09/16/19 Noel Culbertson

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home my Marcus Grodi your host for this program okay once again we get this great privilege to relax and listen to how the Holy Spirit opens someone's heart to a deeper walk with Jesus Christ in His Church and often I just mentioned to our guest that it's kind of surprising when when people think about non-catholic Christians who become Catholic the first thing comes their mind are probably Anglicans and Episcopalians but the one thing that they all don't think about is that the second-biggest group in our database are Baptists what are they doing coming into church well such as our guest tonight Noel Kolbert sin Noel welcome to the journey hole it's great to have you here it's good to be hand I want to God 1/2 of you because your husband in here but he came in at the same time right sure did and our kids were baptized and received in this church at the same time thanks be to God well that is not always the case that both and a couple come in at the same time but it's a real blessing so let me back away and and invite you to start us from the beginning let's hear your journey all right well I grew up in a very faithful Baptist home I we did Bible studies at home we had Bible study placemats every day at dinner we had only had a little Bible study time if there's never a time in my life that I recall that I didn't believe in God or experience that in family life we were very active in our church my dad and have originally started in ministry left the ministry for the sake of the family and then just really evangelized in his ordinary life all through my life so I I grew up going to awana and I was socially awkward and good at memorizing so it was the excellent fit for me and and we and I had a very happy home a very faithful parents and my dad had both of my parents had had an evangelical conversion experience when they were in high school my dad's family was Christian Science and my mom came from a nominally Catholic background and Wow yeah so they had both had very powerful evangelical experiences and so I grew up I think it explained in the end a lot of my mom's hostility toward the church but but it was a it was a good way to grow up I was very happy and I went on mission trips so when I was in high school I went to Europe to convert all of the people who went to church every Sunday but didn't know anything about Jesus and and I was naive and so I thought gosh I know lots of people at my church like that so I didn't think that it was specifically geared to Catholics which it obviously was but I went to Poland Isis in 1991 and 25 years later I was back in Poland with my daughter at World Youth Day to see the Pope so well god is good and brings all things around but that was my growing up we were and when I was in high school we moved to Washington State and I started working at a Christian camp and my dad had come to Christ to a Christian camp so it was very exciting to be part of a ministry that had been so powerful in his life and we worked with lots of different denominations and we had daily prayer with the staff I worked with a high school students on staff and taught Sunday School at church and around that time I met my husband and he came he had gone to school at Colorado Christian University with my sister and joined the Navy and ended up stationed in our area so we so he went to a Christian University yes my husband was a boy's parents bounced around in churches but came from a Protestant background oh but he brought together the two of you both Christians yes people committed as a foundation now you mentioned that's interesting your your dad was or was it your grandfather who was Christian Science originally my great-grandparents were Christian Science so my dad's father grew up Christian Science and then my dad they went from time to time so it wasn't a very strong influence in my dad's household so much but it was definitely a part of their family yes sir so you have this Christian science background which you know I don't know a lot a whole lot about that but it's but that I don't want to be too negative but I would say in aberrant form of Christianity you know on the other hand you have a fallen away nominal Catholic coming so I'm guessing from both of those backgrounds you would have at least subliminally had not the best view of the Catholic Church brought up absolutely so but no church that I went to ever really outright said nasty things about the church however they would say things like we don't earn our way to heaven like some people do or things like that so it was always implied they that Catholics believed things that that were contrary to Scripture but it wasn't talked about really outright and and more no under-the-table sort of ways that underhanded and you would have had a lower view of the sacraments I had no view of the sacraments at all really I didn't come from a liturgical background I was baptized when I was young but you were not baptized unless you had made a profession of faith which I did is when I was six years old and so but other than that we and we had communion once a month on the first sunday of the month and it but it was not a sacramental view of life definitely scriptural Bibles emphasis on our faith and that all that we needed to know and to love and to serve God was really we found in the scriptures and that's what we did and your husband pretty much brought that essentially the same view yeah essentially the same view his parents were definitely more loose in their beliefs but he always desired to know God and the only way we knew how to do that was through the Scriptures so as we were dating we went to church together we read our Bibles together and and did that we were dated for not very long before we decided we were gonna get married and we were getting married as soon as he came back from his upcoming deployment he was leaving with the Navy and he was gonna be gone six months and we were gonna get married right after he came home and about six