PEOPLE NEED THE LORD

“Dear Lord,” I prayed. “Thank you for this food and for this day. And I pray that Grandpa will get saved. In Jesus’s name, Amen.”

Every night, the six of us—my parents, two sisters, my brother, and me—gathered around our antique wooden kitchen table, and someone prayed a version of that prayer for my grandfather. I didn’t know much about him, only that his house was filled with interesting objects and artwork and books, that he played classical music on the grand piano in his living room, that the kitchen smelled of garlic and sherry from his beloved cooking projects, and that he always had at least one cat lurking around the house. I knew that he was a brain surgeon, and I understood that was something we were proud of. But I couldn’t understand why he didn’t love Jesus—the man with the gentle face surrounded by the herd of fluffy sheep in the tiny framed painting on my bedroom shelf.

What I did know was that Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles, were going to Hell. Like everyone who didn’t believe in Jesus, their souls were in great danger. We had to pray for them, my parents told us, and whenever we saw them, we had to “be a witness”—be friendly, respectful, and well-behaved, so as to show them the light of Jesus. Being evangelical meant evangelizing—sharing the news of Jesus with everyone we could, before it was too late. And this was especially urgent for the people we loved most—our family. If they could see Jesus shining through us, they might be drawn to him, and understand that they were lost in the darkness, and that if they would simply believe and pray to receive him into their hearts, they could become better people here on Earth, and then, when they died, go to Heaven with us.

Though we feared an eternity of separation from our family members who would be in Hell while we were in Heaven, my parents seemed cautious about spending time with them while we were together here on Earth. Grandpa lived only a few miles away, but we didn’t see him much. Mostly at holidays and major family gatherings. No sleepovers, no group vacations, no hanging out at Grandpa’s house. We probably spent more time there for the few years of my life when my grandmother, whom I called “Mee-Maw,” was alive, but that’s only a fuzzy memory of a memory; she was gone not long after my third birthday.

So on the occasions we visited Grandpa’s house, I was on my best behavior. The stakes could not have been higher. My childish disobedience, even my failure to exhibit the “joy of Jesus” that should be clearly radiating from my heart, could cost my relatives their very souls. Carrying that heavy truth, I put on a smile.

I was the oldest of the four kids. We were the kind of family of blond, well-behaved children that strangers complimented in restaurants: “What a beautiful family,” they’d tell my parents, who would beam at us. Three girls, spaced three years apart, in smocked dresses and shiny black patent leather Mary Janes, and the youngest, a little boy with thick glasses and a shock of white-blond hair in front, and cheeks like those Hummel figurines we sometimes saw in antique stores.

We knew that our neat appearance, and our obedient behavior in public, was one small way that we could be a witness for Jesus, by displaying what a family could—and should—be like: a father and mother, four obedient children, fresh from church, eating apple pie together. Everywhere we went, everything we did, we were told we must be ambassadors for Christ.

“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” we sang in Sunday school. Or, “Be a missionary every day/Tell the world that Jesus is the way/The Lord is soon returning; there is no time to lose, so!/ Be a missionary, God’s own emissary, be a missionary today!”

We all felt the urgency. And as the oldest, I held a position of honor and had a special responsibility to shine my light, “set an example,” and help care for each of the babies as they came, one after another.

Most of the time, I loved that role. I watched with excitement as my mother’s belly grew each time, slowly over the months. I read, a bit vicariously, her copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, stuffing my T-shirt with blankets or stuffed animals as I pretended to expect my own little baby—something I dreamed of doing one day, something I’d learned was the highest calling for a woman. I enthusiastically watched as my parents prepared the nursery and attended birthing classes; as my mother neatly folded the cloth diapers she painstakingly washed for each child. When the time came, my parents rushed me to the home of a family member or a friend from their Bible study group, and I waited for the phone calls in the middle of the night, informing me, “You have a sister,” and then again, “A sister,” and then—oh no!—“A brother!” What is that?!^*

Each child was a blessing, a reflection of God’s favor: “‘Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him,’” my mother would say, quoting from Psalms. “‘Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.’”¹

My parents were fruitful, and with each birth came an opportunity to gently evangelize. They selected names from the Bible for each of us, starting with mine, Sarah Elizabeth. To welcome each newcomer, in our charismatic evangelical tradition—unlike in Catholicism and much of mainline Protestant Christianity—babies were not baptized. Baptism was reserved for “believers” who’d actively chosen Christ, and so that would come later.

