My Journey

“Raised” Methodist, my family rarely went to church except for Christmas Eve, Easter, those few times when my sister and I were singing in the youth choir, or some other special occasion. I had absolutely no interest in spiritual things during my childhood even though, as I look back, seeds were being planted in my heart by my paternal grandmother.

My real search for the truth began in 1979 when my childhood sweetheart was killed on the eve of our high school graduation. My charismatic mother-in-law stood up at her son’s funeral in a red dress speaking about the Holy Spirit. The Lord got my attention. It was then that I was exposed to the Word of Faith movement when she invited a charismatic preacher for a come-to-Jesus meeting at her home. I went forward at the invitation. I began to faithfully read my New Living Translation Bible and began attending charismatic Catholic prayer meetings in the crypt of a large local Roman Catholic Church with my mother-in-law and her oldest son, Greg. The pastor who came to my in-law’s home started a small church in our hometown, and my family began attending there, as well. My husband and I got married in a Word of Faith church affiliated with my charismatic pastor who eventually became a supposed faith healer with a ‘world-wide ministry’. From a long line of Catholics, my husband’s family insisted a Catholic priest co-officiate the ceremony, but there didn’t seem to be any other discrepancies between the two belief systems. And nobody warned me otherwise.

My husband and I moved to Oklahoma for him to finish college, and I began working for the ministry associated with his school. We headed back home after a year disillusioned with the whole Word of Faith movement (what we thought was real ‘Christianity’). We walked away from all things spiritual for about four years while my husband finished college and then began working for a Big Eight accounting firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After a few years there, my husband left public accounting to pursue his hand as an entrepreneur. He and his family decided to buy a brewery; and we began promoting our beer in local bars and beyond. By this time, I had stopped reading my Bible altogether.

In the mid-80’s, life seemed to be missing something amidst all my material pursuits, so I turned to the Roman Catholic Church. Nobody ever seemed to leave this church, and I wanted something with roots for my children. Determining to be the best Catholic I could be, I was there every time the doors were open and involved in volunteering at the grade school associated with our local church all five days of the week. At first, I felt religious, like I was doing something that somehow made me more holy. While dutifully walking through the rote steps of religion for the next five years, however, my heart was developing a deeper distaste and distrust for anything ‘religious’ because it all seemed so hypocritical and worthless to me. It didn’t make any difference in my life whatsoever.

When I got pregnant with my third child, we moved back to our hometown of Ligonier, Pennsylvania. Still commuting to the brewery about an hour or more away, my husband began listening to a popular Baptist preacher on the radio. Taking copious notes, he tried to share what he was learning with me. But I would not hear any of it. Diligently pleading with me to listen with him, he started coming home early from work. He would take our very colicky one-month-old son back to the bedroom and calm him down as he listened. Eventually, I joined him. As the Lord began to renew our minds, we wrestled with staying in the Catholic Church and keeping our children in parochial school. Naively determining to stay, we sincerely hoped and believed that we could be the change in the church! When we began to get called to the school for ‘issues’ with our children, we knew it was time to leave. (My kids wanted to wear Christian t-shirts to school and were very vocally sharing their faith with the teachers which was NOT appreciated. The final straw was when we got called to the office to face a mob of irate ‘sisters’ regarding an incident that had taken place involving my 12-year-old son. During communion, Jesse coughed immediately upon taking the ‘host’ in his mouth. The story this picture painted as my son later told it was hysterical and horrifying at the same time. He said several nuns swooped down onto their hands and knees in slow motion to recover and rescue the blessed ‘host’ after it had hit the ground! Apparently, he laughed out loud at the scene of the crime.)

When I got pregnant with my fourth child, I began watching a woman Bible teacher on television who just happened to be on at the time my other son took his two-hour nap. I began devouring the Scriptures as if my very life depended upon it. At the same time, we began listening to Grace to You. Eventually, we would begin attending the Baptist church in our town. Sadly, I never felt as though I fit in anywhere, and I could not understand why. It would be a few more years before I began understanding the differences between even the walls within the ‘Baptist’ structure. Eventually, (after two-plus decades) the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together for me within the borders that had been laid out long ago. There is much more in my very long journey to a reformed theology that I document in my book, Living Beneath the Tapestry and Within the Veil. It is available on Amazon and soon coming to my new website.