weeks before he left I went to a doctor's appointment and found out I was pregnant and I was the good Baptist girl I didn't get in trouble I didn't go to parties I went to church every week and how could I possibly let this happen and it was humiliating and terrifying and and I felt like I had let everyone down and in that moment and I'm sitting there in the doctor's office all alone and the temptation flashed before me that said you could just get an abortion and no one would ever know and I was pro-life and it shocked me that that thought even entered into my into my mind and this was why your husband-to-be was overseas he was still here but he was at work and in those days you didn't have cell phones I had no way of getting ahold of him and and I thought I have got to tell someone because as soon as I tell someone as soon as I confess this it'll be real and I can't pretend like it's not real and so I left the doctor's office and I went right to my sister's house and said I need to talk and we went out and I told her and as soon as the words came out the temptation was gone because in the light of the truth you know the power of the lie is in the secret and and so a few hours later is able to tell Stan and in the next few days he told the pastor he talked to my parents I wrote a letter to the staff of the Christian camp confessing what I my sin and asking for their forgiveness and it was such a powerful instance of that the idea of the sacramentality that you when you confess to someone who really has the power to retain their forgiveness and yet you receive it anyway and and it was out loud and it wasn't just God I'm sorry please don't let anyone find out about this which was my Baptist prayer of confession prior but that all of a sudden you have a you have something that that really needs to be said out loud and and that the power of the the truth will set you free even from your sin and and it was one of the things looking back on my conversion this powerful instance of how confession made absolute sense to me when I came when I eventually came to that it was a long way off it at this point but so I found out it was pregnant two weeks later we got married two weeks later he left for six months he came home from the deployment and two weeks later we had a baby so that was our first year of marriage lots of changes but in the meantime we served in our church and my husband eventually became a deacon at our church I was helping to lead women's ministry we had a Bible study in our home and in our Bible study we started going through the book of Acts and we were just ordinary people leading a Bible study trying to grow in her faith and understanding and we first where each week we read in the chapter and we're trying to read the best commentator so we have something intelligent to say and to grow in our faith and yet the commentators often contradicted each other and not just in personal reflections but in theological views our guest is no Culbertson noel Kolb Woodson well it's it is fascinating that on the one hand we professed the sufficiency of the Bible and you would gather with that assumption yet it never crossed your mind that even the consulting of commentaries itself was a bit of an oxymoron right to the idea that this is sufficient so why do I need these other groups so it's one thing just even do that but what you're saying is that in the process of doing it on top of that itself you realize they don't agree and they have and these are people who have time to study yeah I'm an ordinary mom with little kids and my husband is flying for the Navy and we're doing our best to try to reach out to go on then we get to acts 15 and of course as a bap so absolutely and so as a Baptist we were always trying to get back to that authentic early church experience and you know the idea of having a Bible study in your home is akin to this house worship that they had in the early church and we reach acts 15 and you see the early church in action and it met in Council and it defines Scripture in a dogmatic way and then sends out letters to the churches that are binding in faith and you think well that's not how my church works and here we're constantly trying to get back to this biblical authentic early church model and yet it's very far off of what our actual experience is you know just jump in there a little bit because that incident there's a part of that that a lot of folk don't recognize that I think is really significant because I didn't see it back then when I was a similar stage of you and your husband and that you and that is that often you know here's this console gathered to deal with this issue do we do Gentiles have to be circumcised first before they can come into the church I mean that was the big that's why as a consul and then you have this group of what we call Judaizers over here so wait a second I know they gotta be circumcised well the point was they were the sola scriptura guy absolutely and that was such a huge part of our journey as you begin to look at it and you think wool they're defining scriptures dogmatically but also in a new way and and the people that we're looking to scripture alone were on the wrong side of the church and the wrong side of Christ it was shocking really and and again we weren't even on the path yet and yet we were we were we didn't know we were on the path yet and then a oh maybe another year or so later we were in our adult Sunday School class and it was a discussion based group and that our pastor was leading us through the parable of the sower or the season the sower and you know goes through the different types of seeds falling on different types of soil and got to the part where that falls on the rocky soil and it springs up but when the persecution comes that withers away and dies and sustained raised his hand and said you know I know we believe that once we're saved were always saved but this seems to be stating fairly clearly that this there was faith there and then it died so how do we reconcile that and if you're looking to turn