I Wasn’t Brainwashed. I Encountered Christ.

I Wasn’t Brainwashed. I Encountered Christ.People like to assume that serious Christians—especially unapologetic Catholics—were simply indoctrinated from childhood.

That we were raised in sheltered homes, trained from birth to believe certain things, and never questioned them.

That’s the narrative.

It just isn’t my story.

I was not raised Catholic. I wasn’t even raised Christian.

My mother rejected Jesus when I was young as she began converting to Judaism for my father. My father, for his part, was not a practicing Jew. The only time I remember him speaking to God was when he was yelling at Him—complaining about his problems and asking why life had treated him unfairly.

We didn’t go to church.
We didn’t go to synagogue.
We didn’t have a faith life.

God was not someone we worshiped. At best, He was someone my father argued with.

So when people say Christians like me were “brainwashed,” I almost have to laugh. No one was catechizing me. No one was dragging me to Mass or teaching me doctrine. If anything, I grew up in spiritual confusion.

And confusion has a way of making you search.

Over time that search led me into dark places. I became involved in Wicca and practiced witchcraft seriously. I studied it. I believed I was finding empowerment and spiritual knowledge. I thought I was discovering deeper truth.

In reality, I was lost.

At the same time, my life was unraveling in other ways. I carried deep shame from painful relationships and trauma. I believed I was unlovable. I hated myself more than I can easily put into words.

Then my mother died.

Suddenly I found myself alone with my two-year-old daughter. My ex had walked out. I had no real relationship with my father or my sister. There was no family safety net waiting to catch me.

Just grief.
And responsibility.
And silence.

A few months after my mother’s death, I walked into a Baptist church. I didn’t have a theological reason for going. I just knew I needed something I did not have.

That Sunday the message was simple: When you need Him, He is right there.

I went home afterward, put my toddler down for a nap, and sat down on the living room floor.

And I cried.

Not polite tears. Not quiet sadness. I cried the way a person cries when their heart breaks open.

I asked God the question grieving people always ask:

Why?

Why her?
Why now?
She wanted to live.
She loved us.
She wanted to watch her grandchild grow up.

Why take her?

And then something happened that changed the course of my life.

As I sat there on the floor, I felt arms wrap around me.

Big arms.

Not imagined comfort. Not poetic symbolism. Presence.

And interiorly I heard a voice I had never heard before, but somehow knew immediately.

“You asked Me, child, to end her suffering. So I did.”

Time seemed to stop.

I had prayed that prayer during my mother’s illness. I had asked God to end her suffering. In my grief, I had forgotten.

But He hadn’t.

In that moment I realized something that shattered my assumptions about God.

He had heard me.

He had been there all along.

I had not been indoctrinated. I had been encountered.

That moment did not instantly make me Catholic. My journey to the Church would come later. But it changed everything about how I saw God.

He was not abstract.
He was not distant.
He was not an idea people argued about.

He was real.

And once you know that, the search for truth becomes unavoidable.

I didn’t inherit faith.

I encountered the living Christ.

And once you’ve encountered Him, nothing else satisfies.