Jennifer Fulwiler - From Atheist to Catholic - 2015 Steubenville DFC

you as much as I wish my book was number one on all of Amazon it is number one in the humor section right now so I will take that it's called like living among scorpions and I notice it is three o'clock now what did father Gately tell us we're supposed to do let's say it all together now here the three o'clock hour Jesus I trust in you I can't think of a better way to begin a talk so thank you so much for joining me in that it I love this conference I am so excited about this conference in particular because it is so focused on the truth finding objective truth not just how we feel good about what we believe not just our experiences but why do we believe what we believe that that is something that really appeals to my little nerds heart as you'll see in my talk my dad very much raised me to be a truth seeking person you know he would ask me questions like when I would talk about how neat it was that people have landed on the moon my dad is the type of guy who would say well why do you believe that how do you know some people say it was a hoax how do you know it wasn't a hoax and of course he didn't think the moon landing was a host but a hoax but he wanted to give me that kind of training he very much instilled in me this desire to know what is true to ask tough questions to question assumptions and to always seek the truth even if it is inconvenient and I always warn atheists be careful about that because your kids will grow up to be Catholic if you raise them that way so so I can't wait to get into that story but I think what you'll see as you hear my story is that is it is the story of someone who was obsessed with knowing the truth finally found it but found that there was one thing she did not understand about the truth and it's the most important thing that you could ever know so I can't wait to share all that with you let's get started let's start at the beginning I never believed in God when I was younger once not even when I was five years old I didn't wonder if there might be a god I didn't feel anything in my heart a strict atheist materialist worldview just seemed to me like it was obviously true and and I very much inherited this way of thinking from my dad my dad is an engineer his father was an engineer got that great rigidly logical way of thinking now my and he was an atheist he he is well actually he says he's agnostic now so pray were we're moving in the right direction he's the kindest man ever takes my kids to all their activities he is a good-hearted man so so please say a prayer for him but at the time he was a staunch atheist he had done a lot of research in his own life he did not get the answers to the questions he was looking for about belief he didn't have access to wonderful conferences like this one so he became an atheist but he always said that he was not raising me to be an atheist per se as much as he was raising me to seek truth and question assumptions seek truth no matter what even if it is inconvenient for you that was kind of a motto of my upbringing now my mother was not an atheist she is what philosophers call a may seus and that is someone who is more concerned with whether Macy's has an additional 30% off this weekend than whether there's a compelling case for a monotheistic God my mother is wonderful also just super helpful super generous and she's one of those people who kind of feels like well I'm going to try to be a good person I'm going to try to do the right thing and and I think she almost sees questions of theology as as not relevant as long as you're trying to do the right thing so I always tell her you know you're on the right path just keep it you know keep following that line of thought so I just never occurred to me to even wonder if there might be something else out there I was very much in this mindset of you only believe things for which you can find evidence it seemed dangerous to me to believe in things for which there's not evidence I mean I know this podium exists because I can I can feel it I can see it I could weigh it measure it but the idea of believing in something that was just kind of out there that you couldn't experience with any of the five senses it just kind of seemed like well how would you even know that was true how would you know if you weren't part of some church that was manipulating you into believing falsehoods so all my life I was an atheist and I really came to embrace my belief system in college in college I started out at Texas A&M you might have heard of that University is there an Aggie in here did I hear a whoop all my gosh we've got some Aggies all right now now Texas A&M it is like the Steubenville of Texas full of Christians full of Catholics bad place to be if you are a militant atheist and the Christians down there we're doing their job well because I transferred it was just too religious I could not take the religious talk anymore so I ended up at the University of Texas in Austin and I looked around and I said ah atheists yeah this this is more like it this is the culture I'm looking for so being in that kind of environment really helped me embrace my faith or lack thereof and looking back I am so glad you thank you Jesus that this was just before the internet really broke and people could have blogs and put their opinions out publicly because my understanding of my own atheistic worldviews in worldview and my friends understanding oh it was just embarrassing some of the things we would sit around and say I mean I I rely remember having discussions like saying oh those religious people are so stupid what about suffering why would a loving God allow suffering that they never thought of that one I mean there really was