Instead, the church held a dedication ceremony to honor the baby and pray for God to bless the family. The goal was to set up the new parents to “train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old he will not depart from it.”² That passage from Proverbs promised that the right kind of parental guidance would all but certainly achieve the intended result of a devoted Christian adult, who would build a family of her own, and train her own children in the same way. It was an opportunity to invite extended family for a time of celebration, but even more in our case, a chance for them to hear the Gospel and maybe, just maybe, finally “get saved.”

I was six when my youngest sister was born. Before her dedication, at home together in our three-bedroom ranch house, we prayed for the souls of the family we’d invited, that God would “speak to their hearts” and that hearing the Word of God from the pulpit might open their eyes—that they might finally repent.

On Sunday morning, we sat near the back of the mammoth sanctuary at Full Faith Church of Love in suburban Kansas City. This was a megachurch in 1987, before many national news outlets were writing trend pieces about megachurches. Instead of pews, we sank into movie theater–style padded seats, upholstered in a brown that complemented the tan hue of the tightly woven, textured carpet. Up front, a full worship band, with drums and guitars and backup singers, led the congregation in praise songs displayed on a giant screen from an overhead projector.

“Lord, you are more precious than silver; Lord, you are more costly than gold,” the adults around me sang, swaying as they closed their eyes and lifted their hands up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Lord, you are more beautiful than diamonds, and nothing I desire compares with you.”³ The music was beautiful and soothing, and while I felt uncomfortable raising my hands like many of the more enthusiastic adults did, I loved hearing them sing around me, and sometimes joined in myself.

At some point, my dad’s younger brother and sister joined us. I watched them nervously, wondering if the Lord might be working, waiting for the moment that the truth of the Gospel might break through and soften their hard hearts. Our pastor, a rotund man with a bald head who reminded me of the pictures of Mikhail Gorbachev on the nightly news, called our family to the front of the room, where he gently took my baby sister from my mom for a moment and displayed her to the approving congregation.

After a prayer, we were back in our seats in time for the sermon when the pastor could speak directly to us and, more importantly, to my aunt and uncle. As we settled in and he cracked open his Bible to begin the sermon, I noticed a motion to my left. My aunt and uncle waved and smiled politely, and quietly slipped out.

In our belief system, while my sister’s dedication was important, it was only a symbol. For us, the central question was what we believed in our hearts, not whether we’d participated in the proper rituals. I was probably in high school before I realized that the formal name for the kind of Christianity that typically practiced infant baptism was “mainline Protestantism,” not “nominal Christians,” or Christians in name only, as I’d sometimes heard them called.

There were frequent warnings against insincere belief, reminders to look deep within and be certain, absolutely certain, that your “heart is right with God.” At the end of many church services, the pastor would deliver an altar call, asking anyone in the room who didn’t know Jesus to make a decision. “Make it tonight,” he’d urge. “If you were to die in a car accident on the way home, do you know where you’d go? I want you to wake up in Heaven!” And for those who’d already prayed that “prayer of salvation” giving their hearts to Christ: Are you really sure? Is your heart truly in the right place? Have you “backslidden”—the dreaded term for someone who once walked with Christ only to “slide back” into a life of sin? There were so many Bible verses, like Jeremiah 17:10, telling us that God was looking closely, scanning for sin: “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”

Even for children, it was critical to make a personal decision for Christ, as soon as she could even vaguely begin to comprehend it. The summer I was ten, my parents gave me a new Bible, King James Version, bound in lavender leather. On the inside cover, in my mother’s perfect, elegant script, was my name and the date: June 8, 1991. On the opposite page, under the blank page labeled “Church Record,” in my own wobbly handwriting, I wrote down the two major religious events of my life so far: my “believer’s baptism” at age eight and “Saved—age 2 ½.”

