summarize uh what you know a sense of what unitarianism is i mean it sounds like it's probably connected to the sense that a lot of modern people have that they they they're spiritual but not religious like they want they they know that there's something transcendent they desire that but there is perhaps for a lot of the same reasons that you had a real suspicion of maybe a traditional dogmatic institutional more than that i would say what was basically propagated there was the idea that you not only do we embrace all people from all walks of life with all truths whatever that means right it is encouraged to create your own truth and so that became the horse that broke the straws back the straw that broke the horses one of those i think we get the yeah before you're going for it so um literally i was uh being given uh i was i was in the bookstore of that of that church um and literally the invitation there they have all these books from all these different world religions and the invitation there is make your own truth yeah compile the parts of each of these things that you like whatever makes you feel good whatever inspires you um and so that was like the last straw for me i i basically went from that to not believing anything because to me i had been exposed to all the protestant churches in the little town that i grew up in there was like a different protestant church on every corner and you know with when they're both when all of those churches and the whole town all disagree with each other about what the bible says and that's why they all have different names you know first united methodist church of whatever and what like when everybody has their own idea of this is what the bible means oh and by the way all of us are also drawing inspiration from the holy spirit yet we're all arriving at completely differing conclusions about what we propose are very fundamental differences like one church on one corner might say infant baptism is acceptable but we avoid it because catholics do it another church across the street might say infant baptism is evil never baptize infants wait till they're adults and fully coherent they're both drawing on the bible both from the holy spirit and then i see this unitarian church literally taking that to the nth degree they have a bible sitting on their podium for all of their services and all of their services and i never once saw it open for any of their sermons and then the invitation is invent your own truth here's a whole plethora a buffet of truth ideas that you could concoct for your own and uh i was like you know what none of this is true our guest tonight is nick delattore a revert and a former unitarian and he's also i forgot to mention earlier he's the president of awaken catholic you can find that awaken catholic.org and we're going to talk more about that later um it's so interesting you know that uh that that approach to spirituality this sort of buffet make your own sort of truth on the one hand it seems like a ready-made philosophy for the modern mind you know where these these days uh we moderns want to have this perfect intellectual freedom and and we have you know the information all the information on the internet you know available to us and yet like we we yearn for authenticity and so that kind of backfires when the world offers that sometimes to to to young people the this perfect freedom to make your own truth it backfires because we we know the authenticity of that it can't it can't do that yeah and the one chur the one truth that they did consistently teach or propagate and impose on you was this uh teaching on this dogma on the law of attraction so there was this book that was released and then also a documentary called the secret and this secret was this law of attraction and it essentially is um it proposes that we are the gods that we are powerful in and of ourselves by our own mirror and we can manifest the universe can manifest at our bidding whatever we want whether it's material goods whether it's opportunities and this law of attraction where we're attracting these things from the universe by our own merits our own power our own will that is incredibly dangerous because that is so contrary to the gospel and the most nefarious part of all of it is that in the book in the documentary they they propose that you can be a christian and believe in the law of attraction like it is not contrary to the faith well i'm sorry but like we we subjugate ourselves very deliberately very very specifically we subjugate ourselves to god's lordship over us so it is not our will that should be done it is thy will be done and that's the part that's missing from that equation god does want us to do incredible things and he wants to do amazing things in the world through us but like ultimately it's part of his plan not our own plans yeah uh and so that that was the one thing that was consistently like that was their gospel that was their good news and what i what i later came to understand is that that is kind of just a new branding for humanism and humanism is new branding for satanism because when we are worshiping ourselves instead of god satan's happy he doesn't want satan couldn't care if you if you worship him he just doesn't want you to worship god and if you're busy worshiping yourself you're not going to worship god and essentially i go as far as to say that unitarian even though people are well intentioned and they aren't going out of their way necessarily to worship satan there is a sense in which there is uh you know if you look at the lineage of how we arrived at the new age movement and how we arrived at humanism and and unitarianism there's a sense sense in which that is directly serving the the purposes of um the dark one yeah we definitely can see that in our culture at large too that you know as you drift more away from from uh from truth as it's always been understood and pursued and sought you you don't end up replacing that with with freedom of thought you just you just fall back in the same old heiress he's the same old yeah so you acted vi you know violently against that at least intellectually where was was alina still in elena was still in ohio okay uh uh that is my now wife's name yeah yeah uh sorry uh so yeah