Convinced Ep. 7 - Jeff Cavins

growing up catholic i was a what i would call an average american catholic boy in the 1960s 1970s and that is that we go to church every sunday we uh we say grace before meals we say hail mary and our father before we go to bed go to confession a couple times a year and outside of that there was really no discussion about our faith and no no family attempt to go deeper to explain to the kids what what this was all about so i really didn't know my faith very well at all and uh as i look back and as i discussed this with my my friends that i grew up with they didn't either you know we just were kind of along for the ride and i think that the idea on our parents part was that if we're along for the ride it may be 18 19 20 we'd get our own catholic car and keep driving and i didn't in high school i kind of lived two lives one was the the athlete the boyfriend of a popular girl in school and going to the parties you know after football games and on saturday night finding out where the parties were and that was one side of my life and i mean i wasn't a real bad kid or anything like that but on the other side there was this hunger and i think that that hunger was opened up because i was a reader and since i was in fourth grade i started reading a lot of books and adventure books and biographies and and i was interested in the world and i was interested in in truth and i was interested in religion and i didn't talk to people about it that much my best friend didn't know my girlfriend didn't know but i started you know in my junior year of high school reading maybe sophomore year reading books on eastern religion meditation i read the bhagavad-gita the tibetan book of the dead zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance all these books back then that were were very very popular the road less traveled and uh and i i i truly was seeking a truth and not thinking all that time that i was sitting on a gold mine it actually never occurred to me that what i was seeking was where i was living and that was the catholic faith and so as a young man i began to to venture out and to look into other religions [Music] i did go to the parties and i would sit there at the parties and i'd watch people drink and watch them get drunk and a lot of times i didn't do anything i didn't drink anything i just sat there and watched them and i didn't watch them from the perspective of entertainment i i watched them from the perspective of um curiosity as to what are they looking for what is this all about there's got to be more than this and i remember right before i ended up having this powerful conversion experience at 18 years old i was i was working at a college newspaper in fact i was the editor and one of my jobs as the editor was to interview rock groups and so just weeks before i had this powerful conversion experience i was in parties with steppenwolf and three dog night and and interviewing uh kiss and heart and backstage with major groups you know emerson lake and palmer and i remember one specific moment when i was with kiss behind the stage and listening to them talk to each other i thought to myself and i still remember it very clearly they're not happy they're searching and so all my friends thought it was very cool to be a part of this scene and what what they didn't know is what i saw and that was they didn't seem to be very happy in fact they seem to be running also from something [Music] right around my my my senior year of high school i started reading more and more books on religion my friend and i were going to go to california i had gone to the state championship in a stand-up comedy and i was looking to go to california my friend wanted to go to california for acting and he went he went out there got as far as the dating game and the gong show and and i stayed back in minnesota thinking i'm going to get some prerequisites out of the way and then i'll go out to california maybe go into school acting school or something like that i wasn't really quite sure and i stayed back at a junior college and became the editor of the paper and it was my second semester i was in a cultural anthropology class and on the first day of the class this this young lady walks in her name was emily she's my wife now and she walked in i thought ah she's just so beautiful and at the time i was reading michener books about the south pacific and these dark girls with big brown eyes and curly hair and i thought there she is and i couldn't stop staring at her and i ended up after about two weeks of staring at her getting the nerve to say hi and she said hi walked by me and she didn't think anything of it and i followed her after class to the student lounge and i struck up a conversation and found out a little bit about her background she didn't say anything about god to me at all and she didn't know and my friends didn't know that two or three times a week i'd go to the old catholic church in my small town and i would sit up in the balcony and i'd look at this tabernacle with this red light next to it and stare at it and just ask god reveal yourself to me whoever you are just show yourself to me and it was in that context that i met emily and i ended up calling her and asking her if she wanted to go out with me and she said immediately no like matter of factly and i thought well no why and i said why not and and she said well i have to babysit a neighbor kid you know tonight i thought okay well maybe let's go out later in the evening and she said well i gotta i gotta do my hair