Hello my brothers and sisters. I guess I will participate to some degree in this make a post thing and hope to win something toward a pro membership, and make a post about how I became Orthodox, and other good stuff. First I will start at the beginning. I was raised an Episcopalian. My mother's family has always been Episcopalian since the start of the Anglican Church. I can trace my mother's family way back to the 400s with a relative that was an Archbishop of Canterbury when all the world was Orthodox. After the great schism, my mother's family, became Catholic, and then when Henry VIII started his own church, they became Church of England and when my first relatives set foot in America in the 1600s, and, later in the 1700s, we became Episcopalians, which is just the American version of the Anglican Church. I grew up in what was called broad church Episcopalianism, which means there is formality to a great degree, but nothing like the Orthodox Church. Then, while at the College of Charleston, I experience my first Anglo-Catholic (High Church Episcopal) church. Incense, beautiful vestments, chanting, and all the other beauty of a full on liturgy. I was completely captivated, and said to myself this is where I belong. However, change was afoot in the larger Episcopal church and things were happening that should not have been allowed. What I saw happening made me sick. I began to question my place in the church that I loved. I had known and studied Orthodoxy since 1992, but the only Orthodox church around was the Greek Orthodox Church in downtown Charleston, and I was not Greek so I knew I would not belong. The breaking point came in 2007, and splits of splits were starting to form in the Episcopal Church, and I knew I had to go find the True Faith. I found Holy Ascension in Mt. Pleasant SC. I said I had to go there. So I drove to Mt. Pleasant, and met with Fr. John Parker, who was the priest at that time. He is now Dean of St. Tikhon's Theological Seminary. He had been an Episcopal priest as well. The church was a small bookstore on the square in I'on. It was the first day of Lent that I met with Fr. John and it was in that small bookstore church that I decided then and there I would become Orthodox. I was made a catechumen after Pascha that year, 2007, and I was Chrismated on June 8, 2008, I think that was the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils. I was chrismated with the name of Herman after St. Herman of Alaska. St. Herman's repose date, 12/13, is my birthday. I was a layperson for about a year and six months. Sometime in 2009, Fr. John comes to me and asks, "Would you like to be a Reader? You have pleasant voice that is good to listen to. You speak very clearly, and you can project and people can hear you. Basically he was nicely saying you are a loud mouth and everyone can hear EVERYTHING you are saying." Humbly I accepted the call to be a Reader, and on the last Sunday of November 2009, His Beatitude JONAH, Metropolitan of All America and Canada and Locum Tenens of the Diocese of Dallas and the South came to tonsure and ordain me to the Sacred Order of Readers. I have been an Orthodox Christian for almost 16 years and a Reader for almost 15 years. Orthodoxy is for everyone. It is the One True Faith. I wish the world would convert to Orthodoxy tomorrow. The fullness of the faith is tremendous. I am the only Orthodox Christian in my family. As I watch Western Christendom fall apart and go astray, I am more and more thankful that I am not trying to hang on to something that is dissolving. Orthodoxy is my home. Orthodoxy is my LIFE! Glory to Jesus Christ! Christ is Risen!