Kirsten Sanders, on the role that “certainty” plays in Protestant-to-Catholic conversion stories, and why she remains Protestant:

The chief reason I stay a Protestant is not because I think Protestants are “better” and not because I think Protestantism is “truer”. It is, in part, because I think certainty is the wrong question. […]

I do not think church is something we choose. It is, in our baptism, chosen for us. In grace God moves first, and the “yes” of our response is not to a pure doctrine or a truer history, but to a God who in his kindness continues to meet his people in communities that lack all of the certainty and historical claims that would make them valid. I find some comfort in the mess of it all, because this seems to me the kind of thing God does. I am a Protestant because this (gestures wildly) is my ugly mess, and I am bound by my own baptism to it. […]

Religion is so shaky, so rocky, so uncertain- just like a church might be that was founded on the man who had just betrayed his Lord. This does not make it any less true…. That Peter was the “rock” after his unsteady confession means that the strength of the church’s lineage is due to God alone, not to Peter’s own credibility. The source of certainty is, after all, in the God who grants us any grace we might have, to look upon him and live.