We are blessed, here at Our Lady Star of the Sea, to have many converts and re-verts to Catholicism. Below are stories of parishioners from Star of the Sea and their journey home to the Catholic Church.
My name is Michael Jensen. I am a prodigal son from the Lutheran faith tradition who came Home to the Catholic Church twelve years ago at the age of 42. For those who are not Catholic, I hope these words inspire you to be curious about the Catholic faith. For those who are already Catholic, I hope they inspire you to take a second look at the great treasure you have and value it more profoundly.
There were a lot of outside influences that brought me Home to Christ and His Church.
As a young Lutheran boy, I remember the first time I entered a Catholic Church. One day a friend of mine took me to visit his parish Church, and I distinctly remember feeling the presence of God there. I sensed something was different between the Catholic Church and what I had in Lutheranism.
My mother's patient love during my young adulthood was a significant influence in my life. As a young adult, I became distant from the Lutheran church and from God in general, due to my anger and growing addiction to alcohol. Years later my mother helped me seek recovery from my alcohol addiction, and through AA I restarted my relationship with God.
Significant steps toward the Catholic faith came for me, when I met my Catholic wife. Before the wedding, I promised the priest I would raise our children Catholic, but I never promised him that I would raise myself to be a Catholic. For fifteen years, my wife prayed that one day I would change. Her prayer was answered, and I entered the RCIA ministry. During my journey Home through RCIA, I intensely came to know Mary’s intercession for me and to experience God’s mercy and love through an RCIA day retreat and the Sacrament of Confession.
The book The Prodigal Son by Henry Noen was another influence. It really opened my eyes to the mercy of God, and I came to accept His great love for me.
Coming Home to the Catholic Church has brought abundant blessings into my life and into the lives of the people in my immediate family. At the time of my powerful conversion, I received God's infinite mercy and love, and came to know the peace of being united to Christ. In the book The Prayer that Heals, Francis McNutt recommends family members personally forgive one another for whatever wrongs they have done to each another. I decided to do this with my own family. There was a lot of tension and resentment between us. It was time to forgive as Christ taught. One by one, I asked forgiveness from my wife and my children. As a result, a greater peace and love reigned in our home.
In addition, my youngest daughter had a dramatic, positive change in her poor attitude toward learning. A special parent-faculty conference was held to ask my wife and me a surprising question, "What happened, what did you do?" All we could say in reply was, "Prayer. We started praying the Rosary as a family."
And, my marriage was renewed through the Catholic ministry of "Marriage Encounter." This ministry taught me to recognize Christ’s presence in my wife and to love her without limits.
Out of gratitude to God for all His goodness toward my family, my wife and I are actively building the Church as lay missionaries in the Philippines. My wife is from a small town in that country called Ungale on Biliran Island in northern Leyte. In her town we decided to renovate the small chapel as an act of gratitude to God. We are currently constructing St. Mary’s Catholic Center to help catechize children, parents, and adults in the Faith.
The most important effect the Catholic faith has had on my life is my relationship with God. As a new born Catholic man, daily prayer tuned my ears and heart toward my relationship with Him. During an RCIA day retreat at a Benedictine monastery in San Diego, I clearly heard an interior voice say, "Come to me and have a daily conversion." This revelation made me aware that I could not stand by idly in my faith and rest upon my powerful conversion experience if I am to become holy, perfected in Christ, and enjoy the fullness of life God the Father wants for me today and for all eternity. This is why the Sacrament of Confession and Reconciliation is such an important gift from God to me. And it is just one of the many gifts He has given to the Church to help us on our journey.
God continues to invite me - and all of us - to have a daily conversion, to grow in our relationship with Him, to know His love and mercy for us, to receive Graces that increase our capacity to love, and to live selflessly out of love for God and neighbor. The depth and richness of our Catholic faith open up before us, as we participate in parish Church life and in ministries.
Say, "Yes" and respond to Jesus' personal invitation to follow Him.
Lee Anne Martinez
Lee Anne's journey into the Catholic Church began at the age of three when she first encountered the Blessed Eucharist in the Tabernacle at her neighborhood Catholic pre-school. God graciously placed practicing Catholics in her life, as teachers, roommates and friends, who lived their faith openly and shared with her what it meant to be a Catholic. After marrying a Catholic (no surprise!) she began studying in earnest what the Church taught and was confirmed in 1988. Her journey continues and Lee Anne is grateful to God for all His blessings and looking forward to what He has in store for her.
Listen to her entire story of coming home to the Catholic Church.
Bob Struble
Along with many of my peers in the 1960s, I was caught up in the diversions and distractions of a tumultuous culture. Among the casualties was my own Catholicism, harbored since my early childhood but now cast like torn pages to the winds.
Postmodern America of that day reminds me of what they used to say about the French Revolution – like Saturn devouring his own children. It seems to me that kids growing up in today’s culture face even worse snags and more malicious snares.
In any case, my situation was like Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” God pursuing His prodigal son. Late in my college years, through two Jewish friends, He sped me “up vistaed hopes” to explore the Scriptures; first of the Hebrew canon, then in 1970 the New Testament. The clincher was John 5:39-40. Christ put me on my knees for the first time in eight years. At Midnight Mass, that Christmas, I came home to Rome. And yet several months went by in which I fled spiritual discipline. At last, in June 1971, I walked into the confessional.
