To say, "I would not be where I am today without Mary" is in no way an exaggeration. While coming off the cheap thrills of a decade-long binge on secularism, I had an encounter with the Truth in a bar, which quickly led to an encounter with True Love during my first visit to a Catholic Church. It was shortly after this that I would encounter Mary as my Mother.
Raised a Lutheran, when I was nearing the end of high school, I slowly began to give up my desire for virtue in exchange for the more alluring desires of the world and the flesh. Pick a path that the world claims will lead to happiness; chances are I ran down it. In every case, I ran into dead end after dead end. Eventually these dead ends would lead me to a weekly habit of going to a bar and drinking with friends to distract me from the pain of a seemingly pointless existence ... yet it was there that the Truth came and claimed me.
After that living encounter with God, who is Truth and Love, I got into a nightly habit of reading Scripture. When I was only weeks into my conversion and still a Protestant, my eyes fell upon the words that would change my life forever: "When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, 'Woman, behold, your son.' Then he said to the disciple, 'Behold, your mother.' And from that hour the disciple took her into his home" (Jn 19:26-27). I realized I had a mother!
Previously, whenever I had heard someone refer to Mary as the "Blessed Mother," I had always assumed that they merely meant "of Jesus." It had never occurred to me that God intended her to be my Mother, or the Mother of all. I now knew, without a doubt, that Jesus had given Mary to be my Mother, not only now that I realized who she was, but throughout my whole life. I had failed in being a good son - yet she had never failed me in being my Mother, being always present to me, even in the darkest and deadest of ends, calling me back to the light of her Son, Jesus.
I took up praying a daily Rosary and speaking to her through prayer, begging for the grace to become a better son, not only to her, but also to my earthly mother. I soon entered the Catholic Church, and then the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception two years after that. I made my first Marian Consecration as a postulant. Through Mary, I have come to know more intimately not only her Son Jesus, but also God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. In a time when our understanding of family - man and woman, father and mother - is under attack, we should fly to Mary so that she may lead our own hearts and the hearts of the rest of the world to the Way, the Truth, and the Life in her Son Jesus.