While I'm actually awake...

I did an amazing thing tonight. After dinner I snuck away to our attic for a few moments of quiet and prayer, and in a few minutes I was sound asleep. While sitting up in a chair. I'm not sure I've ever done that before in my life. My husband had taken our kiddos out grocery shopping in the meantime, so in the silence I managed to sleep for a whole hour!

All of which means I am here at the keyboard with my household asleep but me awake. Since I've been trying to shift my waking time earlier and earlier (probably the cause of my nap attack), this feels new. Time to sort out a few things that have been on my mind.

Some years back I wrote up my basic conversion story for a book edited by Tim Drake called There We Stood, Here We Stand: Eleven Lutherans Rediscover Their Catholic Roots. The version that went to press inadvertently left out all of the edits in my chapter, so it included embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors and such like. So I suppose it was vanity that prevented me from publicizing my connection with this book. But there is also that aspect of telling a conversion story, at least in the telling of mine, that is awkward because there is no neat stopping point. When I decided to become a Catholic, I was still quite ignorant of much of what that meant, beyond a commitment I was making to continue following Jesus on this new curve He was taking. The day I received Confirmation (16 months later), I decided I was going to leave out the going to Confession part of being a Catholic because I picked up the implication it was optional and it was, you know, very uncomfortable to me. (The Holy Spirit gently but immediately corrected me on that one, and I made my first Confession two days later.) A month after becoming a Catholic, I realized I hadn't really spent significant time "living with" Catholics and I found them very uncomfortable to be around, because I didn't understand Catholic cultural trappings. It took several years for that sense to go away.

So even though I can talk about the things that moved me to leave off being Protestant, my conversion to Christ in the Catholic Church has been so much more than that.

I've been inspired to write a new conversion story, one with a wider scope.

I have found since writing my conversion story seven years ago that I tend to tell the basic outline in that same way each time I talk about it. But the last few times I've been asked to share it, I've essentially been trying to make polite conversation about a past event. Now there's a waste. The value of shaping a conversion story is not only in being ready and able to share one's story of grace; having the story makes one relive it, and find connections with God's call in the here and now. It gives evidence to people that God is active among us. There are many, many stories of how people discover the Catholic Church, but equally necessary I believe are stories of people spiritually thriving and surviving the difficulties once they cross the Tiber.

So, well, I guess I've announced it now, so I'd better get down to doing it. Stay tuned.