RANDOM ACCESS - OUR READERS

Flying Sparkes and Explanations Sorely Needed at 35,000 Feet
Readers share their experiences of random opportunities to share the Catholic Faith with others.

They'd rather fight than switch

I feel called to have some sort of visible sign that I'm a Catholic at work, so I have a picture of Mary and Jesus on my desk. It took courage to put that picture up, but since then, I'm constantly being asked about the Faith. I wouldn't say I've been successful in converting anyone yet, but of the dozen people who sit around me at work, I'd say 11 are former Catholics or weak practicing Catholics. Recently, two co-workers came by at lunch time and started giving me religious propaganda. They must have been Seventh Day Adventists because the literature said the Pope is the Antichrist and to keep holy the Sabbath. They started to attack me about Mary. I was surprised that I stayed calm. I asked them, "What is the pillar and foundation of truth?" They said, "Love and God and the Bible." I said, "Let's look it up in the Bible," and I asked one of them to quote 1 Timothy 3:15 out loud. Their eyes kind of exploded when he read that the pillar and foundation of the truth is the "Church." Then they said, "Well, we're a church. The three of us make up a church."

"If that's the case," I said, "what did Jesus mean in Matthew 18:15-17?" I read the passage, in which He said to the apostles that if a brother is doing something wrong, confront him. If he doesn't listen, get two people to go along to confront him. Then, if he still refuses to listen, tell the Church. "There are 20,000 Protestant denominations," I reminded them. "Which one of them is the Church Christ was speaking about in Matthew 18?" At that, the two guys switched the subject and began to argue that Catholics are wrong to pray to Mary and the saints because the Bible says that Jesus is the only mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5). I responded by asking why we on earth would even bother to pray for each other, since we have Jesus as the one mediator. One of them said, "Well, the angels can mediate between us and God, too." The other disagreed with him, and they forgot about me and started arguing with each other about what angels could and couldn't do. We didn't get to any conclusion that day.

Doug Sparkes, Seattle, WA

The case of the impregnable co-worker

At a Catholic meeting I attended last October, I and some others were sitting in the hotel lounge discussing the Faith when several drunken semi-pro football players came in. I tried to evangelize one of them, but he was belligerent and confrontational and used a lot of foul language. Because he was a football player, I started talking to him about how I had played football in school. One thing led to another, and there we were, in the middle of the hotel lobby playing tackle football. I knocked him down a few times, and that hurt his ego, so he tried to pick a real fight with me. I wasn't going to fight him, so the "evangelization" ended when I ran out of the hotel to avoid a fist fight. It was an utter failure.

Bud Macfarlane, Jr., Cleveland, OH

Welcome Back

I was fairly new to the Catholic Faith when I found out this one co-worker was Catholic. I thought sure we'd bond really well. She's in her 40s, a cradle Catholic. I figured that if anybody at work would know what's going on, she would. Unfortunately that wasn't true. One day we got to talking about abortion and I found out she's pro-abortion. She's never had a child and it really struck me in a horrible way, because I thought of all people, she'd especially want a child to be born since she didn't even get to have one. As we talked, I shared my point of view and I explained exactly what happens during the partial-birth abortion procedure. She told me she had a friend who had "terminated her pregnancy" in the third trimester for no other reason than just wanting to dispose of the pregnancy. My friend didn't seem to have any problem with that. Just knowing her viewpoint has made a difference in our relationship. I feel sad for her because she doesn't understand the Faith. She told me that when she was younger, she couldn't wait to get on the pill so she could go out and do what she wanted. I'll continue to talk to her about these things, although she seems pretty set in her ways. I tried to make her understand that only God can make the decision when a child should or shouldn't be born.

Lynn Ramey, Lemoore, CA

Mr. Good Wrench cleans a clock

I'm a former seminarian, and now I'm an auto mechanic. I work with a guy, a former Catholic, who's now a Fundamentalist. He likes to challenge me on Catholic teachings on Mary, the saints, priesthood, the whole thing. He originally told me that Catholics worship Mary and that's a violation of the first commandment. I responded by explaining the correct teaching and told him the Catholic Church teaches that Mary is not God, and we don't adore her as God. Then he was backing up a little bit and said that the mere fact that we pray to Mary and the saints condemns us. I said we're just communicating with our older brothers and sisters. "What's wrong with that?" I asked him. Ultimately, he kept backing up and finally his arguments against the Church just ran out of steam. It got to the point that I was making him mad, so I backed off, because it wasn't my intention to make him mad. But a few days later he came up to me and admitted that he thought I was right.

Tom Jensen, Bellevue, NE

Eye can see clearly now

I had an appointment with my optometrist, and was sitting in his waiting room reading a Catholic newspaper. He came in and asked me, "Is that a Catholic newspaper you're reading there?" I told him yes. I don't know how he knew. I think he'd seen it before or something.

Then he started asking me some questions. He said he was currently Evangelical, but he had what he called a "hyper-intellectual" friend who was trying to steer him into the Catholic Church. This friend had also been an Evangelical and had recently converted to the Catholic Church. So the optometrist asked me some questions about the Catholic Faith and I answered him the best I could. We talked for about a half-hour, and I gave him some Catholic apologetics tapes that I had in my car. The next time I went back for an appointment, he handed me a tape on sola fide (Latin: justification by faith alone) by a Protestant apologist and asked me to listen to it and let him know what I thought. It was a tape from a lengthy Catholic/Protestant debate on justification and sola scriptura. I thought that the Protestant presented his case well, but I didn't have the tapes of the Catholic team's response. So I checked around and did some research. The next time I went back to see the optometrist, he said he was teetering, and that he thought the Catholic arguments on sola scriptura he had heard on the tape set were better and much stronger than the Protestant ones.

Dave Deaton, Cerritos, CA

Something special in the air

I'm an airline pilot, and one day I noticed that one of the crew members on our flight, a male flight attendant, was reading Scripture in the hotel while we were waiting to get on the bus that would take us to the airport. I thought I'd see what his background was, so I engaged him in conversation. He was eager to talk. He mentioned he'd been Catholic before but that he was now an Evangelical Protestant, a Baptist, and he lived down in Texas. We continued our discussion on the airplane since we had a little time before the passengers came on. He brought up the usual objections to the Church that people seem to have concerning Mary, "ritualism," confession to a priest, and a few other topics. I explained to the best of my ability the Church's position on these things. Two other flight attendants were standing nearby listening also.

From what he was saying I got the idea that because he was Baptist, there were things he missed from his Catholic upbringing. He said his mother is still Catholic, and he said that sometimes he "misses the ritual." I thought this was significant. I asked him several central questions: "Why are you a Baptist? Why aren't you an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian? Why do you feel the Baptist church has the fullness of Christ's revelation and not the others? And what kind of certitude do you have in the Baptist church? Why do you think that their interpretation of the Bible is the correct one?"

He said he didn't feel the need for this authority that I mentioned, that a central authority isn't necessary for Christian. Unfortunately the conversation had to be terminated because our flight was getting ready to take off and we both had to do our work. But I asked him if it would be okay for me to send him a book on the Catholic Church. He said that was fine, so I sent him two books, a copy of Beginning Apologetics and Surprised by Truth. I also wrote him a letter explaining why I believe the Catholic Church is the true Church. I'm looking forward to his response.

Jim Sorely, Layton, UT

Send in your Random Access encounters with friends, co-workers, or family members to: Random Access, Envoy Magazine, P.O. Box 640, Granville, OH. Or e-mail us at editor@envoymagazine.com.