a room full of Baptists on you that's a great way to do it and all of a sudden the room turned on him and we were driving home that day from church and we thought well that was interesting it didn't expect that and yet you're not quite willing to bet your eternal salvation on your interpretation because what if we were wrong what if we're just not seeing something but it was another stone on our Road on our way to Rome yeah that was a very interesting interpretation your husband I mean I don't often see it that way but it's there well and for some race he was awakened and for this once saved always saved you know background that we came from it's it's very alarming because obviously just like when you read through the Scriptures without your Baptist goggles on you begin to see all the things that you didn't see simply because you were reading them through an interpretive lens which interestingly enough you come to realize that everyone interprets scripture through a lens only Catholics admit it yeah one of the problems again I'm just speaking for my own background but from guys that I knew that when you're a once saved always saved on catholic christian often you have a hard time with all the actual teachings of christ you end up like and paul better than absolutely jesus you know because of that very parable other parables like it absolutely and and the explanation i always received growing up was that jesus was speaking prior to the crucifixion and resurrection so therefore what he said what applied to the pre covenant you know their old covenant jews but not to the new covenant christians and it was an easy way to slide in to Paul and to enjoy Jesus without having to obey Jesus the Sermon on the Mount we don't really need that and so so then a few years goes by and it stands on another deployment and I think this was number seven for us seven six-month deployment and he was struggling with the fact that you the only way to encounter Christ deeper is to know the Scriptures better but as a layperson with only so much time what are you gonna do and how do you know you're interpreting it right so he picked up right before deployment and make a MacArthur Study Bible I'm a Kurd there's not typically a road to Rome but there it was and he picked that up and took it on deployment so that he could deepen his faith and and be a better Christian father for our kids and leader of her family and I ended up partway through the deployment I got paired up with a gal named Janet on a field trip with my kids we were chaperoning together and we got to talking about faith and the state of the nation and the moral decay of society and all the things you don't typically talk about in polite conversation and got along famously and we stayed afterward and talked for several hours in the parking lot and just got along really well and a couple of weeks later I ran into her at the hardware store and she mentioned I think your dad goes to our church now my dad had come into the Catholic Church about seven years before this oh I missed that along the way yeah so my I was an adult I had little kids and my dad my dad studied more than anybody I knew and from the time I was a little kid he was studying typically he studied a lot about the Jewish history the history of the temple the layout of it where was Christ looking when he was crucified and all of the connection to the church and and when I was 19 or 20 and my dad was meeting with some rabbis to understand the Jewish Center of the scriptures more they were non men Yanik rabbis but he always loved to ask questions and he said hey I'm going down to the Feast of Tabernacles do you want to come with me sure so it didn't really surprise me when my dad started meeting with a Catholic priest either to ask them questions he was trying to deepen his prayer life and found a Carmelite parish in our area which was recommended to him by another Baptist gal from our param our church and so she was responsible for connecting him with spiritual direction and after a couple of years of that my dad entered the church Wow my mom was furious but you keep working on it you're married and you figure it out and it was it was not talked about very much like you were you still at home no I was an adult married had kids little kids so for my dad I looked at at at it as a very denominational view of things so people who love the Bible they're Baptist people who like liturgy and study are Catholic and people who are charismatic or Pentecostal and it everybody finds their place and that was not the view of the other people at our Baptist Church it was devastating to the pastor who had been very close to my dad my mom openly wept at church at different times and and it made family situations pretty tense but my dad as a sacrifice back to my mom did not talk about it very much to us kids my dad was very convincing and was able to articulate himself well so he did not purposely share very much about his conversion process with us is that you think that subtly opened you up to the church because of what he did it was just not a non-issue you think I would say it didn't put any roadblocks in the way for me I would have loved to hear it I was very open to learning about the faith and and the practice of it so he and I knew he was giving that up for my mom and and I always thought that was a really honorable thing and yet I think back in conversion is such an a grace filled exciting time it was a hugely isolating sacrifice that he made for her sake which I always thought looking back was really beautiful and but I ran and I ran into Janet again at this at the hardware store and she says I think your dad goes to our church and I said oh you go to st. Cecilia's that's great and I thought this was a brilliant question that she asked and she said what do you think of your dad being Catholic and I gave her that explanation that my denominational view of it that it was good for him not for me and she said well what does your mom think of it and I was like oh yeah touchy subject and she recommended