Jonathan Day

Tonight our whole family entered into the Church!   We are so excited that God has blessed us with this wonderful gift – full communion with His Church.  This morning Jess and I went to the RCIA retreat from 7:30am – 10:30am.  We spent the morning with our brothers and sisters praying, reading His Word, reflecting, doing the stations of the Cross, and singing.   Afterwards we took Daneel and Liam to the playground for an Easter party.

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We arrived at the church at about 7:50pm, ten minutes early.  The church was completely dark as we and the rest of the congregation assembled in.  At 8:00pm, the procession took place and the fire was started.  We sang hymns, prayed, and read quite a few pages from Genesis.  Then the lights were turned on and bells began to ring.  It was a wonderful experience of worship!

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It was then time for the boys to be baptized!  First, they received an anointing of oil on their bodies.  Liam watched as Monsignor Pricco annointed the catechumens with oil on their palms.  Liam held out his hand wanting to be anointed with the oil on his hand.  When Monsignor Pricco annointed Liam with the oil on his belly, Liam loved it!  Daneel also received the oil on his belly too.  Then Jess held Daneel over the baptismal font as Monsignor Pricco poured water over his head while saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.   Next Jess and I both had to hold Liam over the baptismal font as Monsignor Pricco poured water over his head saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.   It was absolutely wonderful!  Shortly after, Liam looked around with this wonderful look on his face.  And right after his baptism he sang along the word, “Alleluia”!   He did it so well that after the Vigil, people came up to share that they loved how he sang “Alleluia”.    A father came up to me to express how much he enjoyed Liam’s look after being baptized.  After the boys were baptized, they received their white garments and their baptismal candle.  A wonderful tradition that I  believe goes back many centuries.  The Catechism explains the use of this tradition this way:  The white garment symbolizes that the person baptized has “put on Christ,”42 has risen with Christ. The candle, lit from the Easter candle, signifies that Christ has enlightened the neophyte. In him the baptized are “the light of the world.”43  The newly baptized is now, in the only Son, a child of God entitled to say the prayer of the children of God: “Our Father.”

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Baptismal Garments:

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Baptismal Candle:

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Jess and I then were confirmed into the Church!  We received the anointing of the oil on our foreheads in the sign of the cross.  We were so excited to have finally come home!  Shortly after, we received our first Eucharist.  Our relationship with Jesus took another step – we finally received His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity into our bodies.  It was such a splendid night!  After the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the congregation had a reception and many people came up to us to congratulate us and welcome us into the Church.

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Thank you Jim and Susan for being our sponsors and our children’s godparents!

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Our continual prayer is for our children to grow up in the faith, abide in Christ, and always know how much God loves them!!!  Praise God for His saving grace!!!

God provided me with signs during the 22 years He was preparing me to enter the Catholic Church.  These signs took the form of beliefs and thoughts.

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The first and ultimate sign was the belief that the Bible is the inspired written Word of God and thus inerrant and the desire to want to understand all of His Word.  Unfortunately, when I got to a verse I did not fully understand, I would push that aside.  I justified this as a temporary push until God revealed to me what it really meant.  Over the years, I would get a few answers, but quite a few questions had piled up from my daily readings (see some of my questions).  For the most part I just ignored these because they weren’t essential to my theology.  Then when I discovered the Catholic Church teaching, these verses came alive in the richness and fullness of the apostolic understanding and interpretation given by the Holy Spirit.  This has been an absolutely joyful experience!

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The second sign was the way I prayed.  God had provided me with a way to pray.  I would focus on the crucifix, so as to focus my heart, mind, and soul on speaking with God.  It was a way to humble myself in prayer and also remember the greatest sacrifice, His greatest gift to us.  In my experience now with the Catholic faith, learning about the long tradition of crossing oneself in prayer, has been a wonderful blessing and confirmation of God’s work in my life with this journey into the Catholic Church.

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The third sign was given to me in my experience as a debater for Liberty University.  I had just finished a whole year debating the death penalty and when we began reflecting on our experience with the evidence, it became clear that the death penalty for many reasons, but mainly for moral and theological reasons was not something I could support.  I began to wonder why many of my brothers and sisters in Christ would support such a practice.  I also began to desire and long for the day when my brothers and sisters in Christ would not support the death penalty.  When I learned that the  Catholic Church taught against the death penalty, more joy flooded into my heart.  I quickly told my wife how awesome this was for me.   The home I was running to felt more and more like the home I had desired!

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I feel so humbled and blessed by God’s grace given to me to enter the Catholic Church.  May God pour out His grace on you who read this so that you too may enter the Catholic Church.