there are a lot of cool uh things that I could say about Lorelei Sovereign conversion story this week on the show a lot of places where she she stopped and questioned her even to Uncle Faith the early church what did it look like that once saved always saved am I really and if I'm not if I'm questioning things do I believe in that that doctrine that that underpinning that foundational part of the Protestant faith that I'm a part of lots of things like that that we could go into or the beauty of Lorelei and her husband JP's Faith after becoming Catholic the places they found were this gorgeous and practicing the rootedness and the things that they began to understand and can pass on to their kids that the Catholic Church teaches and that they can Embrace there's a lot to dig into here but I I think at its core this is a story of somebody Lorelei and her husband JP who are truly wrestling with their faith and and either begin to ask questions about their Evangelical Christian faith they are practicing of course JP was was raised Catholic and kind of began to wander from that Faith as they themselves wrestle with these things but in those in inflection points asking those very very tough questions and coming up again and again with Catholic answers to those questions is what I think makes this story so fascinating because from all kinds of angles when you ask those kinds of questions and time and again the Catholic church has the most satisfying logical historically rooted answers well those things begin to add up and in the end of the day in lorelei's case the answer is well I'm becoming Catholic that's the church that makes the most sense that Christ founded that has roots in history that logically fits together and then wow the things that that opens up the beauty of the sacraments reconciliation the Eucharist Theology of the Body the cathetic on sexuality and marriage these things are Life Giving it's an awesome story guys I think you will love it please watch please subscribe to the channel do all those things you do and enjoy so hey friends welcome back thanks for watching thanks for listening if you're watching on YouTube thank you for watching there please subscribe to our channel uh hit the Bell like the video do all those fun things that you do on YouTube and thanks for watching if you're listening on podcast please make sure you follow us on your podcasting app of choice and if you are an apple podcast or on Spotify please leave your rating or review that helps to push the podcast out to new people and expand the listenership and and help stories like this one reach more and more people I am joined this week for a fantastic conversation with Lorelei Sovereign she joyfully joined the Catholic church in 2016 after many years as a Protestant she lives outside of Chicago with her husband four children and a dog named Saint I love that she writes about faith and the family life on this catholicfamily.com and it's also a children's author with two published books through penguin Random House most recently a Catholic retelling of The Secret Garden called the edge of the in between uh this would be a fantastic classic conversation Lorelei thank you for being here welcome to the show and hello I am so excited to be here you actually played a part in my story like without knowing who I was many years back so I'm really excited to get the chance to actually talk to you wow you didn't say that before I met you so this isn't really fair let's look at an ambush I hope I have a good Park you know the the first article I ever wrote on my blog when I before it became Catholic actually so I became Catholic in 2015 so not long before you and I wrote an article uh on a little tiny blog that I had a time for friends and family called what sucks about the Catholic church and this is like my my and it was intended like the the punch like you know this as a writer the punch line was that I suck and I have to I have to work on myself first too but that of course was was at the end of the article and I led with the headline of what sucks about the Catholic church and that article on my title blog went went viral and I had my first like television spot on a bunch of different networks talking about the article and I was like wow I hope that nobody like knows me through just this article and this the guy that like hates the Catholic church or something because that was I don't know it was a good article I think that was awesome I hope it wasn't that idea thank you that's that's awesome okay so uh you're a convert to the Catholic faith you have an awesome Story I Heard a bit of it I don't want to spoil too much of it um but I think what I'll do is I will kind of step back a little bit listeners love me to just be quiet and you just to tell your story and then we'll dig in along the way to things that that are are of deeper interest points of intersection uh dig into those places there and go a little bit deeper but for now uh maybe just start as far back as you want to start with your own faith Journey uh where where does it begin for you yeah for me it begins um a date I don't remember um actually I was baptized Catholic as an infant but not raised Catholic it was kind of a check the box kind of a a thing like I didn't see a Catholic Church other than a funeral on occasion or driving past it like that was the only time I went into a church or a wedding um but for me my personal faith Journey really began when I was a really young kid I just loved Jesus I was going to a Nazarene church with my family starting at around age five we started going to church regularly and I just loved I loved Jesus I felt like Jesus loved me I think I still have the card where I filled out the little sinner's prayer thing you know that I asked Jesus into my heart I think I still have that um but for me it was just something that was so easy and so natural and just became part of my childhood I was deep into like the Jesus Freak era like DC Talk Newsboys Audio Adrenaline so into my like teen years I had a fervor for Jesus that was sometimes strange and and quite quite a lot you know just kind of didn't listen to secular music and um just I don't know it was really deep into the 90s Christian culture in the Evangelical world so um ended up going to an Assembly of God youth group and the people like my friends there and the people at the church would talk in tongues so I got comfortable being around that even though I never really felt like I could talk in tongues like that really wasn't a thing but I just consistently even through like a lot of hard things in my life like my parents getting divorced a parent who is struggling with addiction Jesus was always there and that was just this thread in my life that I didn't really question until much later um so that's kind of like the the synopsis I guess of my very early Journey before Catholicism even entered the picture a little bit was just very Evangelical loved God president of Bible Club at high school like just you know all the things of what would Jesus do bracelets everything everything um so that all just that just was all there and then um after my freshman year of college I ended up meeting a young man whose name was John Paul and he was named after Saint John Paul II and thought he was super cute when when I met him that first time and I remember going home and telling my mom like I met this really nice boy but the only thing is he's Catholic and she kind of was like why is that a big deal but somewhere along the way I realized that I had inherited some anti-catholicism just from people talking I don't really remember like there wasn't like a sermon that I remember that was like really anti-catholic but there was something inside me that I had just like taken into my own that something wasn't quite right with Catholicism and like I knew some of those reasons some of them were they're too into Mary right um why do they need to go to confession when we can just talk to God ourselves and ask him to forgive our sins all of the the really common things that I think a lot of us had like why would Mary be ever a virgin like why did that matter why is that important um so that was all kind of there and that wasn't enough to keep me from stop like to stop me from dating this guy named John Paul so I started we started dating I went to visit his family one time on the ski trip and his whole family is this huge Catholic Family like just so many cousins just everywhere cousins everywhere and they all went together in this room to pray at the end of the night I think it might have been like the Divine Mercy Chaplet now but at the time it was like a lot of Hail Mary's and stuff I didn't understand and I removed myself from that room and went upstairs into a bathroom and just