Pillar of Truth

I've been inspired by the events of the last few days to create my own blog, after years of cluttering up the comments boxes of other great blogs. The main inspiring events are the judicial murder of Terri Schiavo and the death of perhaps the greatest man of the 20th Century - Pope John Paul II.

In a more general sense, this blog will tend to center around the truth of the Catholic Church, hence the name of this blog, derived from the Biblical passage I Timothy 3:14-15, which reads "I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you, so that if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. "(RSV)

I will also discuss various other topics close to my heart, such as baseball, science fiction, music, technology, politics, and family life, but Jesus Christ and His Church will be the main impetus of this site, and the filter through which I evaluate everything else.

A short testimony...I grew up Lutheran, had a conversion experience in my teenage years, during which I became a fervent believer in Christ, and went down the Evangelical path for a couple of years. I devoured a lot of books at this point, and the one thing I discovered for sure from my guides was that the Catholic Church was very wrong. However, I soon began to despair of finding the truth, as these same very educated men, often PhD's who were honest followers of Christ and students of Scripture did not agree with each other on foundational issues such as Baptism, how we are saved, the nature of the Church, and many moral issues. I reasoned that if these honest, highly educated men could not agree on very basic Christian tenets, how was I supposed to find the truth? I continued to fall away at this point due to the logical inconsistency of it all, but before essentially lapsing into a vague practical atheism, I cried out to God, "please help me find the truth!!"

Eventually, God answered this prayer. It's one prayer that is guaranteed to get an answer; Jesus told us in Scripture that whoever seeks the truth will find it. It took a while for me to shed my anti-Catholic tendencies and my first encounter with Catholicism was in the form of my girlfriend. At that point, I figured that Catholics couldn't be all that bad, though she was not very fervent at the time. Some time later, I heard about Medjugorje, a small village in then-Yugoslavia where the Virgin Mary was purportedly appearing. At first, I was not that interested, but I kept coming across this literature, in various places, and eventually I was captivated. This apparition is neither approved nor disapproved by the Church, but at the time (1987), it was the vehicle God used to open my heart to consider the truth claims of the Catholic Church.

I then splurged on a series of Catholic books, to see what Catholicism was all about. With a few years distance between my the period of my anti-Catholic prejudices, and with a more open outlook, it only took a few books, and a month's time, to convince me that Catholicism was, indeed, the Pillar of Truth. Since then, I have given talks about the Catholic faith at Catholic parishes, though now, with six children and a full-time engineering job, I have to a large degree suspended operations insofar as giving talks.

Hopefully, I'll have a few interesting things to say each day.