The screen opened. “Well, let’s just hit the main ones,” said Father understandingly, after I revealed “… it has been eight years since my last confession, and these are my sins.” Oh, the gratification I felt after emerging from St. Anthony’s Shrine that day in downtown Boston! Words cannot describe my soul’s elation. I can well remember walking back to my room on Bowdoin St. and the timely encounter on Tremont St. with a joyful parade marching for some patriotic occasion.
From those years on Boston’s Beacon Hill, to my home today with my family in Bremerton WA, my journey with God and His Church has been enriching spiritually, and sufficient materially. Though on many levels I feel alienated from American politics and culture, Jesus strengthens me through the Sacraments, especially Holy Eucharist, to fight the good fight. I go against the flow, and try to lead my family to do the same, lest my children and grandchildren run afoul of what entrapped me five decades ago.
Pilgrims like me, you know what it’s like to go astray. Welcome home!
Ann Milos
Ann returned to the Catholic Church with her husband after nearly 20 years away. Listen to her story of coming home to the Catholic Church.
Glenn Stockton
Only About Six Inches
My childhood background is from the Regular Baptist denomination. I was “saved” at six years old but rebelled against both of my
parents and God in my teenage years. Although God gave me a Catholic wife and family, I continued to reject His offer of Grace.
God worked on me in many different ways through the years. But when He did, I couldn't share with others about these holes He was punching into my fierce dedication to agnosticism. Doing so, would have been tantamount to abandoning it. But at last - one touchstone moment compelled me to stop digging the hole I had dug for myself any deeper.
On Wednesday morning, June 20th, 2001, at about 7:15 AM, God once again reached out to me. This time, I finally reached back. Earlier that morning, my then sixteen year old daughter Lindsey and I were on our way to pick up the car her older brother Aaron had left in the parking lot at the North Kitsap High School Tech building. He'd left it there the night before and caught a ride to the airport for a national conference in Virginia. After dropping me off, Lindsey was planning to go to St. Olaf to substitute for Aaron during his 6:00-7:00 AM Holy Hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament. (St. Olaf had just begun Perpetual Adoration a few months earlier.)
On the way to get the car, Lindsey asked me if I would like to accompany her. I was a little surprised at the invitation and asked if it was okay for me to go into the Adoration Chapel, since I was not Catholic – indeed, I wasn’t even Christian! She said she saw no reason why I could not do so. I was a bit curious and agreed to join her. I spent the time reading a little from the Bible and simply enjoying the quiet and peace afforded by that time and place.
When our hour was complete, Lindsey asked if I would like to go with her to Starbucks – or as we now refer to it "St. Arbucks." The sun had just risen on one of those crystal clear mornings that is permeated with peace and clarity. I agreed.
As we sat sipping our drinks at a small table, Lindsey shared with me some doubts and struggles she was having with her own faith: how she felt some of the Church’s teachings were difficult to believe, and how some of the trappings of Catholicism seemed to her audaciously and unnecessarily rich in adornment and expense.
At forty nine years old, looking back over my life since turning away from God in my teens, I knew what my loss of faith had cost me, and those around me. I heard, in Lindsey, an echo of my own doubts, and the confusion I felt for so many years. Desperately, in that moment, I did not want my past to become her future.
I looked at her intently, and these words came from my mouth - “Lindsey, I think that you should believe what you can, and trust God with what you don’t yet understand.”
Has God ever borrowed your mouth? For me, the words hung almost tangibly in midair and did not dissipate: “Believe what you can, and trust God with what you don’t yet understand.” I hoped, with my whole being, that my words would be meaningful to Lindsey; and they boomeranged directly back into my own heart! The thought, “Isn’t this the advice I failed to follow, so many years ago?!” filled my mind. The realization that it was, opened the floodgates to God's Grace.
Lindsey and I continued our conversation, but I remember little of it - except for that moment and those words. God used my mouth to grab me and bring me back to Him. What a great gift of God’s Grace I received that morning!
When I arrived home, I immediately looked for, found and devoured Mere Christianity, the classic book by C. S. Lewis. Alan, my oldest brother, had given it to me in my late teens, unfortunately well after my faith had waned. Through the years, and countless moves, the pages had become deeply yellowed and musty as they sat unread on many bookshelves. Now, as I finally opened the book and read from it, I became more and more excited as the seeds of faith that had been planted in my childhood at last began to take root and grow.
Having been “Born Again” into a Catholic family, I wanted to learn what it was my wife and children believed. The RCIA program, books, the internet, and especially KBLE 1050 AM (Sacred Heart Radio) were instrumental in this. I entered the Church at Easter in 2002.
I can’t say it is always easy – it is not. But after more than thirty years of looking for God in all the wrong places, I am overjoyed to be an active disciple-in-training of Jesus Christ.
In 2001, after years of only sitting and standing in Mass on Sundays, I finally found my knees before the Lamb of God. As I leaned forward toward the kneeler for the first time in my life, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the distance from sitting in disbelief to kneeling in adoration was only about six inches — about the same distance from my mouth to my ears.
Rebecca Jordan
Rebecca Jordan has been a parishioner of Our Lady Star of the Sea since 2005. At 17 years old she left the practice of the faith because of her disagreement with the Church's teachings on human sexuality. Listen to her story of coming home to the Catholic Church.
years ago at the age of 42. For those who are not Catholic, I hope these words inspire you to be curious about the Catholic faith. For those who are already Catholic, I hope they inspire you to take a second look at the great treasure you have and value it more profoundly.
casualties was my own Catholicism, harbored since my early childhood but now cast like torn pages to the winds.