like cried because I didn't know what they were doing and I thought it was heretical and I thought it was something other than Christianity and it was very scary you know like it was kind of you know just they're all saying the same thing and this monotonous tone and I'm like from the Assemblies of God youth group you know there's people speaking in tongues and it talking to Mary and like just none of it made sense so so that became really early on um a struggle for us in our relationship John Paul became my husband JP so like we're married now um but all throughout our dating I was exposed to this Catholic Family and his aunt would like pull me aside at family gatherings and try and explain to me why Mary had to be ever virgin and like I just didn't get it and wasn't in a spot to really like internalize anything that they were saying to me at all and when we got engaged I actually entered our CIA at that point in time and dropped out because I just like I couldn't even I couldn't handle like not literally interpreting everything in the Bible um all of the extra books in the Bible there were so many things that they talked about that I just I was solo scriptura like Bible alone faith alone all of that stuff so I dropped out of our CIA and just thought this isn't gonna happen for me so we we still got married um it was still to this day like the thing we probably most frequently thought about was what were like what were we gonna do when we had kids like what church were we gonna go to um I really kind of pummeled him with all of the questions the all of the arguments and he really at that time wasn't really prepared to answer me he didn't really have he grew up with the faith just accepting it probably a lot like I had just accepted my Evangelical faith and then we get engaged and and married actually Catholic wedding as well so funny like funny turnip events there we didn't have a full Mass but we had a liturgy um of the word and we got married in the Catholic church at his college so I look back and I'm like oh my goodness God was giving me these Graces that I didn't even know I was getting I was in a sacramental marriage I didn't even know what a Sacramento was like really I didn't really get it like I got I got that it was serious and I got that it was something more than just like a legal agreement but did I have any deep understanding of sacramentality like no I didn't because we didn't have anything like we didn't have anything tangible as evangelicals like you know we have things in the Catholic church that we can touch that we can taste that we can hear that you know like all of these senses get incorporated into these sacraments and in my Evangelical world I had like I was often chasing a feeling yeah and and it was so real like I want like my faith was real but I didn't have anything to hold on to so I was often chasing this spiritual high that um you can't sustain it's it was just something like I'd go to camp and I would have the spiritual high and then it would it would fade and I would think I did something wrong because like why can't I just stay in that place and it even though I felt like I was once saved always saved like I still like how many times did I rededicate myself to Christ and and how many times did I get baptized a couple more I think than my infant baptism so well you know I like I was living a life of once saved always saved like there was this constant like I the sense of like needing to keep coming back even though I didn't really realize that that was maybe a little bit incongruent with with that idea that one and done um so so we got married and we had the Catholic wedding and first year of marriage just continually the thing that we fought about the most was our faith for a while we went to Catholic mass and then we would go to Evangelical Church service and we would go to two services on a Sunday to try and like support each other but we kept wondering like what's going to happen when we have babies like what are we gonna tell them and what are they going to what are they going to do and how what are they going to think is their faith and what are we going to tell them is the right thing to believe and it got to a point where I pushed so hard on these things and my husband was so not like ready to answer the questions that I had that he for the sake of unity in our marriage actually stepped away and stopped going to mass and truly like he will say this he's like in the other room right now but he will say this like that he didn't know what he was leaving when he did that he didn't know if he had known what he was leaving um then maybe he wouldn't have done it but also we kind of look back now and think well maybe it that was something that had to happen to get me there in the in the long run to get me to to be in Union with the Catholic church and so he he stepped away and we ended up going to uh Lutheran Church Missouri synod which I argued was closer to Catholicism than anything I had done before but that was like that type of traditional stuff without the stuff that I couldn't handle so it didn't have the same Devotion to Mary right like it it didn't it had like consubstantiation you know not transubstantiation so it was it was close but it just it didn't have praying to Saints so it took away the stuff that I was uncomfortable with and it let us find what we thought at the time was possibly Unity because we both had kind of left a little bit of something to find some common ground so so we were Lutheran for for a while and um had our first two kids in um in that setting so they were actually both baptized as infants in the Lutheran Church um so we had Felicity as our oldest and then August is our second and uh it's a it's funny looking back because also all of our kids have saints attachments and the first two we didn't even know we were doing it at that time so that's another just little like thing that I think God wanted me to smile at looking back because he knew he knew where I'd end up so we we had our time as lutherans we moved um due to my husband's work closer to Chicago and we couldn't really find a Lutheran Church that uh that worked well for us we ended up moving back to Wisconsin and we ended up going to um a First Christian Church which was a really nice church it was very focused on social justice and service to others and the church going out and actually helping the community which is really really beautiful um ended up moving again and then we found ourselves at a church that was uh pretty Associated I believe with Baptist Church it was just you know called one of your generic Church titles like and and it um it was affiliated with the Baptist so we encountered for the first time the idea of predestination and Calvinism in in that whole world um at that point my husband and I had two kids and we were you know mid late late twenties like just adults you know like that not transitioning to adults but we were kind of doing the grown-up thing parents and had jobs and and all that stuff and we found a few things one of the things that we found was or that I found was that I had a history in my life of leading worship so at any pretty much any church that I went to I would sing for that church and eventually would probably get to like lead the worship for certain Sundays um or do backup or whatever but sometimes I would lead and these were often like this was this went back to when I was like 12 at the Nazarene Church like I would lead worship we didn't even have a band we would like put in a cassette tape and just like sing over the main track and then I moved to high school and was at the even or at the Assemblies of God church and I was leading the high school some of the songs in the high school worship team and would sing sometimes like solos on the Sunday and then just keep it rolling like I would Canter at the Lutheran service and like I just I and I eventually ended up at these more contemporary churches like on a stage where there were lights and we had headsets and um you know there was a full band behind as like of people who knew how to play instruments pretty well and so when we ended up at this this Baptist influence Church I started questioning if everything that I had grown up believing was actually true and I think it was a moment for me of is this faith my like a cartoon like is it fake like is it actually is it real was it I was either gonna hang on to it or I was gonna drop it as something that I grew out of I just didn't know if it had any legs to stand on or any backbone just as a religion as a whole and there wasn't really a lot of depth there for me like even though I felt God throughout my life I at this point I wanted is it historically true is it logically true is it possible that this stuff