I was raised Catholic, but there was something about the church that did not seem right, so right after high school I stopped attending. I felt that I knew who Jesus was, but what I was learning at church did not seem right to me. Due to some other things going on in my life, I began to lose hope about life and became depressed. I had tried to live my life the way people said that I was supposed to: I got a degree in business and planned on working in the business world, but my initial experiences there were not as good as I had expected. I was now twenty-eight years old, unemployed, and without a spouse. I knew that something was not right in my life so I tried to find happiness in the places that culture says to find it: alcohol, dance clubs, and everything that normally goes along with the two. But I still was not satisfied. Something was missing. I turned to self-help books to try to find the answers, but what I was looking for was not there.

Anthony was a selfish hermit. Instead of staying within society to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), he withdrew to a life of solitude. Although his intention was to get closer to God, he actually got further from God by abandoning His people (Psalm 133:1). The hermits saw the German invasions occurring at the time as a judgment of God so instead of seeing the evangelism opportunity that the bishop of Rome eventually recognized (even for selfish motives), Anthony and the hermits ran away to live in caves and be “holy.”