Share your testimony here

[BarbaraTherese]

my mom is AoG. her side of the family use to be catholic. my dad and his side is southern “everyone is going to hell” baptist.
basically, they both churches taught different things and i remember asking my parents and wondering which church is right. i never got a good answer. enter rebel teen years and i thought christianity was a bunch of bunk. i turned out to be just a godless teenager during those years doing what all the other teens were doing which was usually nothing good.
so i turn 20 and i learn that my girlfriend was pregnant. wasn’t a big deal to me. i was actually planning to keep our kid “godless”. well, i watched my son being born and that moment led me to question everything about my life. i was never baptised as a kid and i suppose by the Grace of God He was calling me to that. so i started going back to my dads church, because they didn’t act as crazy as my moms, to get baptised but my dads church hated me and my girlfriend since we had a kid out of wedlock. lived together to take care of our child… stuff like that. they even went so far to tell me to move out and have nothing to do with her!!
anyway, i stopped, again, from going to that church. i then married my girlfriend at her church but other than that i was done with the baptist faith.
some time passed, enter another Grace of God and i found this site and read the apologetics stuff. considering i was taught to be anti-catholic this was a little weird to me. what a surprise though! of all the confusion i had as a kid and teen, christianity started to make sense! after about 2 years of pondering and thinking i knew i was catholic! so i decided to talk to a priest at a nearby parish and he was SO UNDERSTANDING about my situation and was even sad when i told him about the pastors at my dads church and everything they told my wife and i. at that moment i really felt like the prodigal son because i really felt the love of the Father at that moment. my wife and i started to attend RCIA but for whatever reason she stopped going. i continued on and was baptised by the priest i talked to and welcomed in to the Church last easter!
i finally found what i was looking for as a kid and teen.

Great story, and thank you for sharing it…will be keeping you and your wife especially and child in prayer along with your family…please keep me in your prayer. Wecome home…although you are now not quite a newbie!!! …rather one of the crew aboard the ship!

Well I recall and with great fondness my teen years when ponderings took me to the edge of disbelief, and then something kept pulling me back. I recall at one point in my teens a priest asked me why I believed, and I replied (and at that time it was true) that a non Christian historical writer (a Roman historian I think called Josephus or something similar) from the time of Jesus had written : “Jesus of Nazarth was crucified in Rome today”. And Father replied, “so a pagan has led you to Faith?” to which I replied “Yes, Father” with a frown I am sure, because something in his sentence sounded weird…and it was! Not too often a pagan leads a person to belief in Jesus as truly man and truly God. So off I went again on my ponderings and intellectual wanderings, sometimes verging on total disbelief, with something or other holding me back from the abyss.

Great time it was!

God bless you and thank you very much for sharing…Barb

 

[raindr0ps]

Hi, my name is Nick, I’m Catholic. (lol I feel like I’m at an AA meeting).

haha yea. Your story’s amazing btw!

Hi, I’m Faustina. Born and raised catholic. Went through two years of catholic school and 9.2 years of hardcore catholic homeschooling.

Going into middle school I started going through the rebellious stage, and I began pushing away anything and everything catholic. But it was more of an inward rebellion… I felt like I had to do the good works (aiding ccd, classes youth group stuff, planning a kids retreat, etc) to keep my mom happy, but for some odd reason I felt like I just couldn’t give into what she really wanted, and have that faith in my heart. That would mean she would get what she wants, and apparently in my middle school mind was a bad thing.

Going into highschool I started to feel horrible for constantly wearing this nice happy good service freak mask, when behind that I was torn apart by the constant battle between my desire to really know God and my desire to “win” against my mom. I didn’t think a person like that was worth being a friend with, so I began to draw away from all my friends. I became really selfish, depressed, etc. By late 10th/early 11th I quit having pretty much anything to do with church. I was cutting, suicidal… I’d constantly be looking at my life and I’d get this horrible sick feeling, then I’d just stop caring what happened to my life or anyone’s around me. Its not something I’m proud of.

Nov. came around and I went to NCYC. I don’t know if any of you remember, but that girl Veronica passed away in that hit and run early Thursday morning. That hit me hard. I spent a lot of time thinking about everything going on in my life… I didn’t want to die. What if I were the one who got hit by the car? I didn’t want to spend all eternity separated from the fullness in Christ that I was searching for every single time I picked up that knife! I wanted to break out of the downward spiral, to be at peace… I just wanted to live the life God intended me to live. The very next day I went to confession. And just like that I was done with all the sin in my life. It wasn’t some profound experience, no God high or anything, I just my decided that I wasn’t who I wanted to be, and that I wanted to change it. It was not easy on any level. hah. But, by the grace of God, I’ve stuck with it.

Its still hard. Right now I’m a senior in highschool. Sometimes a single hour doesn’t go by without wishing I could fall back into that old way of life. But at the same time not a single hour goes by that I don’t regret it.

So now I’m at the point in the journey where I’ve been trying to have a relationship with God, but no matter how hard I try, He’s not there. But thats another topic for another time. I actually joined this forum hoping to get help with that & answer some other questions.

Anywho I should probably wrap this up, its getting to be a little long & I have homework calling my name. haha

This forum looks pretty phat, and I’m looking foreword to hanging out!

Pax,
Faustina

 

[chewchoo]

welcome faustina
we’re glad that you joined the forums and really glad that you made a positive decision regarding your path to self-destruction.
we hope to see you here often.
chew