An excerpt from my own Catholic conversion story

With so many things going wrong in my life and in America, basically I understood that most people live the way that they think is best, best for themselves, whether one wishes to call that moral relativism or modernism, or perhaps a type of atheism in which man does not really believe in God, but looks to himself or another man to be god. Christians of many sorts also did this, including me. And I didn't know how to be that new creation that is spoken of in the New Testament, but what I did know was that I kept trying to be good and I was good in the eyes of some and yet a hypocrite in the eyes of those who disagreed with me about God being real, and without any guide, I made up my mind at the end of June that it was time to stop trying to do things my way, no matter how good I seemed to myself to be, that hadn't been working out too well. I made a decision to do the things that God, in our Holy Scriptures, said were good, I would deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus.

I was in prayer, too, because Mr. Sapp in Jesup, Georgia, wanted me to write another article about the Marian window, and I was not convinced about the authenticity of this window. Here's what I wrote, by the way: http://www.examiner.com/roman-catholic-in-denver/the-virgin-mary-icon-image-window-is-for-everyone . I did not see Mary in the window, and my being able to investigate it was very limited, as I couldn't see or touch the thing. As a matter of fact, I did not believe that the Virgin Mary was anyone other than a woman who had been lucky to bring the Christ child into the world. If she was really so special, I wondered, why would she pick me out of all the people in the world, to write about her or this window, if it was a genuine miracle. I was the true skeptic. I was also a Catholic who had never had any formation in our faith, so I did not even know our doctrines. I was in much prayer over all of this, and I had to do research for my Catholic column to be sure that I did not write anything heretical. It was a heavy weight to add on this coverage of this window, to my responsibility of writing only Catholic truth, which I had to study to write, because I didn't know it.

I spoke to and I corresponded with several people, mostly those who had actually seen the Marian window. But I also spoke to and wrote to Justin Stroh, who had composed a beautiful song that spotlit the window. I was honest with him, and I told him that I did not know what to make of the window, authentic or hoax, and that what was worse, I didn't know what it was about Mary that some Catholics seemed to know, some mystery or secret, why she was so important to them; and he seemed to me to be one of these types, one who had some special love for the Blessed Virgin Mary. I asked him to share with me what it was that he knew that I didn't about Mary.

Justin Stroh told me that he did not have the ability to examine the window either, being in another state, but that he was writing the song in faith. I was amazed that he could do such a thing, just offering himself as an instrument of God to write a song and trust our Lord without knowing the actual origin of this window image. With regard to my query about what he found so special about Mary, what secret about her that he and some other Catholics knew that I didn't, he told me that she is the spouse of the Holy Spirit. I had never heard of such a thing. I am ever grateful for that conversation and for the faith and faithfulness of this Catholic servant of our Lord.

Much prayer and contemplation followed and accompanied my interviewing. I was not in awe of the window image, but I was in awe of God, and of genuine faith that made people live holy lives, and with living saints that I previously thought were dead, like Mary. For I had been invited and gone to a Byzantine Catholic Church, and while there, I poured out my heart in prayer to God for the state of my life and my country and the world. Then I returned to the Church again, to talk to the priest there about icons for another informative article that I would write about the Marian window.

I remember going to bed in awe of the icons and the living saints, and I asked a heartfelt prayerful thing of God. I asked Him to show me if these things were the truth, if the saints were still living after death, and to make Mary real to me if she was really there and really active, and to show me if that Marian window was real or not. And then the miracle happened. The first of many, many miracles...