I was raised by two kind, smart parents who did not believe in God.

We didn't mock religion at our house.

We just didn't need it.

Sundays were for pancakes and the newspaper, not for church.

By the time I got to college, I called myself an atheist, and I was proud of it.

I majored in biochemistry.

I believed in what I could measure.

If a friend brought up God, I had my arguments loaded and ready.

I usually won.

At least, I thought I did.

The Fact I Didn't Know

My first crack came from a trivia question.

I was at a bar with some coworkers from the lab, and the question was about who first proposed that the universe began from a single point.

I knew the answer was the Big Bang.

I didn't know the name.

The answer was Georges Lemaître.

A Belgian physicist.

And a Catholic priest.

I laughed out loud, because I thought the quizmaster had made a mistake.

He hadn't.

I went home and looked it up, and then I kept looking.

Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, the man whose pea plants I had studied in my very first biology class, was an Augustinian friar.

Catholic monks and priests had been doing science for centuries.

Everything I had assumed about faith being the enemy of reason suddenly felt a lot less certain.

I didn't like that feeling.

But I was a scientist, and scientists are supposed to follow the evidence.

The Question Under the Microscope

A few months later, I was working late in the lab, watching a living cell divide under the microscope.

I had watched it a hundred times before.

But that night, for some reason, I couldn't stop staring.

Thousands of tiny machines, all working together in perfect order.

Instructions written in a code more complex than anything humans have ever written.

I had always said it was all just chance.

But sitting alone in that dark lab, a question came into my head that I couldn't answer.

Why is there anything at all, instead of nothing?

Science could tell me how the cell worked.

It couldn't tell me why it existed.

Reading the Other Side

I decided to do something I had never done before.

I would read the best arguments for God, written by the smartest believers I could find.

Not to convert.

Just to be fair.

I started with C. S. Lewis, because a friend kept pushing his books on me.

He had been an atheist too, and he knew every argument I was going to make before I made it.

Then I found G. K. Chesterton, a brilliant English writer who argued with atheists for decades and eventually became Catholic himself.

He made me laugh.

He also made me think, which was much more annoying.

Finally, I worked up the nerve to read Thomas Aquinas.

He wrote in the 1200s, and I expected superstition.

What I found was a mind sharper than any professor I had ever had.

He argued that everything we see depends on something else to exist, and that the chain of dependence has to end somewhere, in a being that simply is.

I read that argument over and over for a week.

I could not find the hole in it.

From God to Jesus

Believing that God might exist was one thing.

Believing in Jesus was another thing entirely.

So I read the Gospels the way I would read data.

I kept running into the same problem Lewis had pointed out.

Jesus didn't talk like a nice moral teacher.

He forgave sins.

He said He and the Father were one.

He claimed He would rise from the dead.

Either He was lying, or He was out of His mind, or He was telling the truth.

And then there were the apostles.

Frightened men who ran away when Jesus was arrested, then suddenly went out and preached until they were killed for it.

People will die for something they believe is true.

They don't usually die for something they know they made up.

Why Catholic?

Once I believed in Jesus, I had to figure out where to go.

I didn't want the church that felt best.

I wanted the one that was true.

So I went back to the sources, like any good researcher.

I read what Christians wrote in the first few centuries after Jesus.

They believed the Eucharist was His real body and blood.

They had bishops who traced their authority back to the apostles.

They looked to Rome.

The more I read, the clearer it became.

The Catholic Church wasn't one option on a menu.

It was the original.

The First Mass

I went to my first Mass alone on a Sunday morning, sitting in the very last pew.

I didn't know any of the responses.

I didn't know when to kneel.

But when the priest raised the host and the whole church went silent, I felt something I had spent my whole life insisting wasn't real.

Presence.

Not an argument.

Not a feeling I could explain away.

Someone.

I walked out of that church shaking.

Telling My Parents

Telling my parents was the hardest conversation of my life.

My dad asked if I was going through something.

My mom asked if I was sure.

I told them I had never been more careful about anything.

I told them they had raised me to follow the truth wherever it led.

And this is where it led.

They didn't understand.

But they came to my baptism at the Easter Vigil, and my dad held my candle while I was confirmed.

That meant more to me than he will ever know.

Where I Am Now

I still work in a lab.

I still look through a microscope every day.

The difference is that now, when I watch a cell divide, I don't just see chemistry.

I see craftsmanship.

Faith didn't ask me to stop thinking.

It asked me to finish the thought.

If you're a skeptic reading this, I'm not asking you to take my word for anything.

I'm asking you to do what I did.

Read the best arguments on the other side.

Follow the evidence.

And be brave enough to go wherever it leads.

Jenna is a composite character, and this story is illustrative, inspired by the real journeys of many people who have moved from atheism to the Catholic Church.

Your turn: Did your questions or doubts ever lead you closer to faith? Tell us your story in the comments below.