Rachel didn’t grow up in a Christian home. By the time she entered college, she saw Christianity as narrow-minded, uneducated, and unkind—especially toward people like her. Yet through a surprising encounter with Jesus and a stolen copy of Mere Christianity, Rachel’s entire understanding of faith and identity was turned upside down.
Editor’s note: Rachel’s story represents her own faith journey. Every person’s experience is unique, but her testimony shows how Jesus meets people with both truth and grace.
Doubting God and Finding Identity
Rachel meets me at a fried chicken restaurant. “It’s basically my favorite food ever,” she laughs. She’s easy to talk to—brown hair, thick glasses, and a quick sense of humor. As she looks at the menu, she makes a joke about ordering chicken breasts, then quickly admits it’s too trashy to include in this write-up.
That sense of humor carried her through some hard years. “I didn’t grow up in a Christian home at all,” she says. “So I guess I started life neutral toward Christianity, and then, as I moved into my high school years, I became more opposed to it. The main reason was that I saw it as being for stupid people.”
Then her story took a turn. “When I was about sixteen, I started to understand my sexuality more. I’d already had relationships with guys, but I started being attracted to women and acting on those attractions. I thought, ‘This is where my heart is.’ I knew Christians were against homosexuality, so by the time I was eighteen, I had concluded Christians were both stupid and bigots.”
Discovering a Different Jesus
In college, Rachel began wondering if God might actually exist—but she was ashamed of that curiosity. “I’d secretly look up things about Christianity on my computer,” she says. “What I read about Jesus online was much more compelling than I expected. I was drawn in by this different Jesus—but at the same time, my sexuality was a big barrier. I knew I wanted to marry a woman someday, and I knew Christianity wasn’t OK with that.”
One day, in a friend’s dorm room, she noticed a book that caught her eye: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. “The title grabbed me,” she admits, “but there was no way I was going to ask to borrow it. So I stole it.”
As she read, she was struck by the truth she found there. “I realized—God is real, and I am in a lot of trouble. Not only is He real, but He’s perfect, and I’m incredibly imperfect. But I also understood that Jesus came to place Himself between God’s wrath—His fair anger at my sin—and me. If I trusted Jesus, I would be saved.”
“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:8
Rachel laughs softly as she remembers that moment. “I thought, ‘I like to drink, I like my lifestyle, I like to sleep with women—and all that will have to go out the window. But it’s stupid to pretend the Bible isn’t true just because it’s inconvenient. I need to take this deal because I’ll never get a deal like this again.’ So I prayed right then.”
