Testimony

On Saturday, November 7th , 2020, I discovered that I had cancer. I was 17 years old, and I was a senior in high school. That morning I was retaking my SAT tests at Southport High School, but as soon as I sat down to begin, I felt a very light pain in the side of my torso. At first the pain was very mild and could at worst be called uncomfortable, however, over the course of the next three hours or so, the pain grew significantly worse and worse. It got to the point where the pain was so immense that I couldn’t sit still in my seat or even focus on the test in front of me. At this point, I decided that I needed to do something about it, so I staggered up out of my chair to the woman administering the test to ask for help. I must not have looked good, because she could tell even before I had gotten up that something was very wrong. From there, I explained to her that I was in a lot of pain, and that I needed to do something about it. So, we left the classroom I was taking the test in and walked to the front of the school to wait for my parents to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room. As a child, I had always had a rather high pain tolerance, so my parents knew that things were serious when I called them to come get me. During the thirty minutes that I waited for them to arrive, I could hardly stand up or walk because of the pain, and I was laying on the floor when they finally arrived. When they did arrive, my father drove us as quickly as he could to the emergency room. The rest of that day was a blur of explaining what had happened several times to several people, getting different tests done, and lots of waiting. By the end of the day, the doctor finally came to explain what was wrong. He explained to my family and I that my right kidney was significantly larger than it should be, and that my pain was due to the fact that my kidney had been pressing into other things that it normally wouldn’t have. He continued to explain that this was because there was a large cancerous tumor growing inside of my right kidney. After doing a biopsy a few weeks later, we discovered that this tumor was also malignant. The specific cancer that I had was called papillary renal cell carcinoma. The fact that I had cancer, especially cancer of this kind, made no sense to everyone who knew. Normally we like to think that cancer is the type of thing that happens to someone else rather than ourselves. However, as it turned out, I was the someone else. Additionally, the average person who would get this type of cancer was about 65, with contributing factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and obesity. Thus, as a healthy 17-year-old boy who had never even touched a cigarette, it seemed totally without cause that I had this type of cancer. Fortunately, there was a clear plan for treatment. Because the tumor was contained entirely within my kidney, the easiest and most efficient way of eradicating the cancer for good would be to simply remove my right kidney altogether. So, we did just that. On December 4 th , 2020, I underwent a nephrectomy and had my kidney, as well as the cancer along with it, completely removed. After the surgery they did more tests to see if the cancer truly was gone, and to this day I am completely cancer-free.

The entire process of discovering that I had cancer to no longer having cancer took less than a month, but the circumstances of that month, though short, have changed my life forever. My bout with cancer was rather tame when compared to the battles that others have fought, but the realization that I had a disease that could very easily kill me as it has so many others was a sobering one to say the least. I realized that my death was not only an inevitability, but also that it could come much sooner than I initially thought. With this fact in mind, it got me seriously thinking about what might happen to me after death. At the time, I was not a Catholic, but a protestant Christian who had been raised in a presbyterian church, so I certainly believed in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ, though in all honesty I was a rather lukewarm Christian at best. Despite this, I was unsure of my religious beliefs; of whether God existed, or if Jesus really rose from the dead. Though I perhaps never truly disbelieved in either, I was still plagued by doubts. With that in mind, the fact that I had then just been confronted with the reality of my own death and the question of what would happen after I died, if anything at all, compelled me to set out and investigate these things for myself. I figured that if God exists, and if Christianity is true, then there could be nothing more important in life. Thus, I began a long journey into the philosophy, theology, and history of the Christian faith, which to some extent continues to this day. From then on, I did research into the philosophy and arguments for and against the existence of God. In my research, I discovered that there were actually many compelling arguments for the existence of God, such as those by St. Thomas Aquinas. Additionally, I looked into the fact of whether Jesus rose from the dead, and found that the reasons for believing that our Lord is still alive were likewise very convincing. Thus, at this point, my belief in the former two things was not only reaffirmed, but strengthened tremendously. Around that time, I had also been reading the scriptures like I never had before. I would sit and read through entire books of the New Testament in one sitting. Through my reading, I read the moral commands given our Lord and his apostles, and I realized that I was in fact not living how I should, and that if I were to