What is the hardest part of converting to Orthodoxy?

What are the odds that the church fathers were teaching exactly what the apostles handed on to them? Very high. What are the odds that Martin Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists, rebelling against the Roman Catholic Church 1,500 years later, came up with a pseudo theology that wasn't the same as the church fathers? Also pretty high: they created their own theological system as a response to Catholicism, but it was not the early Christian theology.

When you encounter the Orthodox Church, you're encountering something making absolute claims. As a Protestant you say, I am a Christian and this is the path of salvation, and then Orthodoxy says, I'm sorry, brother, but that path is much narrower, the life of faith is much more specific, and the sacraments have real power. You go from a broad highway to a narrow path, and you have to ask, if I give up all of what I have, am I going to find something deeper here?

My relationship with Christ felt very stagnant, and in the lives and writings of the saints I could see an intimacy with Christ so profound that it was drawing me in. But if I'm really honest, the hardest thing to overcome wasn't what Orthodoxy was claiming. It was my own pride and ego, wanting to run my own show and do things my way. In Orthodoxy I was going to have to let Christ play a greater role in my life and submit my own personal authority to the apostolic lineage and the faith handed down by the apostles.