so embarrassing we were asking the most basic questions in seriously thought that in two thousand years we were the first people to come up to this as 19-year olds who knew everything and it in a perfect way to summarize this is if you ever want a laugh if you ever want to read just the most fabulous brilliant little essay you need to look up the London Review of Books review of Richard Dawkins God Delusion now you know that book that's the book that your seventeen-year-old atheist nephew keeps telling you you need to read it's something of an atheist Bible and so many people say that oh it just it just demolishes religion oh he just he just nails it in the archive read the book it's it's unbelievable I I thought that I would do a series on my blog showing where he was wrong but in every pair every paragraph you need to needed to be addressed he confused Protestant Christianity with Catholic beliefs oh that I mean to use the popular phrase that thing was a hot mess and that that is modern atheism in a nutshell I mean throughout history there have been some atheists that had some arguments that are worth dialoguing about but the new atheists have none of them so anyway the London Review of Books they get a hold of The God Delusion opening line first thing they say some of my favorite quotes ever they say imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the book of British birds and you have some idea of what it feels like to read Dawkins on theology but that was me I mean that was absolutely me I was no better than Dawkins I had all these half-baked ideas and it could see I was the product of this education system of the modern education system which teaches children facts but it doesn't teach them how to think it doesn't teach them it doesn't help them distinguish between the different disciplines it doesn't tell them things like if you want to know the approximate number of galaxies in the universe that is a question for science but if you want to know why the universe is here at all if you want to know why something exists instead of nothing that is not a question for science that is a question for philosophy but me and all of my new atheist friends we had no concept of that and we were seriously steeped in this culture where we honestly thought that the scientific method is how you know everything if you can't prove it materially objectively through the scientific method it must not be true we were a very lost generation so to fast forward a bit I started to work as a programmer at a high tech company and that is where I met my husband my husband is a really smart guy he grew up poor so poor in fact that I mean his mother often didn't know how she was going to put food on the table they very often they couldn't even run the heat in the winter well now it was Houston so it wasn't that bad but he was very poor and she had heard of these places like Harvard and Yale and no one in her family had gone to college I mean she didn't knew much about it but she had heard that if you go to places like that you won't be poor and that is all she knew she didn't even know where they were but she knew they existed somewhere and that if you go to places like that you won't be poor and so this is the type of guy my husband is she told him to go to schools like that and he said okay and he ended up going to Yale undergrad graduating in three years Columbia Law School Stanford Business School and studied in the master's computer science program at Stanford while he was there because why not and he had this amazing network of people he was actually he had an opportunity a possible opportunity that if it had panned out he would have been employee number 16 at a little company out there in Silicon Valley called Google I but but if he had taken that job he would not have moved to Austin which is where we met and I always tell him honey who needs billions of dollars when you have me and depending on the day it's more or less a comforting thought so so he's obviously a really smart guy so we met at a high tech company and and so to fast-forward so we got married and one of the things I learned we had a completely secular ceremony I was really into this idea that we lived in a post-christian culture we weren't going to have anything related to Christianity at our wedding and we rented a theater we weren't even married at our own wedding cuz I had to make a statement about how the state can't tell me if I'm married married or not it was very complicated and you know here's a little tip if you are ever thinking about reinventing the wheel on a thousands of year old tradition you might want to rehearse it first we were too busy planning the after party that ended up lasting for 12 hours so it's good that we spent so much time planning it we didn't rehearse our own ceremony and Joe he knows people from everywhere he had people fly in from all over the world but our ceremony because we wrote our own vows and we didn't rehearse it it only lasted seven minutes we had people from London from Africa and they were thinking like we flew across the world for this and I wore a dark purple dress and as I was walking out what am I one of my Tex and relatives and his cowboy hat said where's the bride disaster so it so again the lesson is if you are going to reinvent the wheel on a thousands of year old tradition just make sure you rehearse it first so so we got married and a little over a year later we had our first child and I hadn't really been thinking of questions of theology at this point about atheism about anything like that it I I I'd kind of put it to the side and this is something this is kind of an arc that you see and a lot of young atheists they're really into being atheists when they're in college and