The questions didn’t go away. If anything, they grew.

I was reading everything I could find — partly to help Erjon, partly because Michael’s baptism had stirred something in me too. What did we actually believe? What were we passing on? And how?

Then one afternoon I was scrolling through a Facebook group for Christian moms when another mom shared a link to a document. I clicked on it without really knowing what it was.

And I started reading.

It spoke about God’s relationship with man — His love for creation, the purpose of our lives, what it means to be made in His image. It was written with a kind of careful, unhurried depth I hadn’t encountered before. And then there were the footnotes. Names I didn’t recognize — “Father” this, “Bishop” that — voices that sounded old and established, like they came from something much larger than what I had known. And alongside them, scripture. Page after page of scripture.

I remember pulling out my Bible and flipping back and forth, reading the passages for myself.

And being surprised at how connected it all was.

I kept reading. And somewhere along the way I realized I had no idea what I was actually reading.

It turned out to be the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I had never read anything like it. I had no background in the Catholic Church — if anything, I had only ever heard small things about it, and not usually in a positive light. So this felt genuinely unexpected. Around the same time I read Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, and it helped give language to questions I hadn’t been able to name.

I brought it all to Erjon. Not as a conclusion. Just as something I couldn’t ignore.

And he was open. Open enough to say: maybe we should talk to someone.

As it happened, he knew a priest through work. And before I had time to overthink it, we had made an appointment.

I went in thinking I would explain everything. But the conversation didn’t go the way I expected.

The priest was warm and easy to talk to. He spoke kindly about Southern Baptists, which I appreciated more than he probably knew. And somewhere in the conversation I found myself trying to describe where we were — what we’d experienced, what we’d read, what still felt incomplete.

I told him that what we had felt like a piece of a prism. Shiny and beautiful, and real. But that after reading the Catechism, I had the sense that there was an entire chandelier still to discover.

He smiled at that.

And then he spoke about the Church in a way I had never heard before. Not just a place. Not just a gathering. But something that stretched across time — a nearness between heaven and earth, as if our prayers and worship here were not separate from something larger but woven into it.

I didn’t have a framework for that. So I just sat and listened.

And then he spoke about the home. The family. What he called the domestic church. That the life of faith begins there. That parents are the first teachers. That what we pass on to our children is not incidental but essential.

That part stayed with me longer than anything else.

We talked about next steps. OCIA. And that September, we began.

Every Thursday evening we arranged a babysitter and drove to a church farther into town. We met others there — people asking their own questions, searching in their own ways. Amy led our group, and she always began with prayer. That simple act helped more than anything else. It didn’t overwhelm us. It just helped us begin.

After a couple of months the drive became too much, so we transferred to a parish closer to home. The format was different, but the path was the same. Classes moved to Sundays, and our boys began their own formation classes too. That part felt natural — all of us learning together, just at different levels.

Jamie and William were baptized that summer, just before their seventh birthday. More structured than what Erjon had experienced, with real preparation beforehand. And we asked Blane to be their godfather.

Blane had worked alongside Erjon at the electrical company for years, and over time had become a close family friend — the kind who showed up for holidays and dinners at our home, who always arrived with a little gift box of cake balls for the boys. That summer, as I was sharing what we were discovering about the Catholic Church, he listened quietly over dinner and then said that if we ever decided to join, he would love to be our sponsor — or a godfather to our children.

That offer meant more than I can easily say. He was recently retired, with a full life of his own — and he was offering to walk alongside ours.

This spring, all three of our boys will receive the Eucharist for the first time.

Erjon and I are still on our own path. We won’t be fully received into the Church this Easter. That will come later.

But we’re here. Still learning. Still showing up.

And honestly? That feels like exactly the right place to be.