On June 4th, I will celebrate my two-month anniversary as a Catholic.
That sentence still feels strange to write sometimes.
Not because I doubt it—quite the opposite. It feels deeply right. But after years of theological study, ministry discernment, denominational wandering, heartbreak, prayer, stubbornness, and enough church committee meetings to qualify for getting out of purgatory early, becoming Catholic was not exactly a casual weekend decision.
A lot of older Catholics do not quite understand why it took me so long.
Some assume I simply “finally accepted the truth.” Others seem relieved, as though I crossed a finish line they had been politely waiting beside for years. Meanwhile, parts of my Protestant family still ask how I am liking “my church” with the careful tone people use when discussing an unexpected haircut or a questionable engagement.
When I tell them, “Yes, I am happy. I love my church. I love my priest. I love the people. I love Jesus,” they usually smile politely and say, “Well… we just want you to be happy.”
And I know they mean well.
But beneath those words is grief. Not anger, exactly—just sadness. A quiet sense that I walked away from something familiar into something they cannot fully understand.
The truth is, most people do not know what it cost me to become Catholic.
Recently, after Mass, one of the OCIA teachers hugged me warmly and said, “I’m just so glad you finally thought everything through, worked out your disagreements with the Church, and decided to become Catholic!”
I smiled and said, “Yeah, thanks.”
Because what do you say to that?
How do you explain that your journey was never about finally agreeing with everything, but about surrendering to where you believed Christ was leading you—even when it cost you dreams you once held tightly?
People see the destination. They rarely see the wilderness.
And my wilderness started long before I ever walked into OCIA.
Like all things, I suppose it begins with my own Genesis—my beginning.
Psalm 139 tells us we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and I have always carried the quiet sense that God had marked my life for something particular. My parents called me their miracle long before I understood why.
When I was twenty, my mother told me the story.
Before she knew she was pregnant with me, she underwent a cervical conization procedure after doctors feared cervical cancer. Her pregnancy test beforehand had come back negative. Weeks later, she returned to the doctor only to discover she had been pregnant with me the entire time.
I suppose from the beginning my life has carried a certain theme: surviving situations that should have gone differently.
I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, and despite everything I may say about denominational differences, I will never deny the beauty that existed there. Some of the kindest people I have ever known came from those churches. They taught me Scripture. They taught me to pray. They taught me to love Jesus.
But hurt has a way of changing your relationship with church.
Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.
There were seasons when I stopped attending entirely—seasons marked by depression, confusion, and anger toward God so intense that I would sit alone in my house and yell at Him. Loudly.
To be fair, if God can part the Red Sea, He can handle a woman from North Carolina hollering in her living room.
Somewhere in those years, I studied psychology, pursued theological education, discerned chaplaincy, and completed a Master of Arts in Religion with a concentration in Biblical Studies from Liberty University. I studied Scripture deeply—Hebrew, Greek, hermeneutics, church history, ministry formation.
I also discerned pastoral ministry.
And that is where this story becomes complicated for some people.
For years, I genuinely believed God was calling me toward ministry leadership. I wrestled seriously with women in ministry, studied the texts extensively, and defended the idea that women could serve faithfully in pastoral roles. I still believe many women are sincerely called by God into ministry work.
What many Catholics may not understand is this: becoming Catholic did not simply require me to change churches. It required me to lay down an entire vision of my future.
That is not bitterness. It is honesty.
I gave up dreams I once thought defined my calling.
And strangely enough, it was not as devastating as I expected.
Because somewhere along the way, I realized my ministry did not disappear simply because it changed shape.
God was still calling me to serve. Still calling me to write. Still calling me to teach. Still calling me to accompany people in suffering and faith and questions and grief.
The form changed. The vocation of love did not.
That realization brought enormous peace.
What has surprised me most about becoming Catholic is not the theology—I had studied that for years. It has been the reactions from other people.
Some Catholics assume I simply “came to my senses.”
Some Protestants assume I abandoned Christ entirely.
And somewhere in the middle is me, quietly attending Mass, trying to survive conversations about Mary without someone acting like I have personally replaced Jesus with a statue from the gift shop.
Recently, I spoke with someone from my past—someone I will call “Esty.”
At one point, she apologized for hurtful things she had said to me over the years.
“I’m sorry for whatever I said,” she told me. “I honestly don’t remember it.”
Now, Southern women are trained from birth to recognize when words technically qualify as an apology while simultaneously accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Bless it.
Still, I accepted it graciously and tried to move forward.
But almost immediately, the conversation turned toward Catholicism.
“You need to get yourself a solid Bible,” she said, “not a Catholic Bible.”
And there it was.
That familiar assumption that I had not studied enough, had not prayed enough, had not thought deeply enough.
As though nobody with theological training, years of Scripture study, and a master’s degree in Biblical Studies could possibly become Catholic unless they were distracted by incense and stained glass.
For the record, I do love incense and stained glass.
But they are not the reason I became Catholic.
I became Catholic because the deeper I studied Christianity—historically, sacramentally, and biblically—the more Catholicism stopped feeling foreign and started feeling familiar. Almost painfully so.
At one point in our conversation, I told her plainly, “Catholicism has brought me closer to Jesus.”
Her response was immediate.
“What about Mary and the saints?”
It struck me then how many conversations within Christianity are not really conversations at all. They are scripts. People arrive with conclusions already loaded and simply wait for their turn to deliver them.
But my actual lived experience has been this:
The Catholic Church has not distracted me from Christ. It has immersed me in Him.
In the Eucharist.
In prayer.
In Scripture.
In silence.
In confession.
In the ancient continuity of believers who spent centuries wrestling with the same questions we still ask today.
That does not mean every Catholic is perfect.
Lord knows, if perfection were the requirement, half of us would burst into flames walking through the parish doors.
But I have found something profoundly healing in Catholicism’s refusal to reduce Christianity into performance, branding, or emotional spectacle.
I have found reverence.
And after years of spiritual exhaustion, reverence feels like water in the desert.
Still, these first two months have not been easy.
There has been misunderstanding from family, suspicion from strangers, and assumptions from ex-Catholics who think they understand my spiritual health better than I do. Even within the Church, some people warmly welcome me without fully realizing what I sacrificed to stand beside them at the altar.
But perhaps that is part of faith, too.
Not everyone will understand your “yes” to God.
Sometimes obedience looks beautiful to one group and deeply disappointing to another.
Sometimes following Christ means disappointing people you genuinely love.
And maybe the hardest truth I am learning is this:
Faith lived honestly will always be misunderstood by someone.
But even so, nearly two months in, I can say this with complete sincerity:
I am home.
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