actually happened and if not then what am I doing so we found ourselves going to church but my husband was kind of in a similar place and we found ourselves kind of living more like practical agnostics but like going to church our faith didn't really influence our day-to-day other than we tried to be nice people but my prayer life was nothing I wasn't really reading the Bible because I'd memorized it all when I was a kid when I did Bible quizzing like I knew it but you know I wasn't in it I wasn't reading it and there was a certain Sunday where I was leading worship and I knew how to do all the things like I could raise my hands I could get people you know out in the congregation to raise their hands and close their eyes and feel something but I'm singing these words and I'm helping people to feel something and I'm thinking I don't even know if I believe this I am lying right now I am a liar and that was the moment I knew I had to step away from leading worship because it wasn't real like I didn't know if I actually believed it it was a lie for me to stand up there and get people to feel things at these songs if I didn't really know if I thought any of it was true so I made up some excuse to recuse myself from the worship team and didn't tell the real reason but I did the best I could at the time I was just trying to like get myself out of like blatantly lying in front of a couple hundred people on Sunday and we did a few other things at that time we tried to go through the membership class for that church and that was a really big one for us because we um we sat in there and the guy who was teaching the class did that classic thing you know the two Cliffs where like there's a cross that they put in the middle of the two Cliffs and then you walk across it and you're a Christian so he drew that on the board and so he drew the two Cliffs and then he he said like Jesus you know makes it possible for you to be in Union with God and he drew the the cross and kind of had a little stick figure you know that could walk across and then JP stood up and went up to the board and he was like but what happens if you've crossed and then you decide to cross back over to the to the first side of the cliff that you were originally on and and the guy who was teaching the class was like you can't do that and JP was like she currently doing that like so that was when we both kind of realized that once saved always saved wasn't the story we were living yeah because somebody could have asked me if I like I prayed that prayer when I was a kid I lived Christian Life I Lived it in my heart I lived it with everything to the point that I was a weirdo sometimes but then you put it fast forward us to our late 20s and I don't know if I believe it anymore I don't think I do and so I see us literally like walking back over to the other side and knowing that that is my lived experience and someone's telling me that's not possible and I'm like um you know like I think I think that's what we're doing so we actually didn't complete that membership class because we couldn't actually say that we ascended to certain things and then there was the whole like calvinist the total depravity thing um that we are the idea that we are um like just dung and Jesus covers Us with a white sheet and then God can't see all of our you know dung that is us he just sees the white sheet um versus the idea that that we're gold and we can sometimes be covered with dung but what God can do is he can wipe away that and uncover the goodness and the beauty that is is in there because of us being made in the image of God so we realized pretty quickly as well that we were not Calvinists that we did not believe in total depravity another big belief that they had was the idea of predestination and that certain people are just destined for heaven and certain people are just destined for hell and um at this the idea of that with Free Will and with God's love and all of those things just never really computed for me so we didn't we didn't go through the membership class and I eventually started looking into just trying to figure out if this Faith was something that was real kind of on my own and there was a really helpful book for me it's by a Protestant Pastor Timothy Keller and he wrote a book called the reason for God and that book really helped me reframe that childhood understanding of who God was into my grown-up understanding of that oh I think this might actually be real and so I read that book and that really helped C.S Lewis has always helped like he's great and so then I found myself at this place where I was like okay you know I've kind of gone in this soul searching I think this is true but like how do I live it then how do I live this truth ful the most fully while I'm here on Earth and I started asking some very dangerous questions I started asking questions like what did the early church look like for example and that was a question I posed at our small group at the time and no one could tell me what the early church looked like and that started to really bother me I thought shouldn't we know though like shouldn't we know what the early church looks like and no one did and no one seemed to really think it was an important question and I started looking at this stage and these lights and these headsets not that there's anything like intrinsically wrong with any of those things but the auditorium style and I started wondering like this but this can't be it though right like like this can't be what the early church looks like and I started to have a desire to find what that was so at the same time we had my husband JP um very surreptitiously and secretively he had a long commute at the time um from our where we live to Chicago and he was riding a train and he started sneakily checking out um theology books from the library where he was doing his post-doctoral fellowship and several of them were catholic and so he's like on the train like like started to read these catholic books but he didn't want to tell me what he was doing because he it had not gone well historically speaking it had gone it had gone so poorly so he's just like quietly feeling drawn back to the Catholic church right so there is this one Sunday and it is one of my favorite turning points in this whole journey we were on a date we were going out to dinner um actually right before this right before the night before this I was sitting on the couch after he had gone to bed and I was thinking through all these things like how much our faith was tied to emotion how I did just so many things like I just didn't feel connection to history I didn't understand like what the roots were what the depth was all these things and I all of these memories come flooding in of all of these random times I was like at math with JP's enormous family when I was with his like enormous set of cousins and his aunt and all these things and something locked into place and I thought oh no I am thinking like a Catholic and that was a weird moment like I literally remember where I was sitting on the couch just being like I'm I'm so everything flips from there so we are out to dinner the next night and it's snowing outside the restaurant it's very pretty and I had not prefaced this with anything with my husband at all but I just said it was like a Saturday night and I said would you want to go to mass tomorrow instead and and he didn't even know what to do with himself because that was very random coming for me because he didn't know I was on this path either and he was like yes I would like to go to master I would love to go to mass tomorrow and he couldn't believe it and I sent a Facebook message to one of my only friends at the time who I knew was Catholic from this mom's group and I was like where are you going to mass and like what time and like and so she like her and I are still friends so she's told me like where they went to mass and what time they would be there and so we take our little Evangelical family into math and I just was like okay like for the first time Mass didn't offend me I was always so offended by it like I was offended by why are we kneeling like what are you kneeling in front of it's you know like it's not right or I'm not included how come I can't receive communion I don't have a pro I never had a problem with transubstantiation so I was just like why why on Earth would you not let me receive communion and so that bothered me so I always found all these reasons to be super offended so I wasn't offended anymore and we found some people after Mass and I was like how do I like get in here like what do we do and they were they were in the middle of an rcia cycle like or just kind of you know a little bit on the front end and because of all of the research and things like I