Everybody has heard accounts of "foxhole faith" before right? You know, people who couldn't have cared less about God, or what he wanted, suddenly finding faith when staring down some terrible catastrophe? These people get through some ordeal with sanity intact, due to their new found faith. Well, that's not me. I'm too stubborn.
I had to lose everything. I had to hit the proverbial "rock bottom" and keep digging, before I could vaguely recognize that the pit in which I found myself, I could only find myself there by the grace of God.
Through all this strife, I experienced an incredible peaceful gratitude for just being. This wasn't a constant bliss, but a reprieve from total panic. People around me, who were going through, or had gone through something similar, were telling me that this was the doing of "God." Of course, they all had their own ideas of what that meant. I was certain, at this point, that God could not be what I had been raised to believe He was.
Thus began my comparison shopping for hope. I didn't believe then that it could be found in any organized religion. Honestly, I tried to seriously investigate various beliefs. There was something lacking in all of them. Whether it was a violent creation account, the disturbing idea of reincarnation, the problematic confusion of polytheistic faith traditions, or one thing or another, every religion that I researched had irreconcilable flaws, right out the gate.
One person truly tuned in to my plight. This person was a Christian, but most certainly not a Catholic. They brought John 6:66-68 (As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, "Do you also want to leave?" Simon Peter answered him, "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. NAB ) to my attention. Ultimately, the central question in these verses was the one that I had been asking all along: "...to whom shall I go?" Ironic as it is, these verses and the ones immediately prior to them, among others, would eventually reel me back in to The Latin Rite of The Catholic Church.
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