by: Misty [Source: Catholic Sistas]
Misty converted to Catholicism from atheism 10 years ago, just a week after becoming a mother to her first child. Prior to becoming a stay-at-home mom, she worked full-time as a magazine writer and editor. She has been married to her best friend for nearly 15 years and looks forward to many more decades by his side. Her days are now spent cooking, doing laundry, freelance writing, and homeschooling her four children. After spending so much of her life in spiritual darkness, she revels in the joy of being Catholic. Without a doubt, the Lord’s greatest gift to her has been saving her from a life without Him.
One of the questions I get most often when people hear I’m a convert is, “Why did you choose to become Catholic?” I’ve been asked this question by Jews, Baptists, Mormons, atheists, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses. The person who asks the question never says the rest of it, which is, “Why did you choose to become a Catholic INSTEAD of what I am?” These are people of genuine faith, who believe they have found and are living by The Truth. So naturally they want to understand how someone educated and sane could believe so differently.
It’s always a hard question to answer, because I’m sensitive to that unspoken part. I don’t want to insinuate–even accidentally–that they are less intelligent, less holy, or inferior to me as a Catholic. I usually give the “safe” answer, and talk about how my husband and I were drawn continuously to Jesus in the Eucharist. But part of me always yearns to say what G.K. Chesterton said so beautifully:
The difficulty of explaining “why I am Catholic” is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.
I never wanted to be a Catholic. I never even wanted to be a Christian. When my husband convinced me to join him on a quest through major and minor religions nearly 15 years ago, I did it mostly to humor him. I had lived as an avowed atheist for more than a decade and couldn’t imagine that The Truth even existed, much less it could be found. Especially when I couldn’t even accept that God was real.
