How It All Started

I was born and raised in Germany. My adoptive family originated from Pomerania, the old farm country in the east where superstition and folk magic were still alive and well. Breaking a mirror meant seven years of bad luck, unless you immediately tossed a pinch of salt over your left shoulder. A black cat crossing your path meant misfortune would find you that day.

Toward the end of World War II, when that part of Germany was annexed by Poland, my family became refugees, together with 1.4 million other Pomeranians, and moved to a small rural town in West Germany.

The women on the maternal side of my family—Omi, Mama, and Aunt G.—all possessed what they called "the second sight," but Omi was the only one who was comfortable with this gift. Mama and her sister dreaded the visions that would assault them at random times—especially because they were rarely about anything nice.

Mama told me that in the latter days of the war, Aunt G. begged her to pick her up from work at night because she was too scared to walk home alone. At one house, she grabbed Mama’s sleeve: “Do you see that black coffin on the sidewalk?” Mama didn’t see anything, but later they learned through the papers that someone had died in that house.

Even though I was adopted, I somehow had the gift as well. One night, when I was about five years old, the adults were sitting in Omi and Opi’s tiny living-slash-dining room. Omi, who was clearing the dinner table, suddenly stopped in her tracks and peered out the window.

“I just saw a flock of white birds,” she said. “That means somebody is going to die.”

I was already in bed, but when Mama woke me up the next morning, I sleepily said, “There were white birds at my window last night.”

One day later, a next-door neighbor passed away from a heart attack.

My family was Protestant, but not very religious. I remember walking to church some Sundays, but there wasn’t much talk about God at home, nor did I ever see anyone pray. Mama viewed membership in the church more like a “Get out of Hell free” card, an insurance policy to stave off fire and brimstone.

Germany has two big churches: one, the Evangelical Church, which espouses a very liberal form of Protestantism and has none of the many denominations you find here; and two, the Catholic Church. Fluctuation is minimal—the Evangelicals have been Evangelicals for generations, and the same goes for the Catholics. Switching church membership is nearly unheard of.

Instead of donations, the churches receive money in the form of a payroll tax from their members, but few people are truly devout believers. Since the churches don’t depend on high levels of attendance for their survival, vibrancy is low and complacency is high—among both the clergy and the parishioners. 

My early years were very sheltered. As an only child, smart and precocious, I was surrounded by doting grownups who adored the ground I walked on. I started reading and writing at the age of three and was reading chapter books by the age of five.

Being the little princess in my family was great, but I dearly paid for it once I entered elementary school. I had no idea how to relate to other kids. I didn’t know how to rough-house or play in a group, and the fact that I was a teacher’s pet and always at the top of the class didn’t exactly increase my popularity either.

I thought I’d lucked out because I was accepted into the most popular clique of girls in my class, but it soon became clear that I was at the bottom of the pecking order. My friends and their boy satellites loved to play pranks on me and belittle me.

God did offer me a way out: My teachers told Mama I was so far ahead of my classmates that I should skip a grade. I could have escaped the torment, but I chose bullying over loneliness. As a consequence, I spent an inordinate amount of time during my school years being pushed into the stinging nettles, dunked in the pond, pelted with snowballs, called names, told I was worthless and stupid, and, once, hung out of a third-floor window by my feet.

Shortly after my tenth birthday, my beloved Omi passed away, which shook my world and turned it upside down. Again, God reached out to offer a helping hand, and this time I took it.

That summer, a tent mission opened its flaps in the field across the street, and I—desperate for a sense of belonging, love, and inner peace—spent every free minute there. I remember the heavenly scent of warm hay, illustrated flip charts with Bible stories, and fun singalongs. I had a major crush on the twenty-something sweet-natured guy who played the guitar and who—with his long hair and beard—looked a lot like Jesus. Later, I sometimes wondered if it was our Lord himself, coming to save me.

By the time the tent mission packed up and left, I was on fire for Jesus. I joined the CVJM (Christlicher Verein Junger Menschen), the German version of the YMCA. I started going to church every Sunday and attended Bible studies and youth retreats. The faith was my sanctuary, a shelter from the cruelty of the world. I became such an enthusiastic believer that Mama feared I would turn into a "fanatic."