that I pick up a book by Scott Hahn because he converted and his wife really struggled and she thought it might be something that would be helpful to my mom and I think her for that and headed on my way and finished my errands and Stan returned home from deployment and we were getting ready to head out on a camping road trip to get reconnected after the deployment and I thought I should stop by the church in town and ask them where do you find Catholic books I had never seen a Catholic bookstore I had I don't think seeing a priest I had never seen a nun I just had no connection with the church my dad was Catholic but I was completely disconnected from that world and so I stopped by on my own because I wasn't gonna ask my dad for help because I thought if I gave this to my mom she would it would not go over well so I stopped by the Catholic Church and the doors were locked and I thought well then I saw some people moving boxes around the side so I went around the back of the building and went and asked the lady moving boxes if she knew where I could pick up this Catholic book and she said well I don't have the book with me but I have a CD by the same person would you be interested in that and I said sure I love hearing religious talks and so she handed me that CD and then she said well would you like any others and I said sure we've got a long road trip coming up and she handed me about 30 Catholic CDs and a seekers catechism and sent me on my way so a couple of days later we're in the car with the kids and we're doing our first trek through the night and after the kids fell asleep in the back we popped in the CD for the first time and we were absolutely dumbfounded because how could we have missed we we were not inactive in our faith we read our Bibles all the time and how could we have missed Matthew 16 and Jesus giving Peter the keys and how could we have missed John 6 it's all so obvious you know that the Christ is asking us to receive him bodily and yet as literal interpreters of the Bible we had completely overlooked it and so we like good Baptists had our Bibles with us and we got to the first campground and opened them up and then well it is there right that's the first thing you want to check I don't remember seeing that there but let's make sure it does make sure intimates make sure it says the same thing and our interpretation which it does and and it was shocking and so you began to pour over the scriptures with new eyes and for the first time you're seeing things that you didn't see before and in a way you didn't see them before you again you began to take those glasses off and realize that you weren't just reading the scriptures for what they were you were reading them through a lens of your tradition and even the kind of lens that says Matthew 16 you don't even need to worry about right I'm you and go there because they only tell you why you just don't go there and or Matt or John 6 right you just skip it it just wasn't part of it you know if you have a building campaign you read Nehemiah you know you have things that you go you always go through the epistles of course and and it was just things that we we missed and so we continued to pour over our Bibles at every stop and and we were listening to Catholic teaching all along the way where by the time we finished our roadtrip we'd listen to more than 30 hours of Catholic teaching on everything from the Eucharist to marriage to contraception and we were absolutely blown away with what was there and and what was there was what we already knew what we were familiar with what the Scriptures only we had seen it through a completely diff lens and and it was shocking and because you knew if you pursue this it's going to mean the end of our the life as we know it in this in the same way we were very connected with our church all our friends were from church we were involved in ministry my mom would lose her mind and yet if that's Christ if he's present and he has founded a church and it is there today we are obligated to follow him regardless and and since we believe so strongly in the inerrancy of Scripture we had to follow what it says well let me ask you me interrupt you rudely sorry you and your husband both love scripture as well as our Lord Jesus Christ and had a view on all those verses that you would have heard in those CDs from these speakers you never heard of before you don't know them from boo what was it about I mean because you could probably pick up a CD somewhere by somebody who had interpretation of the scripture that you would listen to and immediately said well that's a bunch of hooey right but these guys there was something about it that you two were finding at least maybe it wasn't completely convincing yet but at least you were open to what was different about what they were saying well I think first off it's just grace you know that God allows our hearts to be opened as we continue to seek Him and he says if we pursue him if we ask and seek and knock we'll find him and so first off it's not attributed to us as much as the grace of God and and were grateful for that and I think the second thing is that what they said was compelling but compelling in a literal sense that it wasn't reaching for something it was very plain in in the text this particularly in Matthew 16 and in John 6 where it talks about the authority of the church and then also the Eucharist and if those are true if Christ founded a church and it's there and he gave it the power to bind and loosed in heaven which means it has to be true because nothing unclean can enter heaven then we have to figure out how to come in line with that and not the other way around and one thing I was suspecting is like I said you could have had another CD by somebody explaining away those verses where you take a verse like John 6 dad says unless you eat my body and drink my blood you have no life within you that's what it says right so you could have somebody taking that verse but but explaining it away as opposed to what I found compelling about those