Wednesday, May 12, 2010

I can totally relate to Kristine's story ...


Kristine Franklin explains her conversion to becoming a "completed evangelical" when she entered into the Catholic Church.

The last few paragraphs of her testimony for those who don't have time for the complete article:

There was a lot of speculation about why we were becoming Catholics, much of it unpleasant, all of it inaccurate. Some thought we'd simply grown weary of fighting the "good fight." Others thought we couldn't handle the pressures of missionary life and had popped our spiritual corks. Some thought we must have been lured by the strange attractiveness of the Catholic liturgy, or by some wily, fast-talking, Scripture-twisting priest. One of my family members told us we had lost our faith completely and had walked straight into the jaws of Satan.

The truth was just the opposite. We had found Jesus Christ in the last place anyone, ourselves especially, could have imagined, and His arms were opened wide to welcome us.

Blessed Sacrament Church was packed for the Easter Vigil Mass. At Communion, the priest leaned close and whispered, "Kris, you've waited all your life for this." Then he held up Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life and smiled and said, "The Body of Christ."

"Amen," I said. "I believe it." As I received Jesus sacramentally in Holy Communion for the first time, I thanked Him with all my heart for the miracle of grace He had worked in my life to unite me to Himself in this way, in a wonderful, mysterious way I could never have imagined possible. The day we landed in Guatemala City for the first time, I had hoped we were home. In reality, we were only en route to our real home, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

In the Catholic Church we have found the fullness of the Christian Faith. Not seventy-five percent of the Truth, not ninety percent, but all of it, one hundred percent. We have found real worship, shaped by and focused on Jesus Christ, not on this minister or that minister's opinion about this or that passage of Scripture. We have embraced the Faith of our Fathers, the teachings which Christ intended us to have.

We found in our long, circuitous journey home to the Catholic Church that there is indeed only one Gospel, the Catholic Gospel. There is only one place where one can find the fullness of truth and the most personal of relationships with Jesus Christ - and it isn't Protestantism. The last place we looked for truth was where the Truth had been all along. We are home to stay.

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