Our Conversion Story: Part 1: The Nav Year

           This series of posts is designed to explain our path to Catholicism. I’ll (Amanda) tell the story and then, Mark (mostly) will explain the theology over the course of the next few weeks, months, and perhaps years. Our hope is that this story will serve to show how the Lord began to lead us in the direction of the Catholic Church long before even we realized it. It’s a rather epic and brutally honest story, if I do say so myself, full of thumbprints from God that we can only see in retrospect.
         For those of you who may not know, I grew up in a Christian home. We were in church every Sunday and prayed together as family before each meal. My parents were wonderful role models of faith and seeking God’s Will. I went to several churches during my childhood but most of the switching was between Presbyterian and non-denominational churches. Mark grew up largely without religion. He points to an altar call at a Southern Baptist Church when he was 18 as the moment he chose to follow God. As a couple, we attended predominantly non-denominational churches and were highly involved with a Christian missionary/campus ministry group called the Navigators. So, there’s the lead-up to the juicy details as Mark called them.

            If we are honest with ourselves, it began nearly 5 years ago. We were newly married and incredibly enthusiastic. We are both dreamers, BIG dreamers. We were a few months from my graduation and then, the world would be our oyster. One week the plan was to be missionaries in Mongolia, the next in New Zealand, and finally, we settled on EDGE Corps members (a branch of Navigator ministry for recent college graduates) at Purdue University. We believed and expected big things from God. If He really was the creator of the universe and we were so eager to go and serve, then how could the result not be huge? We asked God to use us, to send us, and to leave His thumbprints all over our lives. What we did not realize was how long, how difficult, how unexpected, and yet, how beautiful our path would be and still is.

            My strongest memory during those first few months of naivety was during our training for Navigator staff. We had spent the afternoon studying Bible passages about God’s magnificent provision (all in preparation for fundraising our entire salary!). I came across the story of Gideon from Judges 7. God removed nearly all of Gideon’s army and still led them to victory (with only 300 men). The men were removed and the odds stacked significantly against Gideon in order that only God could ever receive the glory. I stood before my fellow EDGErs and stated that if God removes our “army,” if the odds become stacked higher against us, then we should get excited because it simply means that God must come through in an even greater way. I assumed that I was only talking about our fundraising.

            Working in Christian ministry did not bring with it the fulfillment that we believed it would. Most of this was our fault, we sought fulfillment in things of this world (which in the end, ministry is simply that) instead of in the only One who can truly fulfill. We struggled to maintain the funds. We had no miraculous stories of divine intervention or student impact (at least not how my overactive imagination had envisioned). We discipled students, planned retreats, and spoke at gatherings but did not sense God’s hand on us. Looking back, the trouble with funding and even the subsequent lack of student impact were not the only parts of our “army” God sought to remove. He sought to remove all remnants of our expectations, our beliefs, and even ourselves. It was this year that expectations were devastated and that we first saw the cracks in what we believed.

            We struggled in finding a church. Suddenly, the non-denominational churches that had been our homes seemed empty. We watched as person after person worshiped God on Sunday and the world throughout the week. We watched as even those we might have called faithful were simply living a Christianized version of the American dream. We sought something deeper. In our minds, there should be significant differences between a person who worships the creator of the universe and one who does not. It was not Catholicism we turned to at this time. We had been told of its "heresies" our whole christian lives and figured it was a flawed and dead church. I even remember counseling one student to leave Catholicism sharing those misplaced and frankly, uninformed beliefs which in the end, were simply my misunderstandings. I must say that that counsel is now a great regret of mine. Instead, we turned down more familiar and more comfortable roads. We discovered Gospel for Asia, its founder KP Yohannan, and the biographies of past greats such as Dawson Trotman and George Mueller. We felt renewed. Here were people who took God at His word, who recognized God as the center of their lives, and as capable of more than they could imagine. Each of these men had one thing in common, a healthy prayer life.

We decided to fundraise through prayer alone for our lack of prayer must be why we were not seeing results. Prayer improved our outlook, even gave us a few inspirational moments, but overall, our situation stayed the same. The most important thing that that period of prayer did was to change Mark’s heart and lead us to the one place he swore he would never live again, Tallahassee.

Though the money came through and students were impacted, we found ourselves highly disappointed with God. We had stepped out in faith believing God for great things and received barely the necessities in reply (Do not worry, it was a good thing, we needed that time). We finished the remainder of our ministry year, never really committing to a church. We simply survived clinging to the belief that Tallahassee was the answer and that when we got there, God and our lives would make sense again. We left for Florida with the dream of sharing the gospel with family and friends while Mark finished a bachelor’s degree.

Here's the link for Our ConversionStory: Part 2: The Tallahassee Years.