and uh so she was brushing me off but i i was persistent and little did i know she was teaching a class to baptist uh junior high kids a class called how not to go out with unbelievers now back then i looked i suppose like an unbeliever even though i think i look like everybody else at the time well finally i i pushed the issue and she finally said yes so that night i drove over there and uh look a little different than i do today i drove over and i had i had white bell bottoms and i had a yellow silk shirt and i had hair down to down to here with a bandana and i had in my back pocket some pictures of myself with kiss and i thought i would impress her mother so i went to the front door and rang and her mother answered the door and saw me and kind of gave me that look over like who are you and i stepped inside and while i was waiting for emily to come down the stairs i i told mrs tobler that was emily's mother i told her i said as i passed her the pictures this is what i do you might be interested first thing she thought when she looked at him is there's no way you're going out with my daughter no way at all and she was a bible teacher actually for a women's group called women's aglow very popular women's group well she went upstairs to tell emily you can't go out with this guy and she said she got halfway up the stairs and the lord spoke to her heart and said let him go he's going to proclaim the gospel and so we we went out in the car and before i could get the engine started this five foot two 104 pound little beauty looks over at me and says do you know jesus christ as your personal lord and savior i've never heard anybody talk like that before nobody's ever asked me that before certainly not in the catholic church on sunday morning you know and i didn't know what to say so i said yeah mean i'm catholic and about a minute later she said she came from a pentecostal family she said do you speak in tongues i didn't know what she was talking about i never heard that before in my life and i didn't want to disappoint her so i said yeah as a matter of fact i do and i couldn't figure out what she was talking about but i knew it was something spiritual so about two more minutes go by and i wanted to ask her a question but by then i was a good catholic growing up i didn't know what tongues was i wanted to ask her but i couldn't remember if it was tongues or lips i knew it had something to do with the mouth it could have been gums for all i know so i took a chance and i said so uh so do you uh you speak in lips and she started laughing and she realized that i didn't know anything of what i was you know claiming that i knew well that night she shared with me about her relationship we went bowling of all things and a little different than steppenwolf and three dog night and kiss but she started sharing with me that night about her personal relationship with christ and i never heard anybody talk like that and something about the way she talked and the affection she had for jesus really spoke to my heart and i realized that what she was talking about was what i was searching for in all my books on the eastern religions and meditation and and all of that she was the message she had and was living was what i was what i was looking for and so over the next uh several weeks after school i'd go over to her house and her mother would sit at the kitchen table and open up an old school bible and begin to talk to me about a personal relationship with jesus now at that point i'm not thinking at all anything like well this isn't catholic or i got to leave the catholic church or this is foreign i just thought here's a family that's really serious about this and i i'm not familiar with that and i like what they're talking about make a long story short it was just a few weeks and i was leaving her house and going back to my folks and i was about a 11 mile drive and i got about halfway home and i pulled over on the side of the road and i just started crying and i was 18 years old and long hair went to all the parties had backstage tickets to all the major rock concerts went and i was empty and i was empty and i didn't have answers and i pulled over and started crying and i put my my head down on the steering wheel and i just said jesus i said i want what the toblers have and there was only two words that i recognized that they gave me one was born again and the other was saved and those weren't words i grew up with and i said those words and i said god i said i want what the toblers have i i want to be born again i want to be saved come into my life and i just sat there crying and something happened to me and i realized now it was saying yes to my baptismal you know promises as a baby when my parents had me baptized life in god began then and i was i was i was affirming that work on the side of the road but i somehow felt that something new had happened and i can't tell you why but i know in my knower that from that point on i was going to be spending my life telling people about jesus christ night after the this this conversion experience on the side of the road uh i went home and my mom and dad were still up and i walked into the front door and i think my mom could tell i'd been crying and she said what's wrong and i said mom you're not going to believe it and i thought truly that my mother would be so excited to know that that her 18 year old son she didn't have to worry about him going to parties or driving his motorcycle drunk or anything else that his life had changed and i said mom you're not going