To my grandpa:

You didn't know. Nobody did, honestly. I didn't know how to tell people what I was going through.

The problems I was having weren't primarily personal. They were of a theological bent. Freshman year, I had a Bible professor that told me that Adam and Eve and Job probably weren't real people. Sophomore year, I had English professors who didn't believe in God's goodness and sovereignty both at the same time. That same year, I had a theology professor who introduced me to the concept of theodicy (trying to make sense of God's goodness, sovereignty, and the problem of evil) without giving me any answers to resolve it. Senior year, another English professor told me that he believed all roads lead to heaven, despite Jesus' words in John 14:6. You can imagine how a sensitive girl like me, who had never really studied theology, could be affected negatively by all these concepts being thrown at me in 4 short years, and without a real support base. I'm sorry I didn't tell you and Grandma. I suppose I just didn't know how to begin.

I've also never been good at making friends and being vulnerable. I felt terribly lonely at college that first year, until one night at our weekly Bible study, I shared it as a prayer request with my wingmates, and that's when my dear friend Jenny stepped up (the one who was in my wedding). But I have always had trouble conveying my deepest feelings to anybody. I journaled a lot of my thoughts into diaries and prayer journals.

I want you to know, though, that whenever I came home from college, you and Grandma and our church were such a comfort to me. The faith, love, and kindness you and the people of First Naz showed, undeniably, kept me going. And then I met Stephen... I was a mess when he met me. I picked so many fights with him and we had so many difficult conversations. He was so certain of everything, and had such a dramatically different perspective. And his faith just could not be shaken! I couldn't make sense of it for the longest time. But he kept talking to me and I kept talking to him--just one of the many miracles and blessings of our story.

It's still hard to talk about our engagement. I didn't know how to have a healthy discussion. I didn't know how to have conflict without making personal attacks and getting so heated up. I was so angry and hurt and, most of all, horribly confused. I hurt him a lot. I don't know why he stayed with me. I don't know why he married me. I know that God has been astonishingly good to me with Stephen and our relationship. I know after we got married, I stopped fighting him almost immediately--not because I felt trapped, but because I finally felt secure. If he had gone through all that junk with me and still wanted to marry me... What else could I believe but that he really did love me, not because he "had" to, but because he chose to, wanted to?

Our church in [redacted] also preached some sermons that helped clarify some of my harder questions, like what the sacrificial system of the OT had to do with anything, and why in the world I should ever bother reading Ecclesiastes. (Ecclesiastes is now one of my favorite books.) And Stephen has kept loving me, kept gently teaching me the solid theology that he rests his faith on, until I started exploring it on my own through books by Tim Keller and Kevin DeYoung and others. And just through all these things, God has built me up in my faith to where I am today.

I don't want you to be hard on yourself. God is sovereign. He sovereignly ordained my life. He put me exactly where he wanted me to be. He could've done it any number of ways, but he knows me best, and he knows how I think through things and what I need to make sense of life. I really have nothing but gratitude when I think about all the other dark places, the bad things that could've happened to me because of this broken world, but they didn't. I see that as a huge mercy. And when I look back, I see nothing but God in his providence holding me, protecting me, even when I didn't know and couldn't see.

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