Holly Williams by staff
-
on April 19, 2008 |
I was raised Southern Baptist. I remember picking up the tracts at the front of the church and reading them before my dad picked me and my sister up from church. One day, I wanted to be saved so I asked my Sunday School teacher what to do. She suggested that I read the Gospel of John. So I read the Gospel of John in my new NIV Bible that my dad had gotten me for either Christmas or Easter or just as a gift. I don’t remember. After I read the Gospel of John, I accepted the Lord Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Savior. Needless to say, I wasn’t really saved but at least I was on the right track.As the years went by, I went to a Nazarene church among others including but not limited to: United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Pentecostal Churches, Free Methodist Church, and Baptist Churches. None of these satisfied me.
One day, I prayed to God for something and He answered my prayer in the negative. So I got really angry with God and I became an Atheist for about a week. After this, it took a lot of apologetics reading and stuff to get back to my faith in Christ. I had really damaged my faith by becoming an Atheist for a week.
I have had experience with Wicca (witchcraft) and the Occult in general. It was boyfriends who led me into this stuff. I practiced it for a year or two and then I got out of it and came back to Christianity.
One day while on a website, I saw a Catholic guy. I suddenly became interested in Catholicism. I asked him some questions and was instantly hooked on Catholicism and wanted to convert. So I went to my local priest and asked him to help me convert before Easter which was only about two weeks away. He gave me a book to read and we had discussions about Catholicism. Come Easter, I freaked out and did not become Catholic.
It wasn’t too much later that I entered RCIA. The Summer before RCIA, I decided I wanted my sins washed away at that moment and so I got baptized in a Pentecostal Church at the first available opportunity. Needless to say, they did not have the proper authority to baptize me and so my sins were not washed away even though I thought they were.
As I went through the RCIA process, I became more and more engrossed with Catholicism and I finally became confirmed as a Catholic on Easter 2005. This was after a period of some doubts about Catholicism though.
I was a devout Catholic at first but soon I found that I wasn’t satisfied. I tried to do what I could to stay Catholic but it just didn’t work. I found myself going back to Protestant churches trying to find the truth. I couldn’t find the truth anywhere!
Finally, I decided to look into the LDS Church. I started out by looking at htp://www.mormon.org and also http://www.lds.org. I chatted with the missionaries online and finally I visited a nearby ward in my area. I found the missionaries and asked them if they’d come and visit with me and teach me. I found the Mormon church to be very friendly and inviting.
So the missionaries started coming to my apartment to teach me. I already had a Book of Mormon which I had pretty much never read until then. The Mormons told me how to know whether or not the Book of Mormon was true and so I prayed about it and indeed, I felt that it was true. Before long, I got baptized three weeks later after the missionaries first visit. I was baptized in the wrong ward though and nobody knew it was the wrong ward because the boundaries had recently changed. I received the gift of the Holy Ghost a week after my baptism.
I soon fell away from the Mormon church unfortunately. This was because of my own selfish desires to sin. Finally, I came back and confessed my sins to the bishop. Much to my surprise, I was not punished but was only told not to offer prayers in public until I had dealt with my sins thoroughly. I am now back to being a Mormon again and I’m loving it!
–PaladinMormon02 20:16, 21 October 2007 (MDT)