to believe it i said i've been born again and the look on her face wasn't what i expected and she said you what i said mom i got saved tonight i gave my life to christ and i'll never forget what she said she looked at me she said don't you say that she said you've been a christian since you were a baby and i said mom i don't know what happened when i was baptized as a baby but i know that tonight i've given my life to christ and that began a divide between my parents and myself which lasted for years and it got broader and broader and in fact i got to the point where my parents uh told me they didn't really want me talking about the bible and talking about jesus when i would come home because it was causing it was causing division but from that point on i couldn't stop reading the bible and i went back to college and i sat outside of the room on the floor in the hall and opened up this bible that i bought and i just couldn't stop reading it and i knew that i wanted to go deeper into it and i started to look at the possibility of going to a bible school [Music] after a month or so of this experiencing this conversion experience i uh i felt like i really wanted to go to a bible college and i wanted to commit myself to learning the bible and teaching people and that somehow i would be some kind of missionary or evangelist for christ now on the on the other hand my parents are expecting me to go to college and to become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that i'm not quite sure i'd always been interested in television and radio and the possibility of uh of acting so the the idea that i would go to a bible college did not seem to fit in to the those plans or the plans of my parents and i started to investigate and i found one in dallas texas that i wanted to go to and i remember telling my parents that i wanted to go to this school and they weren't super happy about it because they they kind of looked at it as well you're squandering your time and you're squandering your money you could get on with your with your life i remember the night before i left it was a difficult night uh probably one of the most difficult nights of my life i was in my room packing my bags it was 18 gonna be leaving home for good and my dad came up in my room and he said uh he said jeff what what are you doing why are you doing this and i said dad i just want to go and study the bible i i just want to give my life completely to christ and he says how are you going to pay for all of this and i just looked at him and i said i said dad god will provide and i don't know what it was if it was the way i said it or if it was built up pent-up emotion in my dad but he kind of lost it he he came at me and he hit me and i fell down and i was there on the floor of my bedroom and i started crying and i just said why why does it have to be like this and he left the room and i uh the next morning got my bags ready and i'll never forget the look on my parents face as i drove away my mother crying and that's how i left home and i went all the way to dallas texas went through school there and came out of there went back to minnesota and went through broadcasting school and i got my first job in valley city north dakota at kovc radio at night time as a disc jockey and it was there that i left the catholic church officially and formally and i did it in grand fashion i uh i screamed at a bishop publicly i was very angry i was angry with my parents i was angry with my sisters i was angry with with everything catholic you know i didn't it just didn't seem like catholics were serious about their faith or serious about studying the bible we're serious about evangelization and i went to an open service where bishop driscoll from fargo came over and he just answered questions from the people in the diocese and i raised my hand and and he he noticed me and said yes young man and i stood up in the middle of the church packed and i began to talk to him how frustrated i was my parents didn't seem to receive this new relationship with christ and didn't seem like there was a place for me in the church and i got so angry talking to him that i started trembling and my poor wife we didn't mention that we got married uh prior to that she was wondering what's what am i doing what's jeff doing and i finally i just yelled at the bishop i said i said i have had it with the catholic church and then i clapped my hands together stomped the dust off my feet and i looked at him and i screamed from this point on i am not catholic and i got up and walked out of the church and as i was walking out i heard the sound of one man clapping and i turned around and it was the bishop and he said young man i want to talk to you later and i said i don't know and i left there's a good catholic growing up at that point i couldn't sleep that night you know i thought for sure i'm going to hell you don't just scream at a bishop and then dance into heaven you know as a catholic and i couldn't sleep and i was friends with the with these charismatic nuns outside of town and i thought i've got to go out there i drove my motorcycle out the next morning to tell the nuns why i did this because they witnessed it and little did i know they told bishop driscoll don't go back to fargo stay here in the priest quarters he comes out every morning he's a good good young man talk to him so i knocked on the door the next morning and guess who answered the door it was the bishop and i just felt the blood drained from my head and he goes come in we sat down he said i want