How Toni Found God

At a party recently I sat by Toni. I particularly wanted to sit by her because I knew she had "found God" and I wanted to hear her story. It didn't take long for me to engage her in a discussion about her spirituality. When people are in love, they are eager to talk about it. And Toni is so in love with Christ.

For most of her life an atheist, Toni's journey started a few years ago when she lived in Ireland for a year. She said that one day she was in an ancient church that had been in existence for almost a millennium, and while she was sitting there she started thinking about all the feet that had walked up those steps and sat in those pews for over 800 years, and contemplating what was it that kept people coming to this place for such a length of time. It was the first spark of wondering just how big this Christian faith thing was that called so many for so long.

Back in the States a couple of years later she was feeling lost and sad after a fight with her boyfriend of many years and got in her car and started driving aimlessly. Toni told me that she saw a building and pulled into the parking lot to sit and cry. She didn't realize that she had pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church until a woman came up to the car and told her that the priest was there taking confessions if she wanted to go in. She said she didn't, she just wanted to sit there and try to find some peace. But after the woman left, Toni ended up in confession, crying and talking for an hour.

But it was a little later that God firmly wrapped her in His arms for good. She said she was sitting in her bathroom one day naked and praying and felt nothing. No God was touching her heart, she felt no sense of the divine, and she started wondering if faith was real, or if she was searching for something that wasn't there at all. Suddenly she said she was surrounded and filled with a love so intense that she still finds it impossible to describe, though it immediately brought her to tears when she told me about it. Toni said knew what it was like to love people here on Earth, but that this love was so incredibly powerful and immense that she didn't even know where she was anymore, or how long her encounter lasted. God caught Toni at her most vulnerable, stripped physically and spiritually.

It was life changing. She loves to go to a local Catholic church whenever she can because it's a church that never closes. She goes for Perpetual Adoration, to sit with Christ who is there for her in the Eucharistic sacrament, and pray and celebrate that she can be there with Him.

And I was grateful that I got to sit next to her one evening and hear how God first opened her heart in a church where other hearts have been reached for almost 1000 years.