had been doing they let me hop in to that class in December so I text my sisters-in-law like that week and I was like guess where I am like I'm about to go to rcia and my sister-in-law who knew this whole journey were just like what and so that was that was fun um they were really surprised because their family had really been praying for like 10 years yeah for me to convert to become Catholic and I was so offended by their prayers the whole time just stop praying for me I'm fine and just all of that so so they were really excited um I was really at a point where I was going to ask all the hard questions though because I I was believing and thinking okay this faith is is probably true but if it is true it's probably here and if it's not here then it's probably nowhere and so it was really kind of do or die for me because I understood the logic of it and I understood that there was more depth to it than I had thought there was before but if Catholicism turned out to not be the truth then I didn't really think there was anywhere else for me to go and then I would probably let it all go at that point so I brought all of my questions I brought all the hard hitting questions asked everything I held nothing back in these classes and I had really great teachers and they answered every single one of them and also was like the light started like coming on and everything started shifting and there were times when it would walk in for RCA and they would have adoration going on in this Chapel off to the side of the church and I can't explain this as anything other than like God because why would I want to go into a room where a piece of bread was displayed in a golden case like why would I care I want it in that room like I knew something was happening in that room that was really special and I just something deep inside me wanted to be in that room and there was no logical reason why I would want to be in that room so that's actually where you come in uh yes so I was reading all of these articles or looking for articles right because it's really it's good news it's really it was really helpful so I found a lot of your blogs that you would write and I loved the polite like it just very like respectful tone The Cordial cat you know you live up to the name but like it was just it was logical and it was respectful and it made sense to me so I I like devoured all these articles that you wrote and you know other converts wrote during that time because I was starting to feel fairly alone in our journey no one else was coming with us like we were just doing this on our own we got we got kicked out of our small group at the Protestant church like we weren't even allowed to say goodbye we lost all of our friends no one wanted to hang out with us anymore so I was really lonely so I would just constantly like Google like Evangelical converts to Catholicism like Catholic apologetics all these things and so your articles are really helpful so I'm glad I get the chance to say thank you because thank you yeah so they they were great and they they made a difference and my mom also um I told her I was coming on your podcast and she was like tell him I say hi because she also read a lot of your articles too she ended up getting confirmed the year after me well I love you Mom yeah yeah so I was her a year after my confirmation which was great so anyway so you're yeah so I was reading these articles I was on the coming home network website a lot I was watching a lot of Journey Home episodes and just feeling less alone in that which was so nice so we kind of got the whole process like done and through and because I was baptized Catholic I was able to go to confession and receive my first communion before my confirmation because I had those sacraments done um so that was great and then I ended up getting confirmed in Minnesota which is where most of JP's family lives and all these crazy sovereigns who had been praying for me for 10 years like packed the pews at the Cathedral of Saint Paul and got to see me come into the Catholic Church which and then the aunt the aunt who made me cry was my confirmation sponsor wow full circle so I don't know that brings us up to like their seven years since then but that brings us up to like the moment of my confirmation where I felt like everything that I had questions about got answered where I felt like I finally was connected to the history of our church where I understood what the early church practice and that Catholicism keeps and maintains so many of those beautiful things the theological depth is there I love the sacraments I love confession now going to confession is one of my favorite things it's so healing and so beautiful so that was kind of like that's up till that day but now I've got like I've had life since then too but oh that's that's fantastic there really are a lot of similarities to my own journey and my wife's journey in our family's journey and I think that's kind of funny and strange way back even in high school with the cool with you know Newsboys DC Talk like let's yes yes let's do it and I'm sure when you you were on the journey home which also is is surreal right we can just have a little I mean DB from that for a bit you and I maybe watching watching that show I missed a devoured I mean I must have devoured 30 hours or something of that of that or probably even more than that of that show I used to you know in the early days of YouTube Just consume those episodes all to like three or four in the morning sometimes before we had kids just watch those over and over again and I remember uh David Anders who I'm a huge fan of he had an amazing journey from Lutheranism from Calvinism into the Catholic church and I watched his his episode probably just 12 times just his because he so succinctly laid out his journey and why Luther was wrong why Kelvin was wrong why it made no sense and I just I love those and then of course you had some experience two of them going on the show and kind of being like what am I doing I'm not worthy of telling my story yeah I'm thinking that that that then impacts other people it's this weird like discipleship kind of process which is so strange to think that others now watch your video and are are doing what we used to do right that's wild yeah it is and you never know who those people are in most cases so it's just kind of trusting that that's out there and available for whoever it will be helpful for it was such a such a cool opportunity I had originally just like sent in my written conversion story and then I got an email back asking about going on the show and I was like what me ew I used to be afraid of EWTN like it was yeah so that was awesome yeah it was fun and you would have met Matt Swain probably a fellow Nazarene Bible quizzer so did you guys have a Bible quiz off when when you met him because yeah so yeah we had a lot comment I've actually never met him in person he was a week I was filming but we've met and I was on the coming home network podcast with him a couple months ago so we got so we've like been in touch and I think we share a lot of like the just like the Bible quizzing the the music stuff yeah so we've definitely like talked I would have loved to meet him in person one day at least we got to talk on the podcast I think you should do a Bible quiz off the two of you I mean bring back Catholic Bible quizzing I think that's this could be a thing this could be a minister it could be I mean we need it we could have it right yeah we do so I love that I mean along along the way you you hit these kind of points I you know I was I was Pentecostal in high school so I can relate to the experience of the highs and lows of the charismatic kind of you know the the altar calls without the altar which also is is strange right but the idea is to recommit yourself to Christ kind of over and over again chasing that high of the youth you know the youth group conventions and like the the camps and like you you you're you're pursuing that in in the sense in umbrella that you you are saved you're once saved always saved and those times you don't feel that that way right and you and you and JP really hit that hit that wall at one point but I I feel like in that umbrella there are all those moments of trying to chase that feeling of not feeling like you're saved because you don't have the emotional feelings but knowing intellectually you're supposed to know that you're you're saved despite how you feel and then of course I love that the Catalyst for you guys to begin to kind of step back and question things is hitting that kind of Doctrine kind of square on right realizing that hey we're kind of investigating this how are we still saved that that's a really interesting way I don't think I've heard that before on on this show