A Letter to My Family
The first chapter of The Door Left Open, complete and free, always. No email required, no gate. If it was written for you, you will know by the end of it.
I need to begin with a confession: I did not want to write this book.
Books like this one are usually written by theologians, historians, or professional apologists, people with letters after their names and shelves of references behind them. I am none of those things. I am a Catholic, a husband, a father, and a brother. And it is that last word, brother, that explains why you are holding this book.
Where I Come From
My family comes from Bsharri, high in the mountains of northern Lebanon, at the head of the Qadisha Valley, the “Valley of the Saints,” where for more than a thousand years monks and hermits have prayed in monasteries cut into the cliff face, beneath the ancient Cedars of God. My middle name is Charbel, after the Lebanese monk and saint of Annaya, whose body was found incorrupt when his grave was first opened, and whose reported miracles have drawn Christians and Muslims alike to his tomb ever since.
I have stood there myself, as a boy. We stayed with my grandmother, whose house sat near the top of the mountain; from her balcony you looked down and saw the trees running all the way to the bottom of the hillside. It was my uncle, my mother’s brother, Father Tony, a priest, who looked after her and who drove us out to see the country. He took us to the shrines of Saint Charbel, to small churches and holy places folded into the hills, where you could buy blessed oils and keepsakes stamped with the saint’s name. Charbel was everywhere in that region; you could not travel far without meeting him. On that stay he tried to teach me Arabic, sitting me down, saying the words, waiting for me to give them back. I never gave one back clean; I carried an accent into them, and we both laughed every time. To this day I speak what our family calls broken Arabic. That is the Lebanon I carry: my grandmother’s balcony and my uncle the priest at the wheel of a car, taking a boy from Australia to meet the saints of his own blood.
In 1990, my family left Lebanon for Australia. I was born the following year, the youngest of four boys. And I never knew my father. He died when I was one. My mother was left a widow in a new country with four sons; my brothers were fourteen, thirteen, and eleven, and I was a baby.
How well did they carry it? My mother has a story she still loves to tell. When I was a little boy, my school asked the children about their parents. The teacher came to me and asked about my mum and then about my dad, and I told her, matter-of-factly, that I had three fathers. And I named them. The teacher, understandably concerned, rang my mother. When Mum heard the three names, she burst out laughing: they were my brothers.
One of those three brothers is the reason I am writing this book.
We were not held together by money, or ease, or luck. We were held together by my mother’s faith and the Church that carried her. No Sunday passed without us at Mass, not out of empty routine, but because Sunday without the Eucharist would have felt like a week without food. The people around us lived what the Church taught: they showed up for a widow and her four boys, fed the hungry, sat with the grieving, and never waited to be asked.
All through my childhood my mother was setting things aside for the Salvation Army and volunteering her time with them. When I asked her why, she said they were the ones who had helped her when she first arrived in Australia, a mother with three boys trying to learn English so that she could work. To this day she volunteers at the local Christian retirement village, sitting with dementia patients, people who will not remember she came.
That same uncle came to Australia only once. He spoke seven languages, and English was one of them, but the whole visit I kept trying to talk to him in Arabic. No matter how much I tried, it came out broken, and we laughed together as we had on the mountain. In Lebanon he had been the man who looked after my grandmother and drove us to the shrines; the first time I ever saw him at an altar was the day he married my eldest brother in Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, on Elizabeth Street in the heart of Brisbane. A boy who had lost his father at fourteen, who had helped his widowed mother raise his brothers in a new country, stood at the altar of a cathedral. And the priest joining him to his bride was his own uncle. Our grief, our survival, and our faith all met in that sanctuary. It was the first and only time I ever saw Father Tony celebrate Mass. And it was my own brother’s wedding.
Then came a season of loss I still have not fully taken in. In not very long at all, our family buried three of its own. Another of my mother’s brothers died. Her mother, my grandmother, in whose house on the mountain we had stayed, died not long after. And then, in 2021, in the middle of the COVID years, Father Tony died too: the son who had held that family together, the last of the three to go.
My mother could not go to any of the funerals. Her health would not allow the flight, and when the restrictions eased at last, that had not changed. So she grieved three deaths from the other side of the world, without standing at a single graveside, unable even to bury her own mother, or her brother the priest.