I would come to understand much later that this version of evangelical 1980s American Christianity was the descendant of a long succession of schisms and divisions and calls for spiritual revival and renewal. We had cast off the rituals of older, more established sects for an individualistic, emotional, relational faith. Those rituals did not bring a child into the church; she must choose it for herself, and freely believe in salvation through Jesus. She must recognize that she’s a sinner—that like every other human being before her, she was born with a nature that will make sin inevitable, that no sin is too small to deservedly incur God’s anger, and that God is pure and holy and righteous and cannot tolerate even a speck of sinfulness. She must understand that the only just and appropriate punishment for sin is permanent separation from God, in “eternal, conscious torment,” as many pastors reminded us, in the fires of Hell, which burn forever but never consume.

This was all very dire, but there was “Good News” in the Gospel: a simple way to avoid this horrific fate. It did not require a pastor or a priest or a splash of holy water or anything else mediated by another person or a church. It required, at minimum, a simple “Sinner’s Prayer” of repentance.

Sophisticated theology is beyond the grasp of young children. But I knew who Jesus was. Most Sundays, while my parents stayed behind in the giant sanctuary, I’d walk over to “children’s church” down the hall, where we would sing songs and watch puppet shows all about Jesus and his love for us. During smaller Sunday school classes before church, we sat in a circle with other children our age on the carpeted floor, as smiling teachers told Bible stories. They pressed colorful cut-out figures onto the flannelgraph, an easel covered in fabric printed with images of rolling green hills that could transform, with a few scene changes, from the mountainside where Jesus preached about the Beatitudes to Calvary, where he was crucified in between two thieves.

I studied Jesus’s face—on the flannelgraph, in picture books, and the little framed painting of the Good Shepherd that I kept in my bedroom. His face looked warm and tender and kind. And, I was told, he loved me and wanted to have a relationship with me that would last my whole life, and then greet me when I went to Heaven. That sounded much better than the alternative.

Though I liked the idea of going to Heaven, I wasn’t sure how to imagine it. We’d been promised a place of eternal happiness, with choirs of beautiful angels singing, all of our Christian friends and family dressed in white, walking on streets paved with gold. We’d be reunited with people who died before us, if they knew Jesus, like my mother’s parents (who, despite being Lutheran rather than evangelical, were assumed to have been fervent enough to have been granted admission).

But, in quiet moments when I was honest with myself, I thought that Heaven sounded a little bit scary and strange and even … boring? I worried that I was doing something wrong that made me feel that way. I’d heard a braver child than me raise the same concern once or twice, in Sunday school or Bible class, and I cringed slightly at their boldness in asking what I sensed was an off-limits question. The response, as I recall, from the teacher was that being in God’s presence would be more wonderful than we could ever imagine, and that in our human existence we couldn’t begin to fully understand what it would be like.

I did, however, very clearly understand the idea of fire. In cold midwestern winters, I loved evenings when my father would carry in wood from the pile outside and build a warm fire in our brick living-room fireplace. But when I looked into the flames, and felt their heat as I drew closer, I knew that I did not want to burn forever and ever. So, at not yet three years old, I asked Jesus to come into my heart and save me. No child was too young to be saved. After all, we sang, “Jesus loves the little children.”

I sat in my bedroom with my mother and repeated, line by line, the Sinner’s Prayer. And, I was assured, my life was changed at that moment. Jesus had come into my heart and given me the greatest gift possible: eternal life with God and salvation from eternal torment in Hell.

But still, it was hard not to think about it. I tried not to picture Grandpa burning in the Lake of Fire forever and ever. I didn’t think I felt any different, and I wondered how I could know for sure that I was saved, that God had definitely heard my prayer. So, two years later, I asked my mom to help me pray it again, just to be safe.

My mom told me about her own fear of this as a child. She would practice repeatedly reaching out to touch the radiator, in an effort to build up a tolerance for heat, in case she wasn’t deemed worthy of Heaven. It was only when she truly met Jesus, she said—amidst the energy of the Jesus Movement and the enthusiastic circles of newly converted hippies she joined as a teenager in the 1970s—that she could really give her life to him. And that was when she found true peace.

“I’ve got peace like a river/I’ve got peace like a river/I’ve got peace like a river in my soul,” we sang in children’s church. We waved our hands to the right, then left, and back again, miming the motion of a flowing river. It was a simple song: we chanted about “joy like a fountain,” hands sweeping upward, and “love like an ocean,” fingers wiggling like happy little waves. All because of Jesus.