after that um when i when i was basically like i'm done with faith i'm done with religion yeah um i ended up kind of just kind of hitting the lowest point of my life in terms of i was just lonely i was surrounded by extended family but like where i had put myself spiritually where gosh if god doesn't even matter like if he's not real and what what do i mean like what why does nick matter at all i was i was lonely i was depressed there were times in my life that i wasn't even sure if i would continue to be uh by my own choice [Music] and in that time i kind of made another radical decision i was like i can't do this alone um and i really miss alina and i ended up deciding to move back to ohio there was always something about her and i think this was god working in our relationship that he wanted me to rediscover him through her and um and so i moved back to ohio and uh yeah i started attending church with her and her parents at a non-denominational church uh i was only attending to make them happy i even joined the worship band as a non-believer yeah i was a terrible person um you know what kind of person leads worship of a god they don't believe in yeah it's not pretty but god used it over over the course of months that i was attending that church god was softening my heart i was i was listening to the sermons i was a part of the worship god was softening my heart and there was a specific pivotal point in time where um in the sermon the pastor played this video yeah uh i don't know if you've heard the the song everything by lifehouse there was a skit to it the original skit for that uh if you look it up on youtube it's got millions and gajillions of views but the the pastor played this video and it starts off with god creating this girl and um she's happy she's blissful they're in this beautiful dance together and then as the video goes on uh the devil is introduced and starts kind of uh enticing her with different forms of sin um even even some of which is as subtle as like a poor self-image like look at this girl and you don't look like her right you know and they orchestrate all this beautifully in the choreography uh but as she gets pulled further and further from the lord in this beautiful dance they were doing uh because of these sins and these distractions from the devil um she just begins to be more and more overwhelmed and ends up like surrounded by them and they are completely overwhelming here and it's it's a very uh almost chaotic moment that they create in this choreography and the lord is just trying so hard to get to her and and she can't reach him and she's just in this dark place and then eventually uh the devil hands her a gun and she it trembling starts to hold it up to her head and i was like losing it it was too real i was watching this and i was like um um like this is this is what my journey has been right um with different forms of addictions and battling different forms of sin throughout my life and then the darkest places that i found myself like this is my story and i saw her throw the gun away at the last second before she pulled the trigger and she just bolts towards the lord and all these demons are boxing her out like so that she can't get to him they're holding her back they're grabbing her and this is also part of the story like um and and then eventually jesus chuck norrises these demons and embraces her again and they re-enter this beautiful dance and i just i i was crying like a little girl sitting there and it was in this moment that i was like i need saving and i don't know what that looks like um because i stepped away from faith when i saw the inconsistencies and i saw how like there was no comprehensive agreement about what the bible meant and how to interpret it so i didn't understand the idea of where there might be authority in teaching and that was a major problem for me if god is real and he's outside of time why are his opinions always changing about things yeah um i didn't understand what it looked like but i knew i needed saving because i was in a bad way right so that um you know so i kind of went from being catholic to being protestant throughout high school to being a unitarian to being an atheist to being a protestant again but i knew that there was something more that i had to figure out because i couldn't just go all in on this without some of those intellectual issues navigated sure now i know we're going to talk more about this a little bit here but before the break i've been wanting to ask you you know music is a theme throughout your story where did that come in your life because that was obviously a big i think important thing for you and it's something that kept in a weird way leading you back to have these encounters with the church when did that come in and tell us a little bit about that gosh yeah i mean i grew up performing on stage like for the talent shows every year and stuff but it was always like lip syncing like i knew i was a performer i was actually acting on stage before i knew i could do music i always liked to pretend to like dj and stuff growing up but um really it was in i want to say early high school like maybe even my freshman year that i got a guitar like an electric guitar and i started playing stuff and just kind of out of nowhere very quickly like i joined the choir and it just started to escalate very quickly and so uh basically by the end of high school like i was sold out for music like i love music i love performing i loved singing i love composing um a friend of mine passed away in high school and i composed a requiem for him that was performed on his anniversary um and i just like everything my life became about music uh in college i studied vocal performance like opera that's what i studied at bgsu and um yeah so like i throughout high school i i totally hadn't totally like eliminated the catholic label i occasionally would like play for liturgies in the folk band at mass and um got some exposure to that you know liturgical music that way and then i started playing for worship when i was attending this non-denominational church yeah well i guess i was also in the choir at the unitarian church but i like to not talk about that so yeah yeah certainly that vocation that that skill was