As a former Protestant, how did you get comfortable crossing yourself and kissing icons?

I had no problem with making the sign of the cross, because I just felt like that was intuitively natural, to cross ourselves. Christians have been doing it since the earliest times. You go to Jerusalem, you go to any of the churches in Jerusalem that have basically been around since the founding of the church, and everybody in there's making the sign of the cross. You read historical texts. This is just normal and natural. So I've never had a problem with that. As far as kissing icons go, if you don't feel comfortable kissing icons and you're an inquirer, it's okay not to kiss the icons. For me, when I went to an Orthodox church for maybe even the first time, I think it was, I saw a young girl who was kissing icons. And when I saw it, I realized it was very natural. She was not worshipping the icons. She was not doing anything weird or anything idolatry-like. She was showing love and reverence to the images. And I realized, I thought that was weird or different. I didn't think it was wrong. That's what I would say is the distinction when doing things in Orthodoxy. I thought, this is very different than what I'm used to, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong. There's nothing that I can see tangibly that they're doing that is incorrect. There's no theological basis for going against the veneration of icons. I was familiar with the arguments for why we venerated icons. It made sense to me, but I just realized it wasn't where I was coming from. And so I didn't do it at first. But it wasn't very hard for me.