{"id":244587,"date":"2014-10-17T16:20:15","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T20:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/albertlittle\/?p=31"},"modified":"2015-08-03T16:02:39","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T20:02:39","slug":"slow-road-rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/albertlittle\/slow-road-rome\/","title":{"rendered":"The Slow Road to Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"The
The Heart of the Vatican. Credit:\u00a0Andreas Wuest<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

We were actually\u00a0at<\/em> the Vatican last year, in August.<\/p>\n

After a family cruise around the Mediterranean\u2014something my semi-retired parents surprised us with a \u00a0year and a half earlier\u2014my wife and I disembarked the cruise ship to spend an incredible five weeks touring through Southern Europe.<\/p>\n

Our road to Rome, our first stop after the cruise, was quick, but painful.<\/p>\n

Without knowing it we\u2019d booked a train from the Italian sea-side to Rome on a Sunday, the day when, apparently, all of Rome goes to the sea-side. The train was cramped, awkward with our two medium-sized suitcases, and hot; Italy-in-August hot. Which, as it turns out, is really hot.<\/p>\n

My own road to Rome was far more meandering and not nearly as painful.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I became a Christian at the age of about fifteen.<\/p>\n

My radical conversion experience, ranking up there amongst the great Church Fathers and Martyrs of old, was just about as dramatic as you could get. At least,\u00a0to a zealously converted teenager it sure seemed so.<\/p>\n

Despite growing up with a best friend, three doors down, who was a devout Christian I\u2019d never really considered religion\u2014faith\u2014something that mattered. It was after a fairly mundane end-of-the-year summer party at a friend\u2019s house that the notion even crossed my mind. It was a friend-of-a-friend, a self-professed Wiccan, who introduced to me the notion that \u201ceverything is spiritual.\u201d I wondered, and then thought of God.<\/p>\n

I remember praying, days later in my bedroom, \u201cGod, if you\u2019re there and you\u2019re real, give me a sign that you accept me.\u201d I must\u2019ve known, even then, that I was unworthy of redemption but, at the same time, in the wanderlust of my teenage years I yearned for something more, and wanted to know it was there. What I didn\u2019t know, back then, was that all I had to do was knock.<\/p>\n

The answer to my prayer, the sign, came the next evening when I came face to face with a boy I\u2019d teased in elementary school, Don. He was older now, in high school like me, and bigger. And he was also on drugs, and violent.<\/p>\n

It was actually a lie that saved me.<\/p>\n

As Don\u00a0menacingly stalked me up the street intending to, in the least, punch me squarely in the face a few times he asked me where I lived. \u201cHere,\u201d I lied, and pointed to a random house on my block. A woman,\u00a0who probably heard all the commotion, was standing there watching us. Don realized we were being watched, the jig was up, and fled. Just like that. From sheer teenage terror to overwhelming relief.<\/p>\n

When I got home, minutes later, I was a Christian.<\/p>\n

I became involved, that fall, with the Christian club at my high school and through friendships forged there began attending a church of my own. It was a Pentecostal<\/a> church although only nominally so. (I would later experience\u00a0real<\/em> Pentecostalism<\/a> in a church where parishioners regularly spoke in tongues, fainted in the Spirit, and waved flags but that\u2019s a story for another time.) I was well served in this church although not all my memories are fond.<\/p>\n

A few years after becoming Christian I was baptized and a couple years after that I was sent out by the congregation on a missions trip to Kenya.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always struck me as ironic that my first genuine encounter with God was the result of a Wiccan. My first true experience of a miracle came at the hands of someone I\u2019d victimized; someone that I had been a bully to. And, that that first miracle was, kind of, a lie. \u201cI live here!\u201d I\u2019d said, lying, and instead of getting the snot kicked out of me, I went home.<\/p>\n

Through my time at the\u00a0first Pentecostal church I became a well-versed, biblically-grounded, Spirit-filled Christian. And I\u2019m forever indebted to the community there. It was at this first Pentecostal church, too, that I inherited some of my biases and misconceptions about the Roman Catholic Church. Misconceptions which, when cleared up, would open up what seemed like an entirely new world for me, and my faith.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were actually\u00a0at the Vatican last year, in August. After a family cruise around the Mediterranean\u2014something my semi-retired parents surprised us with a \u00a0year and a half earlier\u2014my wife and I disembarked the cruise ship to spend an incredible five weeks touring through Southern Europe. Our road to Rome, our first stop after the cruise, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2332,"featured_media":34,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22,30,50,61],"class_list":["post-244587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-why-catholicism","tag-conversion-2","tag-evangelical","tag-pentecostalism","tag-rome"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Slow Road to Rome<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Albert Little's experience converting to the Catholic church.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/albertlittle\/slow-road-rome\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Slow Road to Rome\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Albert Little's experience converting to the Catholic church.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/albertlittle\/slow-road-rome\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Cordial Catholic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-10-17T20:20:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-08-03T20:02:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/573\/2015\/08\/header2.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"337\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"K. 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