I saw nothing in the Catholic Church to make me want to be Catholic! And the Catholics I knew were the biggest argument against the Catholic Church. Neither my wife nor I have ever set foot in a Catholic Church out of principle. We had never met a Catholic priest or religious and most unfortunately, we had never met a Catholic who could explain or defend their faith.

The gravity of it all caught up with me one night while sitting and talking with my mom. I blurted out, "I need to know if there is a God out there who loves me. I just want to know if I'm loved, and if I can count on being loved. If I had that, then I would be willing to do anything He asked of me. I wouldn't care if people thought I was a religious fanatic; I just have to know. I need to know." I didn't recognize it at the time, but God the Father can't resist that kind of desire; it is His Holy Spirit Who brings it about!

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished (Matthew 5:18).

Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it (Matthew 16:17-18).

In my study I learned that new converts often talk about "the verses I never saw." These verses are ones that didn't fit into their denomination's teaching or where very difficult to interpret based on their doctrines and were often quickly passed over. However, when they are examined from the Catholic perspective, they become very clear and understandable...and with no difficult examinations of the original Greek texts or complicated explanation of the verse. Consider the following:

I think it is impossible to deny that the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” within Protestantism means exactly what I’ve suggested above — that each of us is on our own to figure out Christianity from the ground up. It makes no sense to me to say that a Christian can simply accept that certain doctrines are Christian doctrines because the early visible Church decided them and then, at the same time, assert that that Church was a fallible Church that eventually fell into utter doctrinal apostasy.

Anyone who writes knows that writing is a journey; a journey in search of meaning. You simply cannot write without seeking for something below the surface of life, something that links moment to moment and incident to incident, something that gives profundity and purpose to a story's climax. My fingers tapping on the keyboard were drawing me through the labyrinth of human life; and, as G.K. Chesterton says, nothing is more horrifying to man than the thought of a maze without a centre.

But how could there be a centre, a direction, a purpose worth caring about, without God, the Alpha and Omega, the magnetic North of all existence? What was the point of any story if, as Macbeth said, life itself was a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing? Because it couldn't mean anything, if the atheists were right; that much was horrifyingly clear. I fell into the deepest depression of my life, for several months. It became a kind of mental torture, at times. Nothing in my life, nothing I could even hope to achieve, meant a thing without God. I craved ultimate meaning as a man in the desert craves water.

And, for the first time in my life, I began earnestly searching for God.