I actually am the opposite, I was raised Catholic and come from a long line of Italian and Irish Catholic background.
But I noticed very many inconsistentcies with the way people would go to church on Sunday, after partying and drinking Saturday. Not only the people but the priests also at our Fall festival could drink it down with the best of them. To me this was a red flag and not very Christ like.
Well I continued at this particular church and began to have some questions and a close family friend was a deacon at another Catholic church of Jesuit order, he told me not to read the bible, it was only for the priests to interpret. So I tried to read it for myself and didn’t know where to begin and I really didn’t understand it.
About a year later I went on a retreat in the mountains with our church, well we broke off into small groups and they asked each of us to pray from the heart, I have never been asked to do that before, I only knew memorized prayers or prayers from a book. So when it came my turn to pray I just wept and asked myself, who am I kidding anyway, I didn’t know how to talk to God from my heart, I believed in Him, but didn’t know Him, so I just wept and realized in my heart, I was just playing church, I had friends that I grew up with there and it was the good thing to do, but that was about it.
The next day they asked us to go on a Jesus walk and bring a bible or a prayer book, I brought my bible and went to a very peaceful place in the snow and sat on a log with bible on my lap, I opened it again in sincerity said, “I don’t understand this”
and a wind from nowhere came and began to blow the thin pages quickly, at that very moment I felt the presense of God for the first time, and He spoke to me in a still small voice saying, “I will show you MY word” 3xs and i said, yes Lord.
When the retreat was over, we came back to reality (home) and I wanted to get started in knowing Gods word, so i asked Him from my heart, show me Your Word, so I turned to the book of Wisdom, I thought that is a good place to start, well I was discouraged because it do anything for me, so I turned to Proverbs, and WOW my eyes were opened, it pointed me in the right direction in knowing God, it was soooo good that i could not get enough. I was finally beginning to understand the Word. And i was beginning to see who God is and I immersed myself into His word I hungered for it. This is when i fell in love with God, He was no longer a God of wrath or out of reach. I was understanding Him more the more i read about Him.
So after that, I continued going to the Catholic church that i was raised in, and I realized I couldn’t hear what the priest was really saying, the sound system was bad and the echo made it hard to hear him. But before that it didn’t bother me, but after my ears were opened Spiritually I realized how dead it was in there. People praying with their eyes open and barely anyone sang the worship songs, they really looked to me like a bunch of zombies, and i thought that was me and how i was before the Lord came to me.
Then i went to a non-denominational church were they taught the bible and worshipped like they meant it and prayed with their eyes closed and from the heart. The bible study was like nothing i ever heard before, the Pastor spoke so clearly and read the bible with such clarity and it all made sense. And the people didn’t party and they spoke of the Lord and encouraged me in my walk with the Lord and prayed for me alot. I knew i was in the right place, I’ve even gone back from time to time to my old church and realized it was a religion not a relationship with God, it all was so dead, no Spirit was there, people just doing their weekly duty. So i never went back, but I do pray for them, and will always have a place in my heart to see them come into a relationship with God according to Spirit and truth.
It is one thing to believe in God in your mind, and another to know Him in your heart and daily experience.
