May Catholic ReCon Testimony

Stacy Wendt: He Called Me By Name

Here is this month’s summary of a Catholic ReCon testimony: Why She’s Still Bible-Believing - But Now a Catholic. May it be a sweet blessing to you, as it was to me also.

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Stacy Wendt was baptized at 13 into the Methodist Church. She didn’t grow up in a Christian home but was drawn to the open church doors in her small community and later at age 17 lived with a Presbyterian family, attending church with them, in her final senior year, so she didn’t have to shift schools in her final year, when her parents moved away. Later, she was slowly drawn back into Protestant churches, after the birth of her first child. She explains: “I was surrounded by very sincere people seeking truth.”

She became actively involved in a charismatic evangelical church, and her kids attended a Baptist school. During her 25 years of in this church community, she had two good Protestant pastors give her a deep love of Scripture and help her to understand the connection between the Old and New Testament.

Then, after 18 years of homeschooling, she ended up working for Lighthouse Catholic media. Through this ministry, she listened to a CD of Scott Hahn, given to her by her boss. This was not her first time listening to it. In this talk Hahn shared about the tenth plague and the Israelites being instructed, before their escape from Egypt, to both eat the Lamb and sprinkle its blood on their doorposts. He asked: “what if the Israelites hadn’t followed all the instructions? What if they had only done some of what the Lord had instructed? What if they had done everything but eat the lamb?”

She knew that Lamb represented Christ and that they were spared from the angel of death because of the blood of the Lamb. “It literally hit me so much that I stopped it and rewound it and listened to it again and shut it off.”

She explains: “My love of Scripture was where God met me. He met me right where I was at.”

Then, at a Lighthouse media conference, Patrick Madrid talked about stained glass windows being dull on the outside, but once you go inside and the light is streaming in, then you see the beauty and it becomes alive, that there’s a message being revealed in the light

That made her think: “If I am going to give the Catholic Church a fair chance, then I need to be looking at it, not from the outside in, as I was doing, but from the inside out. Who better than to help me learn the Catholic faith, than the Catholics.” She was researching a lot until then, but always made sure she had a Protestant source. She explains that she wasn’t overly anti-Catholic, but that she did question what she back then saw as the “worship of Mary”, the Pope and so forth.

At the time, her employer had a chapel built on site, where mass was offered once a month and Adoration was now being done ten feet from her office. It made her wonder: “What is this? This is a secret I don’t know about.” Mark, her boss, then one day said to her: “I can’t go in for my ten minute Adoration slot and Jesus can’t be left alone, so will you go in for me and he probably did that on purpose too .”

And so she went in and didn’t stop going in. She knew now from Scripture that Jesus was present in the bread, especially from John 6, but she didn’t have faith to comprehend it. She would always pray the same prayer- she would start with a Psalm and then just pray for Jesus to show her the truth. “Lord, I want to know the truth, show me the truth.”

And this went on for 9 months. During this time, she had some real wrestling experiences. She called it her Jacob experience. Just like Jacob, who dislocated his hip and was given a new name, she knew she wasn’t going to come out the same, the other end of it. And she wasn’t going to let go until God blessed her, until He showed her the truth.

On July 22, 2010, she attended a mass on the feast of St Magdalene. In the Gospel reading of that mass from John 20, Mary Magdalene was looking for Jesus in the tomb and she says, weeping, outside the tomb: “They’ve taken my Lord and I don’t know where to find Him.”

Stacy explains: “This was me. I was saying to Jesus: “I thought I knew You, but where did You go? Where are You?”

Mary sees Jesus and thinks He is a gardner. Jesus says to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). [John 20:13-16, NRSVCE]

She explains: “And when I heard the priest say “Mary”, I literally heard my name spoken at the same time. I heard Mary and Stacy at the same time. It was so real that I looked around the room to see if anyone else had heard it. I literally heard nothing more in the mass. It just stopped me in my tracks.”

She felt Jesus say: “Stacy, don’t you recognize Me?! ... I’m right here.”

She explains: “Just like Mary, I thought I knew Jesus. He fit into this box and I couldn’t see Him outside of that form that I had been formed in for 25 years. When He spoke her name, she [Mary Magdalene] recognized Him and the same thing happened to me. And that’s when it went from here [pointing to her head] to here [pointing to her heart].”

She signed up for RCIA- but still struggled. She explains that she was not so committed because of church softball game conflicts. Mark, her boss, noticed and encouraged her to seek out her RCIA priest. The next RCIA meeting centered on Mary being called by name at the tomb. Despite this renewed calling, Stacy comes up afterwards to tell her pastor she can’t commit at this time.

She explains: “It wasn’t so much a struggle to believe, as it was about what I was leaving behind. 25 years: all our family and relationships were based around those we were in fellowship with [in our church]. But Father said: just do what Mary did: say yes. Of course he was talking about the Blessed Mother. That’s all he literally said.”

Stacy went home and began journaling about the day. It’s then she suddenly remembered that her name Stacy means:

“Spring time of the resurrection”.

She explains: “It just hit me. He wrote my name into that story. That was it. I said yes. This is literally days before the Easter vigil [in 2011]...I saw it as this huge step. But really it was just this small step. I just had to get out of the boat. I’m here, I’m on the shore. He brought me home.”

She goes on: “I had a lot of head knowledge because I knew a lot of Scripture...As soon as that [obedience] happened, a lot of the questions I had dissolved. Like with Mary- it’s like God took me and put me in her arms. You look into the face of your mother and no one has to tell you: “This is your mother.” She’s nurtured you to bring you to life. And you know her voice. You know her. I never had a doubt about anything.”

She realizes that at first she couldn’t get to a point of faith because she was so busy trying to figure it all out. Later, she saw how she hadn’t been the one chasing God after all, He had been chasing her. She explains: “There were all these things I couldn’t have written into it. It was 4 days short of 9 months from the day of that mass. She literally carried me in her womb.”

Stacy points out though that she is so grateful for everything her Protestant experience brought her, for the good. She credits it as leading to her conversion in the end: “God used it. And it was very, very powerful to see the depths and extent He’ll go to...I kept doubting, where is the Holy Spirit in the Catholic Church. But then through the Sacraments, I realized the Holy Spirit is everything in the Church. Now, I sit in His Presence and ask Him to teach me to walk in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Church is such a gift.”

She is grateful she was able to keep two close friends from her old church and points out: “When you have a friendship of spiritual integrity, they cross that boundary. We’re friends because we’re Christian and that’s what is the core of our friendship and that doesn’t change, when one becomes Catholic. It certainly shouldn’t.”

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