then they kind of get a job and they just you know they don't care as much anymore so those I just really gotten into this blasé attitude about anything having to do with faith but then it all came bubbling up again when my first child was born because you know it's one thing to mess up your own life it's one thing to make mistakes in your own life but when you have a kid you really want to get it right and it occurred to me that you know I'd had some questions about the atheistic worldview that I had never really explored and and I was still pretty sure it was right but I started to think that maybe I should just make sure it's right before I pass this along to my own child and then and and then just the experience of being a mother had such an impact on me you know something to understand is I grew up in very secular circles where you know babies were just not a part of the mix I mean I I never had a friend growing up never who had a baby in the house I don't think I ever had a friend who had more than two siblings certainly no more than two siblings living at home so I had kind of disconnected from that side of the human experience I mean I think in the back of my mind I didn't know where new people come from I kind of thought that like they all come from from a cloning room at the back of Starbucks and they walk out with their wire-rimmed glasses in their latte so I mean having a baby was like well I was really kind of knocked off kilter by that and so I looked at this child when he was about two weeks old and I and I thought what is he in a strict atheist materialist worldview not borrowing from spirituality not borrowing from judeo-christian tradition not what I wanted him to be what is he truly in in the belief system that I claim to profess that's something that my dad always trained me and he says follow your beliefs to all their logical conclusions don't flinch really think through them so I looked at this baby and asked what is he in the atheist materialist worldview and I looked down at him and I said oh he is the most precious little randomly evolved set of chemical reactions that came from nothing and will return to nothing I was like this is just false I don't believe that this is true the love that I felt for that child was so real in it wasn't that I just wanted it to be real that this was a mother trying to impute more value than it was actually there I knew that the love that I felt for that child came from some external source to the chemical reactions in my brain was real in the sense that if the whole world blew up tomorrow that love would be there and would still exist in some sort of eternal way I knew that more than I had ever known anything in my life and that was the first moment that I was no longer in atheist so I knew what I didn't think was true I didn't think that the atheist materialist world B was true the problem is that I didn't know what I did think was true so I I thought okay so I'm not an atheist anymore so what does that mean and I thought well okay so I guess I believe in some sort of spirituality but you know I didn't want to take that too far so I thought I thought I would do something crazy and say a prayer now I'd seen this in the movies and you know I went to Texas A&M for a while I mean I'd seen people pray I was aware that this is a thing that is done but I had seriously and I'm in my late 20s at this point I had seriously never said a prayer in my life and I didn't I had all these questions these really nerdy analytical questions like well how do you go how do you know when you go from talking to yourself to talking to whatever might be out there I mean is there like you go like is this thing on testing testing I mean I don't I really didn't know and so I said the lamest prayer anyone has ever said I just basically said if anyone or anything is out there things plural I'm in Austin I want to be open-minded here I'm open to hearing from you now and then I said Amen because I'd seen it on TV so then nothing happened my room was still silent there was no mysterious knock at the door with a message I mean look I had seen the hallmark movies I had even occasionally seen some like Christian specials and if I knew one thing about religion I knew for sure that the moment you first say a prayer things start happening I mean I frankly I would have expected a chorus of angels some lights bare-minimum though crazy coincidence you know like someone walks up and hands me a Bible which would have been weird if I was in my bedroom and it was like 2 o'clock in the morning but still hey this is prayer it's supposed to make amazing things happen so I just said well there you go God doesn't exist so that's that was easy that'll move me on to the next phase because obviously if a loving personal God exists and wants me to know him he would have responded in some way so I looked at it like well I I tried to call and it went to voicemail so to speak so I can check that off the list does does a personal God exist who cares if I know him no so moving on so I live in Austin so of course I started dabbling in Buddhism you're required by law to dabble in Buddhism for at least 3 months in my city so I you know I started reading those books and then it's totally out of the blue and one of the crazier coincidences of my life I was in a bookstore and I happened to come across a Christian book now this was unlikely for a wide variety of reasons one of them which is I had never been in the religion section let alone a Christianity section of a bookstore or library in my whole life with one exception when I was in the fourth grade I took all the Bibles from the religion section and I moved them to the fiction section in what was the edgiest prank the entire fourth grade