I was bored with the Catholic Church! All I did was daydream through Mass and my Catechism class. I could not stand it. When I was 10, my parents stopped going to church, and my father would drop off my sister and me at the church. If it was not for my sister, I would have stopped going. But I felt guilty for not going when my sister was still going. One Sunday morning a very strange thing happened during the consecration of the bread during Mass. At the same time that the priest raised the bread and said “This is my body”, my sister fainted! What amazed me is that she fell very gently onto the floor. If she had fallen normally, she would have hit her head badly on the pew. But she sort of glided down to floor. When she was on the floor, she started to moan and groan. Some of the men leapt over the pews to help. As soon as communion was over, she regained consciousness. Later she told me said something I never forgot. “Paul,” she said “It was the strangest thing, but I saw something actually going into the bread!” She now has forgotten this experience entirely, but it always stayed with me, even when I left the Catholic Church.
My life was pretty depressing at that time. I have a minor case of cerebral palsy – not bad enough to be noticeable but bad enough to make me terrible at any kind of sport. I was constantly ridiculed by others. This made me very shy. I thought that once I went to college, things would be different. Although no one ridiculed me anymore, I was not very adept at making friends. The harder I tried, the worse it seemed to be.
Then I received a pamphlet called The Four Spiritual Laws. It told me things I never heard in the Catholic Church (maybe it was because I was not paying attention!). It told me that God loved me and had a wonderful plan for me life, but my sins broke me from my wonderful plan, and that all I needed to do was ask Christ into my life. This I did. And Christ did come into my life. He changed me – not overnight, but gradually. I was not as much into my shell, I could reach out to others. I realized not try to get others to love me, but just love unconditionally. And as I started to love them unconditionally, I started to have friends. But the most important thing of all was having a relationship with God. Jesus Christ was my best friend. I could sense His presence with me at all times. I knew that I was never alone, He was always with me. And when I died, I would be with Him forever.
I then became involved in Campus Crusade For Christ. This was a lay ministry for college students. I became one of their student leaders. I taught one of their classes at their weekly classes and their retreats. My expertise was the doctrine of salvation. I used to read everything I could on the subject, mainly from what the Reformers wrote on the subject. I had the conviction that the most important key to a victorious Christian life was to realize with absolute certainty that you are saved. I taught we were justified by faith alone. God sent His Son to die once and for all, and inputed Christ’s righteousness onto us, that we can apply to ourselves His righteousness simply by faith. This did not mean we did not try to live a righteous life. If we were truly born again, we would be so grateful for what Christ did for us that we would want to live a righteous life. And yet even though we may want to live a righteous life, we still have a sinful nature, in bondage to sin.
Needless to say, I was no longer a Catholic. I was not too involved in a particular Protestant church. I started in an Independent Bible Church, then went to a Baptist Church, then to Evangelical Free Church, then the Assemblies of God, and then back to the Baptist Church. I was more involved in Campus Crusade for Christ than any church. After I graduated from college, I was involved in another lay ministry, called the Hub in Chicago. It was a ministry to Christian singles. At the same time, I went to seminary. I could not make up what church I wanted to be a minister in. But my last year I decided to join the Assemblies God.
I do thank God for my Protestant experience. One thing I appreciated about Protestant Evangelicalsm is that it was able to lay things down simply for me to understand. For instance, Campus Crusade For Christ has these booklets called the 10 Basic Steps Toward Christian Maturity. These booklets laid down very simply how to pray, how to be filled with the Holy Sprit, and how to read the Bible. These were very helpful for someone like me who was just starting out my spiritual journey. This is one criticism I have of the Catholic Church. Its priests need to do a better job of simplifying things. I am not so sure I would have ever been able to get close to God, if was not for the Protestants laying down the basic foundation for me so that I could understand it. I am afraid that if I had started my spiritual journey within the Catholic Church, I may have been overwhelmed of what needed to be learned. Not only that, but the Catholic Church, at least in America, was heavily influenced by liberalism in the 60’s and 70’s. God protected me from the liberalism in the Catholic Church by having me Protestant.
But although I appreciate what Protestantism did for me, it could only take me so far and then no further. If I had remained Protestant, I would have eventually turned my back on Christ.