something intentional with the lord i mean obviously well and i think that the most profound way that it was a part of my journey back to faith is the fact that music was always such a part of my relationship with alina we met at a school talent show our junior year of high school and then we started dating our senior year and music was always like we were always songwriting together we were always performing together we would play on the sidewalks together uh downtown you know like we just loved making music together and um the best music that either of us has made is when we're collaborating and so yeah so so god made that such a prominent part of us that was always such a connection point and still is to this day yeah yeah i love it well let's take a quick break and we'll come back and hear how that continued you know you're you're back in ohio and you're back with lena and you're attending this church you have this great experience we'll see where that goes next thank you for joining us um we take a quick break and we'll be back to hear the rest of nick delatore's story [Music] well welcome back to the journey home uh we're joined tonight by nick deletori a revert and former unitarian and the president of awaken catholic awaken catholic.org and we've just heard the first part of your story nick you know how you grew up catholic but you know for lots of reasons ended up sort of rejecting the faith but you're being led back through your music through your relationship with with your future wife and through your experiences at the non-dominational yeah non-denomination okay so what happens next what happens next well so you know i realize i need saving i realize that i need a relationship with jesus christ no idea what it looks like where it also reconciles my concerns intellectually um i know i i had a sense inherently that if faith was was going to be a real thing for me like there was a sense in which it could not contradict reason and i saw a lack of reason in the inconsistencies across the board when you look at all the different denominations again that they're all coming from the bible that they're all inspired by the holy spirit none of that works uh in my mind i had never really considered the catholic option at this point uh that was kind of just my childhood thing i was over it right uh it was this you know old guys in rome kind of situation um so anyways uh fast forward a couple of months i'm you know i've now i'm starting to actually worship when i'm going to this non-denominational church i'm starting to really listen to these sermons and i'm active in like the young adult group on some level uh so i'm studying at bowling green state university i'm a vocal performance major and i i'm also attending a geology class because you know science yeah and um so the instructor lets us know at the beginning of one of these classes that we're going to get partnered up to work on whatever project and you know typical college young guy scan in the room like oh what pretty girls might i get partnered up with this is exciting um and lo and behold i got partnered up with not a girl but just the stubby kid that was next to me and i was like oh this is great thanks greater power in the universe um and gosh god was there his hand was there um i'm working on this project with this with this awesome guy that now we're we're friends and i'll forever be grateful to him for the conversation that would happen now yeah i don't know if you uh have any particular care for writing utensils john mark but i don't uh i don't really care about writing utensils but for some reason in that moment the holy spirit inclined my vision to the man's pen and i see the pen and it says creed on campus and i'm like hey what's that pen about he's like oh this is the catholic group on campus you should totally come to one of our events and i was like oh no good uh i'm good thank you uh and he's like no seriously we're going to be talking about sex and i was like oh what time does it start and so literally the next night was the the first time that christopher west himself was brought on campus and gave this huge uh performance uh give this huge uh presentation uh at the university student union um a ballroom and i attended that all because of that pen stupid pen if you're anyone out there working for non-profits if you're thinking about budgeting money for pens get the pen uh you could save somebody the pen is mightier yeah the pen seriously um so i'm attending this presentation and i brought alina with me again she was brought up a protestant protestant so you know that wasn't something she was interested in but she went with me she was my girlfriend and uh where we're sitting there and i'm hearing this guy talk about the human person and relationships and our dignity and our destiny and i'm hearing words that nobody in my life has ever said before and these messages and i was just like this is catholic like since when does a christian anyone speaks with such authority on the topic of human sexuality and marriage and like i just my heart was like kind of opening up to to something in in such a radical way just from how beautiful the the messages of the theology of the body are yeah but that wasn't even the thing that like changed the game for me that that was like you know contributing elements right but in part of the presentation christopher west said uh that artificial contraception has always been considered intrinsically evil by all christian denominations the use of artificial contraception until around a century ago when most protestant denominations veered away from that teaching and started teaching otherwise and which by the way for me is like so god changed his mind like what is what is that what is the implication of that um but that the only church that still teaches that the use of artificial contraception is evil is the catholic church and that the reason is the magisterium the reason is that the church's teachings can never change and never have in 2000 years and and the reason is that when something is true it doesn't change and he talked about apostolic succession and the preservation of truth over the centuries millennia talked about the papacy and this is a theology of the body presentation