I've been getting to kind of question your kind of Evangelical Faith realizing that maybe I don't think that I am safe anymore that's yeah interesting yeah like I don't necessarily know that I believe God can be known like that was kind of where I was at so how is it how is that possible like if God had like if I don't know if something had happened to me in that moment like I just I just wasn't there in terms of in terms of belief or faith or anything and so yeah that really that wall of once they've always saved fell purely on personal lived experience yeah and that's looking at myself over here for a book and I can't quite see it from where I am here but I think it's by a guy called Paul hacker or hackner who was a Lutheran convert to Catholicism who wrote a book about Luther he was very schooled in Luther and wrote a lot of uh on on Lutheran Theology and one of the things he uncovers in this book is the idea that when Luther Cleaves himself from the Catholic church he had to then have faith in some kind of institution and to know that he was saved if you're once saved always saying yeah and the thing that I think hackner says that Luther had faith in was his own faith so if his own stalwart Faith began to waver he would then feel like he's not not safe anymore so it's this really weird thing of you have faith in God but then you have to have faith in your own faith kind of commitment and that sounds very similar to what you guys kind of began to bump into and of course if that's like one of the core kind of things that Luther in the establishment of the Lutheran faith of the Protestant Reformation well that of course if that's not in solid footing you can begin to kind of unwind that right yeah yeah and it just it made so much more sense when I started viewing our faith as an infusion of Grace over a lifetime and a transition and a journey towards sanctification that may not even be complete when you die right that's what we have Purgatory for so the idea that that you know like you can have times where you do something or you turn your heart away from God and that that that injures your your relationship with God but that you can turn back to God and that hopefully as you go through life you just let that love in more and more and more fully ideally while we're still living here on Earth right that's like our saints that we recognize but if not like our hearts need to be ready for love we need to be ready for God and so that's why we have that Purgatory as as a process to finish that sanctification if it's not complete like that just felt so beautiful to me yeah and so it almost like took the like I don't want to say took the pressure off but kind of took the pressure off just in terms of like I had I had to believe this one thing and that was and that was it and that I'm good um and it became more of a not that I want to be lazy but that I'm cooperating with God on this journey so I had a more active role in it versus a much more passive role when you just pray the prayer rare and then let God you know do whatever but there just really wasn't this sense that I that I had to have an active role in my sanctification or that I could cooperate with my sanctification at all and now it's like every day like my heart chooses yes or my heart chooses nor throughout a day my heart chooses yes or my heart chooses no so it's much more of a a Cooperative thing and it's not like it's not like I'm toiling and laboring you know working for my salvation and then you sort of stress or guilt-inducing weight it's this this beautiful just you uniting with the with the sacraments and The Graces of our faith and journeying hopefully to let love in fully as soon as possible like that just that's just it's awesome it's great that's that's very well said and I I can resonate with that with that feeling I think that listeners can too come from that kind of background because I would you know you you would go to a Sunday morning service as an Evangelical and you would you'd sing worship songs you would lead worship songs whether you like like felt it or not which is I think also interesting kind of insight to that whole experience right but you'd you'd feel the feelings of worship and give God kind of that Glory through song and then pray and then hear a sermon right and I the sermon was meant the thing that builds you up for for becoming more like Christ for service for Mission but there never was that like you're saying this the sanctification kind of element to it right yes it was it was weird like I look back at now and trying to understand what I was thinking back then but you're you're hearing a sermon and meant to then live that summer Annette meant to internalize it and become more like Christ and live a better Christian Life and serve others and and love God more but there wasn't really like a okay so how and and how does that actually work other than just reflecting on that sermon throughout the week and and praying more and and reading your Bible where I the the difference to me in the Catholic faith is the Mass is like that thing that's meant to actually tangibly like work on your soul and use that Grace like a spiritual kind of exercise right and of course prayer is important and the Bible is important and the sacraments are important and these things are important it it to me that the whole process though that simplification process is is so much more explicit and intentional in the Catholic Church towards making Saints and it ever was for me as an Evangelical it just makes a lot more sense yeah yeah it's like yeah like you almost like once you see it you can't unsee it okay like I feel like it's like I'm in the in the Matrix like you know like I once you see it you can't see it I think those sermons in the Evangelical Church it was like nice to do right it'd be like good to do but it wasn't like like if you didn't do anything like nothing really you're one saved always like it didn't really matter and so when we go to a confession or we go to mass and we and we enter into this this space that removes the veil Between Heaven and Earth for a little while and we receive Jesus in the Eucharist like that like everything builds up to that and I think that's like one of the big differences for me too is that everything in my old church is built up to the sermon and the sermon was like 30 minutes long and that was what it was all about and then in Mass it builds up to Jesus it builds up to the Eucharist and then we take that and it's inside and he's inside of us and and we carry that into our daily lives like that's just become such a part of the fiber of like who I am and and what's interesting is there was always some part of me that was drawn to communion there were times when I would be at a Protestant service and there would be the little cups of the juice and the little pieces of bread and I would look at it and I would imagine it as the body and blood of Jesus like it meant a lot to me I would sometimes cry thinking about it and now I can see that it was a desire for the Eucharist like inside of me that I didn't even really understand what the Eucharist was then but I would just look at that that grape juice and I would imagine it as Jesus's blood and so to know that that really existed like I didn't know that that really existed somewhere and then when I did um and had access to that like that I don't know it just it filled something it does so that's interesting because for me it was almost the opposite I always hated communion because to me I couldn't quite understand why we were doing this thing why why once a month and just the whole process laborious like the handing out of this and the passing along and the waiting it and it's not really a rational like dislike I don't know why I disliked it so much but I but I always had this feeling of like this doesn't feel right I don't like this and I attached that now to the fact that well because it wasn't the Eucharist it wasn't what Christ said it was and it makes sense in hindsight to me why I disliked it so much but at the time it was this really weird kind of irrational kind of oh not this oh it's oh it's this Sunday again like oh come on but yeah it would make the service longer yeah definitely I think it was this strange longing that I didn't really understand yeah until it was satisfied in the in in the actual Eucharist and I can remember one time before I even became Catholic just struck me as so strange listening to uh you know a protest an Evangelical Pastor in the community service before communion reading the words of of of Saint Paul in Corinthians talking about you know quoting Christ this is my blood this is my body and he he he changed the words so he's he he had his Bible there but he read this is like my body yeah