What grief like that can do to a family, to its faith, I would only come to understand in the year that followed.
A Phone Call I Think About Often
In the middle of that grief, my mother had a simple, loving idea. She asked one of my brothers to set up a Facebook account so the family could post tributes and share memories of Father Tony, so that a good priest’s life could be honoured, and so that relatives scattered across Lebanon and Australia and everywhere else could grieve together.
My brother rang me and asked if I could help him set up the account.
I remember that phone call clearly, because of what I said next. My brother is not a computer person. He didn’t grow up online. He didn’t understand how social media actually works. And I did. So I warned him. I told him that social media is not a neutral place. I explained, as best I could, how the algorithm works: that it watches what you click, learns what holds your attention, and then feeds you more and more of it, more extreme, more alarming, more addictive, because your attention is the product being sold. I told him to stay away from clickbait. I told him, almost word for word: it will take you down conspiracy videos, and you will get sucked in.
He laughed it off. “I won’t,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I helped him set up the account. It was for our uncle, after all, a priest who had given his life to Christ and His Church.
Within about a year, my brother had found the lectures of a man named Walter Veith.
What Happened Next
If you don’t know the name, Walter Veith is a former university professor and a Seventh-day Adventist speaker with a vast online following. His lectures are long, confident, and delivered with the authority of a man who spent his career in front of students. They weave together the Bible, history, and world events into one grand story, a story in which the Catholic Church is the great villain of history, secretly behind the world’s evils, and in which a small remnant, the Seventh-day Adventists, are the only ones who have seen through it all.
I should say one thing here plainly, because any fair-minded Adventist will rightly want it said: Walter Veith is a popular speaker, not an official voice of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and this book will not treat him as one. Where I weigh a claim he makes, I weigh it as his. Where I describe what Adventists actually believe, I go to the church’s own words: its 28 Fundamental Beliefs and the published writings of Ellen G. White. Veith has a place in these pages for one reason above all: his lectures are how this reached my family.
My brother got sucked in. Exactly as I had feared, and faster than I had imagined.
From Veith’s videos he was led to the writings of Ellen G. White, the prophetess and co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and from there into a whole ecosystem of teaching built on one central claim: that the Church our family had loved and served for generations, the Church that carried our widowed mother, the Church our uncle gave his life to as a priest, is not the Church of Christ at all, but a deception. A counterfeit. The very enemy of God.
He did not keep this discovery to himself. He is my brother, and I know his heart; I truly believe he thinks he is saving us. But the effect on our family has been devastating. He drew them after him, our mother and my two other brothers. Our mother is the woman whose faith held four sons and a widow together in a foreign country, who wanted nothing more than a Facebook page so she could grieve her brother the priest. She followed that same son out of the Church that had carried her for a lifetime.
And it is not only the adults. My brother has seven children. Those kids are being raised now to see the faith of their grandparents, the faith of their great-uncle the priest, as a danger. What breaks my heart most is this: I have watched fear replace love. The Jesus they are being taught about is a Jesus you must be afraid of, a Jesus keeping score, whose judgment hangs over you, whose Church cannot be trusted. That is not the Jesus who laid down His life for us. That is not the Saviour who says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Children should run toward Christ, not flinch from Him.
The Brother Who Fed People
Before I tell you about the day everything changed, you need to know who this brother was. Who, I believe with all my heart, he still is underneath.
Of my three “fathers,” he is the youngest, and he is the one who taught me almost everything I believe about loving people. Not with words. With food.
Our family ran a cafe near the Brisbane city centre, and in the afternoons there would be leftover food. My brother’s practice was simple: homeless people would come by at closing, and he would give them whatever they needed. I still remember the first time I saw it. I was a schoolboy, and I was greedy the way schoolboys are. I had already counted that food as mine. There was more than enough for me and for them, but I wanted it all, and when he handed it away I was upset and couldn’t have told you why. He didn’t lecture me. He didn’t quote a verse at me. He just kept giving, week after week. And on the drive home, if he spotted someone sleeping rough, he would pull over and bring them food too, unasked, before he had a family of his own, before anyone was watching.