has had ever seen I was Vince so just so randomly I come across this book the case for Christ by Lee Strobel and I couldn't put the thing down now wait I need to jump in and say something here usually when I named that book and people know I was lifelong atheist converted to Catholicism they've got out their smartphones they've got it on one day shipping to their atheist son who's in college it's important to note notice I'd said that prayer it was a really lame prayer but I had said a prayer a few months before I could have come across this exact same book and I would have laughed at it and thrown it aside just a few months before so I was in a state of openness nobody will ever encounter the truth if they're not open to it so it's important as I say what's next that you understand that I was in a state of openness so I'm reading through this book and it really caught my attention but I'm still in the bookstore and I had to go and I thought I can't I can't buy a Christian book what if someone sees me I mean I know people in this town but I'm kind of like hiding it behind my back in case anyone I know is here and and I I walked away and then I walked back into us I have to get it so I go up to the the checkout and and then and other people started coming up and I'm trying to get this book and so I knew what I would do I loudly said to the cashier I said I'll need a gift receipt for that cuz that is a gift I have a friend she's a Bible person I don't know gift receipt in that bag I need it really need it so I take this book home and I read it cover-to-cover and it wasn't that it was perfect there were some chapters at least Strobel wonderful guy he's a Protestant pastor even now there are some chapters like especially about Authority and issues that you know they're not perfect but he said at the beginning of this book he said my goal is not to convert you to Christianity on the spot my goal is simply to get you to see that this is worth looking into that there is enough of a historical case for for Jesus Christ being who he said he was that you should explore it further and I'll give you just one example I mean there are a lot of things that I found compelling about it but to just give you one example so Lee Strobel was interviewing a philosopher with a background in chemistry named JP Moreland in Morland is talking about the the religious and social institutions that have been so important to the Jews over history and Moreland says he points out that you know these Jews believed that to abandon these social structures such as keeping the Sabbath holy animal sacrifice would risk their souls being damned to hell after death this is Morland talking now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region he teaches for three years gathers a following of lower and middle class people gets in trouble with the authorities and gets crucified along with 30,000 other Jewish men who are executed during this time period Moreland goes on to say but five weeks after he's crucified over 10,000 Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion and get this they're willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such in have such importance both sociologically and theologically something huge happened in 1st century Palestine and Lee Strobel pointed out when you look at how much these people were willing to sacrifice and how many of them were for this new religion I mean becoming a Christian meant persecution Lee Strobel pointed out that you know people might be willing to die or suffer for things that they think are true but they're incorrect about but you have all these people but but nobody is willing to suffer and die for something that they know is false and yet you have all of these people saying that they are following Jesus Christ and that he is the Christ and that he is the founder of this new religion and they are willing to suffer and die for this and in Strobel said no one would be all these people who claim to see risen from the dead would not have been willing to do that if they were lying and so he takes a step back and says you have to admit that something happened what happened here and he proposed a really interesting theory maybe they really did see Christ risen from the dead so that got me thinking I was certainly not anywhere near ready to convert to Christianity I had all of these negative stereotypes about this religion but it did got me thinking and so I decided to go get a Bible I'd never owned a Bible before I knew nothing about the Bible I I was as sheltered from this book as you could possibly be and live in America today and it caused me no end of embarrassment when we moved around a lot I moved it I lived in the Bible Belt many times in different places and sometimes my parents would let me go to Sunday school with little friends not even though they didn't agree with the religion they were not going to get up early in the morning after I'd done a Saturday night spend the night so I ended up at Sunday school and I remember one time that I always knew to use the line that when they asked where I went to church I would say something vague like oh it's a it's a country sure yeah you wouldn't have heard of it it's but I do definitely go to church and one time the sweet Sunday school teacher took all the books of the Bible and did a game where you can put the books of the Bible in order and she said why don't we let our new visitors start oh I had no idea but I thought I could have I thought I could make a pretty good guess like numbers would be in the beginning because that was probably a table of contents now I had heard of the names like Matthew Mark Luke and John every author knows that you start with your strongest character at the beginning