I like my blood and I went wait a second yes I know that's not what the Bible says I know that's not the scripture you're reading that translation does not say like oh my goodness that struck me as wait a second what are we doing here and that you know that was in some way a catalyst were beginning to unwind this thinking of okay but Christ didn't say like but then why do we have to add that in there yeah right yeah that's a that's a really good point there was actually a moment we had a similar moment with our kids had the Jesus storybook Bible and it was a very common Bible given out it was very commonly given out at our churches that we went to and that also has that change where and the community and he said this is like my body this is like my blood and I also this was like on our journey so we were already like pretty much Catholic at that point but I was like nope we're not that's not we're gonna get a different kids Bible because that's not the thing um yeah yeah that's it's always interesting certain of our churches would have an old some of them still had an altar some of them didn't have an altar some of them we'd only have communion once in a while but it was just yeah there was always just something that wasn't wasn't full for me until I became Catholic and then now we're like seven years passed my conversion my husband's re version obviously he came with me um back into it you know two more kids we have two kids who've had their first communions and I'm so grateful that my kids have access to this at such a young age like I know I had to go on my journey but the fact that my two oldest kids have access to the Eucharist and confession at such a young age like what a gift that they have those Graces and I'm so thankful for that for them um there's a little part of me that's like oh I wish I could have had it that long but I know I had to go on this story this was my this was my journey but it's just really cool to see my kids already like leaning into the rhythms of our faith yes and asking to go to confession and we I work at a Catholic school so I we walk through the parish often to get to my classroom and there's adoration sometimes and it's no longer a piece of bread you know in a golden container for me so we will go in and we'll just say good morning to Jesus for a couple of minutes and there's just such a such a roots in that and to know that we have been we're doing the same thing that Christians have been doing since the beginning of our faith that yet we are a part of something that runs so deep and so far back um like you just can't you can't replace that groundedness you can't know what that is until until you know what it is almost like I didn't know what that was until I went there and had it yeah yeah that is that is the challenge of this show for me for for the last four years doing this podcast and blogging before that is trying to express that that that you you have to really in a sense begin to live it to understand the depth and beauty of that it's very hard to articulate I think but there is that that that beauty in the roots and the groundedness and the history and the and the practice of of the rich faith we have the unique situation of I became Catholic um while my wife was pregnant of go me like what husband of the Year okay and actually in in her first experience of mass She fainted she's a fainter during during pregnancy we know this now in hindsight my goodness she's fainted like once per pregnancy so far it seems like just you know whatever happens the the physics is the wrong word the biology the the hormones the yeah the body's doing things she often will think at least once once a pregnancy yeah we didn't know that at the time but this was our the first fainting and we're in math and in the middle of math her first experience of math and all of a sudden she's going over on the gentleman next to her and then kind of goes whoa what's going on and we had to apologize it was kind of funny because in hindsight now her very first match She fainted it was it was just that bad but she became Catholic the year after me became began our CIA uh in like September of the year that I became become Catholic yeah and our son was born was was a newborn I think the first time that I took care of him on my own was for her to go to rcia when he was when he was two months old or so which is just kind of cool but we had him baptized just after she became Catholic the priest had no wait let her do RCA first so you're both Catholic then baptize your son and then you can baptize him as both Catholics so we had this crazy history of you know her and I met an even local church together we we served in that church together we were married in that church our friends were in that church but our our kids will never never know that church right yeah our son was baptized Catholic they'll only know like the after right they'll never know the before and it's so it's so interesting raising our kids and seeing them uh you know now go through our oldest now just had his first communion and he's now did his altar server training so he's up there at the altar shortly and it's it's so strange to see them embracing a faith that they've inherited through to us as their parents but we you know sought out and converted to and and left a different Faith they have no idea about this yeah it's a very strange kind of experience it is our kids are are the same like they I don't think even our oldest I don't think she has memories like other than like maybe vague memories of the church that we left to become Catholic so yeah like the bulk of their their lives like all of their lives for especially like all the younger three and mostly for our oldest is going to be in this phase which is so great and I don't know if this happened with you guys too but the idea of how we live out our marital vocation changed a lot when we became Catholic and I think that that is making our family just as like a unit so just there's so much there like we view our call to be a married couple to help each other grow in Holiness right like we're helping each other on the journey to heaven and I just didn't and we got really into like Theology of the Body like got like just another Matrix type type moment that we're here to be gift to the other that we're meant to live our lives as gift to the other to will the good of the other is to love the opposite of love is to use like all of these things that respect the Dignity of the human person that are allowing us to become better husband and wife to each other which helps us become better parents to our kids so they're growing up in a different family than they would have if we hadn't found or if I hadn't found my way to the Catholic faith if JP hadn't found his way back like our literal like family like we have more children than we probably would have had like all of those things there's more like literal humans here um than there would have been and how we relate to each other and how we view this vocation and how we raise our kids is all oriented toward raising our family for heaven and that that is the main thing and respecting the Dignity of the human person and showing them what actual love is so when we send them out into the world they know what that is so they can recognize it when they see it and they can recognize the counterfeit when they see it and I just didn't have any of those things like we didn't have any of those tools before we came into Catholicism like we there just it wasn't there to the same degree so I don't know if you guys experienced that at all well the funny thing for us this is this is my wife's story not mine I can't I can't tell too in depth I don't I don't know it that well but she was talking with someone so after we so she met with some friends for quite a long time that we had made from our our previous churches experience and and the weird thing for us is that we were deeply rooted deeply rooted in this non-denominational church that we we married we're married in often today we served in here we actually served in the the married couples Ministry before we we left the church and we had all of our friends there and we actually moved to a neighborhood with a lot of these friends to raise our kids together and when we became Catholic shortly after that all the friends in our friend group began to fall away from the faith which was crazy to us because we we had pictured in our minds this this life of living downtown in this beautiful you know Urban Canadian city raising our kids together with our friends going to this church and and we thought we had it all kind of kind of figured out and little did we know we become Catholic but then all these friends we thought were such such serious faithful like really deeply rooted