I wanted to feel the peace and joy we sang about, and that my mom talked about, but it was often elusive. And when it did come, it felt more like an unpredictable trickle than a mighty river or an ocean.

If you’d accepted Jesus into your heart, that was supposed to settle it, I thought. But had I really believed, and believed enough? What if I was among the lost? The stakes were far too high to get this wrong. Alone in my bedroom, I flipped through the pages of my lavender Bible, looking for reassurance. I read the words of Jesus in the book of John: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”⁴

And from 1 John: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”⁵

I’d done it all, confessed my sins again and again: my disrespect toward my parents, fights with my siblings, laziness and reluctance to wash the dishes after dinner. I’d prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, more than once. But still, my heart was troubled. At night, after I’d settled into my twin bed with my little sister asleep in the trundle next to me, my stomach tightened and my mind raced.

I was never afraid of monsters. I knew from children’s television shows and in books I saw at the public library that other kids were. But monsters seemed kind of silly, especially compared to demons and the Devil himself, which were very real and never far away, trying to steal our souls.

In the darkness and quiet, I wondered if it was all true, and why, if Jesus had come to save the world, so many people apparently would not be saved? Something felt very wrong about that. But to entertain such doubts would be to subject myself to the same fate I feared for them. What if this was the Devil, trying to lead me astray? What if, despite the prayers and the promises in the Bible and the reassurances of my parents and pastors, I wasn’t really saved?

And even if I was saved, and if it was all true, then what? There was still so much to fear. We lived each day with the knowledge that Jesus could come back at any time to take us to Heaven, in the Rapture predicted in the Book of Revelation. If, and only if, we were ready, Jesus would take us up with him, into the clouds. “The trumpet shall sound,” the verse from Matthew promised, and he would gather up his people from all over the Earth. This was supposed to be a joyful hope for the Christian, but I was ashamed to feel afraid when I thought about it. I wondered, if I didn’t believe quite enough, could I grab my mother’s ankles and fly into Heaven with her? Would God let me in? And if I did believe enough, what would it mean to be sucked up into the air? The sound of a train whistle, or a loud car horn, was enough to send me into a panic, that maybe this was it, the moment of truth.

Our concern for lost souls extended far beyond our own and those of our family, of course. We were taught to share our faith freely and widely, with anyone who might be placed in our path by God, ready for the Good News. God brought people into our lives for a reason, and we always should be looking for “divine appointments”—meetings arranged for us by God, to tell them the Truth that they were blind to. We were reminded of this in sermons at church, and chapel presentations at my Christian school, which met on the campus of a local Bible church. The theology there was slightly different from the church we attended on Sunday mornings—they didn’t speak in tongues or raise their hands in worship like we did—but we were all united by our belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and in the necessity of faith in Jesus Christ to secure our eternal salvation in Heaven.

Missionaries—people who dedicated their lives to telling others around the world about Jesus—would come to speak, toting a slide carousel from their travels. One missionary’s wife showed us how to wrap an Indian sari. They all offered glimpses of busy markets in Latin America, crowded streets in Asia, and faces of thin brown-skinned children.

During one of these presentations, I remember sitting in the red upholstered pew of the church sanctuary that doubled as our chapel during the school week, watching these faces flash across the screen, as a recording of the Steve Green song “People Need the Lord” played in the background. Through lyrics about passing “empty people” on streets and being able to somehow see their emptiness and internal suffering simply by looking “in their eyes,” the idea was that people without Jesus are so lost and without purpose, their desperation is written all over their faces for any devout believer to perceive. The chorus climaxes with the solution: “People need the Lord!” And it asks the listeners, assumedly Christians sitting in a pew like I was, to “give our lives” to help bring the Gospel to people.

The traveling missionaries exemplified the Christian’s mandate to evangelize and share this Good News. Secretly, many of us feared receiving such a “call” from God—a call we were told could come mysteriously, even during childhood, in the form of a feeling or a strong impression that we must one day leave our own homes and families, live within a new community somewhere in the world, and learn their language so that we could sufficiently communicate and perhaps translate the Bible for them.

For the moment, the instruction was clear: the least we could do was avoid missing an opportunity to share the Gospel with someone God had placed in our path, right in the middle of our relatively comfortable midwestern lives.

