Diary of A Convert

First Excerpt-Introduction

Hello and God bless all my new readers. My name is Dustin, and I am recently converting to the Catholic Faith. Through this article, which I am calling my “Public Journal,” you get will get to read about my spiritual growth, everything from attending R.C.I.A., to praying with the saints, venerating our Blessed Mother, the Sacraments, and everything in between.

            We all know that the life of a Catholic, especially a convert, can be tough in the out there in the public world. We must deal with religious persecutions, our virtues being tested, and often being asked bizarre questions like, “Why do you worship Mary?”

            Well, I can tell you that I used to be one of those people. I used to think that Mary was worshipped, and that Catholics were extremely strict and were not fun. My viewpoint completely changed back in 2013.

            First, a little history about myself. Being the youngest of four children, I was born to Agnostic parents. My mother and father believed in God; they just didn’t go to any church. My father’s mother, though, was a devout Christian, a Freewill Baptist. So, naturally, I was brought up Protestant. My grandmother, who was also my Sunday School teacher, saw to that.

            Once I was old enough and was able to experience the world for myself, at about the age of 16, I feel hard to sin and lost my faith. Just to keep the list of my sins short, I’ll just say they were both grave and venial.

            When I was 18 years of age, my mother left my father and they divorced. I moved with my mother to Mississippi. A couple years later, my parent s got back together, and my father moved in with us. I then moved out, to California in 2011. After I moved, my parents went back to Michigan. In the 2013, my father became gravely ill. I bussed it all the way to Michigan to be with him. After his passing, I felt I needed spiritual solace. Remembering my Protestant roots, I decided to look for a church to go to and pray. The closest church I could find was a Catholic Church, which I will leave out their name for privacy. The was when I had the most profound experience in my life!

            First, at the beginning of Mass, I could feel like someone was directing my feet, like I was walking but someone else was walking me. I felt myself being guided to a pew and sat down. I followed along with the prayers, with the help of the devotional books that were kept in the back of the pews. And then it happened, the miracle of a lifetime!

            I saw the priest turn the bread and wine, just by praying and asking Jesus, into the Host. I saw it become the Body and Blood of our Savior. It still looked like a wafer and wine, but I knew deep down that they were not bread and wine anymore. I felt this sudden urge to get in line to receive them. I was about to get up and rush to the front, when I felt a hand on my shoulder stopping me. There was no one behind me, because I was in the last pew. Naturally, I thought it was the person next to me, a lady that was maybe 20 years older than me, wearing a blue dress and one of those lacey head veils. She seemed to have been wearing perfume heavily, all I could smell from her was roses.

            I asked the Parishioner if she just grabbed my shoulder to stop me. She told me no, but then she asked me if I was Catholic. I told I wasn’t. She informed me that I could not receive the Host then. She said I must first be confirmed Catholic, confess, and repent of my sins. She told me what I could do is stand in line and cross my arms. With my arms crossed, I can receive a blessing from the priest instead. So, that was what I did.

            After I received the blessing, I turned to see that she was gone. I didn’t see her anywhere at all. Because I was holding up the line, I walked back to the last pew and sat down. After Mass had ended, I spoke with the priest about the lady who told me what to do. I described how she looked, with her graying brown hair tied in a bun with the white lace over it, the blue floral dress, and smelling heavily like roses.

            The priest had me come back in, to the Parish Office. He led me to the secretary, and they started talking. He asked her a very weird question. He had her show me a picture that she had in her purse. It was the lady in the blue dress.

            “That’s her!” I nearly shouted.

            “She passed away last month.” The priest told me. “We had Mass for her here.”

            The lady in the picture, that lady that instructed me on crossing my arms, was the secretary’s best friend. She was also a secretary in the Parish Office. The other secretary was just as surprised as I was, but the priest wasn’t. He just seemed amused.