same kind of CDs is they weren't explaining it away they were just saying this is what gets absolutely and and it's a completely different experience all of a sudden you're reading something for what it says and not for what it might have said if someone else was in charge and as you said as if it through a lens right yeah and and it's and it was very shocking to realize that as much as Baptist looks down on Catholics for following blindly among tradition it's exactly what I was doing myself and I was reading all of the scripture through my through my tradition only I didn't realize I was doing it yeah especially that that whole once saved always saved lens has to take so many scriptures and explain them away or ignore them it really just has to and and I don't want to be critical of those that are in that theology but you get caught in it and you just like your husband have the audacity to even hint at challenging it and yeah well let's pause there Noel and I just want to remind the audience that if you're interested in reading Noel story it happens to be called magnet of truth and it was printed in one of our coming on network newsletters and you can go to our website CH Network dot or we can find her story as well as many others we're back just a moment for the rest of Noel story [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest is Noel Culbertson and I've rudely interrupted you and your journey solicit let's get back into it all right so we get home from our road trip after listening to all this cowboy teaching and we think we have we have to we're obligated to the truths that continue to look into this so we begin scouring Catholic bookstores and finding we found the early church fathers we got introduced to and at that same time I got introduced to GK Chesterton who helped my conversion move from merely an intellectual assent to the scriptural teachings to this joyful ingenious journey into the wonder of the church and God's creation and how we live this faith out in an ordinary way and so I begin reading Chesterton I was introduced first to orthodoxy and moved rapidly through anything I could get my hands on as we're entering the church and I'm following his own conversion process through that into the church and and his wit and his wisdom makes sense to me you know that the church isn't simply just a dry set of regulations which I had never felt in my in in my history and yet you know as people look at and go all the Catholic Church is so dogmatic and you think no Chesterton says in his his book on conversion he says Adam and Eve lived in a Garden of a thousand mercies and the one inhibition was the greatest mercy of all and anything that the church asks us not to do is a great mercy and all we have to do is to seek to understand it and and I found that such a beautiful gateway to understanding what the church taught but we're Baptists oh of course we're primarily studying the scriptures and and the interpretations of them as the plain text begins to say and the church has interpreted over the years and so we go for several months on our studying my husband and I before we thought we should really attend Mass at some it's it's so backwards from a sacramental understanding of things but that's how we came to know the Lords of the Bible so we but we knew what a wave that would send a shock wave that would send through our community so we thought well maybe we'll slowly back out of the church and we'll go to Mass one weekend to the Baptist Church one week and just slowly back out of our ministries so it wasn't so painful for my mom and and my sister's husband worked at the church and and it was complicated and so we settled on a date to go to our first Mass and at that point I told my mom and dad separately and my dad gave me a little thing he'd written up on understanding the mass what you were seeing when you walked through and I told my mom and at first I thought well that went better than I expected she was very oddly calm which within about an hour turned to hysteria she came back to my house and was shouting and was very upset and I said well we were just thinking about it at this point we haven't even been to Mass we're just we're just thinking about it and and considering coming into the church based on what we've read well we went to our first mass and we sat in the front row because we were Baptist and we were committed which is good and bad you can see what's going on but you cannot see what is going on and we had I had never been to a liturgical service before so I'm sure I was left standing when everyone else was seated but I wasn't super worried about it and the responsorial song came on and it was if today you hear his voice harden not your heart and and we were so primed by this point and understood what the church taught that that you're seeing the Scriptures come alive in a new way and you're hearing God called to you through the liturgy and following that that priest gave is Holly and it was just a priest who show beamed holiness somehow and you could just see it in them and during his homily he talked about Cortes and his men coming to the Americas and they got off the ships and encountered hardship after hardship after hardship and they wanted to go back and Cortes burn the ships and they had to go on and he talked me related that to the life of faith and I leaned over to Stan and said I think our ships are on fire and then came the Eucharist and we watched as people from every walk of life every race every you know so many ages and demographics and they all walked up and received the Lord and I looked over at my husband and he was weeping and I said are you are you okay and he said I'm just watching the room fill up with Christ and we never went back you can't I can't when you encounter Christ present and it was a singular grace of that we don't have that at every mass but but there it was the singular grace that God had given at that particular moment as we were entering the church and then the firestorm began my mom was furious she started