Jockey Lot Update 5/11/24:

Ernesto and I decided this week to go to the Jockey Lot on a Saturday. We had heard stories that it was much fuller on Saturdays and we found this to be true. We pray before our outings that the Holy Spirit would guide people to us and inspire us to share the Truth. There really were not many who wanted to engage us, however we did have some very meaningful encounters.

We talked with Elias, whose 20 year old daughter Anna is in Columbia, SC studying speech therapy. He is Catholic and explained that even though she was baptized Catholic, after entering college has since fallen away even though she still wears the Brown Scapular. He showed us that he is still wearing his. He wanted some material to give to her to convince her of the truths of our faith, so we gave him the Catholic Answers booklet "Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth". I invited him to allow us to pray together then and there. We prayed for Anna together.

Ernesto engaged a few Spanish speakers who took some materials and rosaries. I met Alton, an older gentleman who was wearing a gold crucifix. He told me his father built the Jockey Lot and he used to run a large shop there. He wanted to talk about his ultimate goal in life which was finding his true self. I tried to redirect from self alone, but finding your true self in God as being important. I talked about the human's inherent and natural dignity being created in the image of God, therefore finding our true uncorrupted self, our identity in God can help us find God and know that He loves us. I shared my struggle with this, both in my past and even now because of interior and exterior distractions or sins. Life is a struggle against the things that want to distort the image of God in us. True self is the image of God and cannot be realized until we understand how much God loves us and that He created us good. I began to share with him about Jesus, who sets us free from the things that drag us down, but he seemed to want to divert the conversation, until I found out he did not believe Jesus was equal with God. I could see he didn't want to go much further as he began to talk about how he writes his thoughts down and then recited a poem he had just written based on our conversion. I asked him before he left if he wanted any prayer. He said he would rather pray for the world, so I asked him what specifically, so I prayed for the people of the world to find their true selves in God, to realize how much God loves them, and set them free.

Just as we were praying together, Russel, a Protestant evangelist who looks somewhat Mennonite and who we have engaged before came to listen to the conversation. After Alton left, Russel and I got into it. We dived deeply into topics like man's natural goodness and because of the fall, his necessity for infused goodness from God in order to overcome his fallen nature. We discussed the nature of works and grace, the value of good works which have to be done in Christ in order to be meritorious, and how good works flow from our faith in Christ. He wanted to point out that everything we do is filthy rags since the fall. I tried to point out that Catholics do not believe in total depravity and explained why, emphasizing that man's original nature, which God created good, is not totally corrupted. Unbelievers can do inherently good things. And we both came to an agreement that because God is absolutely good, man's goodness, even if good, pales in comparison to God's goodness, but ultimately we need to be united to Christ in faith in order to please God for our salvation. He seemed to be agreeing with everything I said. He then emphasized the idea that man, in his pride, will make up his own way. At this point he mentioned something about man made religion and I knew where he was going with it (many Protestants make this accusation about the Catholic Church), but directed the conversation to the fall in the Garden of Eden. I talked about how at its essence sin is going our own way and not God's - exactly what Satan thought he could do. I also pointed out that Satan does not have creative power - evil is a deprivation of good. Satan is called the destroyer for a reason. He wants to mar and destroy God's good creation, but he cannot totally destroy it. I brought it back to the image of God in every human being and pointed out that no matter how sinful a person becomes they still bear the image of God. Our conversation on this topic went on for quite some time until I brought it back to when he mentioned man made religions and told him that Satan wants to destroy the Church, which is One, and has created chaos and confusion with denominationalism...and this is when the gentleman selling goods next us decided it was his turn to start preaching to the Catholics.

He immediately started to make the assertion that we should pay attention to the Church fathers more to find out that the concept of the Catholic was a later invention and power grab by Rome. His point was that the original Christians didn't look anything like Roman Catholicism which was developed later. This of course feeds into the strange dichotomous desire that even though Protestants have rejected the clear unbroken line of succession found in the apostolic churches leading all the way back to the first Christians, now feel this desire to identify with them, but have no clear evidence that those churches and christians looked like or practiced and believed anything the same as what we see in modern evangelicalism. Whatever the case he made the assertion that if we studied the Church fathers we would clearly see that the idea of Rome being the head of all the other churches was not original Christianity. So I looked up the Church Fathers right then and quoted to him St. Irenaeus' famous passage in his book "Against Heresies" (187 AD) on Rome and its headship as the church to which every other church throughout the world should look too. He then said it was written too late. I said not very long after the apostle John died, and in fact St. Irenaeus was only one generation away from John and was his successor. I made the assertion that I became Catholic because I realized how Catholic the Church Fathers were especially on the very Catholic doctrines. I asked to give me evidence of anything from the Church Fathers earlier than St. Irenaeus that said anything contrary to his assertion that Rome had primacy. The gentleman didn't seem to want to listen and just began to preach his ideas and he and Ernesto went at it (Ernesto said later he would try to give an explanation or ask a question and the man would just interrupt him).

Russel and I begin along the same line of discussion, with much respect to each other. We talked along the lines of historical evidence for the papacy, but he came down to the conclusion that he is a Bible alone believer and that no matter what the historical evidence and the Church Fathers, if you can't prove it from the Bible alone, it doesn't hold water. I pointed out that although we believe in the authority of scripture as Catholics, we do not believe in it alone, because it did not come about alone and neither is there any passage in the Bible that explicitly teaches the Bible alone. But I said, if I hold myself to the Bible alone, I can point out several passages from Scripture that point to the primacy of Peter and the gift of infallibility given to the authoritative body of the Church that Christ founded for the proper interpretation of Scripture. Of course y'all know where this conversation led us. We went back and forth: Me trying to convince him that the gift of infallibility is necessary in order to maintain the unity of the faith with the canon of Scripture itself included and many other notable Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ which took time to develop; and him asserting that the Holy Spirit was given to all believers to give them private individual understanding on how to interpret the Scripture properly without a governing authority. I pleaded with him to understand that this idea has led us nowhere but disintegrated Christianity into all these denominations and subjectivism, a result that even Luther himself lamented at the end of his life but was clearly evidenced by the many heresies at the time of the Church Fathers, like Arianism, which appealed to their own interpretations of Scripture. He was not budging on this and left me with a challenge in these words, "Just as I tell Johova's Witnesses and Mormans (apparently we are a cult as such), listen the the Holy Spirit and read the Scriptures without any influence from Catholic sources." He didn't know who he was talking to because it was this very practice that led me to the Catholic Church and to the realization that Scripture is not a matter of private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). Christ left us a Church which is the Pillar and Bulwark of Truth (1 Tim 3:15). To interpret differently than what the very Church that God founded is man-made religion.