But Satan, seeing that he was losing me, hauled his biggest cannons to the frontline. Life began to throw more and more rocks into my path. In addition to the ongoing bullying by my friends, Uncle W.—Aunt G.’s husband—began to sexually harass me. He relentlessly pursued me, always trying to catch me alone, groping me, threatening me, and then pretending everything was perfectly normal.

Here, too, God protected me from the worst: Uncle W. never managed to actually rape me, though it was certainly not for a lack of trying. Once, the Holy Spirit nudged me to lock myself into my room, and just minutes later, my uncle banged on the door and demanded to be let in. When I started screaming at the top of my lungs, he reluctantly backed off.

The biggest blow came, however, when I finally mustered the courage to tell Mama about it. I had played out the whole scene beforehand: I would tell her everything, and she would be in shock. “This bastard!” she’d say, her eyes blazing. “He’ll never set foot in my house again; in fact, I think I’ll press charges.”

She was in shock, all right. But what she actually said was, “You need to keep this a secret; don’t talk to anyone about it. And be a little nicer to your uncle; people are already figuring out that you don’t like him.”

That was the moment that I became an orphan all over again. Mama, who’d always treated me as the center of her universe, the apple of her eye, had suddenly turned against me, stabbing me in the back so she could stay in her comfort zone.

Along with this betrayal came a crisis of faith. I had a tough time in the Bible study group because the awful stories of massacres and cruelty in the Old Testament didn’t seem to jibe with the just and loving God I knew. I also found out that the very men who were supposed to be my role models—that is, our pastor and our youth group leader—were not just imperfect but downright vile people. At some point, my disgust became so great that I threw in the towel and left the church. I didn’t give up on God; I took Him with me. But other things, like boys, soon started to capture my attention more than religion.

At the age of seventeen, I started a relationship with H., a man nearly twice my age. We stayed together for four years, and he introduced me to the thrills of the paranormal—UFOs, "ancient aliens,” extrasensory perception (ESP), ghosts and poltergeists, Bigfoot, unexplained mysteries, and New Age beliefs. After we broke up, I broadened my interests to conspiracy theories, channeling, the history of the occult, Tarot readings, the Law of Attraction, and Native American spirituality. I read everything I could get my hands on; I joined New Age groups and attended New Age workshops and seminars.

When I was twenty-one, I listened to a paranormal radio show and followed their instructions on how to “contact the dead.” As a result, I brought down a haunting on myself that was one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve ever had. After weeks of sheer terror, I finally got rid of the specter by calling on the names of Jesus and Michael the Archangel.

But even this experience didn’t deter me for long—I kept digging in the treasure trove of occult knowledge, and seven years later, the evil spirit returned. This time, I had help: a powerful Reiki master, who cleansed my apartment and told me that I needed to learn Reiki and become a practitioner in order to protect myself in the future.

The loving, all-accepting, gentle pull of New Age spirituality was nearly irresistible. Unlike Christians, New Agers believed that there was no such thing as sin or sinners. The reason we—spiritual beings in a physical body—incarnated and reincarnated on Earth was just so that God, who permeated His whole Creation, could experience Himself through us. And unlike the Christian version of God, the New Age version was utterly loving and tolerant and nonjudgmental. He didn’t want or need anything from me, so I could just love Him as the free spirit that I was, without all that pesky obedience stuff that organized religions demanded.

Over time, it became harder and harder for me to reconcile my glamor job as a copywriter in advertising—which seemed to me like the epitome of vanity and materialism—with my spiritual life. My greatest desire was to live my faith authentically. It didn't help that after fifteen years in this high-pressure industry, I was burned out and exhausted. In my other, secret life, I was a Reiki Master, a hobby Tarot reader, a spiritual seeker, a manifestor. I even had a Native American teacher who guided me on the path of the Great Spirit.

At the age of thirty-four, I moved to Sedona, Arizona, one of the New Age meccas of the Southwest, and shared an apartment with D., an old friend from Germany, and her boyfriend S. It felt like I had died and gone to Heaven. I loved my new, enchanted life.