Evangelical Christians began to question their faith and began to become agnostic or or atheist in some cases begin to attend kind of church less begin to get kind of distance themselves from religion which was wild for us to experience that because here we are digging more deeply into our faith becoming Catholic and all of our friends that we thought were were we would raise our kids with and alongside are actually leaving the faith so yeah that was that was weird and then conversations for my wife became or began to revolve around well how do you talk to our kids about things like like sex and living together and these things and she mentioned one one day after meeting with his friends came home and kind of said this is weird because we have such a grounding as Catholic and Theology of the Body and and can understand why and what we believe about sexuality yeah these kinds of things and I'm listening to my to my friends talk about this and they have crazy ideas like well I guess just that my kids experiment or guess let them yeah just figure it out and of course they're going to do these and it's it's it's crazy to think that there is that disparity but then the Beauty and the thank God we have theology the body and the rootedness and the sensibleness like it is the the Catholic faith makes sense right it's sensible and these pieces fit together like I always say when I teach RCA to these these candidates I always say like the reason why the church like prays to Saints and has relics and venerates Mary and says that Christ had you know a body and these kind of things in the same reason why the church says you shouldn't sleep together before you're married like all these different pieces they might not they might not seem sensible they all fit together and come from the same Wellspring and you dig into them they they fit together and they make sense right opposed to this kind of like haphazard figuring out well why would I teach my kids this versus this like thank goodness right yeah I'm I'm a big I don't know stickler for logical consistency yeah so if if we're gonna say one thing like I need to see it applied consistently throughout and time and time again that was one of the things that one of the many things I saw with the Catholic faith like we asked Saints to pray for us because we ask anybody to pray for us and they have more time they don't have dishes to do right they're they're there like they're available just like I like my husband prays for me like we can I can ask the Saints you know to pray for me I have a Saint Anthony candle behind me because we lose a lot of things in our house um but yeah it's with those answers for our kids especially like you know as our kids are starting to get older I don't feel nervous about those conversations at all because we went through the Journey of Theology of the Body and the Catholic teaching on human sexuality and the whole person like a few years ago that was actually part of my post-conversion journey was like understanding NFP understanding theology the body um JP started reading Theology of the Body and just started changing in the way that he related to us as his family members and there was a point where I was like what like what are you doing like what's gotten into you and he was just really like becoming much more as selfless and self-giving and everything like with our kids yeah it's it's great it's really it was so helpful so so he like and he was like while I'm reading this book called Theology of the Body and I was like what's that and and thus began that Journey for us but when our kids ask those questions like we're ready for them we've seen how it's changed our marriage and our family life and we see what happens when we have friends who don't have that like we've seen a lot a lot of the devastation that can come from not understanding those really basic things and so we can we just have so much that we can share with them when they're ready for it and it's so nice to just know that that is there and that's an ongoing conversation it's a way of living really um is to view every single human person with that dignity and that humans we are never an object of use and we should we should never use someone as an object of use and that what Love Actually all of those things like it's just all there and I'm so excited to raise my kids in it and to have it I like they I believe I've read some books recently um from some Evangelical people who they're kind of starting to get there like a little bit um there have been a few books that I've read or that I've seen I actually have one that just came out for younger or for parents talking to their younger girls about it called like she deserves better and it's kind of unpacking some of the harmful messages that the Evangelical Community kind of had passed on especially to girls and to guys um and so they're getting there but they don't have like they don't have like all of it all of it yet like there's pieces of it there um but it seemed it seems like a positive momentum for me but just yeah so thankful for for that that teaching yeah yeah I could talk about Theology of the Body for a really long time that's fantastic that's fantastic one one thing that was for us kind of Cornerstone of our own conversion was seeing this family therapist right so one of the things that we did in our conversion was to talk to a therapist about what was going on in with our relation entrepreneur in our marriage and we ended up trying to find a neutral guide to talk about this stuff with and ended up being not neutral whatsoever we learned it was a Mennonite therapist who had an ax to grind I feel like it turned out and one of the things that he asked us in the counseling session we were paying hundreds of dollars for so I feel like we're maybe getting ripped off in this particular circumstance but he said to me you know why is you don't become Catholic okay and I said well I'm looking for like a the roots of the church is what I'm looking for and he said to me why why is older better and at that time I was being challenged by a guy in Authority this therapist yeah I didn't know what to say the funny thing is that later on uh we had a couple more sessions with him and then we kind of let him go for lots of reasons but the more he challenged me the funny thing is the more my wife began to stick up for me in these sessions and the more she began to have to explain Catholic Doctrine dogma and my thinking of conversion to this therapist we were paying okay again oh no why right but so that was a turning point for us because she began to then be able to explain what I was thinking and you know you know in the education field this is this is then the that next level of knowledge when you can then explain to somebody what what you've learned and know so that was that was cool but that question for me for a long time stuck with me why is older better and I couldn't answer it then but I'm thinking of you know you mentioned looking into the early church and kind of going okay well what did the first Christians believe right as a catalyst for your journey and then you begin to unwind this the history of what you think your faith was and the history of how the church used to be you know that that small group you mentioned where no one in the small group could understood that could explain how the other Church lived and you go what shouldn't we know this yes right yeah and and the long history you mentioned two of the Catholic faith and that rootedness of that tradition that practicing the faith that we've always kind of practiced like this beautiful Catholic liturgy and the mass I wonder if you could answer that question like how you'd answer that if somebody asked you okay so why can't they just be Evangelical why can't I just be Protestant why is older why is a more rooted Church better yeah I think I think I would kind of turn it back I've actually thought about this a lot and and ask that person to help me understand where the early church was wrong yeah because it you know we have really early writings of belief in the Eucharist like there there's very very early you know in terms of History writings of that so if if they're so close to the original event and they believe this how come we're more right than they were um and that and that happens in a lot of different areas right like Devotion to Mary like there's just these early early things so I think for me it did become more of a like like almost like I feel like that question almost needs to be defended by the one trying to defend the newer ways like why was the original stuff why was that stuff in those first in those first couple centuries like why was that wrong and if it wasn't then why are we not still doing it so yeah yeah I've thought about