I began my journey to Orthodoxy by trying to protect my son Taran from being corrupted! You see, he had been accepted into the University of Dallas, and this Great Books/classical leaning university fit his personality well. But Heaven forbid! It was a very traditional Catholic school! So, I started reading. After all, I knew Catholicism was wrong, and he might be swayed!
Let’s backtrack a bit. I have been a Christian my entire life. I was born into Protestant Christianity (Assembly of God), so I cannot remember a time when I did not believe in the Creator of all and in the Lord Jesus Christ. However, after I got married, my husband and I did not attend church anymore. We just got too busy and sleeping in seemed more important. We still would have called ourselves Christians, but we weren’t really practicing Christians. Our worldview more closely resembled secular culture than it did Christianity.
After my first son was born, we moved to Oregon. I ended up getting a job at an Orthodox Jewish school. I saw the faith and sincerity of the people there, and I started to say to my husband that we needed to bring our son up with faith and get more serious about spiritual things. At the time, I prayed to be led to the Truth, even if that were Judaism or something else.
With much reading and praying to the “Truth” (whatever that might be), we returned to being practicing Christians and attending Evangelical churches. We became serious Protestants. During this time, I served as a Sunday School teacher, a children’s worship leader, and then as the coordinator for a parachurch scouting group called American Heritage Girls. I also coordinated a drama group for Christian teens called Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits. In addition, while homeschooling my own children (after adding another son and a daughter), we began to heavily teach our children apologetics and defending the faith.
Over time, however, my husband and I both started to feel that there must be something more. Evangelical Christianity seemed an inch deep and a mile wide. Then, my oldest son applied and was accepted—through a series of Providential coincidences—to UD. As I began researching Catholicism to “protect” him, I started to realize that I thought Catholicism was more correct than Protestantism. I also ran across Orthodox Christianity. Even though I found it strange, the theology kept calling to me. This prompted me to read some books on Orthodoxy. I mentioned Orthodoxy to my son, but he’d attended a Liturgy in Texas that hadn’t excited him much. Nevertheless, by the time he came back from college with his Theology and Philosophy degrees, he was no longer Protestant, although he wasn’t yet anything else. Roman Catholicism had some issues that just didn’t sit right with him. He asked me for the books I’d read on Orthodoxy, we both kept reading, and things grew from there.
I agreed to go to visit an Orthodox Church with him. I called and made an appointment with Father Theodore. The website seemed friendly and was in English. My son and I started attending the week after Pascha in about 2016. We loved the beauty, the tradition, and mostly, that we could find Truth there. After listening to my son and me discuss Orthodoxy, my husband decided to join us and started to attend Liturgy that Pentecost. It took a few years, but the beauty and Truth of the Orthodox Church drew us in completely. We were all baptized three years ago, and now, we are Orthodox Christians. We are home!