The supernatural and paranormal experiences that I had gotten used to now became an almost daily occurrence. Some were uplifting and inspiring, others dark and scary, but I embraced them all because they were proof that God existed, that there was truly a world beyond our five senses, a life beyond our earthly life. It was all true. It was all real.

It was the most exhilarating feeling—like being the protagonist in a fairytale, complete with magic and fairy dust.

For the first time, the constant pressure to perform, to succeed, was off, and I could spread my wings and fly. I dove head first into my spiritual studies, especially my Law of Attraction practice. I learned to focus and visualize to such a high degree that I had to rein in my thoughts because whatever I thought of seemed to materialize within weeks or even days. My friends started to call me “the manifestation queen.”

I became proficient at Tarot and psychic readings; I even started working as a professional Tarot reader at a New Age center in town. I facilitated workshops and wrote articles on manifestation. Though money was often scarce (it was the only thing I had trouble manifesting), I was the happiest I'd ever been.

Most New Agers I met were sweet-natured, dreamy idealists who were all about love and light and recognized that we were all One. What could be better than following my calling and being surrounded by angelic people who loved everybody and were living and breathing Christ Consciousness? 

I still believed in Jesus, but in a more abstract way. Jesus the man had just been a great teacher, like Buddha. His divine qualities, “Christ Consciousness” and “Christ Light,” were things attainable by everyone if you were just open to it. Since God was present in all of His creation, humans were powerful co-creators who could shape their own lives as they wished. Little did I know that these were the lies of the enemy.

Granted, there were a few cracks in the patina. Many “light workers” appeared pretty saint-like at first glance, but soon it became clear that while all of them talked the talk, few of them walked the walk.

One guy who prided himself on "doing God's work" turned out to be an abuser who mooched off of gullible women and couldn’t be bothered to visit his little daughter who lived in town, let alone pay child support.

People with real-world problems weren't well tolerated in New Age circles because they "brought the vibration down." According to The Secret, the bible for Law of Attraction disciples, if your life sucked, you had attracted your misfortune by projecting negative thoughts into the Universe. Depressed people and pessimists were given a wide berth so they wouldn't contaminate the rest of the group. 

I also noticed that there was a lot of darkness in Sedona. Black magic, Satanism, and witchcraft were rampant. I experienced several demonic attacks and got myself into some very dangerous situations—both physically and spiritually—all of which, by the grace of God, I managed to escape unscathed. 

A few of those rescues took active divine intervention. Once, I found myself in a group of Satan worshippers and in my terror called on God, Jesus, and the archangels to help me get out of there (which they did). Another time, I was offered a pact with the devil…by the devil, speaking to me through a clearly possessed individual. I don’t know why Jesus chose to keep me alive and safe from harm, but he did.

Even in those days, our gentle Lord kept reaching out to me. Right after I received the above-mentioned satanic offer, I found a prayer card in the mail slot at the New Age center where I worked as a Tarot reader. It was Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

What made it even more significant was that Psalm 23 happened to be my "family psalm," the piece of Scripture all of my German family members—for generations—had memorized and recited for their Confirmation.

So I knew God existed, the devil existed. I knew demons were real. And yet... and yet, I couldn't bring myself to pursue this line of thought to its logical end. If the devil was real, didn't that mean Hell existed too? If the devil was real, didn't that mean the entire love and light, nothing-can-hurt-you New Age narrative was a lie? And if Hell was real, Heaven would have to be too... which meant the concept of reincarnation, which is so huge in the New Age religion, had to be wrong as well. Better not to think about it.

In 2001, I got married to my American boyfriend whom I had met in Sedona, and soon after, we left town. For the next eight months, we moved around the country—Oregon, Washington, New Jersey. The post-9/11 recession was terrible, and we couldn't find any jobs. By the time we got to New Jersey, we were so broke that we couldn't afford the security deposit for an apartment of our own and had to stay with a host family for a while.

