Surprising!!!

I went to the toilet in the middle of the night, and when I got back to bed, I prayed "OK God, why have you woken me up?"

The words that drifted through my mind in the inky blackness of the night were "I'm calling you to be a [Roman] Catholic"

WHAT !!???!!!

So:

Option 1 - it was genuinely God. I am about to preach a sermon on the topic of obedience, and how it will lead us into very surprising places, so this may be so.

Option 2 - it was just a fantasy of my own mind, stirred up by my worst fears that God might call me in this direction.

Option3 - It was the Devil trying to tempt me with 'Babylon the great Harlot'

So I didn't get back to sleep for a while. For a start, I am hardly ready to become a Roman Catholic. I am a strongly Protestant person - I reject transubstantiation, penances, purgatory, the confessional, their almost-Pelagian idea that you have to supplement God's grace with good works to be saved, prayers to Mary and the saints, images, infant baptism etc etc etc. It would be daft for me to just go and join the nearst RC church - I would not fit in. If it was indeed a call of God, I see it more as a description of a milestone or destination along the road, the long road, that I am already on.

When I got up in the morning and did my normal Bible Reading, the passage was Jesus speaking - "In my father's house there are many rooms". In the context of the day I read this as "In my father's house there are many denominations. You can move from one to another. There are people there that never meet each other and think wildy different things, but are all in the one house."

So we shall see where God leads me.

It will be interesting to come back to this post in 20 years time, and see if i think "Ha, that was a stupid idea, what was I thinking?" or "Wow, that was the start of this wonderful journey".