right he's packing a lot of this he's packing all that but what shook me is i didn't know that less than you know around 500 years ago for all of christian history up to that point other than like some schismatic heretics or whatever that like we were a family of the body of christ we were a family of christians we had a teaching authority we all believed the same stuff and that there was this unanimous understanding of what truth was something that today cannot be seen unless you're looking at the historical context and you see it in the catholic church and that was the game changer if is a god that is outside of time and he is real then his then the truth about him and any truth that he wants us to know can be unchanging it has to be unchanging i hadn't seen it until this very moment i wasn't particularly interested in the teaching on artificial contraception itself at this stage in my life sure but it was the foundation of like why that shook me right you know i think he might have even mentioned congregationalism where you have these denominations that are like voting on what to believe let's take a vote what does god want us to believe now like that's not truth that's not even close to truth and i had found the pearl of great prize like i was like this is literally the answer to what my my soul is aching for is is something i can i can rest on a solid foundation that i can build my house of faith my house my whole life on future marriage like this is the answer [Music] to everything that i needed both because of what i needed to understand about truth and what i needed to find about truth but then also goodness gracious the healing that i discovered in theology of the body and then and then subsequently in the sacraments like let me tell you something my first sacrament of reconciliation following that [Music] priest survived thanks be to god by the grace of god but man the power that i experienced uh the healing um it's like nothing else yeah you know you know that our lord uh the gospel uh that we receive about our lord jesus christ is so connected to the miracle that is the church you know that we look at the historical miracle that is this church that has persisted and the teachings that have um that have developed but but not changed there's not been a discontinuity like that those go together because again if our lord is who we believe he is who he said he was then he doesn't change you know he's the same yesterday today and forever and so his church his body you know uh uh reflects that and so yeah to find that to even to find that claim i think is again an interesting thing that the church is claiming this for herself you may not believe that off the bat but this is what the church is claiming that christ established this kind of a church he had this this vision this this uh this body uh that we can connect ourselves to you know yeah that's exactly it and and looking at the context of if you're really looking at scripture objectively without any previous bias like you see the catholic church in it you know like jesus didn't leave it you know this whole notion about the bible and personal interpretation that was that i was struggling with uh struggling with seeing the validity of um like everyone's got to have their own bible everyone's got to memorize that bible and if you really love jesus you'll learn greek and you'll translate your own version of the bible because the all the translations that have been done in all these centuries those aren't good enough you gotta you gotta translate yourself to really love jesus listen if jesus if the if the principal concern of jesus was that everybody memorized scripture and that everybody like like know the bible inside it out and that that you have your personal bible with your name on it and whatever he would have left us a divine printing press we invented the printing press in the 11th century jesus was concerned for us to know the gospel which is not a written page the gospel is the good news jesus was jesus left us the church right saint paul says that the church is the pillar in the ball work of truth like as soon as you start to have this like paradigm shift where you like swap lenses out like the optometrist and all of a sudden it's like wait a second the catholic church is written all over these pages of the bible um that was another major thing for me in in kind of just going berserk about catholic i mean i was sold out i was like the catholic church is the answer to my life it's the answer to every life and i want every life i want every person i know to find out about this answer to their lives yeah um i was so on fire like literally uh in in this major wave of like coming back into the church [Music] this is only possible by the holy spirit and then all of the formation i had waiting for me from my childhood right within three months of that night i think roughly that i seen christopher west i was already teaching confirmation classes like i was just nothing else mattered um and i think that's what jesus wants from us on some level turn around and go share it yeah tell us a little bit about that process how did you go from from that night well i mean i always had some because of my catholic upbringing in catholic school and stuff like i i learned the things i was supposed to learn sure i just didn't understand yet why it mattered and then in this moment like that connection point happened the circuit was was you know closed or opened closed closed that one there we go uh and uh yeah and so aside from that uh gosh i just went crazy reading books and and honestly consuming content from ewtn um this show i watched the journey home so much at that time uh and yeah i just was like i could not be satiated i was just reading and watching and learning all day every day it's like all that mattered to me and so uh i went from teaching a confirmation class to uh i literally uh dropped out of the program i had been spending years working towards for opera singing why did i want to be an opera singer why did what did you want to be an opera singer nick thanks for asking john mark you know all the right questions i wanted to be a famous opera singer i wanted my my name you know at the met in new york like that was that was my