Beautiful day for doubt

Why am I doing this? I hate the Catholic church. These people are the worst and they go against everything I stand for. I am a hardcore left-leaning democrat and though Pope Francis is super cool, the rest of his church leaves me feeling nauseous. This is a huge mistake.

These things are true, and I don't think they will ever be untrue.
But I could literally say the same thing if not more about the evangelical christian background I came from. Those people are the WORST. There are bad people everywhere.

My brother and I were discussing my journey the other night, and he was describing the Catholic church as the biggest douche-bag in the history of the world. He's not entirely wrong, but I responded with a moment of clarity. I said something along the lines of
"Yeah the Catholic church is super fucked up... but so am I, and I find that beautiful and compelling."

I'm not sure how I'm going to reconcile who I am now and what I believe with what the Catholic Church seems to put out into the world because they are so utterly different. But the reason I am even interested in the Catholic church has absolutely nothing to do with people and everything to do with God. I want to be as close to God and as focused on God as I can possibly get, and I think the Catholic church might be my best chance at that. I grew up criticizing my Catholic friends for not being "real Christians" because I believed their faith was dead and old and that no one who went to Catholic church actually knew or cared about Jesus. I'm sure that does exist. But what also exists is the beautiful and meaningful liturgy that focuses the body and mind on God. I have met and know several amazing people with deep and steadfast faiths that are rooted in the teachings of the Catholic church. I want to be a part of something like that.

Today, S gave me a new book called "Catholic and Christian" whose aim is to explain the teachings of the Catholic church to protestants. Hopefully reading this will be one of the first steps to figuring this out for myself.
I'm also going to mass with S on Sunday. This will be my first mass if I remember correctly. She helped me out by explaining "Genuflecting" and reminding me that The Lord's Prayer is a bit different. I'm excited and nervous.
I also half-prayed the rosary for M. He, without knowing it, has played a big role in the timing of this journey and now he is leaving for something new and the best way I knew to honor him was to pray a rosary for him. The decades were really long though and I only did three "Hail Mary's" per decade. Maybe becoming Catholic will help with my ADHD (ha).

Here we go,
Andrea

Why I'm here...

Hello, my name is Andrea and I am considering becoming Catholic. The past few days I have been looking for a blog-like account of someones conversion to Catholicism and I haven't really found what I'm looking for so I decided to just do it for myself. Hopefully my journey will be helpful to not only myself but anybody who might be going through the same thing. Plus this is a super easy way to keep everyone updated on what's going on. I am not certain that this journey is going to end in me becoming a Catholic, but I'm at a point in my life/faith where I want to know everything there is to know about it and make an informed decision.

A little background...
I have been a Protestant Christian my entire life. I grew up in a basically-baptist Methodist church, was confirmed and baptized Methodist. In college, the majority of my time has been at an Episcopal church for three years, a charismatic non-denominational (actually a cult) church for awhile before that, and now I am a baptized member of a Cooperative Fellowship Baptist church. I feel like I've been all over the map. So why Catholic? Why now? Well there are a lot of answers to that question. Since high school I've had many spiritual interactions with friends that were Catholic and then in college I started being interested in the liturgy and creeds, and I read several Catholic-leaning books, and I've just come to the point where it feels like I need to take a serious look at the Catholic church and explore whether this is the direction I want to go in.

In this blog I plan to tackle my prejudices with the church, figure out where I stand on theology, reflect on all the books I'm gonna read, and just get as comprehensive an understanding as possible. I am an extremely blunt person who is open and honest (sometimes to a fault) and I will probably get extremely personal and deal with uncomfortable things. The goal is to be as transparent as possible, so as to aid myself in this decision, and hopefully whoever decides to read this as well.

No matter where this leads, I hope to have a better understanding of God, the church, and myself by the end of this process (if one exists). I would love for you to join me in the process, no matter what that means.

Much love,
Andrea