that too I like to think things logically through yeah yeah absolutely okay why was why does wingly right then to do yeah especially when nobody else in their information liked him because he was yeah they were they were persecuted by everybody yeah yeah no that's that's interesting I I don't want to keep you too too long here maybe one more question for you if you have a second yeah just just to reflect on me because you you know you had your conversion you've had a lot of times since then you've mentioned Theology of the Body these kind of The rhythms of of the Catholic faith reconciliation the Eucharist uh things you've grown to appreciate even more since conversion I know for us it's just that the having more kids for us and raising them in Catholic and seeing these different things and now for us brand new you know this year is seeing our son go through first communion and and the beauty of his excitement of that and the the experience of teaching about that and and watching them walk through that and the assignments of his friends at urge for him to receive that one of his little friends was was also serving that that mass it was a year ahead of him and the joy when he walked in of his friends okay buddy today it's a day this is so exciting like that for us is the unexpected Graces of of becoming Catholic is now that raising our kids that way and passing on these these Traditions so you've also touched on that a little bit and you write on that in in beautiful stuff on the blog that you you guys thank you it's fabulous but what would you say if you get a bow down to one or two things like that you've come to love sensor conversion yeah um maybe maybe two one is just like I can't even the richness with which I appreciate how tangible our faith is like it cannot be understated I can touch the bread I can you know I can taste it um I can drink the wine I can hear I am forgiven when I confess my sins I can audibly hear that my sins are forgiven I can smell the incense and I think for me that connection to our physical nature like I can touch the holy water right like our physical nature like in these body we are bodies right we are bodies and souls composite so the Catholic faith for me understanding and appreciating that more um just really unifies those things for me for most of my Evangelical life it was very much a soul thing and in the Catholic faith my body and my soul can both experience this faith in really rich in unique ways and so that's one and then I think the other one would be a pretty recent development for me I've recently started I'm seeing us spiritual director it's one of the priests at our parish and there was a time after I converted honestly for for a period where I didn't do a lot of individual Bible reading almost because that had been my faith like that had been like what I had I had the Bible and that was that was the thing and so when I became Catholic I had all these other things too and there's a ton of Bible in the mass like I mean for all the jokes about Catholics not reading the Bibles like there's so much Bible in every Mass it's like it's hilarious how much Bible's in there but like I kind of stepped away from that personal interpretation of the Bible because like that I was so scared of being inaccurate at interpreting the Bible wrong because I I didn't have really a historical or integrated context for it so I kind of read my own stuff into it as an Evangelical just because that was what we did that was all we had we didn't have an authority we didn't have a magisterium you know we didn't have anything other than this book and so fast forward to recently when I'm I'm seeing one of our priests that our parish as my spiritual director and he has helped me start to dig in a bit into like ignatian prayer and putting myself in the scenes of the scriptures and then you know like reflecting on that and writing about that and I'm like I'm reading the Bible again as a part of that because I'm literally reading stories from it and trying to imagine myself in the scene and trying to observe what's happening and where I am and who I am in the scene and it has just caused my prayer life and my Bible read like it's come alive again but I feel like I almost needed that break to come back and like put it in a context that was helpful for me like I needed to just I needed to heal a little bit reset reframe and then now is like the time that I can have that so the ignatian style of prayer I know it's not like only Catholics can do that but it's been introduced to me through my spiritual director and it's just one more thing that's making a huge difference and helping me grow closer to God in ways I in ways I didn't really um like that personal way that personal way that we know as former evangelicals right like that's that's back again so that's that's really great that's awesome I love you mentioned to the tangible I can you know when when covet hit and and churches closed I had a lot of even local friends who are not no big deal but in a sense no big deal right and wrote Things wrote blogs that were kind of like guys chill out like churches are closed we're okay we're still Christian we'll be fine but yeah I was I would react to those articles viscerally and I had to kind of step back from Facebook for a bit when some friends were posting these things I was like no no that that's fine for you guys you know you guys don't get it though like as as Catholics that was kind of a big deal when the parishes were closed because we you know you you realize how much you loved and Drew from the physical tangible receiving the the the from The Chalice receiving the host or the bread the wine like that you realize when it's gone wait a minute that was integral to my faith but even juggles it didn't didn't get it in the same way right yeah you can have this sermon still virtually but we couldn't receive the Eucharist version that actually delayed our daughter's first communion we had to like find a we had to go out of state yeah but yeah like I cried yeah I would watch the virtual math and we'd do you know like a spiritual communion thing and I would just cry because it was I was devastated to not be able to be there and we were you know we were in a place where it took a long time for our churches to open their doors again and it just that was painful I was so happy to be back yeah yeah absolutely okay well this has been awesome an awesome conversation and we could go on for a long time because there's lots of parents didn't even dig into I mean there's lots that we could that we could talk about but we'll be here for for a long long time so we'll leave it there for now uh and uh to be continued maybe on Thursday the body could be a whole whole two hours amazing um but thank you this has been released thank you thank you so much I really enjoyed this I think listeners will love hearing your story too it's a great one um and want to hear more from you so I wonder where you want to point them towards to find more things that you are doing your your books your blog those kinds of things uh I'll put those links in the show notes but where do you want to point them towards Lorelei yeah so just for general family life Catholic things I started our blog this catholicfamily.com uh right around when I was converting to kind of process things and now it's become a life and faith thing I'm also a regular contributor for Catholic mom so I have an article there once a month uh pretty usually sometimes a little more but usually once a month is is good for that and then my two books are both by me um edge of in between the circus of stolen dreams the edge of in between is a deeply Catholic book it is a retelling of The Secret Garden and I literally kept waiting for my publisher which is penguin Random House like very big secular publisher to email me yeah I was I was like waiting though for them to email me along the editorial process and be like I need you to tone down the religious elements of this book and that email never came so I got to publish it and it's full of Catholic allegorical glory and um so I wrote that to bring goodness and beauty and Truth into an arena where we don't get to see that as often these days so you can find my books anywhere books are sold or online as well that's awesome I love these I mean that's that's cool this is it they're like oh no this is really really good or it rang true somewhere deep inside them yes and they just let it fly yeah that's amazing I love that that's cool well I'll put those links in the show notes uh Lorelei and thank you so much for being here this has been awesome I want to say God bless you uh the awesome work that you're doing for the church and and thanks for this conversation thank you thank you for having me foreign