            “God sent her to you to help you.” The priest told me. “As for the smell of roses, she never wore perfume. Mother Mary was with her. Sometimes when we receive a vision from our Blessed Mother, we can smell roses.”

            Now I know that you’re reading this and thinking, “Did this really happened?” I can only tell you by word of mouth, well by keystroke in this case, that it really did happen to me.

            To make an already long story shorter, I came back to California and, for years, had been studying everything I could get my hands on about the Catholic Church. I am now in R.C.I.A. and, with the grace of our Lord, will be confirmed Catholic. This article is my public diary for all of you to read. For this spiritual journey, for me to live my life by the will of God, I had to make some changes in my life. After I came back to California, I fell into more sin. This time, I fell into a sin that I was planning to get away from at the start of it.

            Now begins my first journal entry. For this, we must go back two months. All the journal entries are from my actual journal that I keep. Not only does it track my spiritual growth, but also it contains my favorite prayers, novenas, and litanies. I have a couple of disclaimers: 1. I have changed the names of people and places for their privacy. 2. I have sins that my not be completely appropriate, but I will try to be as discreet as possible.

December 4, 2023, Monday

            Even though I had this journal for a while, I am finally recording my life events into this book. So far, I have only been recording prayers, and a few poems I have written praising God.

            In summary, I am a sinner that want to be Catholic. I am currently living in a sinful relationship. As soon as I can, I will righten this so that I may walk the path our Almighty Father has chosen for me. I feel that the priesthood is calling me. Oh, Blessed Trinity, help me to live my life by Your will.

            Well, I hate to be that one person who says, “to be continued,” but…to be continued!

            For each article, I would like to end it with a little Q and A session. If you have a question you would like to ask me, please email me at dustin.stroud@yahoo.com, with the subject as “Diary of A Convert Q  and A” and I will feature them in the next article with answers. Please be aware that I may receive a lot of questions, so please patient and will try my best to answer every single one. Since this is my first article, I shall come up with the first question. I will start with the question I mentioned earlier…Do Catholics worship Mary?

Q and A Time:

            This first question comes from, well, pretty much everybody who isn’t Catholic…, “Do Catholics worship the Virgin Mary?”

            There is a long answer and a short answer for this. The short answer is “No, we don’t worship her at all.”

            The longer answer is that we do not worship her, but we venerate and honor her. There are several reasons why we don’t worship anything or anybody else other than the Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

            The most important reason, as can be seen in chapter 20 of the book of Exodus, in the Ten Commandments of our Lord, the very first law states, “You shall not have other gods beside me.” Our God does not want us to worship anything else but Him, because He is the only true God we have. If we worshipped Mary, we would be breaking this very important commandment…and remember, our God is a jealous God, as He says so Himself in the Bible. Who are we to question that?

            We venerate and honor Mary because, after all, she is the Mother of God. She bore Jesus and let the Word of God take human flesh through her. When the angel Gabriel told her that she was going to be the mother of our Lord and Savior, even though God already knew what she would say, she allowed it to happen. Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). She had a choice. She could have said, “Nope, nu uh, no way!” But she didn’t. And then she became mother to us all with the help of her own Son, Jesus! When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said tov his mother, “Woman, behold your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home (John 19:26-27).

            Did you see what happened there? Jesus made Mary, his own mother, the mother of us all. Through this divine act of our Savior, Mary became the mother of nations, the new mother of mankind, and the mother of the Church. Therefore, because of Jesus, we must venerate her. To not venerate and honor her would be like telling Jesus he shouldn’t have done what he did…but we all know that we can’t tell that to Jesus…and why would we? I, for one, love our Blessed Mother. She has helped me as a mother would her child throughout my life. I am glad to become her adopted son. I do not worship her as I worship God, but I do lover her like my birth mother. This is the kind of relationship all Catholics have, or should have, with the Virgin Mary. So, no, we don’t worship her. We just love her a lot.

            That concludes my first article. I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much I had writing it. Until next time, may God bless us all!