life's goal at that point and you know that was all for me that was all for the glory of nick and i had to slam the brakes on it um and i just i i sold out for god you know so i i became a full-time youth minister very soon after and uh from from my work i think i spent like uh maybe around three years as a full-time youth minister and then i ended up getting a job at the paris we met at um as the music director uh and i was there for about three years and then i became a pastoral associate i was like the pastor's right-hand man for another three years at st joan of arc parish in toledo and then from there i ended up running the office of marriage and family life for the diocese of toledo for another three years roughly uh these jobs keep happening in three sets of three i'm almost three years into awakened catholic what's going to happen just kidding um but yeah so um what ended up happening over the course of probably the uh well a lot of that time that i was working at parishes and um uh as time went on i was starting to be asked to speak at different events conferences around the country either speaking or leading worship or performing i was doing one of those three things around the country and it was starting to get to a point where juggling both of those kind of responsibilities that god had put before my family and i my wife and i um juggling all of that was becoming very taxing on my family which is no bueno when you run the office of marriage and family life uh no it's no bueno no matter who you are your family comes first and we began a discernment period with my uh superior at the time at the diocese it was an open conversation like hey you know god keeps asking me to go to this conference or that conference and speak or do this thing or that thing and like we need to figure out how this is going to play out do we just not do the other stuff just do the diocesan work or do we just do the other stuff and not the diocesan working after several months there came an evening where alina approached me because i was working at home in the evening after having worked nine to five at the diocese she says uh it's time nick we're done with this and the next morning i walked into my boss's office and i said it's time and he knew exactly what i meant he said all right do you want to announce it at the staff meeting i said yeah and uh so that's how that played out and then you know at this point i i think we so we missed it earlier uh your wife at some point in this process catholic as well sorry let's double back and check on that double back yeah uh so we when i went crazy for catholicism i was just all in uh very shortly after that christopher west event my wife broke up with me my at that time girlfriend broke up with me because she was like i i thought we were going to have a nice protestant family this is not what i signed up for so i you know i actively discerned priesthood during that time like i was you know i did some retreats i had st mind rid for discernment and during that time she thought we were done and i actually ended up starting to see someone else at the time which was you know alina is the one yeah elena's the one and um so but in that time she as far as she was concerned as far as i was concerned that book was close we were done um because i thought she would never consider catholicism she thought i would never not be catholic so angie saw that i was starting to date someone else so she uh secretly started investigating catholicism not because she wanted to win me back or anything like that she was haunted by the things that i learned that i shared with her she was never going to be able to be to be a protestant again for the rest of her life without these ideas haunting her of authority of of you know sola scriptura not actually being a thing that should be well i'm sure seeing it at least to some degree too in your own life that you didn't return to your catholic faith and abandon christ yes that that those two came together and that was that's such a great point absolutely uh but in that that in investigation that she was doing she became open to catholicism and we ended up reconnecting not because of that but because as far as i knew she was not open yet right but we just couldn't resist each other we just we're made for each other i don't know how else to tell you um and but yes so she ended up becoming catholic uh like a year before we got married um and yeah yeah that's how that happened you know i wanted to go back you know so that that talk that you heard that was such a a game changer you noted that it wasn't necessarily at the time the theology of the body and contraception stuff that was the that was the thing but it is so interesting that that was a pivotal thing because the theology of the body you know for those who aren't familiar it's this great body of teaching by saint pope john paul ii on human sexuality and god's plan for the family and there's much to be said of it it's a beautiful it's a beautiful body of uh presentation of the christian understanding of all that but one of the things that makes it i think so powerful because i was there around that time and you know we heard some of the same talks and a lot of people really touched through the theology of the body was because it really takes something that we're all familiar with you know our human sexuality something like a a reality that's very close to all of us and it points out this design that's just beneath the surface this theology the study of god this image of god that we see in our in our bodies it's interesting in your story too because again like so unitarianism and some of those things that you that you dabbled in you know outside of the catholic faith there are these little bits and pieces and there are people who are grasping at these threads but the whole picture and that's that's what we've experienced is the whole picture is is in christ's church yeah well and and like you said it it has to do with some of the most intimate stuff in our lives i would also say it has to do with one of the uh the most profound sources of wounds or areas of wounds in most of our lives um male or female there are wounds that you have probably experienced that maybe you don't think about