Above all, we have created this site, and the blog.TruthISLove.org blog out of thankfulness to Christ, because, back in 2002, "...He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins ... And although [we] were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled [us] in His fleshly body through death, in order to present [us] before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach..." (Colossians 1:13-14,21-22)

Next, when it gets right down to it, we created this website because our heart -- for friends and family and people we meet, who have a certain understanding of God -- beats in a similar way as that of the Apostle Paul, who spoke of his ancestors, the Jews, when he said, in Romans 10:1-4:  Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.  Paul was speaking of devoutly religious people who sincerely believed they were the “Chosen People of God” due to their adherence to many religious laws and traditions set forth for them in both the Word of God and their own religious tradition that sprang forth from the Word of God.

Furthermore, we have established the website, TruthISLove.org,and its corresponding blog, because through our searching of the Holy Scriptures presented by Almighty God in the Bible, we have been converted by God from trusting in Roman Catholicism to a saving faith in the substitutionary sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God offered up once, on the mount of Calvary, as a complete payment for the sins for all who would believe.  Through the understanding of the Holy Scriptures, made possible by the Holy Spirit, we have been brought to the knowledge of the truth that Roman Catholicism, as it exists today, is NOT the true Church which was founded by, and which is continually built and established by, the resurrected, eternal Lord Jesus Christ.

After doodling around in the website-building arena for a few years with the skincats.com site, shortly after my conversion to faith in Christ around January of 2002 (I, Paula, was so overjoyed with God’s promise to me of forgiveness and eternal salvation), I created a site called, “My Testimony” which shared, in great detail, an overview of my entire life -- from my Roman Catholic childhood through my gravely troubling adolescence and young adult years deeply immersed in utter and complete rebellion against my parents, drunkenness, profanity, anger, unforgiveness, self-centeredness, promiscuity, adultery and total disregard for the wellbeing of other people, much less the things of God -- all the way through the point at which my heart and life were transformed through God’s gift of my conversion to faith in Christ.  However, an "interested party" was angered deeply that I had revealed too much of the personal details of my life (and thereby theirs), and threatened legal action if I didn’t remove the site immediately. I may be a fool, but I don’t need to be told twice.
 
The next site I began (at paulandpaula.home.mindspring.com, which now hosts a mirror of the TruthISLove.org site) was known simply as, “The REAL Jesus.” It was a relatively simplistic site that I never finished working on, since my work on the original TruthISLove.org eventually overshadowed it. However, its content, from the viewpoint of a [now] born-again Christian, born and raised in Roman Catholicism who was [at that point, a 37-year-old] "3 years old in the Lord," is incredibly important, so I thought I’d include some of it here -- because it touches upon the real reason why TruthISLove.org exists.   It began like this, back in May of 2005:

“In this new web site, I am going to reveal some of the wonderful truths that God has lovingly and painstakingly revealed in the Bible through the obedient writings of His servants, the prophets and apostles. Why am I doing this?
 
My heart is burdened to share these teachings from the Bible because I always knew about Jesus and believed in His existence, as I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and was schooled in Roman Catholicism from pre-school through high school. Although I all but ended my relationship with the Catholic Church between the ages of 16-18, I still maintained a belief that Jesus was the Son of God who died and rose again for the sins of the world.  Along with that went a deep seated belief that, as a Catholic, the Roman Catholic Church was the supreme religious entity which had authority over all the important spiritual issues of my life, so even though I was disassociated with the Church, I still considered myself to be under its authority -- witness my previous dependence upon its management of my “paper trail” of sacramental documentation -- the official records certifying the completion of my baptism, first confession, first communion, confirmation, marriage, last rites, etc. so that I could be assured that I’d performed all of the legal steps, in the ascribed order necessary to assure that, one day, I’d go to Heaven because I had been a good Catholic.
 
After having satisfied most of the crucial hurdles, I had always tended to believe that if I were to simply maintain the verbal confession that I was a baptized “Catholic” (and if I could keep myself from murdering anyone) I was pretty well off as far as Heaven goes, except for the obvious after-death punishment I expected to experience in a dreadful place called “Purgatory.” Purgatory is the place where I, as a Catholic, was counting on suffering for the sins I hadn’t confessed to a priest (and for which I therefore hadn’t done penance), and for the sins for which I hadn’t yet suffered quite enough while I was alive. I guess these sins would be, therefore, those for which Jesus hadn’t already suffered on the cross.
 