Our hosts were a "Jews for Jesus" family. When I told the lady of the house about my spiritual adventures in Sedona, she stated flat out that I'd been in league with Satan all along, whether I knew it or not, and even my sacred experiences, my encounters with God, had been a deception from the devil.

Nothing I said could persuade her. "Even Satan can appear as an angel of light," she kept repeating.

Another woman in our neighborhood wasn't as subtle. She handed me a Christian pamphlet that quoted Exodus 22:18: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

The level of rage and hatred I felt in response to these admonishments surprised even me. The Christians had managed what the witches and Satanists never could—they completely turned me off Christianity. I swore I'd never have anything to do with religion and church ever again. I harbored this deep-seated resentment for several years... but even while I was still seething with rage, Jesus gradually stepped in to break down my defensive walls. 

Every time I entered a church—like for a concert or other event—I'd get weepy and sad for no apparent reason. I secretly envied the Christians and their tight-knit church communities that I could only observe from the outside. For a while, I formed a New Age spiritual group with three other women, but the group was lacking cohesion, so over time it started falling apart. There was a little bit of Wicca, a little bit of Tara, a little bit of Native American spirituality, a little bit of this and that, but nothing real to hold onto.

One day, I received a major wakeup call. The group was meeting at my house, and my friend L. complained about pain in her left knee that had started when she had visited some ancient temple in Peru. I intuited that a fragment of some dark spirit was lodged in the area of her knee and used Reiki to draw it out.

As I applied the energy, L., who was lying on my couch with eyes closed, began complaining that her stomach felt “queasy” and that something was moving upward through her body. Finally, her mouth opened, and she let out the most eerie groan. It sounded like an echoing voice rising from the abyss.

That freaked me out, but I managed to stay calm. After I ended the Reiki flow, I immediately got out the sage and started smudging the whole apartment until the energy felt light and clean again. Unfortunately, I forgot to cleanse the door to the room of my three-year-old son A., who was in bed sleeping.

My friends left a few minutes later, and I sat out on the porch smoking a cigarette when a piercing scream from A.’s room made me jump up and run inside. He was sitting up in bed, pointing at a dark corner of his room, and sobbing hysterically. I comforted him, cleansed his room, told him everything was fine, and he went back to sleep. He’d never been prone to night terrors like other kids, neither before that night nor after. That event made me realize that with my occult practices, I was putting my own child at risk. The group disintegrated soon thereafter.

At some point, I realized that Jesus was calling me; He wanted me back, and He patiently kept nudging me, no matter how stubbornly I resisted. What I didn’t know was that He didn’t want me just anywhere—He was sneakily maneuvering to get me into His One True Church.

After God had softened me up for a few years, it came time to send A. to kindergarten. Due to the bullying I had endured as a kid, I was hyper-sensitized in that regard—so I decided to enroll him in the local Catholic school, which proclaimed to have a zero-tolerance policy on bullying.

I also wanted to get him baptized, as a precaution against the snares of the devil, which I had seen first-hand so many times. I understood that Baptism would afford A. lifelong protection against the forces of evil—and since I wasn't a member of any church, I figured I might as well have him baptized as a Catholic. He was already learning all the prayers and Sacraments at school anyway, and surely it wouldn’t hurt him to get some religion.

Another big factor in my decision was that the Catholic Church had exorcists—that is, unlike in many other Christian denominations, here were people who  believed in the existence of Satan as an actual entity, not just a psychological force for evil. I needed “in the know” Christians who would take this ever-present threat seriously and who, if necessary, would help me protect my precious little son.

My husband was a fallen-off Catholic and I had no religious affiliation, so it took me a while to find a sympathetic priest who agreed to perform the Baptism in the presence of two godparents, only one of them being Catholic.

My resistance was seriously crumbling now. Eventually, I caved and became a member in a Congregational Church in our area. I loved the church community; the members were friendly and welcoming, and via the regular Sunday coffee hours, I got to know them very well. I even became friends with the pastor. I would take my son to church with me on Sundays, and he'd snuggle up in the pew with me. It was a happy time.