to hear your story i began to tell him my story of why i left the church and the conversion experience i had in bible school and you know seemed to be no acceptance at home about this he says he says listen i want to tell you three things number one the journey you're on is of god i said well hallelujah i didn't think there was anybody that would say something like that you know in the church and the second thing he said was he said i'm going to call you little newman i didn't even know what that meant i had no clue i thought he was talking about al newman from mad magazine like i'm funny or something you know and uh and he said do you remind me of cardinal newman he said you got that drive for scripture he said number three he said you mark my words one day you'll return and when you do you'll teach your people and i looked at him and i said i don't think so i got up and i shook his hand and walked out and that's how i left the church my parents were not very happy about it to say the least it was shortly after that after leaving the church i i ended up in radio and i ended up going to iowa in christian radio in pella iowa and it was there that i really had the the bug to go further even further in my studies with the bible and uh i was out at a a damn red rock dam outside of pelham iowa when a guy came up to me that was in a church that i was going to and a open bible church open bible standard and he came up to me said he said have you ever thought about teaching scripture and i said well i don't do really well in front of people i get really nervous and he said you've got a gift you need to pursue it you need to seriously pursue it and it was shortly after that that i went to florida went back to school and came out and i became an associate pastor in the local church and then later was ordained and took on a church in minnesota and i started a new church in minnesota for seven years and then i was a pastor in five years in dayton ohio so for 12 years this young catholic boy grew up to be a protestant minister in a thriving church an exciting church where we didn't just uh talk about the bible and and praise god but i mean we even taught hebrew we taught people how to read the bible in in hebrew and they were they were good years you know we had good friends i learned a lot and i owe a lot to my protestant brothers and sisters their zeal for the bible their zeal for witnessing their zeal for worship and praise their zeal for home group hospitality a lot of these things i i absorbed during those years and i still to till today i feel like they're very important and i and i owe them something i didn't see these things in the catholic church growing up i saw them when i was outside of the church and i have kind of uh imported them you know into my life today so i was a pastor for 12 years it was probably about the ninth between the ninth and tenth year while i was in dayton ohio that i continued to study while i was a pastor of a charismatic church a very very lively church i had one thing going for me that a lot of my peers didn't and that was i really continued to study in a serious way i studied not only the early church fathers and i had the languages but i also studied a lot of the the current tv evangelists and listened to what they were saying and so my my sermons on sunday were the the result of my study serious study and hearing what other people you know were saying but there was one thing that was always nagging me and that was jeff how do you know that what you're saying is true or is it your own interpretation or is it uh someone on television their interpretation or a commentary's interpretation how do i know that i'm on bedrock how do i know that this is what jesus intended this how do i know that this is the church that he intended as i continued to study in a fairly serious manner the early church fathers i started to notice that there were common denominators and there was there was teaching that was it was was very consistent and uh and i started noticing that the the look of the early church and the content of their teaching did not look like mine as an independent church uh for example there um i started to notice in the early church there was this talk of the bishop of rome uh the pope and i started to to ask myself well you know who today follows that model and my my searching obviously brought me back to the catholic church and i thought wow that's interesting the this al habayit this one who is over the household in the old testament and i knew all about that and i studied it and then i suddenly realized that that's what the catholic church teaches and i don't know if anybody else that teaches that okay so they got something right you know i mean all right but that doesn't seem to be a lively truth today and then i started noticing the emphasis on the blessed virgin mary and i was familiar with the uh the queen mother the gebara in the old testament and the queen mother had a throne to the right of the king she had she had a responsibility she was an advocate and an intercessor on behalf of the people and uh so i thought that's so interesting and that the early church would talk about that and that well who does that today and once again i ran into the catholic church i thought oh boy you know there's two of them and then there was another one with the eucharist which was probably the biggest for me is i realized you know in the old testament you had to take a lamb and you had to you had to roast that lamb and you had to eat that lamb if there was going