going to counseling so she could go get a handle on it my mom was not someone who could make nice if things were she however she felt was on her sleeve and and and it was a really it was difficult cuz we were very close and she thought it was an absolute betrayal for for us to come into the church when I knew what it had cost her when my dad became Catholic and my grandma became Catholic in between there and you can discount one person and you can discount two people but now myself and my husband came into the church and our kids were baptized Catholic and now her whole family she feels is turning against her and it was a time of a lot of suffering and and and you and I you know you're sympathetic to to her because of how she sees things and they doesn't see it in the same way and her experience with the church was through her parent who weren't great examples of the faith and and you associate things oh and we can't help but do it and it's a great reminder to us as Catholics to remember that we are that person for other people and yes you couldn't even rejoice or at least accept that as you had as a denominational thing yes good for you dad but not for me she couldn't allow herself to rejoice in her husband's decision and your decision in your husband your husband's decision your and saying well okay that's I rejoice for you this is helping you come closer to Christ good that's good for you doesn't have to be for me but she couldn't even get there no it was it was absolutely if they're if you're once saved always saved the one way you can lose your salvation is to become catch okay at least it showed that you didn't have an authentic conversion in the first place there however that would have been worded but it was a real struggle for my mom and we came in at the Easter Vigil and 2011 and RCA and all they said we did they and they offered to fast-track us after we met with the priest and we declined because part of coming in line with the church was coming in line with her schedule and her calendar and that it wasn't about just getting what we wanted when we wanted but entering into the calendar of the church as well and and the forms of the church and that was we had not been a part of that so it was important to us that we that we moved through that process and so the following we went on my mom was furious she didn't speak to me very often because when she did she would yell a lot and so she just withdrew and the following January after we came into the church my dad found out he needed a transplant it was fifty nine and ten days later we found out my mom had a brain tumor and it was terminal and so all of a sudden my otherwise healthy parents and my mom who was not speaking to me moved into our house and we took care of them and when you think you have forever to work something out you take your time and when you realize you have six months to figure it out a lot of healing can happen in a short amount of time and and I thank God for the grace of conversion because before that we had no place for suffering or at least not in the same way you had platitudes for suffering but you did not have you didn't have a real means of taking on suffering and so we began to offer those sufferings up and and to connect those with the cross of Christ and throughout that process of taking care of my parents we got closer towards the end of my mom's life and a few weeks before she died it was laying down and chatting with her and she said well I have something to tell you I can see that you're experiencing Christ in the Catholic Church which I thought was that was a long way for my mom to come and I was so grateful for for that and and then she gave me a sly smile and said I just don't know why God would do that and yet for someone who doesn't just say things it said a lot she she understood that cry we were experiencing Christ in our life and the then my dad died and three weeks later my mom died and but in that right before my mom died my mom had grew up Catholic and she was confirmed and we were brand-new Catholics I had never been to a Catholic funeral and I was planning my dad's and the next few days when I knew my mom was close to the end my husband said I I really think that we need to have your mom anointed but I don't know if that's okay so you talked to the priest and he said the priest is coming over at this particular time and I said great except the Baptist pastors gonna be here at the same time God was good and staggered the visits but he the Baptist pastor would known my family for 20 years and who loved my parents and came and he couldn't read the scripture to my mom because she was unconscious he prayed for her but couldn't pray with her he had nothing to offer in that moment of you know of human experience you know that of death and and he left in a few minutes later the Catholic priest who had just come to the parish the week before we didn't know him from anyone and and we knelt along around the bedside and the church had something to say when there's nothing to say and something to do when there's nothing to do but because otherwise it's just they're going to a better place don't be sad they're going to be with Jesus and he thought but there is a place for suffering even Jesus wept and it was so beautiful and was such a stark contrast in that moment side by side to experience that and then as the the following October so a couple another month later after my parents passed away I was at my grandparents house and my grandpa asked if that or CIA thing was still going on yeah it is and he said I've never in my life needed something bigger than myself to deal with something and with the loss of my son I need something bigger than myself and my grandpa was baptized at 84 years old and came into the church and and he said it was it was a it was a beautiful experience to be together with my grandparents and my parents and and so and I thought back to my mom's devotion she had a devotion to Our Lady as a kid and said the Rosary had a little shrine in her closet and I was thinking