You Go to My Church

Converting from Protestant Christianity to Catholic Christianity is a risk. I wasn’t leaving Jesus behind. Quite the opposite. I was following Him into a place I had come to believe He was leading me. But following Him doesn’t mean the road is without loss.

When you have spent much of your life in Protestant circles, particularly when your family and your identity have been so deeply intertwined with ministry, becoming Catholic changes things: relationships, conversations, the way people understand you, and often the way they receive you.

For our already blended family, it meant blending things even further. It meant navigating different faith traditions, different expectations, and questions that pop up repeatedly.

I’ve learned that’s the thing about conversion. Sometimes your heart arrives somewhere long before you have the words to explain how you got there. I had studied. Deeply. I had wrestled with Scripture, history, and theology. And once I knew what I knew, I had to do what I had to do.

But knowing something to be true and knowing how to communicate that truth are two different things. How do you put brain plus heart on paper? How do you explain something so lofty and heavenly, yet so deeply personal, without diminishing either its theological weight or the tenderness of what God has done in your own life?

That’s part of why I pursued further theological education through Notre Dame. I wanted to learn to handle these things carefully. To give sacred things the language and accuracy they deserve. To be able to explain my faith without reducing it to an argument, and to share my heart without sacrificing the truth.

But while my mind has been busy studying and my heart has been busy growing, I’ve also been a little lonely.

I have people close to me who share my faith, and I am deeply grateful for them. But my season of life doesn’t lend itself to the kind of parish involvement I would love to have. I’m a mother. I’m a caregiver to a teenager with significant special needs. I’m a wife, a therapist, and a woman navigating a season that has felt particularly heavy lately.

And if I’m being completely transparent, it’s been a struggle.

I am well loved. My husband and friends have been extraordinary, and I am taking care of myself in every way I know how. I have learned that accepting support, seeking help, and tending to my own needs are not signs that I am failing to carry what has been entrusted to me. They are part of how I carry it.

I have also learned how to carry struggle with composure, but it is there just the same. This time, though, I’m allowing myself to process it as it comes rather than waiting until I have made it through to acknowledge how difficult it was.

And even with all that love and support, there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from longing for a deeper connection with your faith community.

There are days when I would love to be more involved in parish life. To sit in a Bible study. To linger after Mass. To build the kind of friendships that grow from regularly showing up and sharing life together. But caregiving doesn’t always leave room for those things. Sometimes just getting to Mass is an accomplishment.

And so, even though I know where I belong, I have sometimes felt like I’m standing on an island.

Which brings me to today.

I was at the grocery store, doing something entirely ordinary, when a young man who was sacking groceries at the register next to mine stopped what he was doing.

He looked up, smiled, and said,

“Hey! You go to my church.”

Oh. How my soul needed that.

He didn’t know what I had been carrying. He just recognized me.

And for a moment, I wasn’t the woman trying to explain why she became Catholic. I wasn’t the caregiver trying to figure out how to participate more fully. I wasn’t the woman whose responsibilities have made her world a little smaller than she would like it to be.

I was simply someone who belonged.

Someone from his church.

Our church.

And isn’t it something that today’s Gospel gives us a picture of Jesus traveling from town to town with the Twelve and a group of women who accompanied Him? Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and many others. Different people, different lives, different stories, all brought together in the company of Christ. (Luke 8:1-3)

They weren’t all the same. They didn’t all have the same role. But they belonged to the same company.

I think sometimes I have confused being able to participate with belonging.

Because my life doesn’t allow me to show up for everything, I have felt as though I am somehow standing at the edges of my own faith community. But the Church is not a collection of people who can attend every gathering, volunteer for every ministry, or stay for every conversation after Mass.

It is the Body of Christ.

And I belong to that Body even on the days when caregiving keeps me home. Even when I’m exhausted. Even when I have nothing left to offer but my presence at Mass and a whispered prayer.

Today’s psalm says:

“I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God.” (Psalm 17:6)

I have been calling upon Him a lot lately. Not always with beautifully constructed prayers. Sometimes with tears. Sometimes with silence. Sometimes with little more than, “Lord, I need You.”

And today, I believe He answered me through a young man sacking groceries. A young man who has pushed through his own challenges and appears to be thriving.

The answer was not presented with a solution to everything that is weighing on me, and it was not with a sudden change in my circumstances.

But it was with a smile and six little words.

“Hey! You go to my church.”

I went home thinking about how desperately we all need to be seen. Not just noticed, but seen at a soul level. To know that our presence matters. That even when we feel like we’re standing on the outside, we haven’t been forgotten.

I don’t know if that young man will ever understand what his words meant to me today. But I believe God knew.

He sees the woman who followed Him into unfamiliar territory because she could no longer do otherwise.

He sees the mother whose world has become smaller because the needs within her home have become greater.

He sees the woman who loves His Church but sometimes struggles to find her place within its daily life.

He sees the exhaustion, the longing, and the quiet effort it takes to keep showing up.

And today, in the middle of a grocery store, He reminded me that I am not standing on an island.

I am loved. I am supported. I am doing the work of caring for myself and the people entrusted to me.

But today, He reminded me of something else I needed to know: I am part of a family. I am known. I belong.

What a gift it is to be reminded of that in the most ordinary of places.