After a year and a half, though, I started to have misgivings. After being inducted as an official member of the church, I was immediately roped into working on the Mission Committee. In fact, since I didn't duck fast enough, I was unanimously voted in as chair of the committee. This gave me an intimate glimpse of the behind-the-scenes reality of the church, where secret feuds were carried out among the committee members. Some loved the pastor, some couldn’t stand him. Many openly criticized his demeanor.

It was all quite ugly, and to make matters worse, the pastor whom I had admired so much, began to morph into a raging zealot. Suddenly, every sermon seemed to be about, "We don't do enough; we don't give enough; if you have money, you should feel ashamed of yourself because you're like that rich man stepping over Lazarus the beggar on his way out the door."

The few times I accompanied my son to Sunday Mass at the Catholic Church were like chicken soup for my soul. The church was tiny, but there in front was a huge cross with Jesus on it, something I'd never seen in any Protestant church. The wall behind him was painted sky blue with fluffy clouds, which made it look like he was floating in the air. There was a small table with an ornate golden box and a big white altar covered with colorful table cloths and all kinds of golden vessels. There were statues of Mary and Joseph, and candles and flowers everywhere.

What a stark contrast to the austerity of the Protestant churches!

I also noticed that everyone was quiet and respectful, even the children—a vast difference from many Protestant churches I'd seen, where the kids were allowed to run wild and then were shoved off to Sunday school before the sermon.

When I attended my first Mass, the power of the ancient ceremony made me tremble. These were the original prayers and rites handed down by Jesus, the apostles, and the early Church fathers! And the message was beautiful: "Jesus loves you, and he wants you to be saved." Mass felt alien and hard to follow but also somehow like home.

For the Catholics, everything was about God, worship, sacrifice. In comparison, it felt like liberal Protestants were running a secular social-justice organization, with God sprinkled in as an afterthought. 

The final straw that would ultimately lead to my decision to become a Catholic came when, a few years after I had left the Congregationalists and had drifted through life uncomfortably churchless, I attended a few services at another liberal church.

The pastor was a lesbian who lived in a committed relationship with a woman. Not a big deal to me then, since I was still pretty liberal myself. However, what really irked me was that she appeared to make everything about LGBTQ and feminist issues. 

On Easter Sunday, after the traditional Easter reading where the women approach the tomb and find that the stone has been rolled to the side and the body of Jesus is gone, the pastor asked, "So, what is the most important thing in this story?"

I said, "That Jesus was resurrected." 

"Well, yeah," she said dismissively, "that's important too. But what’s most important is that it was the women who found him!"

That was it for me. After that service, I never set foot in a liberal Protestant church again.

In the meantime, my marriage started falling apart as my husband and I struggled to find any remaining common ground. His anger issues began to grate on my nerves, together with other traits that I found harder and harder to tolerate.

I also battled hormonal changes due to the onset of perimenopause. At times, the symptoms—ranging from irritability to depression, night sweats, compulsive thoughts, joint aches, and brain fog—were so bad that I feared I was losing my mind.

When I turned fifty, my midlife crisis hit me without warning. I had never worried about it—I’d made it just fine through the big three-oh, four-oh, and four-five, so I wasn’t worried about the big five-oh at all.

What really did me in was an article by a thirty-something children’s book author. Several years earlier, I had developed a strong interest in creative writing for children and was working on my first middle-grade novel.

In her article, the best-selling author said it took a while to hone her skill: “What the reader perceives as my debut novel was actually my tenth one. My first nine novels were so terrible that I buried them in my drawer, never to see the light of day again.” She proceeded to say that maybe everyone needed to write nine crappy novels before succeeding.

The sudden realization struck me that I was too old to write nine failed novels. I didn’t have the kind of time that she was talking about.

Being confronted with my own mortality like that—realizing that there were a lot more years behind me than ahead of me—shocked me to my core and made me question everything. Was this really all there was? Did I really want to live like this, in these circumstances, with this man, for the rest of my days?

The more I agonized over it, the more it seemed that I desperately needed change. The added perimenopausal burden didn’t help. When I felt depressed, it was hard to tell if it was just hormonal swings or if I was truly unhappy. The default answer was that something was terribly wrong with the way I lived. When one day I gave my husband an ultimatum to change his ways or leave, I knew deep down that this spelled the beginning of the end of our marriage. Eventually, he and I tearfully agreed that it would be best if each of us went their own way.

