Catholic Church Organist Was Kneeling in Front of a Cross for 19 Years—and Never Once Asked What It Cost for Him to Be There

Danny was moaning behind the partition. My brother. My 6'7" athletic brother who always made a path for everyone else. The EMTs kept saying “semi-comatose” into the radio. I could hear his breath catching, having difficulty. My hands were shaking so hard I had to sit on them.

I did the only thing I knew how to do. I prayed the Hail Mary. Over and over. Like counting backward from a hundred, like if I said it enough times, God would hear me and fix this. He didn't.

And what the doctors told us three weeks later destroyed everything I thought I knew about faith, family, and why bad things happen to good people...

That was January 1976. Danny was 18. I was 19. We were farm kids in rural Wisconsin, and snowmobiles were what we did after dark—ten of us sometimes more, riding in packs across fields our parents trusted us to know.

Danny always went ahead. He was the kind of brother who made a path for everyone else. That night, I was dressed and ready to go with him. He turned to me and said, "Stay here, I'll be right back." Those were the last words I ever heard from my normal brother.

Less than thirty minutes later, my cousin came back. Danny had crashed a parked car buried in the snowbank on the side of the road. I don't remember much after that. Just flashes. The snowmobile smashed into metal. Danny lying on the snow. Dr. Patterson's face when he said they were sending Danny to University Hospital in Madison.

And that feeling in my stomach. Like something had been ripped out and nothing would ever grow back. The updates came in pieces. "Coma." Then, weeks later, "Awake but not aware."

We all came to grips with it eventually. The Danny we knew was gone. The lives we knew were gone. I graduated high school three months later and spent the summer taking care of my younger brother Ryan and the house while my parents lived at the hospital.

I went to Mass every Sunday. I played the organ at 10 a.m. like I always had. I followed every rule I’d followed since second grade, when I took my First Holy Communion and learned the catechism answers by heart. But I felt nothing.

I wanted to visit other churches. I wanted to ask questions. But how do you tell a priest you've served for years that the faith isn't enough anymore? How do you tell your Polish Catholic mother and grandmother that you're not satisfied? So I ran.

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I took a job at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois that spring. It was perfect. I could get away. I could test out other churches. No one would know. I lived in the employee dorms with three other roommates. Each one went to a different church.

I went with all of them. Baptist. Lutheran. Methodist. I sat in their pews and listened to their sermons and came to one conclusion: There was no difference. It felt the same. Rituals. Rules. Words meant to comfort.

I still felt like I was standing outside a locked door, listening to people talk about God like He was in the room—but I couldn’t see Him.

Then one very ordinary day, I was working my corn dog stand when my manager said she needed a volunteer to work outside at the kiosk. I took the job. The very first customer handed me money for her corn dog—and a folded piece of paper.

I didn't know what it was. I stuffed it in my money box. At the end of my shift, while cashing out, I pulled it out and showed my manager, Rachel. It was a Gospel tract. A short, simple Bible pamphlet. I had never seen one before in my life.

Rachel looked it over. She verified that every question on that tract was true and found in the Bible. I was stunned. I'd been a devout Catholic for 19 years and didn't even know the books of the Bible.

I told her what had happened to Danny. I told her I was looking for God. For a reason. For comfort. She invited me to study the Bible with her at her home outside the park.

Every week, Rachel and her mother fed me. They made me feel welcome. They had something I didn’t have. I didn’t know what it was yet—but for the first time in months, I felt like I wasn’t sinking.

At first, I couldn't learn enough. Each page was like a revelation. But the more I learned, the more complicated it became. If this was true, then everything I'd been taught my whole life was wrong. That meant my mother was wrong. My grandmother was wrong. The church was wrong.

How could I—how dare I—suggest to them they didn't know the real God? I started having dreams. Dark figures chasing me through shadows. Shapes reaching toward me. I’d wake up in a sweat, heart pounding, feeling like something was pursuing me.

I didn’t recognize it for what it was: deep inner conflict. Then, three weeks in, Rachel showed me a verse. Colossians 2:14. "Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross."

That was it. My sins—blotted out. My sins—no more. Nailed to a cross. The Catholic Church taught me that everything was an ordinance. Confession booths. Lighting candles. Praying my way to purgatory. But this verse said none of it mattered.

My sins were taken away. There was nothing I could do to save myself. The work had already been completed on the cross. He gave His life for me. I knelt in front of a wooden cross every Sunday for 19 years. I stared at Jesus nailed and bleeding on a tree. And I never once asked why He was there.

I was so blind to the truth. Because of Danny’s incident, I found faith. It could have been me on that snowmobile. Danny said, “Stay here.” And I stayed.

Years later, my father read a tract I brought home. He was trying to argue against it—and found faith instead. My mother. Both my brothers. All changed by grace. I hope to meet the woman who handed me that tract in Heaven someday.