about it as I went on I thought all those now and at the hour of our death now when at the hour of our death and that my mom's childhood prayers could have had a peace in our conversion so that at the hour of her death she was close to the arms of the church and then as and then that following December we were at the Christmas midnight mass and and you celebrate this high Feast of the Incarnation of God God coming to man and connecting with us and the very next day I was at daily Mass and it's the feast of st. Stephen the martyr so you go from the high of the Incarnation to the low of the first martyr and that's life and that's conversion these grace is infused through the process of conversion and this you know this joy make with the sorrow and yet neither are in vain and even the calendar of the church speaks to the human heart and our experience with Christ and you know scripture talks often about especially second Corinthians talks about that we're comforted that we might comfort comforted that we might comfort it and I think as you look back on your life you see ways in which the Lord had prepared you in unique ways for how you can comfort others now that you've come into the church absolutely and and and it continues on and we begin to see that the network of the family is is something much deeper than than we had even anticipated in our faith intersects with every area of our life and and there and that it doesn't matter if someone is hostile towards you God calls us to love them and he doesn't matterr of all of when my mom first found out she had a tumor the readings about Lazarus and the rich man we're at daily Mass that particular day and and I was thinking over it and afterwards and praying and I thought we don't have to look far for the person that's outside our door God provides them and all we have to do is offer ourselves back to serve that person and we know ourselves that often the person we throw out there is a is a shield over what's really happening inside so even all those years of your mother's antagonism was covering up maybe what was really she was struggling with on the inside absolutely and that that connection with her own family and that and and how do you reconcile this real experience she had outside of the church and as a Catholic we have a place for that and and and thanks be to God there there were movements towards that and and so much of that timeline being sped up through her illness brought about the reconciliation of that relationship GK Chesterton played a big part in opening your heart to the church did he continued have a place absolutely I am a nearly full time volunteer of Chesterton society of the society or Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his spirituality has been a huge part of my continuing on in my in my lay spirituality I suppose but he continues to be my jovial and genius guide through the life of the church and recently the Chesterton society put out a book about conversions that were connected to Chesterton and I had my story in that book and Chesterton is such a great way to encounter the truth he had an influence in CS Lewis's life which is how I encountered him in the first place it was mentioned in in CS Lewis's own conversion story that Chesterton was the first person who made Christianity makes sense and so he is a was a great launching pad for for me and he explains things and that you always knew but never knew how to articulate and and he brings a way of saying things that you just couldn't say on your own and yet are so obvious and and so I had spent a lot of time working with the Chesterton society and trying to connect other people with him I I host a local Society in our area as well and work to connect other people with Chesterton as well as a Catholic mother and wife looking at through Catholic lenses how do you look back on on your pregnancy your first pregnancy I look back on all that as an absolute grace we named our daughter Tori Grace because of all the graces that came during that time and and as much of a picture of confession it was a picture of the Grace and the mercy of God and the Catechism talks about in the beginning that the beginning of the knowledge of God is to understand where we stand in relation to him and I had always been a pretty good kid and hadn't had a real experience of that and it absolutely provided that for me and humbling of my of my of me and but I look back and I think what would my life has been without her and she's in college now and there isn't a day that goes by that you think I wish she wasn't here and it also gave me an understanding of that kind of the temporal punishment for sin and that I was forgiven obviously and I carried her to term and I raised her and I loved her and yet someday I would still have to tell her how she came about and then she has to struggle with that sense that my parents didn't plan for me and it was something I knew I would have to do and yet there those things kind of hang on and and help you to understand why do these effects of sins hang on even when we're forgiving because all of our our actions have consequences and yet God works through all of those things to bring about healing in our life in the lives of our kids and the lives of the people around us all right we have an email Sharon from Georgia she writes I am relatively a relatively new convert and my husband and I have been wanting to know how to involve our young children in our faith and how to immerse them in Catholicism in a beautiful and appropriate way we weren't raised in the church ourselves so our starting from scratch so to speak what was work what worked well for Noel in creating a Catholic culture within the home well first off it's not exactly easy to find your way into a community inside the Catholic Church or at least inside the mass because it's not a fellowship it's a sacrament and so but what I began to do is attend daily Mass I brought my kids with me to daily Mass I homeschooled so that was easy to do and I began to connect with other faithful