"Eternal Father, I offer you the body and blood, soul and divinity, of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. In atonement for our sins. And those of the whole world. For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us, and on the whole world.”
When I was 26 I experienced a major reconversion to Christ.
I had a great job as a paralegal. I made a lot of money and had lots of clothes and a nice apartment. I was also lonely, raging against God, and probably depressed. I felt empty inside all the time. I went out to “happy” hour with my friends on Thursday and Friday and was the loneliest I’d ever been. One Friday in August 1991, I had gone out for drinks with a friend. At the bar, we were surrounded by some college boys from UT who were loud and seeking our attention with drunken flirtations and B.S. We moved to get away from them and met a man named David from Canada. David was quiet. After talking with him awhile, he seemed humble and happy with life. I wanted to know his secret.
That night at the bar I picked David’s brain about how he was making his dreams come true. He seemed to be a truth-teller. At one point I made him show me his Canadian driver’s license as evidence for part of his story. We talked about his dream to be a fire-fighter and how he was traveling to Texas A&M to go to their fire school. I was troubled by the fact that I knew I wasn’t following my dreams, even though I couldn’t even decide what they were. (A problem I’ve had pretty much my whole life.)
The conversation continued late into the night at my apartment and into the next morning. I was so cynical and depressed that when David walked around my place, admiring my things and my decor, instead of being proud and pleased, I was worried he was going to steal from me. I couldn’t believe that someone would simply be grateful for a pleasant evening, a fulfilling conversation, and the comfortable shelter of my home for the night. As embarrassing as this is to admit, I do so now because I know there are others who were (or are still) as sad and lonely as I was. There is hope.
The next day, Saturday morning, I took the kind Canadian back to his hotel and made my way back to my apartment alone. Once there, I just broke down. I didn’t know how I’d live with my loneliness. I wanted to die. I cried and sobbed for awhile because I thought it would help, but all it did was make me feel worse.
After a while I decided I needed to clean my face and get myself together. I was walking past the small kitchen in my apartment, toward the bathroom, and as I did, I shook my fist at God and told him, “The reason why I don’t know what love is, is that I’ve had NO ‘ROLE MODELS’!” At that moment, I saw Jesus in my kitchen. I saw him in my peripheral vision. He was wearing a belted white tunic. He had long brown hair and a beard like the pictures I’d seen as a child. He held both arms out to me like a parent would do a young child. (This is very similar to the Divine Mercy painting given to St. Faustina, although I didn’t recognize it as such until after I’d become Catholic, 16 years later.)
“I am your role model.”
He said to me, “I am your role model.” I heard the pronoun “I” very clearly. Not “‘He’ is your role model,” but “‘I’ am your role model.” It seemed to me as though the words were coming from somewhere outside myself, and not from inside my own imagination. I still believe Jesus was using that teachable moment to speak personally to me. The vision lasted only for that moment, and He didn’t repeat Himself.
The very next thing I remember is thinking about my grandmother, Nannie, and all the congregation members at Joppa who used to sing the hymn, “In the Garden” which contains the following line: “He walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own.” Next I thought of the hymn “He Lives,” that goes like this:
He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today,
He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way,
He lives, He lives, salvation to impart,
You ask me how I know He lives, He lives, within, my heart.”
I thought about Nannie who used to talk to herself sometimes. We always thought that’s what she did, but I realized, at that moment, that she actually wasn’t talking to herself. She was talking to Jesus, because he was real to her. It wasn’t just make-believe or “wishful thinking” as Frederich Buechner might call it.
As for me, I knew, after this experience, that, yes, Jesus was alive. Suddenly, I had an intense desire to know where he was. I mean, I knew he was “in my heart,” but what exactly does that mean? I knew he ascended into heaven in Acts, so I knew he was in heaven too. My scripture knowledge was so weak, but I knew I had to learn more. I had to find the place where I knew Jesus would be - a place where I could count on him being, and it couldn’t just be in my imagination. I saw Him once in my kitchen, and I wanted to know where to reliably find Him again, and again.
Where are you Jesus?
The very next day happened to be Sunday. This presented a problem for me. I had the strongest desire to go to church I’d ever had. Finally I knew who I was going to see at church. But I had no idea where to go. Should I go to a Baptist church? Presbyterian? Methodist? Lutheran? Pentcostal? Non-denominational? (Which is really just another denomination.) Where?