It’s difficult to save a world you’re taught to fear and are carefully sheltered from. In my early years, my own world revolved around our church—on a sprawling campus a short drive over the Kansas state line into the suburbs—and the K–12 school I began attending at age five, which met in classrooms inside redbrick buildings of a small fundamentalist Bible church in Kansas City, Missouri. Aside from my father’s family, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t know Jesus. Our “mission field” was limited, so every sustained interaction with a potential nonbeliever felt a little guilty, like a shirked obligation, if I stayed silent.

One of those rare opportunities presented itself when I was about eight years old, as my mother correctly determined that I needed to spend several Saturday mornings at what can only be described as remedial skating lessons. At least once a year, my school rented out a rink for a party where we skated to praise and worship songs. Some of the girls would show up with their own beautiful skates from home—in pink or white leather—and seemingly fly around the rink. And I, in my rented brown skates, would cling to the metal bar, scooting a few steps at a time around the circle, and often falling. So my mom found a class where an instructor patiently showed us how to maneuver our skates to slow down and speed up, and how to use toe stoppers to brake.

I didn’t know any of the other kids, but I understood that most of them went to public school. There was one girl about my age that I especially liked. She was friendly and chatty and almost as awkward in the rink. We’d stumble through our lessons together, then talk while we unlaced our skates and put on our sneakers to go home.

One week, an unwelcome thought entered my mind: What if God wants me to witness to her? My stomach tightened. What if I’m the only person in her life who can tell her? What if she dies without Jesus because of me? I couldn’t shake the sense of obligation.

The last week of class came, and all I could think about was what to say to her. As we took off our skates and put on our shoes for the last time, I couldn’t bring myself to start with the opening line we’d heard in so many sermons: “If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?”

It felt like a little much for Skateland.

We picked up our jackets and I followed her outside. We waited by the front door, watching the car line as each parent pulled up. Any moment, my parents would arrive, whisking me home to clean my bedroom before spending a lazy Saturday afternoon playing in the backyard. I’d probably never see her again. Eternity hung in the balance, with seconds to spare.

My heart pounded. Now. This is your last chance.

“Uhm,” I said. “Do you … go to church?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” she said. “Anyway, my dad’s here!”

And that was that. No big sign from God, no literal come-to-Jesus moment. Only me, my skates, and my awkward gesture toward Heaven. I wouldn’t try to make another one for a long time.

My memory from Skateland flooded back as I came across artist Stephanie Stalvey’s comic book–style drawings on Instagram, where she vividly describes her own post-evangelical journey under the #exvangelical hashtag.

In one frame I particularly resonate with, a young white girl sits on a school bus, clutching a spiral notebook and a folder with a picture of a kitten. Beside her sits another young woman, wearing a hijab.

In the next image, the first girl’s thought bubble reads, “God probably placed her in my path because he wants me to witness to her and help her get saved!” She begins to plot her strategy, planning to invite the Muslim girl to church, but not too soon, so as not to appear too “pushy.” In one image,⁶ her face crumples as she contemplates the dangers of waiting “too long” to invite her friend: “This bus could crash at any moment, and if she died she would go to Hell. And that would be partly my fault.”

Like me, Stalvey grew up hearing that it was her responsibility to help save the world and to share her beliefs with others, without being influenced by theirs.

“Everyone who was not a Christian was either a potential convert or a potential stumbling block,” Stalvey told me.⁷ “Either you could lead them to Christ, or they might influence you away from Christ.”

Stalvey is a little younger. She grew up in the 1990s in Ohio, the daughter of a pastor who led an evangelical mission and church-planting ministry, and she, like me, attended a Christian private school.

“I was kind of always immersed in that parallel universe of American fundamentalist Christianity,” Stalvey said. “Every adult in my life, every authority figure, was repeating and teaching me these same things. So that was reality for me as a child.”^*

She’s now in her thirties, working as an art teacher and living in Florida with her husband and their toddler, and processing her evangelical childhood through her art.

“Everything was either black or white,” Stalvey writes in one series of images. “Sacred or secular, righteous or unrighteous … We were all either saved or lost.”

