Recently, I found myself telling my friend Melanie, who introduced my husband and I to each other, about how Stephen had been there every single step of the way for one of the roughest times in my life, and that I believed God had put him in my life at that time especially for that purpose. It was amazing to be stating things about God like that to someone after what I'd been through; it brought me such confidence in the restoration of my relationship with God. Today, as I read these awesome blogs that other people had written about what God's doing in their lives, it dawned on me that I have a story like that in my life, too. And why not post it? Maybe posting it will reaffirm that confidence I felt. So I'm basically going to retell what I told Melanie.

I went to a Christian college, so naturally, we were required to take some courses in religion. Freshman year, we took Intro to Biblical Literature. Sophomore year, it was Intro to Christian Theology. And for the last two years of college, students had to take one more religion course, but had their choice of subjects. (I chose Parables of Jesus.)

In Christian Theology, we studied the theology of many different theologians, including John Calvin, even though this was a Wesleyan school. It was a big deal at my school to learn to think critically about other viewpoints, and Christian Theology was no different. Melanie asked me if that was tough to undergo, growing up Wesleyan and believing with great conviction that Calvinists were wrong. "No," I said. "No, actually, what really messed me up was a couple literature courses during my last semester at college."

My last semester of college, I took three classes (American Literature, British Novels, and Intro to Literary Criticism) and read three books that altogether messed me up: 1) Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy), 2) McTeague (Frank Norris), and 3) Ever After (Graham Swift - NOT the Cinderella story!).

The plot of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is as follows: Tess goes to work for a family and gets raped by the family's slimeball son. She gets pregnant from this encounter and has his baby, which dies. Next, she meets and falls in love with a wonderful guy, who loves her back, and they get married. She waits until their wedding night to tell wonderful guy about her past, and he promptly leaves her because she's not "pure" like he thought. Tess wanders homeless and alone for a long time and eventually comes across slimeball again. Slimeball still makes advances on her and begs her to marry him and she finally says yes and they get married. Wonderful guy finally comes back and says he forgives her, but it's too late, obviously. He goes crazy, so Tess murders her slimeball husband so she can be with wonderful guy. But just as they are renewing their relationship, the army comes and arrests Tess for slimeball's murder, and then she is executed. That is how it ends.

At this same time, I was also reading McTeague, a story about a huge monster of a man (McTeague) who marries a woman of good family (Trina). They lose all their money and she becomes a lunatic miser, then they win the lottery and she controls every last penny and hides everything she can from her husband, but eventually he finds out and beats her all the time and eventually murders her. There's also this a lot of unhappy drama with the characters around them too, and every single character dies in the end in some brutal way.

On top of all this, I was reading Ever After, a book about a seriously depressed man whose grandfather lived during the time of Darwin's discoveries and fights a long, inward battle between religion and science and eventually loses all his faith. The story is told through the voice of this seriously depressed man with an awful, messed-up life, who has tried to kill himself at least once before, and at the end of the book you are led to believe he will try it again, and this time succeed.

And in my Literary Criticism one-on-one course, which I was reading Ever After for, I was learning about postmodernism--a concept that means that absolutely nothing has meaning. There is no God; there is no right or wrong whatsoever; there is no purpose for life or anything in it that happens; the world is hopeless and void, the end.

That semester sent me into a rapid downward spiral into agnosticism--and all the while engaged to a man with a very strong, fervent belief in God. I threw questions and doubts at Stephen constantly. I asked him how he could possibly know there was a God. I threw everything I had in my artillery at him. But no matter what I did, no matter what I asked him, I absolutely could not shake his faith.

It was his absolute unshakability, and his complete commitment to loving me, even to the point that he agreed to disagree for now, that started to bring me out of it all. It must've taken Stephen vast amounts of courage to do agree to disagree, I can see now, as he felt he was about to marry someone who appeared to not believe in God at all. I asked Stephen if he would marry me even if I didn't believe in God, and for some reason, he agreed to put our relationship above our disagreements about God, but he would keep praying very hard for us to be of the same mind, and believed God would answer his prayers.

The thing was, he had seen me spiral downward. He had seen me with faith; he knew that I at one time had a strong relationship with God; and he had watched me lose it all. In the beginning of our relationship, I knew that I knew that I knew that God had put Stephen in my life to marry, and that God was loving me through Stephen. At the end of our relationship, I knew I still wanted to marry Stephen, and even in spite of the spiritual turmoil I was going through, deep inside I also wanted to still believe in God.

And I had Stephen's unshakable faith as a witness to me to keep me going. He was miraculously (and I say that with its full meaning) there for me every step of the way. It was obviously God who was giving him that kind of strength--no man, however well brought up and however mature, could withstand all that without God's grace at work.

I should add that, when I say Stephen was there every step of the way, I really mean it, because one part of the story I haven't included happened back when I literally first met him. We were barely friends when I went away to California for a week to volunteer at a Christian outreach camp. I had a great time at the camp, but when I came back, several things happened at once.

When you go to a church-based camp, there's usually a camp high while you're there, and then a big crash afterward. When I got back, I was rather depressed and lonely and chatted online a lot to help ease the loneliness. Well, I had this conversation with some guy online about philosophy; I think he was using philosophy to disprove the existence of God, and I was trying to prove him wrong. I left the conversation pretty rattled and hoping I never saw him again. Then, a few days later, I was following some discussion boards on Facebook about the existence or nonexistence of God, and ran into some of the most hateful people I had ever met. They were atheists, or agnostics, or both, and the hatred I saw in them, plus watching all their arguments and how Christians wouldn't stand up against them, shook me to the core. I think that's when that downward spiral really started.

This was the same time I was just starting to get to liking Stephen--as a dance partner, as a friend, and possibly more than a friend. We had lots of talks about religion and God while we danced, and I asked him the questions I had then, too. I guess our relationship has always been built around conversations about God.

So I believe very strongly that God put him in my life right at that time on purpose. I desperately needed someone to show me the way, and it turned out to be him. While we were engaged, it didn't seem at all like God was part of it, because it was extremely hard on our relationship. But God has an incredibly strong hold on Stephen, mind and heart, and obviously He hasn't let go of me either.

-Stephanie

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