Speaking from personal experience, that good old “Catholic guilt” so many of us joke about is a very real and serious issue indeed, when someone like me has been convinced that they must suffer to some towering, mysterious degree, in order to satisfy the demands of an angry God. Talk about living with crushing heaviness of heart and insurmountable guilt of conscience... Thankfully, while guilt is real, and God has given us guilt in order to drive us unto Himself in repentance, this is not how God wants us to live.
  
While I was familiar with, and “believed in” the Jesus about whom I was taught in the Roman Catholic Church, I now know with complete clarity that that I had never -- in all those years I spent in the Catholic Church -- come to a knowledge of Him to Whom I now lovingly refer as “The Real Jesus,” or “The Jesus I Never Knew.” The real Jesus is so much greater, so much more complete, perfect, powerful and glorious than I had ever imagined, and so much more awesome than I had ever been taught.
 
I came face to face with this Jesus I never knew when I was encouraged by some friends to begin reading the Bible shortly after Islamic fundamentalists attacked the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 -- an event which left me no other option for peace in my heart but to seek after God for relief from the terror and hopelessness that had overtaken me.
 
Because of His Goodness alone, through the Holy Scriptures, God the Father saw my distress and had compassion for me, due to His perfect love.  He, by the power of the Holy Spirit, began to open the eyes of my heart to the real Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son, who has supreme authority over everything in all the Heavens, all the Earth, and over all of creation -- through my desperate and hungry pouring over the Gospel of John, in a beat-up second-hand-store copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
 
As God opened my mind  to understanding the wonderful truths in the Bible, I fell passionately in love with the perfection of the real Jesus, and God graciously and personally responded by allowing me to experience an intense revelation of my own sinfulness, compared to His perfect Holiness. I repented of the life I had been living, and He granted that I would begin a personal, intimate relationship with God by placing my trust in the faithfulness, promise and power of the real Jesus, who is revealed by God in the Bible.  But that’s not all He revealed to me through His Word.
 
The truth is, many of the things I began to read in the Bible were deeply troubling to me, and were very, very different from the Jesus in Whom I had always believed before I had begun reading the Bible. As such, I had to face some incredibly painful truths about the 'different' Jesus I had believed in for so many years, including feelings of betrayal and confusion about exactly why the 'old' Jesus and the real Jesus didn’t match up in so many ways. And so I will be sharing some of these amazing truths with you, beloved, in hopes that you will come to know, and love, the real Jesus... And that by choosing to trust in the Jesus of the Bible, you will receive the assurance of eternal life through that faith, which is a gift granted freely from God, completely apart from religion or good works.”.

You see, the Roman Catholic "gospel" (which is no gospel at all) of "believing in Jesus + receiving sacraments + performing good works" stands in absolute rebellion against the gospel presented in the Holy Scriptures. It is completely foreign to, and negates the gospel presented by the true Church of Jesus Christ, and rather than saving souls, will most certainly seal the condemnation of the souls of all who believe in its "gospel."

The office of the Pope of Roman Catholicism stands in absolute rebellion against the Holy Scriptures and has absolutely no authority over, and therefore does not speak for, the true Church of Jesus Christ. The Sacramental office of the Roman Priesthood stands in absolute rebellion against the Holy Scriptures, and plays absolutely no role in the true Church of Jesus Christ. The Purgatory of Roman Catholicism stands in absolute rebellion against the Holy Scriptures and does not exist in the true Church of Jesus Christ.  The Roman Catholic doctrine of spiritual devotion to its contrived version of Mary, the sinless mother of God and spiritual mother of all followers of Roman Catholicism, stands in absolute rebellion against the Holy Scriptures, and is completely foreign to the biblical Mary, who was a mere sinful human being, the obedient and submissive vessel of human flesh through which God the Son took flesh upon Himself in order to live a substitutionary life, die a substitutionary death, and rise again to eternal life as a sign of God's acceptance of His sacrifice, for all who would believe.

No flesh will ever receive eternal life by submitting to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, its "Jesus," it's "mother," its Pope, its priests, its sacraments, its prayers, or its sacramental practices, i.e. praying the rosary, offering novenas, purchasing indulgences, attending mass.

By submitting to any or all of these things -- or by trusting in any religion or human effort -- in order to earn salvation, one will find his soul eternally condemned to an unending, torturous hell which is described as a place where the eternal flesh will experience the misery of being separated from the glory of God, and a continual experience described as the sensation of burning flames and voracious worms devouring it throughout all of eternity.

Trusting in the substitutionary life, death, resurrection and perfect righteousness of the living Lord Jesus Christ is the only pathway God has ever provided for mankind to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and it will always be the only way.