so I went from numbers Matthew Mark Luke now there's some big words I didn't know so I put them at the end Revelation would probably be first cuz you know you kind of want to start with a bang so she looks at this list of the books of the Bible and she leans down and she said honey where did you say y'all's family goes to church again I knew nothing about the Bible and even in college I intentionally avoided courses that were that would talk about the Bible even from a historical perspective because I was into this idea that we live in a post Christian culture and it's irrelevant so I skipped all that so I get my first Bible and you know I'm a writer I like to write and I know good writing skills so I thought that you know I'd always heard that you should introduce your main character no more than 20% of the way into the book that's a big writing rule now Jesus he's the main character of the Bible I'm expecting him to come in about page 30 so I'm reading through it I had also through these Bible school moments I had picked up through cultural osmosis there was something about their fishermen and they sang songs and there was bread and wine that was also in the Bible so I am in Deuteronomy like whoa whoa in the 9000 the army was wiped out and I'm like where are the fishermen this is crazy and I was driving Joe crazy cuz it J Joe would come home stressed out from work and I mean he'd say oh he has some problems and I would say Joe have you tried sacrificing a bird over a clay pot in dipping its blood and yarn and hyssop it's in the Bible I'm reading the Bible I think I know so Joe took me aside and said stop New Testament that's the New Testament and so and so oh that's what I was missing and now I'm gonna you know by this time I'd really felt something with this Jesus person I felt like I was getting close to something real and so I opened up the New Testament it was a list of names like just a bunch of names in light and then you get to the end and it's like some guys dream and then I I was waiting I wanted a bulleted list of like here are the reasons why we believe what we believe and there should at least be a strong call to action at the end like if you are convinced by this testimony then here's what you do next and it's like some vision like I don't know what to do with this I was I could not have been more confused and and so then so I thought okay I'm going to stick with this though so I'm reading the New Testament I did not see a clear case for what I knew to be the traditional Christian moral code abortion euthanasia the death penalty I did I just didn't see this spelled out anywhere and so of course I turned to the Internet like a good nerd and I and I would ask people on the internet like why did I am not seeing this and they would say well you know you need to read the new tech that the New Testament with the entire Old Testament so that you know how to interpret the Scriptures in concert with one another and then it also helps if you have a biblical encyclopedia and a biblical dictionary some reference materials and I wanted to say don't you guys have jobs because like I I have a little kid here and my husband works all the time and like when is it that you think that I have time to become like a PhD in sacred scripture like I this is this really the system that God wanted to hand us and by the way guys this is not a system that works without the printing press none of it biblical in in concordance and encyclopedia those are all great impossible for the average person to have before the printing press I think I once read that it took monks something like 2,000 hours to hand copy a copy of the Bible they were very expensive and so I said you know the printing press was invented in the 16th century but how on earth could people ever come to know Christ before that especially that they were out working in the fields you know they didn't have time to read the Old Testament in the New Testament but the biggest thing that concerned me is when I would ask these Christians what they believed everyone like what the moral code is every single person seemed to give me a different answer but they all had scripture to back up their case and so some some Christians would say well we don't like abortion but it is necessary sometimes and you Tunisia's okay as long as it's compassionate death-penalty you know what I could gonna go either way everyone had scripture to back up their claims so here was the problem as someone who was totally unfamiliar with this religion what I wanted to say to the Christians was I need a very fundamental question answered here and that is the question of who is Jesus Christ you guys are telling me that I should be part of this religion and so I need to know who is it that you want me to follow because let me tell you that Jesus Christ over here who says hey man whatever y'all want to do is cool marriage whether however you want to define that that's cool abortion contraception death penalty I you know really just as long as you feel positive things in your heart I'm down with it that is a different Jesus then the Jesus over here who calls us to the very highest standard of love for our human for our fellow human beings who says that marriage means a very specific thing because it is the protector of new human life and it is the protector of human love who says that we must respect all human life from the moment of conception until natural death that is a very very different Jesus than the happy-go-lucky Jesus over here and I could not get a clear answer from modern American Christianity about which Jesus I was supposed to believe in now meanwhile I had started a blog because that is what you do when you're a huge nerd and you're having an existential crisis