I used to sit in my closet as a kid and talk to God. I didn’t know then that this was an early invitation to come Home.

Life got decently complicated early on. I was an intuitive, highly sensitive soul, who felt everything, knew when I was being lied to and kept all of what I saw and felt inside.

I got sick when I was 7 years old with an autoimmune disease that ran through the women on my Mom’s side of my family - Crohn’s Disease. A painful, often embarassing affliction that had me running to the bathroom, sitting on a rubber ring most of my grade 8 year (cue the deepening embarassment) and have bouts of hospitalization.

Looking for answers to what became an existential question of “why?”, I went on a search outside of the conventional medical model that had provided many bandaids to my condition, but no solution.

Through trial and error, I ended up deeply immersed in self-help and new age practice. I became an Intuitive Energy Healer, employing these newfound practices that really excited me.

After my 5th bowel surgery at 33 years old, now married and recovering at home, I noticed that part of my incision had opened up and I just wasn’t feeling right. I called up a healer that I knew and had worked with to see if she could assist me in my healing of this latest surgery.

She took me through a deep, meditative journey that ended with me sitting face to face with Jesus. That day, I experienced for the first time in my life, a totalizing, unconditional love from Him.

It completely undid me.

Afterwards, I took a bath and was looking at this incision in my belly that had opened up. I then noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before this experience with Jesus.

A piece of suture was sticking out of the incision. That was weird, I thought. I hadn’t noticed that before. So I pulled on it and out came about a 6 inch piece of medical suture. I was nervous that I had just undone something but nonetheless, I got out of the bath and towelled off.

As I went to get dressed, I looked back down at my incision and it had completely closed up.

What?! How had that happened? And in only a couple of minutes?

I realized that a small miracle had just taken place.

I would have several more Divine encounters in the coming years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being called.

In the fall of 2023, after being back in a Crohn’s flare for a few years and not getting anywhere with my own efforts, I was at home and fell to my knees. I asked God, in complete sincerity, to take this disease. I told him that I didn’t want to be in charge of my health anymore.

I was done.

And not only was I done trying to control my health, but I was done trying to control everything. My role as a wife, a mother, my service in the world…everything.

And I received an immediate response. He told me that, of course He would take all of what I was offering. And that in return, I was to commit myself formally to Him.

I knew exactly what that meant. It meant that I was to go into religious life. It would mean a conversion of faith.

And here I am.

The very last place I ever thought I would find myself. A middle-aged Catholic convert.

It has changed my life in ways I could never have anticipated.

I have gone from a ‘me centred life’ to a ‘God centred life.’ My identity has been completely rewritten and continues to be.

It turns out that in the one who suffers autoimmunity, there is a massive forfeit of identity. Of course there is with everyone. But it seems to be extreme in the autoimmune soul.

In other words, I could never have reconciled this existential conundrum through a self-help or new age model. These models only serve to deepen the identity of Self, as isolated and unique from other Selves.

It is an incredible gaslight that is simply not seen by those in its grasp.

To come into the Relational through the Trinity of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, is to displace our own isolated being. It is to displace the conditions that the world and the culture places upon us for our self-worth.

It inverts the whole model.

This is still a work in progress. It likely always will be. But it has opened doors that I never knew existed.

I know you feel this too. That there must be something beyond the incessant yearnings and desirings of the Self.

Stick around a while and see where we can go…

Much love,

Ann