My parents were believers and Catholic and so I was raised in Catholic traditions. We prayed often, especially thanks before meals and bedtime prayers. In fact, my mother would have us kids (seven of us) kneel on the living room floor for our evening prayer time. I attended catechism classes, Catholic school, served as altar boy, sang in the church choir, never missed Sunday or Holy Days of Obligation mass, and during the Lenten season we attended mass and/or rosary services every week day. Even today, when I attend a Catholic mass I can still recite almost the entire liturgy from memory including the Priest's parts.
In about 1979, at about the age of 20 or so, I began to question what I had been taught. The prayers and liturgy I knew so well became nothing more than memorized phrases and words with no backbone meaning. I stopped going to mass, praying, and believing. In fact, although I wasn't flat out anti-God, while in college our English professor assigned an essay where we could choose the topic and I chose to discredit the Bible. He actually gave me an A on the essay for technical reasons but also told me he did not like or agree with what I wrote.
I began living a life that was less than ideal and at 23 years old I married my first wife who was a proclaimed atheist and still holds to this claim. We divorced after eight years and even today I now struggle to introduce my openly anti-God son and consequently my grandson to the Lord. I keep hoping that he will one day see Jesus in me and begin to rethink his eternity.
When I remarried in 1993, and my wife became pregnant, she suggested that we consider looking for a church. I agreed only to appease her but it also turned out to be the beginning of my walk back into the Father's arms.
