Prima Verba – Part 10

I’m at the point in my story where I’ve had a decision to make. I could write about how, as I was in the midst of burning out as a pastor, Cami came to see that I really did need to resign, and how we made that decision together. Or I could shift gears and write about how, as I was in the midst of burning out as a pastor, I began to take an interest in the Catholic Church.

These two options marked a fork in the road for me. Yogi Berra famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I always thought that was just a bit of comedic nonsense. But in this case, it’s exactly what I needed to do: take both prongs of the fork. All I had to decide was which one to take first. No problem.

But that decision hasn’t come easily. In fact, my recent silence has been due—in large part—to indecision. To be fair to myself, I was sick for a little over a week around Thanksgiving, and my foggy mind was in no condition to make this decision, let alone dictate any actual writing to my hands.

But now that I’m feeling better and am thinking more clearly (at least, I think I’m thinking more clearly), I’ve decided to start with how God placed the Catholic Church on my radar. That was in 2023. But to write about that, I need to go back another thirty years, to 1993.

Cami and I met in the fall of 1992. By the time 1993 arrived, we were dating, and I was becoming involved in the Methodist church she’d grown up in. Through a good friend there, I was introduced to a guy who became another good friend of mine—Keith Nester.

Keith had moved to our hometown to pursue a music project. That project didn’t last terribly long, but some interesting threads still extend out from it to this day. Most of these threads lie outside the scope of this particular story, but there’s one I need to pull on here.

That thread is my friendship with Keith that continued over the next several years. It was bolstered by common music interests, by some common life experiences, but most of all by a common faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, Keith and I both ended up being pastors.

Keith entered pastoral ministry before I did, and it took him to a city about two hours away. That distance, combined with the addition of children into each of our families, meant that our paths intersected less frequently than before. But every now on then, there would be some church- and/or music-related event at which we’d have a chance to reconnect.

It was at one of these events that Keith dropped a bomb on me. He told me that he was thinking very seriously about becoming Catholic. I don’t remember all the details of the ensuing conversation, but I know it wasn’t marked by charity. At least, not on my part.

I’m sure I gave him all the reasons I knew of not to become Catholic. I now know these ‘reasons’ to be inaccurate at best, and slanderous at worst. But I didn’t know that at the time, and the result was a conversation that radiated far more heat than light.

To make a long story short, Keith eventually came into the Catholic Church and is now involved full-time in Catholic ministry. You can check out his work here, here, and here.

Now, there wasn’t really a lingering rift between us, as friends. To whatever degree we had argued about the Catholic Church at that event, we didn’t continue to do so perpetually. We did, however, allow distance and our doctrinal differences to cause us to become something more like acquaintances than friends, functionally speaking. And for many years, we rarely saw each other or even talked.

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We can now jump ahead to 2023. The February classis meeting from my fourth wave of burnout had recently taken place, and I was feeling physically and emotionally drained.

I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but in March or April of that year, I ended up watching one of Keith’s videos. He had probably just made a new one with a provocative title and posted it on Facebook or something, and I took the bait.

However it came about, I clicked the link, watched the video, and ended up commenting on it. A friendly comment, as I remember. I probably suggested some nuance or balance to whatever he had said. At any rate, my comment had a much different tone than the last time he and I had interacted on anything having to do with the Catholic Church.

Why?

Because I wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. About anything, really. I didn’t have the energy or the will for it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I watched and commented on a few more of his videos, and he replied to a few of my comments. He has said publicly that, at the time, he thought I might have been trolling him. For some reason (probably a juvenile one), I still find this really amusing.

At any rate, these interactions on YouTube led to some text messages between us, which in turn led to us deciding to meet for lunch in a town about halfway between us. I didn’t know it then, of course, but that lunch meeting at a Mexican restaurant would prove to be pivotal in our friendship and in my journey.

And I’ll write about that meeting in Part 11.

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I am ever grateful to all of you for your ongoing interest and support. It is truly humbling. Given the busyness of this time of year, and the fact that I’m going to be traveling for four days of it, I recently set for myself a modest goal of publishing Parts 10, 11, and 12 before the New Year. So, I’m now a third of the way toward achieving that goal!

I hope you’re all having a blessed Advent Season, and I look forward to sharing some more exciting news with you in the near future!

May the Lord bless and keep you all.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

Aaron