By Jessica Easthope
Amanda Dennison still has the dress she wore during her civil wedding to her high school sweetheart Jonathan – and soon she’ll wear it for the start of yet another new chapter:
On April 19 at the Easter Vigil, she will become a Catholic.
Amanda’s decision to convert was slowly building inside her for years. Having grown up Pentecostal she has always had a relationship with Christ but she feels now that relationship is at a new level.
“I want to be able to be in a place that He can use me for the glory of His kingdom, and that His will will be done in my life,” she tells Currents News. “My parents, they were actually Sunday School teachers. As I got older I started to question my tradition, how I grew up. We were missing certain sacraments. And I didn’t understand why that was.”
So, she put in the work, starting with attending Mass at Blessed Sacrament Church in Jackson Heights, Queens.
“So I started buying different books. I was listening to converts. I started getting into apologetics, learning about the faith and listening to debates between Catholicism and Protestantism,” she explains. “And now I truly believe that Catholicism is the fullness of Christianity.”
Amanda will be baptized, receive communion and confirmation – three sacraments in one day – and a week later will come a fourth sacrament: she and Jonathan will be married in church.
“I’m so grateful to God that he put him in my life,” she says. “I just can’t wait to be able to receive the sacrament of matrimony and really ask God to be the center of our marriage and help us to be able to love each other in the way that He loves us.”
She already has so much to look forward to, but that’s not stopping Amanda from envisioning her future life with faith at the forefront.
“Now when I have kids, I can pour all of that knowledge within them and really build up their faith really strong,” she tells Currents News. “And I’m really looking forward to it. And I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be able to do this at this stage.”
It’s never too late to put faith first, and Amanda is proof.
“This journey that I’m going through,” she says. “It has a bigger purpose.”