It took me years to understand what I had been looking at. My brother was teaching me the Scriptures before I could really read them: “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?” (James 2:15–16). Everything I know about seeing Christ in the poor, I learned by watching him hand food out the back of a cafe.
I tell you this so you understand: this book is not written against my brother. It is written for him, for the man who fed people. Because here is the change that grieves me more than any argument we have ever had. Recently, when the subject of feeding the hungry came up, his answer was that the Bible calls the word food, and that the word is all people need. The man whose hands once preached James 2 better than any sermon now has a teaching that talks him out of it. That is what I mean when I say the fruit changed. I have not stopped believing that the brother who pulled the car over for strangers is still in there. This whole book is a knock on his door.
The Day It Stopped Being a Debate
For a long time I told myself this was just a disagreement, heated, painful, but still a conversation between brothers.
One Mother’s Day at my mum’s house, I stopped telling myself that.
We were sitting at her dining table after lunch, just the two of us, and he was doing what he now did at every family gathering: pressing me, verse by verse and theory by theory, to turn my back on the Church. Around us, our families were chatting and the kids were playing, the ordinary noise of a full house.
Then we were interrupted, and what happened next will stay at that table. My wife took our boys and went home, and I stayed behind, not to keep arguing theology, but simply to calm things down.
What I will tell you is what was underneath it, because I know my brother. It was frustration, and it had been years in the making. He believes the Church I will not leave is a counterfeit, and he is a father: in his heart he is trying to save his family, and every time we sat at that table I was the brother who would not be saved.
When my brother drove me home that day, I knew something had changed, and it was bigger than a doctrinal dispute. Whatever my brother had found in those videos and books, it had not made him more gentle, more patient, or more at peace. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). I do not tell this story to shame him. I tell it because it was the moment I understood that this teaching was not merely wrong on paper. It was bearing fruit in my family’s life.
That was the day I decided I could no longer answer YouTube videos with dinner-table arguments. Arguments at a table can be shouted down. Sources on a page cannot.
Why I Am Writing
I am not writing this book to win an argument. If winning arguments brought people back to Christ, the internet would be the holiest place on earth, and I would have won my brother back long ago.
His word for what he wanted from me was research. “Do your own research,” he would tell me and then send me videos: this speaker, that lecture, another man’s reading of a verse. So I did. I simply did not do the kind he meant. Instead of watching more people tell me what the Bible said, I opened the Bible and read it for myself. I went to Mass more, not less. I gave more of my time to my parish. And I began to read in earnest, not apologetics blogs, but the history of the Church herself and the first Christians in their own words.
Somewhere in that reading I found a sentence from John Henry Newman, an Anglican who followed the evidence of the early Church into Rome in the nineteenth century, that I have never been able to shake: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” [John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Introduction, 5] What moved me was not that it told me what to conclude; it does not say “study the past and you will turn Catholic.” It says something humbler and harder: go deep enough into what actually happened, and some stories simply cannot survive the reading, and then you are free to judge for yourself. That is the only kind of research I trust, and it is the kind this book is made of.
Let me be honest with you about how this has gone in my own family. My brother did not fail. You have already seen how many he drew after him. I am the one he did not move, and not because I won our arguments. I lost most of them, at that table, where he is quicker and more certain than I am. I am still standing where I stand for one reason only: because when I finally stopped arguing and went to the sources, the sources did not say what he had been told they said.
That is why I am writing. Because I love my family, and because love sometimes means doing the slow, unglamorous work a video never will: opening the sources, checking the quotes, reading the history, and holding every claim up against the Word of God.
And I am writing for you, whoever you are. Maybe you are a Catholic watching someone you love drift away, and you don’t know how to answer the claims they bring home. Maybe you are a Seventh-day Adventist, and someone gave you this book, and you are already bracing for an attack. Or maybe you are somewhere in between, genuinely unsure, hearing confident voices on every side.
Whoever you are, I want to make you three promises.