believers that were daily communicants and they were of all ages but it helped me a lot because I didn't a background with a Saints I didn't have a background with liturgical life in inside the home I just had no connection with that and these people that daily Mass were a huge help to me and then connecting with Catholic homeschool materials that was was very helpful because as I taught my kids I learned and it was very helpful to me yeah I mean there's some things that Catholics have always done that newcomers you know didn't have mm 101 at some point in their life to know you know even rosary I mean how was that for you and your husband and our lady that whole it's not a part of your back absolutely and there are first we went to our first mass and that after mass someone invited us to a Catholic conference that was the following weekend and we headed up to this parish nearby to go to this conference so we had been to one mass and the following on Sunday and the following Friday we showed up and I had no connection with the church I didn't know how it worked so I called him up ahead of time and told him where we were coming from and they said we'll make sure somebody meets you and we'll get you connected so on Friday night I had dinner with Tim staples from Catholic Answers just by chance he was one of the speakers and the people I had called had made sure that we had dinner with him yes so that was said God just provides and so we tripled the number of masses and set our first rosary that weekend and we had never said the Rosary hadn't really looked far into it my husband struggled a lot more with Mary than I did I came to the authority of the church and if that's what the Church teaches about her then well I just gonna figure it out even if it's not easy it was a lot more of a struggle for him but that first rosary and the first in the beginning my husband prayed the rosary with Psalm 23 on every bead took him a long time to say the Hail Mary at first but even just beginning kind of a prayer of repetition that brings us into the presence of God was a new experience and it helped him along the way and prayed for the grace to understand that he went what was the hardest barrier for you and your husband if there was a really difficult barrier to get over I mean you had your family issues in that but anything else even within the church er I mean for you confession was opened up because of your experience yeah and we really once I crossed the the idea that the church was the church that Christ founded you know a lot of the other things fell in line fairly quickly but I would say the isolation of coming in to the church from a very close community before we met with a priest when we when we were talking about joining our CIA and I said well are there ways that we can get involved in the parish and he's I said Bible studies anything like that and he said no not really the Catholic Church just operates so differently and and now like I said what about about your integrating with your children I would tell someone come to daily Mass and begin to experience that and connect there is a place to connect with people they typically have a little bit more time and we we developed what the staff at our church calls our convert Protestant or president convert parking lot ministry where we stand out in the parking lot and visit with people after mass and and to begin to kind of create some of those connections that that all of us need and and that the mass isn't set up for because that's not what it is but we still needed as human persons and I would say that isolation was was the largest thing we lost all our friends and my family wasn't speaking to me and we were very alone at that time and I also think that so much a part of your life were Bible studies absolutely you come into the church and they're just not readily available which is sad because they should be even and yet daily Mass is a daily Bible study and that's why to me that was that was the connecting point because the daily Mass became my Bible study if you would let's assume for a second that there's a Southern Baptist watching you right now what would you like to say that Southern Baptists about their why they should also make the same journey you've made because you love the scripture and you love Christ and you love that he came and died for us and desires us to be close to him and he offers that in a larger and fuller way without losing anything that you already have you gain all that he left for us and it's worth it because what isn't worth leaving for the sake of Christ no well thank you very much for joining us on the program sharing your journey our blessings on your husband look at your husband's name Stan Stan that's right Stan and give him on the show some time to share his own journey and and of course all your family thank you so much and God bless you and your continued use offering of your service to the church as you come into her presence thank you and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do want to remind you again she almost opened the door for an infomercial because she talked about the the struggle that people can have when they come into the church and connecting and having fellowship and knowing what to do and as suppose if you want a Bible study or something and that's not available in the local parish CH network.org is our website but the coming up Network its goal is to stand beside people on the journey both on your way in and then when you've arrived and as you've continued in the church the coming on the network wants to stand beside you to help you understand what God is calling you to do and how God is calling you to continue to use your gifts you want to find out more about our work please go to our website CX network.org so god bless you see you again next [Music] [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 22,935

Rating: 4.8988504 out of 5

Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01671

Id: IzQG6oQjNHE

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019