I did not have a lot of Christian friends oddly enough couple decades of being a loudmouth militant atheist does not leave you with a wide social network of devout believers so I thought maybe I could find some Christians on the Internet kind of an interesting side note my blog when you start a blog you don't have any readers so I've recruited people to come talk to me I went into some really heavy heavy atheist forums and and I would find people there were tons of Christians but I hand-picked 10 or 15 who did an amazing job of just demolishing atheist arguments it was embarrassing for the atheists they knew more about history than the atheist they knew more about science than the atheist they knew more about the human experience and again this was a small percentage of the Christians on there but I said these guys have something that's real and I want it so I emailed them individually I would find out later - a man - a man every single person I had identified as being able to demolish atheist arguments was Catholic but at this I didn't know that I didn't know that at this time because I just started the blog so I had those issues of not knowing who Jesus really is so I go back to the blog and I said guys I I hate to tell you this but I have got some bad news your religions totally bunk I'm sorry it's you know I've been investigating it can't get a clear answer on your moral code can't get a clear answer on who Jesus is so you know there no one knows how to interpret the Bible everyone it's like their own personal book that they like project their personality onto and say it's from God this is a disaster so there you go and I kind of thought they would be like well that's a great point does anyone know where the nearest Buddhist temple is can't argue with that but they came back and they said something really interesting they said what if before Jesus returned to heaven he founded a church one church that he instilled with his own authority what if he did with this church what he did with the writers of the Bible and that he took fallible imperfect people and used them to convey infallible perfect truth what if he's promised to stay with this church to the end of the age so that it could speak truth to all cultures in all times in all places and I heard that and I said this yes this theory makes so much sense this explains how people could do Christianity before the printing press this explains how illiterate people could come to know God that was another question I was wondering when people were telling me about in biblical encyclopedias and concordances and reading the whole Bible I thought the world literacy rate is only 80 percent and that is much higher than it's ever been in history like how do illiterate people ever know who Jesus is so this explain this this idea of this living church it explains how illiterate people can come to know God people without free time to read the entire Bible this makes so much sense yes yes yes and they said that's the Catholic Church and I said no no no don't you what what are you talking about I can't become Catholic I mean obviously it's it's archaic it's patriarchal it oppresses women I mean you name a bad stereotype about Catholicism I had it so I said no no there's no way I could become Catholic and Joe he was so Joe was at the time that we got married Joe was kind of a lukewarm very much fallen away Southern Baptist and so he had all the anti-catholic stereotypes and so he'd been kind of following along sort of amused with all of this and so he he when he when he saw this turn of events I mean this was just I had just gone off the rails and he said you know it's bad enough that you've been messing around with this Catholic stuff and now you're messing around with these Catholic Internet people you need to you need to take a step back but I said to him I said Joe I don't have anywhere left to turn because this is the only theory within Christianity that is even possible and I said I I think I am on to something with this Jesus person I can't explain it but I feel like there is something there and I have nowhere else to turn but the Catholic Church and somewhat reluctantly he agreed and he got on board with me and so we both began researching this we bought all the books we had stacks and stacks of books and it was kind of interesting to see how his questions as a Protestant differed from mine like he was he kept wrestling about the role of Mary that day that just made so much sense to me from the very beginning not that I wasn't sure if I believed all this but I said look let me tell you this Joe so God the creator of all the galaxies and all the stars and planets in the whole universe so if he can't if this is true that he came down to earth then that means he got to choose his own mom don't you think she'd be pretty special in the one true church you think maybe yeah Marian devotion boom easy but I had I did I had different issues that we had to work out but the big thing for us was the most controversial issues of the church abortion contraception when we realized that the church was right on those issues I mean we could not have been more shocked I was always militantly pro-choice I donated to Planned Parenthood I was as pro-choice as you could possibly be I didn't even know you could be pro contraception I thought it was an urban legend that anyone was even anti it so so when I read the Catholic catechism I was shocked that even the stuff that I was most certain that I would disagree with it just made sense and it was the most internally consistent belief system I had ever seen and when I read it when I found out what Catholics actually believed Joe and I both agree we had all these different perspectives but we both came together on