Let me be clear here: I have no personal disdain for Catholicism. I just don’t belong to it. To me, again, they are brothers and sisters in Christ. So nevermind the differences.

But I will say this… When I went to Eureka Springs, Arkansas with my wife and her family, and we visited The Thorncrown Chapel there, it was pretty. The building and surrounding nature was nice. But when I visited St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, it was amazing. I could… feel something in the church there. Something tangible. It was like the Spirit was there, in that place, despite it being empty. I didn’t want to leave. I genuinely felt in that moment like I could have sat in that pew all day and just been in His presence. My family wanted to do other things that afternoon, and it made me sad to leave. It made me think about Aslan in the Narnia novel Prince Caspian where he tells Lucy she should have gone to him even despite her siblings’ protestations of not seeing him anywhere.

It was only days later when I mentioned my experience that my family admitted feeling similarly. My wife says the next time we go back, we will go there and just be for a while.