First, I promise to state Adventist beliefs fairly. When I describe what Seventh-day Adventists believe, I will use their own sources: the church’s 28 Fundamental Beliefs, the published writings of Ellen G. White, and, for the claims the lecturers themselves make, the public lectures of their best-known speakers. If I misrepresent Adventism anywhere in these pages, then I have failed my own standard, and I would want to be corrected. I know how it feels to watch your faith be caricatured by people who never took the time to understand it. I will not do to Adventists what has been done to Catholics.
Second, I promise not to attack people. My quarrel is with claims, not with souls. The Adventists I have known, including those in my own family, are sincere, disciplined people who genuinely want to follow God. Sincerity, however, is not the same as truth. A person can be completely sincere and completely mistaken; most of us have been both at some point in our lives. So in this book I will examine teachings, test predictions, and check historical claims. I will not pretend to know anyone’s heart. That belongs to God alone.
Third, I promise to play by rules we both accept. I know that if I open the Catechism of the Catholic Church and say “the Church teaches this,” you may well close the book, because for you, the question is whether that Church can be trusted. Fair enough. So the arguments in this book will rest, first and foremost, on two things: the Bible, quoted, wherever possible, from the King James Version, a translation Adventist readers know and trust; and the documented historical record, especially the writings of Christians who lived in the first two centuries after Christ, long before Constantine, long before the medieval papacy, long before any of the villains of the conspiracy stories had even been born. And on the rare occasions this book quotes from one of the seven Old Testament books that Catholic Bibles contain and most Protestant Bibles omit, I will flag it plainly the moment it appears, and I will not ask you to accept it as Scripture. That question gets its own chapter, and until we reach it, those books will be treated as nothing more than the ancient documents everyone agrees they are.
The Test We Must All Accept
Before I examine anyone or anything, I want to set down the standard here, in chapter one, so we agree on the rules before the examination begins.
The Bible itself tells us how to test a prophet, and it is ruthless about it. Through Moses, God gave a standard with no margin for error: if a prophet speaks in the Lord’s name and the thing does not come to pass, then “the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:22). One failed prophecy is enough. And even accuracy is not sufficient. Deuteronomy 13 warns that a prophet whose sign comes true but who leads you after other gods, away from the faith you received, is still to be rejected. Then Paul makes the test as severe as language allows: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). No visionary, no prophetess, no professor with a lecture series stands outside it.
These tests have a chapter of their own, and there we will apply them carefully, with the sources on the table. Here I ask only one thing of you, whichever side of this you come from: agree, before we begin, that they mean what they say. Paul bound both duties into one command: “Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). That verse is this book’s promise: no claim will be despised in these pages, and no claim will be left untested. If Adventism passes the Bible’s own tests, you have nothing to fear from this book. If it does not, then no amount of sincerity, sabbath-keeping, or health reform can rescue it.
A Hospital for Sinners
One last thing before we begin.
Somewhere along the way, my brother came to see the Catholic Church as a museum of corruption: a gallery of bad popes, dark centuries, and scandals. I will not pretend those things don’t exist. The Church has sinners in it; that has been true since one of the twelve apostles betrayed Christ for silver and another denied Him three times before breakfast.
But the Church was never meant to be a museum of saints. It is a hospital for sinners. It is the place Christ built because we are sick and need a physician: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2:17). Her holiness has never depended on the perfection of her members. It depends on the One who founded her and who promised, in words no failed prophecy has ever revoked: “Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
Nearly two thousand years later, that Church still stands. Empires that persecuted her are dust; the gates of hell have not prevailed against her, and they never will. Movements that predicted her fall have come and gone, including one that set the date of the world’s end for October 22, 1844. What happened when the sun rose on October 23 is where this book turns next.
This book is the longest letter I will ever write, and it is addressed to my family, to my mother, to my brothers, to seven children I love more than I can say. If you are someone else, someone with your own family in the balance, then you are welcome here too: read it with them.
My prayer, every single day, is that the people this letter is for will one day walk back through the doors of that Church and find what was waiting for them all along: not an institution to fear, but a family; not a courtroom, but a Father’s house; and at the centre of it, the Jesus of the Eucharist, who comes so close that He gives Himself to us as food.
At the end of the chapter:
If you would like to read on, the book continues through seventeen more chapters, every one built the same way: the claim stated fairly, the sources opened, the reader trusted to weigh them.
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