Today I am excited to welcome Sunny Dawn as she shares her journey to the Orthodox faith. I always find it inspiring to hear about how God has led others, and I hope you will be encouraged as well! If you would like to share your story, send a 500-750 word essay to theorthodoxmama@gmail.com for possible publication.
Today I would like to share my story of conversion to the Orthodox Church.
Protestant Church Background
Originally, I was baptized in the Protestant Church. The traditions were followed rigidly and the Bible was known by heart. My family was a fervent Church-goer and celebrated each Feast on a wide scale. I liked everything about it since the unity of family values made me excited and pleased completely with my life. Love and peace prevailed in the family.
An Inner Shift
As I was growing up, I started to ruminate on the place and origin of our faith. Was it the church established by Christ and his apostles? Did we confess the proper faith or did we just respect aspects of being exemplar Protestant Christians? Over the time, these thoughts flooded completely my mind, and I prayed fervently to God to help me sort the things out with my confession.
I was still attending every service on Sunday, but my inner dissatisfaction grew constantly from Sunday to Sunday. So I prayed. It continued for several months until God revealed his Holy Faith to me, which I consider to be the biggest blessing and treasure in my life. Whenever I start thinking about God’s mercy to me, tears brim over my eyes, so inscrutable his will is to me.
God’s Messenger
Once I got ill with flu. I stayed home not knowing what I should engage myself with. Finally, I approached our book shelf and took the book my uncle gifted to us but was never touched by any of us since its content was a little bit unusual for our family. It was a fiction book the title of which I can hardly remember.
The main point is that this fiction was written in accordance with values of another faith. And it was Orthodoxy. Our uncle told us about his discovery of the Orthodox faith. Therefore, in some respect it was my uncle who became a messenger of God for me. I started to attend Orthodox services and was completely smitten with the parallel grandeur and simplicity of these services. But the thing that appealed to me the most and helped to understand it was the thing I had been searching for: a live feeling of the Holy Spirit’s presence. I felt myself at home, at my heavenly home.
“I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)
What was the reaction of my relatives? They were against my conversion to Orthodoxy because my previous religion was entrenched into our family. However, very soon another miracle happened – my sister was baptized by an Orthodox priest on Easter day, as it was done in the ancient times when catechumen were baptized just two days a year. So it happened with my sister. I was so grateful for God and for her heavenly patroness St Christina of Tyro. I had been praying for her also to make my sister understand the real way of life, the real saving way of life.
Talking about our relatives’ attitude towards our conversion, it was initially bitterly painful. They could not understand us and sometimes hurled insults on account of our faith. But we were patient and did not judge them for this misbehavior. We are just praying ardently and also ask you, dear readers, to do it together with us, so that God will reveal to them the joyful light and let them join us in His Kingdom!
Glory to God for all His mercy to us, the sinners.
Sunny Dawn is an Orthodox Christian who converted into Orthodox 7 years ago. She is grateful for being a member of this blissful community. She is busy doing her Bachelor degree in the field of Linguistics. At the same time she is a freelance writer for http://www.freelancehouse.co.uk/. In her free time Sunny enjoys playing the piano and reading spiritual literature.