In the runup to the 2016 election, my political views shifted as well. Living in a state with a blue super-majority, I watched, appalled, as my liberal friends—on social media and in real life—became more and more radicalized. They cheered as Shakespeare statues were removed from museums because they "represented the white Euro-centric patriarchy." They agreed when the mainstream media portrayed Donald Trump as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Some of them, being avid animal rights supporters, said they wished human beings would go extinct in order to restore the animals’ natural habitat.

All of a sudden, every common-sense viewpoint was racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, white supremacy. I increasingly found myself in heated arguments with the members of the social groups I was a part of; eventually, I started dreading our get-togethers.

Things got worse and worse as the election approached. Two women in Oregon lost their business because they had the audacity to run a Mexican tortilla shop while being of Caucasian descent. A writer friend of mine fell victim to a leftist smear campaign targeting her debut fantasy novel, which was launched by an activist who seemed to have read only the first five pages. At a nearby college, students physically attacked a conservative speaker who'd been invited by the faculty. An anthology based on world mythology that was going to contain one of my short stories was canceled because of "cultural appropriation." 

Finally, I drew the line when one of my liberal Facebook friends told me categorically that “You don't have the right to vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton.” I had endured so much hardship for the privilege to become a US citizen. I had earned the right to vote in this country, and, by God, I was going to use it as I saw fit.

Desperate to find kindred spirits, I sought out the scant circles of Republicans in our state and, contrary to what I’d been told, found them to be the warmest, most God-fearing, most kind-hearted, and most charitable people.

As my liberal friendships deteriorated and I turned my back on the progressive insanity, it only seemed natural that I would drift toward more conservatism in my religious beliefs as well. At last, I decided to become a Catholic.

Unlike other churches, you can't just join the Catholic Church at a whim. First, you must get an education. For eight months, I attended an RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) class and was confirmed in April 2018.

In hindsight, I pity the poor deacon and his wife who ran RCIA and had to deal with me. I was belligerent, suspicious, and stubborn. I asked provocative questions and simply refused to believe certain parts of the Catholic doctrine, such as praying to Mary and the Saints, and the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

How could a wafer made of flour and water "become" the living body of Christ? And how could Jesus live in that golden box? And why did I all of a sudden need "middlemen" interceding for me with God when I'd always prayed to Him directly? 

I also thought I could get away with preserving some of my comfortably familiar New Age beliefs and practices, like performing Reiki healings and doing Tarot card readings for myself (I’d given up on client readings a few years earlier because people would get so focused on the predicted outcomes that the readings often turned into self-fulfilling prophecies).

Moreover, I still dispersed free Law of Attraction (LOA) advice through my website, Grumpy Manifestation Queen. I did try to teach a way of "sustainable manifestation" that took God into consideration as the Creator of all things. I scoured the Bible for loopholes and convinced myself God would be fine with what I was doing. Didn’t Jesus himself say, “Ask and you shall receive,” echoing the creed of LOA disciples around the world? But despite my best attempts to merge my New Age ways with Catholicism, my feeling of unease grew.

One day, I asked God, “So how am I doing?” and randomly opened the Bible for an answer. My heart sank when the book opened to Matthew 7:21–23:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”

Reading this shocked me to the core. But then I quickly pushed it aside—surely, this was just a coincidence. Still, a lingering doubt remained in the back of my mind: Did He really mean that; was this addressed to me?

And yet, even though God was not pleased with me, He didn’t forsake me. Instead, He loved me through everything.

For the previous two years, I’d been developing cataracts in both eyes until my vision had severely dimmed and it became impossible to drive at night. Still, I kept postponing the surgery because I was so scared to have someone cut into my eyeballs—without full (knockout) anesthesia! What a nightmare.

Eventually, the Holy Spirit pushed me hard to make and keep an appointment in late February 2020… and He helped in other ways too. The week before the surgery, all fear miraculously drained out of me like it had never existed. On the day of the surgery, I felt so calm and peaceful that I barely recognized myself… to the point that I was smiling and joking around with the medical staff and the doctors.