day to day but that are somehow subconsciously affecting you and that can take a kajillion different forms but it really taps into like healing opportunity for everybody one one way or another yeah yeah oh that's wonderful well so again we met around that time yeah there at bowling green state university and uh yeah we came into the church and we've known you since then a lot of good work in the diocese tell us what you're doing now we left off there you left your work at the diocese yeah so we started um we started uh going all in on just being full-time evangelists speaking doing music leading worship and we held this fundraising event one night at someone's house uh and at the end of the night we're collect we collected the donor cards and this one person wrote on one of the donor cards why not nfp and you know if you're nick at the time you just quit your job as the marriage and family life guy for the diocese your first thought is he's asking you why are you and your wife not using natural family planning and i was like this is incredibly invasive number one number two why are you assuming we're not using it anyways so turns out what he meant is why not a not-for-profit and uh that just sent us down this incredible rabbit hole where the lord revealed uh in this incredible snowfall snowballing effect that he was calling us to something to do something so much bigger than just nick and elena delatorre evangelists it wasn't about nick and elena deletori um it was it kind of got back to the original struggle i had with why i quit opera school or this this is not supposed to be about nick deletory this is supposed to be about glorifying god and bringing souls to him and in the process of developing the not for the non-profit um it was just revealed day by day how that was going to manifest and awakened catholic is what that is manifested as it's it's an opportunity for us to reach people that are on the fringes people that have either fallen away from the faith or have never been exposed to catholicism never been given a reason to consider catholicism um and a lot of times like we have we have so much good stuff happening in our church so many different types of people being served but i just know that there are some people that don't know that they have a place in our church but that would love a place in our church if we offered them one i did uh the last parish mission i did before kovit hit last year was this huge tri-parish mission i spoke there for two nights and this woman came up to us this young woman crying who shared that she was almost voluntarily going to enter human trafficking to make it easier to receive opioids and i'm getting emotional just now even remembering it but like that is who we're doing this for is people that are rece are experiencing something transformational because they hear the gospel presented in a way that no one else has presented it before i'm up there on the stage doing this parish mission with my tattoo exposed and i'm being very honest about like where i've been in my life the pain that i've experienced the darkness that i've been in and how much power i have experienced from god the transformative healing power and the work he's done to redeem my heart and mind and like there's honesty that we need to be conveying that we're you know somewhat over focused on like this political correctness or prim and properness that we're not being maybe sometimes as honest as we could be to open the door for that woman to encounter jesus in that parish mission i don't even know how she got there right but she encountered jesus there we had adoration she was weeping she didn't want to leave um and so that's that's kind of the mission that's that's at the heart of what we're doing if there's anything we're doing differently it's that we're trying to not we're targeting people that aren't drinking the kool-aid already we're targeting people that maybe have a disdain for the smell of the kool-aid so to speak you know um and and hoping to uh heighten their their awareness and maybe re-expose them or expose them for the first time to the beauty and the power and the amazing thing it is to be catholic sure and to be in relationship with the lord so if they go to awaken catholic.org they'll find gosh awaken catholic so we are we produce a lot of different shows um you and your wife do a beautiful job on yours elevate ordinary uh and i host a show there we have we have i think eight different shows actively being produced and we release new episodes every week and um we also have a social media alternative that is also a great hub for the content that we're creating in the form of an app uh so search for awaken catholic search for awaken catholic on your app store of choice or you can just visit the awaken app dot io we're also doing pilgrimages we're going to the holy land this year as well as we have a women's pilgrimage to paris and lourdes so if you're interested in that check that out um there's a lot going on we're hoping now with kovid lightening up on some level people getting the vaccines feeling better about things we're hoping to get back into parish missions and stuff because i just i want to walk with people i want to share my story and and and share the good news yeah with people well very good we've got about seven minutes left and so a couple things i want to ask you before we we head out you know number one looking back from your your catholic roots you know and all the different things that led you first away from the faith and back into it talk to talk to us a little bit about you know how that the there and back again story has brought you in terms of your own prayer life and you know you described yourself earlier maybe that the unitarian maybe wasn't the the best form or label maybe you're just you know former you know uh heathen or whatever yeah we were joking before the show that the correct title for me would be former terrible person yeah well so but you're back now talk about a little about your your vocation as a husband and father and your relationship with the with the lord now yeah absolutely yeah um i uh my first mission uh you know maybe after after the mission to like make sure i am in good standing with god uh myself uh my