one thing we looked at this and we said it's like we have discovered the owner's manual to the human soul whoever put this together whoever put this body of wisdom together knows us better than we know ourselves so this was the final thing I had been looking for all along I had been wondering as I was getting closer and closer to the church I thought well how would I know if it's true I mean this theory makes sense and it all sounds right but this is this is a big leap to become Catholic I mean how would I know if this church really were guided by God and what I had come to as I said I would need to see something here that humans cannot do on their own I would need to see the fingerprints of God somewhere and when I saw this moral code that was so reviled by the world in so counterintuitive yet was so perfect and it was like everything that had been written on the human heart just poured out and clarified and when I saw that this church has been teaching this same truth never reversing itself saying the exact same things for 2,000 years after Empire after Empire has fallen away around it I said here is something that humans cannot do on their own I had found the fingerprints of God so Joe and I both became Catholic at st. William and Round Rock Texas that is still our parish today we both became Catholic at Easter Vigil 2007 and that's where the story should end right you become Catholic and then you don't have problems anymore in life is easy like that's kind of what I expected frankly I mean seemed pretty cool like gods on my side now so we've been I know the truth so wolf boy I'm glad all that suffering is over with Oh little did I know so right before we became Catholic I mean a few weeks before we became Catholic I got a deep vein thrombosis here in my right leg that is a blood clot in a major vein they are very dangerous it was in my second pregnancy it turns out that it was caused by a blood clotting disorder that makes pregnancy very dangerous for me it makes it likely that my that my blood will clot when I'm pregnant it is a rare disorder it is an inherited disorder and I inherited it from both parents and the hematologist when he diagnosed me he kept there was kind of this look on his face and I think he was trying to find a delicate way to ask did your parents meet at a family reunion there's something you're not telling me I mean nobody has two copies of this gene so it's it's really crazy and it's again it the big thing was that it made pregnancy just a mess so first of all treating this issue that I had it was enormous ly expensive we were self-employed had really bad insurance and then also just the the stress of going through all that and so we we were just kind of in a bad state we also lived with my mom Joe was starting a business it was just a really rough time and so then in my first lesson as a Catholic that God's timing is somehow sometimes different than your own our third child was on the way just a few months after my second got here and this was I had barely healed from the deep t oh my doctors I thought they were going to kill me with their bare hands I mean they they just they thought they just thought it was so crazy but we did we were able to manage this condition with this blood thinner the trick is the blood thinner costs a thousand dollars a month and that is that's my insurance covered it that was my portion it is outrageously expensive I mean you could like buy I used to think of what what else I could buy for that money so we had been wiped out from the last pregnancy we still lived with my mom there weren't even there wasn't really even room for me and Joe to live with my mom so now bringing a third child into the mix it was it was a low time for me I was so stressed out about money we were on the brink of bankruptcy and I bet I thought this is it did so I guess Jesus was serious about all this stuff in the New Testament about how you're gonna suffer if you're a Christian oh this is lame I thought it was gonna be I didn't think he was serious about that cuz I know I dread all this stuff but ah cuz you know the Lord had had really called us into this life of you know we used to live downtown and drive a Jaguar and all that and the Lord seemed to be calling us away from that but I'm saying this this is miserable this is hard I am NOT happy I do not like this this Catholic life thing so at that time I was kind of trying to pray in my own bumbling way and I just told the Lord I am miserable and this is too hard and I don't think I can do this frankly and so this quote came to me and it's one of those things I just I read it somewhere someone posted it on the internet or something and it was I don't know if you've ever had a moment like this but I just I knew that these words were what the Lord wanted me to hear right now it's from blessed Elizabeth Hasselblad and she says dear Lord I do not ask to seek the path in darkness in anguish in and fear I will hang on tightly to your hand and I will close my eyes so that you know how much trust I place in you spouse of my soul as I reread those words and again I can't explain why but you might have had a moment like that I knew that they were the Lord's words for me what he was saying was close your eyes let me do this you have been a control freak your whole life it's time for you to have a rest but here's the thing this idea of trusting the Lord in a real way that I'll just tell you that is not what I signed up for I thought that being Catholic was like you know the truth and you follow the rules and you have less free time on Sunday trusting God in a real way for a lifelong atheist that that just sounded crazy that just sounded irresponsible so I so I told God I was actually in the adoration Chapel I went