The Vancouver Follower

On March 31st, 2018, I will be fully initiated into the Catholic Church. I will receive the sacraments of Confirmation and Communion, which is something that I have longed for for a couple years.  My story is simple, fundamentally rooted in God’s grace working in the world. There are many touching moments in my life where I can say, “Ahh, see, God is really at work here.” In filling out the information sheet for the Right of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), one of the questions was, “Who inspired you to join RCIA?” In retrospect, one of the answers I should have given was His Holiness, Pope Francis. The Election of Pope Francis on March 13, 2013. At the time I was just leaving middle school and entering into high school. It was at this point that I was beginning to understand, even though it was at a basic level, the things that were happening around me. The election of Pope Francis would prove to change the course of my life in a way that I could not have predicted. His

Ten months. Ten months ago, I started to satisfy my hunger with soup because I was afraid of eating carbohydrates. Ten months ago, I decided I wasn’t allowed to feel ‘full’ anymore. Ten months ago, I looked in the mirror, at my stomach and felt absolutely defeated. I started restricting my food intake last October, and continued to do so because there were no immediate consequences. I still had energy, I was doing well in school, and I seemed to have everything more or less together. But, when I saw my ribs poking through the skin of my back one day, I knew my desire to exert control over every aspect of my life had turned into something extremely detrimental. I knew this physical weakness was a result of not fully entrusting my heart to Him, the one who made it; I had failed to nourish the body that housed my heart. I had not respected my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit and instead of letting the Spirit free me, I’d tied it up in chains. I had forsaken the Father. There was

I’m being received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation (anointing with blessed oil) in three weeks. Thinking about this occasion has given me cause, therefore, to give consideration to my reasons for undertaking that step. But my reasons for why I’m entering the Orthodox Church are rather, properly prefaced by why I’m still a Christian at all. Through everything, there has been one concept that has captured my imagination, one that I ultimately cannot shake. One reason why, in spite of all of my wandering around – from a nominally Catholic home, to a conversion experience at age 15, to a weird mishmash of evangelicalism and Catholicism, to die-hard scholasticist Calvinism at the age of 20, to giving up on the concept of God entirely until realizing that I was ultimately  trying to engage in moral reasoning as a Christian* while living outwardly as an atheist , to being spiritually rehabilitated (somewhat) in two theologically liberal mainline churches (the United and Anglican ch

I should start by saying that I am a perfectionist to a fault. People have joked in the past that it is because the Lord instilled within me a sense of responsibility and not accepting anything less than the best. But my desire, or obsession, with perfection has many times led me astray, especially when it came to how I saw myself in my relationship with God. Quite simply, I had no relationship with Him. He was always a looming figure in my mind, someone I knew that existed and someone who was talked about frequently enough. I didn’t have fear of the Lord; I just  feared  Him. I feared hell and eternal damnation. But despite this fear of being banished to a place where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, I was incredibly apathetic. The bible tells us that Jesus died for us because He loves us. Cool story, right? I thought I understood the depth of that truth. But that all changed when I had my Conversion moment in December of 2016. Just before my Co