first mission is my wife i love my wife i i want to do everything in my power to help her experience heaven here now and get to heaven and eternity um and so you know being vigilant i kind of liken my ministry to my wife as that of um you know the one that adam screwed up in the garden uh you know like hey he was given dominion over all the animals all he had to do was rebuke that serpent and not let it do what it wanted to do in the garden and and to me uh as men we have a similar role in in our families and our households of evil has no place here uh and and so i see my role with with alina and with my kids as as protector as a prayer warrior for them and i love praying over them if any of them are struggling with anything um and i would encourage anyone watching like get in the habit of praying over your your family and i don't just mean praying for them privately but like literally put your hands on your wife's head and pray over her now you don't just have to do that if you're a husband like that's something anyone can do but you know it's again it gets back to the theology of the body we were touching earlier that uh this is part of what it means to be a catholic this is part of what we've discovered in in this this whole big picture of what it means to be a christian and understood as as we do as catholics that the body matters yeah you know the body communicates the body communicates visibly what is invisible the reality of the human person well we communicate those things through touch through through word that's why you know our lord and his in his wonderful mercy gives us the sacraments of the church amen he comes to us through the visible things that do invisible things you know he imparts the invisible grace he changes our life in invisible ways through these visible words and signs and water and oil and those things amen and so yeah and praying over people that's one of those so elena i have three kids um lucia cecilia and augustine uh and i love them they're they're wonderful um and other than that uh my wife and i still produce music and stuff but uh most of our focus and energy is put into awakened catholic and you know raising our children we're homeschooling now uh we got a little taste of that at the beginning of coven when everyone got a taste of that forcibly uh and uh we ended up enjoying it and we're still doing it um so you know you and theresa have been super helpful in that as well actually we enjoy your friendship and yeah industry yeah our kids love you love listening to your your vision cd in the car that album check it out you're not supposed to talk about that album that's right on the market anyway anyway um you know a few minutes left but speak to a couple of different people i mean first of all maybe people who they they maybe grew up catholic but through a variety of things maybe inconsistent witnesses of the faith maybe you know family broken families you know speak to them about yeah um why they should return absolutely yeah being catholic is just downright the best way to live i will say i had a really interesting interaction with someone recently um who messaged us at awaken from ireland and she was just lashing out like she had had some terrible experiences in her childhood and relatives of hers had had terrible experiences and it would have been so easy to get defensive or whatever but it just became this opportunity to just let her share her her frustrations and then love on her and i think that my my biggest invitation to anyone that is unsure about catholicism is look for love in you know like the you'll know them by their fruits like i one of the things i found so important in my transition away from protestantism back to catholicism is like i don't want my identity to be wrapped up in the idea of protesting something i want my identity to be wrapped up in submission to the lord and that means i don't have to be okay with something for it to be true that i don't like gravity i would love to walk out of this studio today and just take off like superman but you know what the truth of the universe doesn't care what i think and i think that we need to be so willing to to subjugate ourselves to god's lordship that we do it his way no matter what that means because he created you he created me he created john mark only he knows what is best for us and with my children i tell them things all the times that they don't love sometimes they get upset sometimes they cry sometimes they scream and i worry that we've got the cops called on us and it's like over a cookie and and ultimately they think they know what they want they think they know what'll make them happy alina and i know better and now amplify that to scale with god who is infinite and who is perfect and who literally created us we we co-created our kids but we're not the ones that lined up all those molecules and dna and all that stuff god did that our ability to know what's best for them is far superior to their own but limited and god knows what is best for me and for all of us and like the catholic church was instituted by jesus christ if you got a problem with the catholic church then your real issue was with the way jesus ended up deciding to do things he didn't leave us a divine printing press he left us a church it's an imperfect church because it was it's you know made up of people and people are imperfect yeah so yeah it's beautiful it's healing it's powerful god is active and alive in it ask the holy spirit to uh to guide you in your discernment because he will yeah good stuff nick thanks so much for sharing your story brother i'm glad to uh hear the whole story i've known bits and pieces of it but yeah you know and we we thank you audience for for listening in watching in hearing another story of what our lord has done what a good god we have what a great gift we have in the church in the sacraments in our lives and our bodies you know let's let's be thankful for those today thanks again for joining us on this episode of the journey home program i will see you next week god bless [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 9,879

Rating: 4.9338841 out of 5

Keywords: jht, jht01736, ytsync-en

Id: UydLp_E6i88

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021