I’d been to Joppa as a kid, but that was out because it was too far away. Today I can honestly say I love my Baptist brothers and sisters in Christ. They have some really good hymns. (Now, as a Catholic, still, I have a fantasy about FedEx-ing my big red Baptist hymnal to the Vatican with a note saying, “Can y’all please look at this one more time? There are some really good hymns in here that I think could fit our liturgy. . .”) However, at the time of my re-conversion I couldn’t see myself attending what I saw as a stuffy Baptist church like Hyde Park or Great Hills. I really didn’t see them as being humble. I admit, this is probably unfair, but still, it’s the way I felt at the time. At that low point in my life, I didn’t think I would fit-in in a traditional Baptist church.
I’d been to Covenant Presbyterian and Westminster Presbyterian as a teenager. I remembered I’d even been “confirmed” in the Presbyterian church at the age of 12, at Covenant. However, those communities didn’t seem “alive” enough. Again, probably an unfair judgement on my part. Today, I can truthfully say I love the Presbyterians for introducing me to liturgical worship, for showing me that it’s really O.K., in fact, soothing, to have a repetitive liturgy, and for showing me I could use my mind as well as my heart to love Christ. Still, the Presbyterians weren’t calling me.
It was confusing to try to decide where to go, somehow, it was important to me to be in the “right” place, that a “right” place did, in fact, exist, but that night I went to bed without an answer. I woke up the next morning with Riverbend Church on my mind.
My Riverbend Church Backstory
Four years before, in 1987, my best friend from childhood, Carol Cave, had died of cancer. I spent that summer going to the University of Texas to finish my English degree and visiting Carol in the hospital across the street at St. David’s. When she died on July 30th, I couldn’t believe it. I saw how sick she was, but I guess I had a very elementary view of faith and God, and no teaching on the nature of suffering, because I never let myself believe she’d actually die. My mother was worried about me, so she steered me to church, and the church she steered me to in 1987 was Riverbend.
Gerald Mann was the preacher there. He’d been at University Baptist in my childhood and Carol’s family went there. I used to occasionally go over to Carol’s house after they got home from church, (on the weekends we didn’t go out to Joppa), and I remember the spirited discussions around their Sunday dinner table about church as the strife there started to heat up. UBC split in 1979 and Riverbend began, as the story goes, with 60 families meeting for worship in a local middle school cafeteria. By the time I visited in 1987, Riverbend was holding worship services in a new multipurpose building, a fellowship hall, built in 1985 on their Westlake property.
So, in 1987, I went to Riverbend for a few weeks with my mother and tried to hide my grief while Gerald preached. Everything he said seemed to go right “in” and it was so painful, mainly because I had such a big lump in my throat that would not go away. It would have been such a relief to cry, but I couldn’t let myself go in the middle of the service.
One of the Bored, Battered, Broken, and Bruised
And in 1991, when I woke up at 10:30 that first Sunday after meeting Jesus, my first thought was, “I bet I can get dressed and make it to Riverbend by 11:00.” It just seemed I needed to hear that penetrating, yet hopeful, preaching again. I did need hope. Sure enough, I was sitting on a bench outside the Fellowship Hall at 11:00. I realized, with the lightest heart I’d had in a while, that, yes, I’d probably fit in here. People were walking into church in jeans. Yay! And I found out later that the service didn’t actually start until 11:15. In the four years since I’d been to Riverbend, they’d changed their service times. I was actually 15 minutes early. Right on time. (I think there’s a song called, “He’s an On-time God.”)
That was 1991, and I spent the next ten years, singing hymns, attending worship, doing bible study, singing in the choir, attending retreats, and learning about God and his grace, Riverbend style. It was fun, and it was what I needed at the time. I tried to listen for the voice of God, and I tried to be obedient. When I got laid off in 1992, I started doing youth work, and that church, fed me two to three times a week with the youth group at a time when I had to choose which bills I would pay, and which I would not pay each month.
In 2000, when my mom died suddenly in a car wreck, Carlton Dillard, the music director at Riverbend, agreed to bring a volunteer group of people to my mom’s funeral to sing. Just because I asked. I can’t remember today the song they sang, but I know, for months afterward, people who’d attended the funeral would always remark about the beauty of that song.
I relate these facts in the story of my re-conversion as a testimony to the faithfulness of God to me, and his working in many of the lives around me for my personal good. Today, in 2011, as I write this, God has brought me farther down the road and into the welcoming arms of the Catholic Church. However, I can never forget his work along the path of faith in the past. God, in his Divine Mercy, was willing to meet me where I was, to get me to where I am today, from glory to glory.
Jesus, I trust in you.
