I have to be careful with this chapter, and the care is the chapter.
Here is the trap I could see, clearly, from a long way off:
become a Christian
→ the objection goes away
→ get the relationship back
That is a transaction. And if I am honest — and this book is not worth writing if I am not — some part of me had done that arithmetic. I would be lying if I said the thought had never crossed my mind, because it had, more than once, usually at two in the morning.
Which is exactly why it had to not be that.
Fact
Religious difference was one of the structural problems in the relationship.
Feeling
That if I resolved the difference, I might resolve the structure.
Question
So how do I know whether I am doing this for God or for her?
What I learned later
By checking whether it survives her being gone. It did. That is the only test I had, and it is a slow one, and I had to pass it before I trusted my own answer.
on the timing
The timing is genuinely bad, narratively. If I were making this up I would move it. A baptism that lands right after a breakup looks like a man doing something drastic about a feeling.
But the searching started in chapter four, before her, and it kept going after, and the thing I was looking for was never a solution to a relationship problem. It was the low hum from chapter three. That is a much older problem and she was never going to fix it either.
what it actually felt like
Not a lightning strike. I keep having to say that in this book.
Mostly it felt like putting something down.
I had been carrying the question — is this real, am I allowed, is this mine or inherited, what would my family say, what am I giving up — for something like two years, and it was heavy in the specific way that unresolved things are heavy, which is that you don't notice the weight until it's off.
Water is very ordinary. That is, I think, deliberate.
I did not come out of it certain. I want to be clear about that too, because this website is not a testimony and I am not selling anything.
I came out of it committed, which is a different word. Certainty is a feeling. Commitment is a direction you keep walking in on the days the feeling isn't there.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.