Like mine, her evangelical childhood also was characterized by the push and pull of fearing eternal punishment from God while embracing his love, which was the theme of every church service, every prayer meeting, every hymn. In one of Stalvey’s images, a little girl smiles, looking up toward the Heavens and basking in “the early message that I was completely, unequivocally loved by God.”⁸ The warmth and security of that feeling was belied by what Stalvey describes as an “invisible threat,” the ever-present awareness that she was sinful, so sinful she deserved Hell; that were it not for Jesus, she would go there; and that because of her sin, Jesus had to die a horrible death by crucifixion in order to save her soul.

“One of the first things I knew is that I was loved—I was loved by God. But it was confusing because I didn’t deserve that love,” Stalvey said. “You metabolize the idea that you’re inherently bad.”

As she got older, Stalvey struggled with evangelical teachings about who was saved and who was lost. As a teen, she remembers talking to other Christian friends about their friends who were LGBTQ+.

“It’s like, ‘What are we allowed to think about this?’” she said. “It’s kind of like pulling on the string and everything starts to unravel.”

As she began to explore her deepest questions and express doubts about her beliefs, some evangelical friends, no doubt worried about her soul, told her to trust God, to pray more. It wasn’t as if she’d never tried that.

“I have stood in a church singing a worship song that I didn’t believe in,” Stalvey said, “and kind of feeling this ache and wanting to believe in the words, and it feels like you’re the only one.… That doubt is really isolating. You’re like, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

I do know that sense of isolation. But over time, like Stalvey, I’ve realized I’m not alone. And in the past several years, I’ve observed a groundswell of other younger adults like us, reevaluating the picture of the world that was painted for them by their evangelical subculture and trying to make sense of how, in the words of the prophet Micah, “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly” with God, or with an altered vision of the divine, as the case may be.⁹

There are signs, particularly in an era that has been characterized by a growing evangelical alliance with white Christian nationalism, conspiracy-theorist thinking, and science denialism, that many former evangelicals are trying to make sense of these questions. In his 2020 book After Evangelicalism, the Mercer University ethicist David P. Gushee argues that evangelicalism is in decline largely because of a rapid loss of its young people.

Gushee estimates, based on Pew Research Center data from 2014, that, even before the rise of the Trump era and all of the fallout it brought, some twenty-five million American adults who had been raised evangelical had left the faith. He points to data showing that the white evangelical church is aging more quickly than the population as a whole, as younger generations of Americans rapidly become less and less religious.¹⁰ And he notes, as documented by polling researcher Daniel Cox in 2018, that about one-third of Americans raised in evangelical households leave the tradition as adults.¹¹

This, Gushee writes, goes well beyond the typical process of adults growing up and charting their own life course, as humans have always done to some extent: “What we are seeing is not just rebellion against parents or normal ebb and flow. We are witnessing conscientious objection. Ex-evangelicals are leaving based on what they believe to be specific offenses against them personally, or against their family and friends, and specific experiences of trauma that have left lasting damage…” Those experiences, he says, include a host of ills within the evangelical community: clergy sex abuse, bigotry against LGTBQ+ people, hypocritical leaders, and more.¹²

Gushee describes being approached by many “promising but troubled (ex-)evangelicals” at an American Academy of Religion conference in 2018: “They hailed from the best evangelical schools. They were pursuing or had finished doctoral programs in religion and theology. And, to a person, they knew that there was something deeply broken about white US evangelicalism.… Since then, I have looked around a bit more and seen the signs of distress everywhere. One might even call it a movement.”¹³

For Stalvey, and for me, connecting with other exvangelicals has been a relief and an important part of our journeys. With it has come a realization that “there are other people in the pews or in the audience or in the congregation that have this tension,” Stalvey said. “Hearing friends of mine and people that I’m close to affirm and say to me … ‘You don’t need to figure it out. It’s fine for you to just be and let it sit.’ It’s so crazy how restful it is to hear that.”

Stalvey told me she is learning to let things “unravel” a little bit and create something new—a metaphor that makes a lot of sense to me.

“It’s really hard, but it’s also kind of freeing to say, ‘Wait, I have agency. I have the right to explore this in any way I want to, to define it however I want to,’” she said. “It still feels rebellious, even as an adult, because you’ve been taught to fear that.”

Peace has come not from praying harder, but from letting go of the idea that she has to save anyone.