to be salvation and freedom with the passover and that when jesus is celebrating the passover he talks about his own body and he never mentions anything about a symbol but he talks about eating my flesh in john chapter six and i thought well who who believes that today that you have to literally eat the lamb catholics and then the final one was this concept of the word of god being scripture and tradition i i subscribed at that point to sola scriptura scripture is the only means of divine revelation and i i realized that that's a new doctrine it's only a couple hundred years a few hundred years old and that the early church well in the old testament the jews believed in scripture written scripture and oral tradition they believed it during jesus day and paul believed it jesus believed it the early church believed it but then the reformation that brought about a huge change and that i subscribed to something new kind of a new kid on the block theology and so as i started to put all this together in the early church it was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle you know on a jigsaw puzzle you start with the four edges and as you you put the four edges together everything else seems to start fitting much easier and those those four were the four edges for me as the eucharist the papacy the blessed mother and scripture and tradition being the word of god and as i as i put that in place and framed this world view in the early church i started to see how everything fit and i went deeper in my studies and it brought about a crisis in my life and that was if if the church that i'm pastoring and the message that i'm proclaiming is inconsistent with the first 400 years of the church what am i doing and where did i get it from and that was a crisis i could have ignored it and i could have said you know well everyone else is in the same boat i'm in or i could have said which i did i got a problem and i need to get to the bottom of it [Music] so this crisis came upon me what am i going to do am i going to continue on with what i'm doing with this uh nagging thought of are you sure you're right uh you know how what are you going to do with being inconse you know inconsistent with the early church or are you going to go deeper and start asking more questions about this it was then that i started to talk to my wife and my wife was not raised catholic and i started telling her about the fine findings you know in my study and and that things started looking catholic to me and i at that point kind of resolved in my heart that i wouldn't go back to the catholic church for several reasons one uh i didn't want to give my dad the pleasure uh this is pride you know i'm not going to go back and say you guys were right you know number two i didn't want to cause an upheaval in my own family number three what in the world am i going to do for a living i mean these are practical things that you think about you know at that point but my hunger for the eucharist really got really got a hold of me and i started looking at other liturgical movements that took into consideration communion tradition and i ran into a couple of friends who were part of the charismatic episcopal movement called the convergence movement at that time and i got a hold of them and i went to kansas city to be interviewed by the bishop of one of these groups his name was bishop randy sly and i went down there and i got interviewed to become a deacon in this charismatic episcopal church because i thought well this is the answer i'll do this and i won't have to go back to the catholic church but i'm kind of snuggling up close in some ways you know and they accepted me i was going to go through about six months of becoming a deacon and then i'd be ordained a priest in this organization but i made one big mistake which ended up becoming good i went to the book table and there was a book there by thomas howard called evangelical is not enough i thought what an intriguing title i picked it up i looked at the table of content oh man this is what i've been talking about then like i showed my wife i said this is what we've been talking about i bought it i read it on the way home on the airplane fascinated but i thought he was talking about the episcopal church at the end he says he says i i wrote this book in 19 whatever and i came into the catholic church and i thought what and it really confused me why did this guy i just agreed with everything he said why did he go catholic so i looked up thomas howard's phone number out east and i called him and he answers the phone now this guy is as an academic you have to have a dictionary at your side to listen to him you know he answers the phone and says hello and he said uh thomas howard he said yeah said my name's jeff cavins i said we have a mutual friend there at gordon dr marvin wilson oh yeah marv and i said listen i read your book i'm uh i'm a pastor and i read your book and um i noticed you came into the catholic church yes yes i did how did that happen and he began to tell me the story and i got teary-eyed and i said mr howard the same thing's happening to me and he said it says i got two friends i want you to to talk to that have just gone through this themselves one is marcus grodi and scott hahn i never heard of him i never heard of anybody coming into the catholic church to be frank with you and uh it was during i wrote their numbers down i didn't call them it was during that time that i started sneaking into st mark's catholic bookstore in dayton as a pastor i went incognito