My optometrist told me later that I’d been one of the last patients to have her cataracts removed before COVID shut down all elective surgeries for over a year.

Then the bishop closed all the Catholic churches in the diocese, and I was left rudderless. Watching a live-streamed Mass just wasn't cutting it for me; I needed the real deal.

Jesus saved me again. On a Republican Zoom call in April, I opened my big mouth a bit too wide and was tapped to run for office. My initial reaction was, “Oh heck, no!” but after sleeping over it and consulting the Holy Spirit, I decided to step up to the challenge. K., the county committee chair who had asked me to run, also invited me to visit his Evangelical church, which was still open and only required masks for entry and chatting, but not during the service. 

It was such a wonderful experience that I nearly stayed. I started to attend services every Sunday. I loved the modern worship songs and the expressive prayers. The people were much less uptight and more warm and welcoming. After two years in my Catholic parish, I still barely knew anyone, but I made friends among the Evangelicals within three weeks. Once, when I didn't attend two Sundays in a row, three different people called me at home: "Are you okay? We missed you at church!"

Plus, unlike the liberal Protestants, the Evangelicals were all about Jesus and had very conservative views, just like the Catholics. Everything was perfect, and I thanked God every day that He had led me to this church and these people. When the Catholic Church opened back up, I made a half-hearted attempt to return, but I was pretty much set on converting.

Still, every once in a while, the words of a Catholic acquaintance would invade my mind: "Just remember, this is not like your other churches where you jump from one to the next if you don't like them. You’re stuck here now."

She was right. I couldn’t get rid of the nagging feeling that Mass was where I belonged on Sundays, but I chose to ignore it and kept attending the Evangelical services instead.

That’s when the Holy Spirit moved from gentle nudges to kicks in the butt.

Around Thanksgiving, I wanted to go to church and my car refused to start. I finally got it going and arrived at the Evangelical church. There, the worship leader announced that from now on, everyone would have to wear a mask all the time…a nightmare considering that the services were several hours long and I didn’t do well with masks, both physically and out of principle. I cried through the entire service. Somehow, I intuitively knew that this was the last time I would ever set foot in this church.

When I left the church, my car's engine balked again, and some of the men had to help me jumpstart it. I was a quarter-mile from the repair shop when the car died, and I had to wait over an hour for the tow truck to show up. To me, it was a clear sign from God saying, "I told you not to go there anymore!"

It took me a while to grasp what Jesus was trying to tell me: Once He had me where He wanted me—in His One True Church—He just refused to let me regress. I kept asking Him for permission to at least attend some special events at the Evangelical church and see my friends, but the answer was always a resounding "No!" By that time, I knew better than to disobey Him.

Now that I was a bit more receptive to His suggestions, by and by, God showed me why I belonged in the Catholic Church. The most direct demonstration came when I accompanied a Catholic friend to a "Jericho walk" around the State House where conservative Christians went to pray for the lockdowns to end and our country to heal. God arranged it so that we met two groups of believers on the platform in front of the State House: one was a group of Evangelical women, the other a group of Catholic men.

As soon as we had introduced ourselves, the leader of the Evangelicals launched into a dramatic prayer, loudly imploring Jesus to help us in our time of need. She was tearing up at times, and so was her audience. When she ended after nearly ten minutes, she looked positively smug as her group applauded her performance. The Catholic men, on the other hand, humbly and quietly pulled out their rosaries and started to walk around the State House, reciting Our Fathers and Hail Marys as they went.

The contrast couldn't have been any sharper. 

I was still a lukewarm Catholic, though. I didn't agree with the stricter parts of Catholic doctrine, like contraception and same-sex marriage... I didn't really believe in Jesus's presence in the Eucharist... my house was still filled with Buddha statues, various Tarot decks, and books on the paranormal and the Law of Attraction... and I didn't think anything of binge watching Lucifer on Netflix.

My final wakeup call came on November 4, the day after the election.

This is where my story starts.