ON BEING CHASED BY GOD
I grew up Baptist. I was a Protestant in Texas.
As a Protestant, a lot of times you're raised anti-Catholic. So everything I knew about Catholicism, I didn’t like. And so I remember saying, “I will never be Catholic, and I will never raise my kids Catholic."
But God is more stubborn than I am.
It was in my 30s, when I started having children, that I could feel that touch of the Lord again, saying, come back to me, bring your kids to me, you need to teach your kids about me, or the world will teach everything that isn’t me. But I fought Him. For the six years I was fighting Him, I tried every church that wasn’t Catholic. 
My grandparents, on my father’s side, were pretty devout Baptists, but my parents were not devout anything. Every time we would go spend time with my grandparents, they would take us to church. I would say I was 5 or 6. I was young. I can just remember the feeling of liking whatever they read to us out of the Bible. So to me, when I look back on my journey now that I'm older and I’m a convert, I was like, “Oh, that was my first touch, I think, of the Lord touching my soul.”
But then it went away.
With my parents not being devout, I didn’t go to church for years until I was a teenager, the Lord just made me want to know Him. And so I reached out to my mom and said, “Hey, I feel like I need to go back to church.” A pastor was starting a new Baptist church outside of town, so I started going there every day it was open. Then I decided to get baptized when I was 16 years old.
I’m the youngest of three. My brother was the oldest. He was 24 at the time when I was 18. He killed himself, and that was faith-crushing. So everything that I had gone through to grow closer to God was just—it was truly crushed when he died. And I couldn’t figure out, at that moment, did God cause it? Why did He allow it? Why did this happen? You know, it’s that struggle of good and evil and why God allows evil in the world, right?
And nobody could answer that for me.
And so I got mad at God.
If you think of the stages of grieving, I got stuck in the anger stage, and I was just mad. I was mad at Him for most of my 20s. So I lived very secularly, very sinfully, all of my 20s.
I met my husband in my mid-to-late 20s. We got married when I was 27. He is a cradle Catholic but not practicing, and so that was kind of my first touch with Catholicism. He even wanted to get married in the Catholic Church back then, and I said no. Because, as a Protestant, a lot of times you're raised anti-Catholic. So everything I knew about Catholicism, I didn’t like. And so I remember saying, “I will never be Catholic, and I will never raise my kids Catholic.”
But God is more stubborn than I am.
I didn't get married in the Catholic Church. Actually, we got married in Vegas. Loved it. It was so fun. But it was in my 30s, when I started having children, that I could feel that touch of the Lord again, saying, come back to me, bring your kids to me, you need to teach your kids about me, or the world will teach everything that isn’t me.
But I fought Him.
For the six years I was fighting Him, I tried every church that wasn’t Catholic. My husband was like, “I don’t like these churches.” And even though he wasn't practicing, the Catholic Church was what was familiar to him, so everything else was really unfamiliar, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like bands on stages and stuff like that, which I look back on and I’m like, yeah, he was right. So finally I decided to try the Catholic Church, and when I tried it, I realized, oh, there’s something there. I realized, “Oh, Lord, maybe this is something I need to think about.” Even the Lord said, “You’re trying to answer my call. You've been trying for years and years and years. If you really want to answer my call to come back to me, you have to be open to the Catholic Church.”
I tested the Catholic Church out in January, February, and March 2013, and it was probably August of 2013 that I finally realized that I didn’t want to, excuse my language, half-ass it anymore because I couldn't take Communion. There were things I couldn’t do, and I knew it. I was respectful of not doing that, but I was like, I don’t want to come to Mass anymore and halfway participate.
In 2014, on March 1, we got our marriage convalidated. In April 2014, I came into the Church. In May 2014, I got both my kids baptized. They were 5 and 7 at the time. I had never baptized them because that’s not a Protestant thing.
I started formation here at the Lanteri Center and was missioned as a spiritual director in 2024. This past year, I was invited on staff. So I teach people who are becoming spiritual directors. So I do more than just direct.
This is a job of patience. Our job is a long game, it’s not a short game.
Part of our job is to meet people where they’re at. Some people are so broken it’s hard for them to be vulnerable, or it takes years maybe to be vulnerable, and that’s fine. I will walk with people and just meet them where they are every time. Our faith, to me, is a paradox. It’s that painful joy. The crucifix is a painful joy. It’s painful that He had to die, but our salvation came from it, so to me it’s helped me kind of reconcile that paradox more because I see it every day.
I think my greatest joy is seeing God meet everybody so uniquely because that's how He made them, and it shows all of us His uniqueness too. The most challenging thing is watching someone doubt God. Watching someone in their head say, I’ve read the Bible, I know He loves me, but they doubt Him. It doesn’t sink down to the heart, and that's hard for me because I've gone through it myself, so I feel them. But it’s hard because our Lord is the most loving God. He wants us to be close to Him. He wants us to trust Him, and so many people don’t, and they want to control life themselves
I see God most in the hurt. In the struggle. In the painfulness of this world. We may not feel it, but He truly is there. He’ll gently draw you. Our Lord is a gentle lover. So all that gentleness and goodness, when someone talks about that, it means the Holy Spirit is working through them or on them or drawing them.
The more I see stuff in my directees, the more I see stuff in myself. It’s funny because sometimes I tell my directees things like, “Oh, I need to take that advice for myself.” Sometimes I think the Lord is saying, yeah, I'm talking to you too.
He talks to us both.
He’s a good God.
You know what I’ve realized? I’ve been looking over my faith life more and more lately, and I’m more and more realizing, if you look at Song of Songs—you should, it’s really short—all of our journeys are just a huge love affair. He never gives up on chasing us, right? Even when I went away from Him in my 20s, when I hated Him and I was mad at Him because of everything, He never stopped chasing me.
And then He turned around and brought me back through the love of my own children, and He continues to love me.
He continues to grow me.
So if you look at your life, it truly is a huge love affair of our God chasing us.
And He never gives up.