continue to do so, my soul could very well be damned. I felt a tremendous guilt for my sins, and the fact of my own wickedness hit me like a truck. I remember when sitting alone one day while recovering from my surgery, when I suddenly heard the words “God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” from the tax collector in Luke 18:13, in my head. After hearing these words, I began to cry with such sorrow for my sins. This was especially odd, since I rarely cry to begin with. After a time of this, my sorrow turned into joy. I realized as if for the first time that Jesus Christ was willing and able to forgive my sins, that I was immensely loved by God, and that he wanted nothing more than to have me, Jackson Lee, in heaven with him forever. I felt such a profound joy and peace like I had never experienced before, and looking back on it I know that this was the grace of God and the Holy Spirit working within me. This conversion of the heart that I experienced is all well and good, but it does not explain why I converted to Catholicism. After my belief in the truth of Christianity was reaffirmed, I then had the problem of finding out which Christianity was true. After all, there exists something akin to thousands of different Christian sects, each with their own separate beliefs and all of them claiming to have the fullness of truth. Furthermore, as I read scripture more and more, I found that many of the protestant doctrines that I had been raised with were either not taught in scripture, or were taught against. For instance, the protestant doctrine of faith alone that I once held to was not only absent, but contradicted in many places. As a whole, the scriptures taught that in fact our actions do affect our salvation, and that through our evil deeds we can reject God and his promises, regardless of our belief in him if we do not repent. If the doctrine of sola fide wasn’t true, then I could be certain that the Presbyterian church did not have the fullness of truth. Thus, I had to look elsewhere. Eventually, I decided that what I should do is to go and read what the earliest Christians believed, and find a church that best encapsulated what they believed. I reasoned that since they were closest to the source of divine revelation, being Jesus and the apostles, then they were the most likely to have the correct doctrine. As St. John Henry Newman wrote, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” and this was especially true for me. As I read, it was as if every ounce of Protestantism in my body had completely evaporated upon the profound discovery that the early church was in fact the Catholic Church. The early church fathers espoused doctrines such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the salvific nature of baptism, the Authority of the Church and the bishops, the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, and much more. They also certainly were not teaching that scripture alone is our rule of faith. Many of these writings came extremely early too, with writings by St. Ignatius of Antioch no later than 110 AD explicitly affirming that the bread and wine of the eucharist are actually the body and blood of our Lord, and that “Wherever the bishop appears… there is the Catholic Church.” What troubled me especially was that these fathers of the church didn’t even debate about these things. They all believed without dispute the things that were centuries later rejected during the protestant reformation. I realized that one of two things could be true; either the apostles initially taught classically protestant doctrines, and then immediately after their deaths the Church forgot all that they taught and went straight into error, not to be corrected until some 1400 years later, or that the apostles taught their successors well and that God did not allow his church to be overcome, as he promised it would not be in Matthew 18:18. It seemed to me so implausible that the former could be true. Furthermore, as I read the bible more and more, I began to see that many Catholic doctrines that I once considered unbiblical were actually incredible grounded in the sacred scriptures. In them I found evidence of the papacy, the eucharist, baptism, apostolic succession, purgatory, and so much more. Eventually, I realized that I had no choice but to become Catholic. There was simply no way I could remain a protestant in good faith. So, in the Easter Vigil Mass in April of 2022, I was confirmed into the Catholic Church. The decision to convert and be confirmed was a clear decision, but not a comfortable one. My family took the news that I wanted to convert rather well all things considered, but still there was and still exists friction because of our differing beliefs. I had to make sacrifices as well, such as giving up certain behaviors, friendships, and even having to break up with my girlfriend of three and a half years because of major differences in beliefs, even though we were very much still in love at the time. All that being said, there are those who have sacrificed much more than I in order to follow Christ, even so far as to give their lives for the truth. If the martyrs could endure what they did, then by the grace of God, I could endure my comparatively small trials. Despite all that, I am ultimately glad to be a Catholic. Before I felt homeless in this world, and the fullness of the truth about God was unclear. Of course, this world is not really our home, and we will never truly be home until we are reunited with God forever. Upon discovering the Catholic Church, however, its as though I’ve found an ark that our Lord has prepared for us to wait out the storm until that day finally comes.