and i got all these books you know and the catechism and i found this book by scott hahn that just came out rome sweet home and carl keating had a book and i bought probably eight or nine books and brought him home kept reading and this was built this was my reading that was built on top of the church fathers that i'd been doing for several years and i so i suddenly saw that these guys made the move too and for some of the same reasons that i that i had found and i pretty much had come to a conclusion that god was in fact calling me back but i didn't know what that would mean how do you do that and what will i do with my life you know and what will i do with my wife you know at that point and so i kept telling my wife that i was getting more serious about this and she said well i'm not going to become catholic and neither is our daughter at the time and i said oh yeah it's okay i don't want to fight about it and uh i finally ended up calling uh marcus grodi and i said i didn't know who he was and i told him what was happening and he said well you should talk to your childhood pastor what's he doing now and he said well he's a bishop in south dakota different than the other one bishop paul dudley and i said i don't do too well with bishops and he said he said bishop dudley he's fantastic he said you got to call him and so a couple weeks later i ended up calling sioux falls and i didn't you know i didn't know any better i just called a lady answers the phone diocese of sioux falls i said yeah can i talk to bishop dudley and she said just a minute and the next thing uh on the i hear is the voice of my childhood pastor who would become a bishop he says bishop dudley and i said bishop jeff cavins jeff kavins how are you doing he said your father was robert right i said uh-huh he says how are you doing and i said not bad i am i'm a protestant minister now he said you are how did that happen and i explained to him and i told him what was happening in my life and i said bishop i feel like god wants me to come home he said can you come out here and spend some time with me so i said yes and it was during that time that i ended up calling this scott guy and he he answered the phone and i told him what was happening within five minutes he stops all of a sudden in the middle of my narrative and he says he says jeff he said i just have this feeling that you and i are going to be friends for a long time and i thought who is this and i just had a couple questions to ask him you know well i ended up going out to south dakota and uh it was a a life changer for me to meet with my childhood pastor and for him to welcome me and i told him that i you know i stayed there for two three days and i stayed next to his chapel in a guest room and i couldn't sleep that night and i got on my knees in the middle of the night and i just uh i got emotional and you said jesus i want the eucharist so bad i'm willing i'll give all this up and uh i just want you i'm gonna come back i'm coming back and i made my mind up that night and i left there came back home told my wife and she wasn't exactly thrilled about it and i knew that i needed to tell the the leaders in my church the elders in my church and so i called them up one by one and they were they were a little bit uh relieved i think because they were wondering what was happening in my life because i started teaching differently i started i started having communion every week and one i remember one week we were having communion and without even thinking it all came from my childhood i raised up this piece of bread it was just regular bread of course and grape juice and i said to one of the ladies i said the body of christ and she said amen and crossed herself and i looked at her she was a former uh catholic and when i said body of christ it triggered she did the sign of the cross i thought wow that's powerful well i ended up meeting with my elders one one by one and telling them what was happening in my life and that i had made my mind up i was going back to the catholic church shocked them it disappointed them they prayed for me they bound the devil they did everything possible you know and they thought i was being deceived some of them and i remember one of them said jeff he said listen you'll never make a living in the catholic church and i said i think you're missing something here that's not why i'm doing it i said i don't expect to i don't even expect to do anything formal i'll probably run a 7-eleven or i'll get some other job and maybe i can teach you know in a church at that time there you just you just didn't hear of ministers coming back like that the only two that i knew of were marcus grodi and and scott hahn and steve wood and that was it and so i thought it's over it's over and the bishop said i want you to i want you to go to steubenville and i want you to get a catholic degree this time and i said i will and i told my my wife and she was disappointed but she was just so beautiful and following and saying i'll be with you and i said listen honey i'm not i'm not going to try to force this on you but all i would ask you to do is to read what i read and to be open to what christ wants in our in our life and to be open to church history you know cardinal newman said to be deep in history is to cease to be protestant and that's exactly what happened to me [Music] i had to face another hurdle and that was how to tell my dad how to tell my dad that i'm coming home and that they were right and that was that was difficult that was hard because i had to