When people ask me why I chose to be baptized at 39 years old, the answer is simple, but also hard to explain without telling my whole story.
This isn’t about religion for me.
It’s about finally surrendering my life to Jesus after spending most of my life searching, questioning, hurting, resisting, and trying to hold everything together on my own.
I didn’t grow up deeply rooted in church. My family believed in God. We celebrated Christmas and Easter. I knew who Jesus was. But knowing about God and truly knowing Him are two completely different things.
For most of my life, I believed God existed, but I struggled to trust Him fully.
I carried questions I couldn’t understand.
Why does a loving God allow suffering?
Why was my brother killed?
Why do innocent people hurt?
Why do children die?
Why does life break people the way it does?
Those questions sat heavy on my heart for years. Sometimes they made me angry. Sometimes they made me distant from God. Sometimes they made me feel guilty for even questioning Him at all.
But even when I wrestled with Him, somehow He never stopped pursuing me.
Looking back now, I can see His hand in places I couldn’t see at the time.
In the moments I should have fallen apart completely.
In the prayers I whispered through tears.
In the times I felt alone but somehow kept going anyway.
In the tiny moments that didn’t seem important then, but now mean everything to me.
God kept showing up.
Not always loudly.
Not always in ways I expected.
But quietly. Constantly. Faithfully.
In sunsets.
In sunrises with my children.
In the feeling I would get after praying.
In moments of peace that made no sense during painful seasons.
In the way my heart softened over time.
In every near miss.
In every moment I felt protected without understanding why.
In every time I saw an ambulance or accident and immediately felt led to pray for strangers I didn’t even know.
He was there in the smallest pieces of my life long before I fully gave my life to Him.
As a mother, I started trying harder to believe. But if I’m honest, a lot of that faith first came from fear. I was terrified something would happen to my children. I thought maybe if I believed harder, prayed more, or tried to be “good enough,” God would protect them.
But real faith isn’t built on fear.
And God was patiently teaching me that.
During one of the darkest seasons of my life, I begged God to remove me from a situation that was hurting me. I prayed desperately because I didn’t have the strength to fix it myself anymore.
And He answered me.
Not only did He remove me from it, but He carried me through it.
That changed something in me.
Slowly, my faith stopped becoming about obligation and started becoming about relationship.
Then after I turned 39, everything began changing even more.
My best friend mentioned wanting to start going back to church, and immediately something in me said yes. My boyfriend at the time started going too, and we attended almost every Sunday together. We worshipped together, prayed together, talked about sermons afterward, and for the first time in my life, I bought my own Bible.
That may sound small to some people, but to me it felt huge.
Because for the first time, I wasn’t just hearing about God through other people.
I wanted to know Him myself.
A few months later, after one church service, my boyfriend and I ended our relationship. I remember that day so clearly because the sermon was about life, seasons, and endings. Deep down, I had already been struggling and questioning whether that relationship was truly meant for me right now.
I remember praying:
“God, if this relationship is not part of Your plan for my life right now, please give me the strength to walk away.”
And later that same day, somehow I did.
It broke my heart.
But at the same time, I knew God was answering me again.
After the breakup, I stopped going to church for a few weeks because I was hurting so badly. But even in that pain, I knew something had changed inside me. I knew I didn’t want to lose the relationship with Christ that had started growing in my heart.
So I went back.
And when I did, God met me there.
I started listening to my Bible app every day.
Reading Scripture.
Using Bible study guides.
Listening to worship music constantly.
Praying differently.
Not just asking God for things, but truly talking to Him.
I started wanting to become the woman God created me to be.
Then one Sunday, the sermon was about faith and fully surrendering your life to God.
And something inside me completely broke open.
I sat there crying quietly while tears rolled down my face because for the first time in my life, I truly understood:
I was never in control.
God was.
And strangely, instead of fear, I felt peace.
For so long I had tried to hold parts of myself back from Him.
My pain.
My questions.
My fear.
My control.
My grief.
My relationships.
My future.
But in that moment, I realized He had been loving me through every single version of me anyway.
Even when I doubted Him.
Even when I ran from Him.
Even when I questioned Him.
Even when I only came to Him out of fear.
Even when I didn’t fully understand who He was.
He still chose me.
And He still does.
That’s the part that overwhelms me the most.
Not that I finally found God…
but that He never stopped finding me.
Over and over again.
Through heartbreak.
Through loss.
Through motherhood.
Through survival.
Through healing.
Through tiny everyday moments most people would overlook.
I can’t even fully grasp the ways God has shown up in my life because some of them were probably protecting me in ways I’ll never even know about.
And still, somehow, He continues to pursue my heart.
That is why I am choosing to be baptized at 39 years old.
Not because I suddenly became perfect.
Not because I have life figured out.
Not because my questions disappeared.
But because I finally know who my Savior is.
I finally understand what it means to surrender.
To trust God even when I don’t understand.
To stop living with one foot in and one foot out.
To fully give my heart and life to Jesus Christ.
And honestly, I can’t think of anything more beautiful than finally saying yes to the God who has been saying yes to me my entire life.
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