to the adoration Chapel and I said I don't know how to trust you I don't even know what that looks like but I'll just tell you this here are some problems I'm having God and you can tell me what I'm supposed to do about them I don't have a house I don't have a place to live II you know what that's like that ii-i've nowhere to go I can't afford this medicine that I need to save my life and frankly even if I did have a house we used to live in a loft downtown I don't have furniture for a house so there you go I know that you know it's not supposed prayers not supposed to be like an ATM machine you know you get exactly what you want but I didn't know what to tell the Lord other than what I needed the next day I go to the pharmacy to get my thousand dollar prescription but I realized that morning I didn't have money couldn't afford it we just barely didn't qualify for financial aid programs sometimes the people at the pharmacy if I looked pitiful enough would take mercy on me and give me some samples so I went down there and I gave this girl my name I said I'm Jennifer full Weiler I have a prescription and I was about to say but I can't afford it do you have any samples and she just starts typing and says that'll be $30 and I said no but unfortunately I've been through this a lot it's not $30 so double check and she said now I see it right here it's $30 so I got my full prescription walked out for $30 week later Joe and I were driving through the neighborhood happened to see a for sale by owner sign that had just been up had just been put up a few hours before it was the perfect house for us it is the house we still live in today we got it so cheap from this owner who just wanted to get out of there the mortgage company made us sign an affidavit swearing that we did not have a previous relationship with the owner because it was so cheap they couldn't believe that we got it for that price furniture I did I told god I was like I need a coffee table a sofa a refrigerator and lawn furniture hey you want you want me to close my eyes I mean all right close mises what I need my dad got a job overseas had a bunch of furniture he wanted to get rid of asked if we needed any of it two of the items included a sofa in a coffee table my mom who had not known of my prayer said she was sick of her fridge had wanted to get with it rid of it could we take her refrigerator the owner just of the house who we bought the house from just before he left he said he was going to a condo where all the yard stuff was taken care of he left us his entire suite of lawn maintenance stuff as a gift every single prayer was answered and because I'm me I was like Lord was that from you i reaiiy really I was like well I mean it could have been coincidence I mean you know atheist training coming here so I said Lord Lord visit I mean I don't want to be irresponsible I mean did are you telling me that I can trust you because you know you've only answered 50 prayers in a row because I'm really not sure with this prayer on my lips saying Lord is this your sign that I am supposed to trust you I went back to that same pharmacy I went to pick up my prescription Oh yet another answered prayer is we got new insurance that would fully cover my medicine for only a $50 copay so from a thousand dollars a month to $50 a month but the new intrat the new insurance would take effect in like two weeks so I thought while I still had the old insurance that was now for whatever reason thirty dollars I would just save twenty bucks I'll go down get my thirty dollar refill before the fifty dollar plan started so I go down there same pharmacy and I go to pick up my prescription and the guy rings it up and says oh that's expensive Wow poor year that'll be a thousand bucks and I said and I mean it was okay because again the new entrance was about to start but I said no this it's thirty dollars I know we've been through this you'll see last time it was thirty dollars and he did some typing and and I said look look look up when I was here last time I got this stuff for $30 he typed some more and he looks at me and says ma'am there is no record of that transaction now the takeaway here is not that God just gives you whatever you want under the Sun I mean because if it were I've been telling God I have my eye on the iPhone 6 and if he wants to continue this role the takeaway is not that you give give the Lord of your shopping list in the cute it's like Amazon you know just sends everything to your doorstep for me what that answered prayer was was letting me know that I can trust him because before that moment I had thought of being Catholic as an intellectual endeavor like you might decide to become Republican or Democrat or libertarian I had Zaman the issues and I had come down on the side of Catholicism and that's all it was and what I learned with what happened in my life there is that Jesus Christ is a person and that the truth that I had always been looking for is not just a concept but is a person and that is what I want to leave you with here at the conclusion of my story the biggest thing that I learned through this crazy conversion it is the most important lesson in the world but it is so easy to forget and that is that the truth is not a concept but it is a person the living person of Jesus Christ who is with you and will take an active role in your life and he will help you in anything you go through and until you understand that you will never fully understand the truth thank you

Channel: Steubenville Conferences

Views: 83,297

Rating: 4.8425617 out of 5

Keywords: Steubenville Conferences, Catholic, Franciscan University, Catholic Ministry, New Evangelization, Youth

Id: BU5EAFbVXzk

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016