revisit the wounds and what happened that night and so i ended up arranging a trip to israel and i'd already given my notice to my church and i had two weeks left then it would be on my own and it looked scary and i had one more thing to do and that was to take a trip to israel with dr marvin wilson at gordon college and in my heart secretly i was looking forward to the trip because i wanted him to talk me out of it i wanted to someone somebody to talk me out of this because i didn't want to be catholic but i wanted the truth and there was a part of me that was excited about becoming catholic and there was a part of me that was scared so then my mother came out to dayton ohio to watch our daughter while we went to israel and the night before we left i got a phone call 3 48 in the morning and i didn't answer it but i heard an answering machine in the other room and all i heard was fairview southdale hospital and my mom came running into the room and said dad has had a heart attack i thought oh boy what am i going to do i felt like my world was being turned upside down do i go to israel do i go back with my dad what do i do try to get a hold of him i couldn't get a hold of him he was in intensive care and i persisted and continued to call and finally got a hold of him and his voice was so weak and i said how bad is it dad and he said they don't know and i said i don't know if i should go to israel or come home and he said go ahead and go. he said but do me one favor son watch take care of your mother and your sister sisters and i knew at that point it was serious and um and i made the decision to go home and my dad had a bypass surgery quadruple and when he came home i knew it was time to talk to him and i was at the house and we're all sitting around the kitchen table and i said dad i got something i want to talk to you about and he said what's that and i tried to say it and i couldn't it was like something got stopped up in my throat and i said and i knew i needed to apologize i needed to reconcile and i finally i told him i said i got something i need to tell you uh i've been doing a lot of studying and he said yeah you've always done a lot of studying and i said i uh i wanna i wanna come back to the catholic church and he looked at me and he said you have no idea what this means to me he said as long as i said i said i need i need to also apologize for my anger and leaving and he said he said as long as we're getting things off her chest he said bub call me bob he said i need to get something off my chest he said you remember the the night before you left home couldn't even say anything at that point he said i am so sorry i've thought about it every day all these years i don't know what got into me but i'm so sorry but he said what's really killed me all these years is what you said after that which i had forgotten i said what he said you looked at me when you're on the floor and you pointed at me and you yelled you're no father of mine and i'm not your son and all of a sudden it came back and i got up and i gave my dad a hug and he hugged me and we cried i said i love you it was the first time for a long long time that i said there was a tremendous healing and a reconciliation between us [Music] after the reconciliation with my my parents bishop dudley came to my parents house and formally brought me back into the church they had to actually do some research in the archdiocese of saint paul minneapolis to see if i had excommunicated myself when i screamed at the bishop and the conclusion was that i had not and that all i needed to do was go to confession and so the bishop came to my parents home and on the back porch i knelt down and he heard my confession and brought me back into the church and then celebrated mass that day and during the sign of peace my mother walked over and said i'm so sorry she said we just thought you were getting it growing up and she said all those years when you were gone when i would receive communion i would ask ask god bring my son back because she said i knew i couldn't argue with you about theology and the bible and but she could pray for me and it was a year later i was at steubenville and i was taking courses and i was teaching undergrad scripture and it was a year later that my my wife came into the catholic church with my daughter carly and we all became one catholic family and i'd have to tell you you know since coming back to the catholic church i've never had more fun studying the bible i've never had uh more of a sense of certitude of what i'm studying is right and that i can be certain of it and i've never been more fulfilled and there are things about my my protestant experience that i miss some of the fellowship and the excitement about the bible and uh you know the home groups and things like that but one of the things i found out is that i can bring that into the catholic experience you know i don't have to wait for somebody to do it for me you know i can i can do that myself and as i am a director i'm the director of of evangelization for the archdiocese of saint paul and minneapolis i can create that reality and and and let people experience that life that our protestant brothers and sisters do so well and it's just been it's been absolutely great and since then we have had two more girls so we have three girls now and i have grandchildren and i'm one happy catholic guy

Channel: Convinced Catholic

Views: 39

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: x-zZBo5nX3w

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021