In a world of endless choices and zero certainties, one law student’s questioning the other day changed my afternoon.
I met Josie for an hour last week. She’s twenty-two, first year law student, searching for something she couldn’t quite name. We sat in my office with the door open, family photos visible, handwritten Bible flashcards taped to the walls. She asked several questions about my faith and lawyering.
First, she wanted to hear my story. So I gave her the general overview: September 18, 2015. Hit by a car. Coma. Rapid recovery that defied medical predictions. Married Chelsea at eighteen while recovering. Seminary. Law school at 20. Four children before twenty-three. Published author. ABA keynote speaker exactly ten years after the injury. Josie kept asking questions and leaning forward, not seeming intimidated but genuinely curious.
Then I told her more information about my wife. How Chelsea gave up her medical school dreams to become a nurse because of my accident. How she supported me through law school and early practice. How once I found professional stability, I could let her pursue what she’d sacrificed. Matter of fact, today she’s in her fourth year of medical school and currently on dermatology rotation in Memphis, TN.
Josie’s face registered something between shock and wonder. It was too much. Too unlikely. Almost unbelievable.
But here’s what I think she was really processing: everything she’d been told about how life works might be wrong.
The culture insists you choose: Career or family. Ambition or devotion. Personal achievement or sacrificial love.
“You must lock in your career trajectory at twenty-two and pursue it relentlessly or risk being left behind.”
“Marriage at eighteen? Professional suicide.”
“Four kids in law school? Academic impossibility.”
“Supporting your spouse’s dreams after she supported yours? Naivety.”
Yet here we sat, surrounded by living proof that covenant is the producer of possibility rather than its limitation.
I’m not suggesting everyone should marry at eighteen or have four kids in law school. The Lord led me through trauma into an unusual path—one that required extraordinary grace and partnership. But what struck me about Josie’s reaction wasn’t that she needed to replicate my timeline. It was that she seemed surprised these choices were even possible—that the cultural script might have invisible alternatives, that integration wasn’t inherently naive.
Whether your path involves trauma or tranquility, early marriage or later commitment, the principle remains: covenant and commitment creates possibility rather than limiting it. Integration doesn’t require extraordinary circumstances—it requires ordinary faithfulness.
Josie then asked about denominations, authority structures, how to choose a church. She mentioned attraction to Catholic order while remaining Protestant. But beneath the theological vocabulary, she was asking: How do I know what’s true when everything feels subjective? How do I make good decisions when every position has a counter-position?
I gave her what I could: Scripture. Providence. Community. The assurance that answers aren’t always found in proper hermeneutics or textual implications, but in the answers of Providence—what’s before you, where you’re at, who you are with. The mission field, or life’s calling, isn’t “out there” somewhere, or arriving someday, it’s everything and everyone right in front of you. Thus, our responsibility comes down to response: whether by faith, or by sight—or both.
She seemed to struggle with the absence of authority in law and Protestantism, something I wrestled with as well during my law school years. I filled journals and notebooks working through these questions.
I told her the truth: a world without God is a world of ambiguity, a challenge anyone can feel in uncertain times. But the world with God—specifically the God of the Bible—offers definitions and singularities: One God. One Scripture. One Savior. One identity. One destination.
Keep grounded in that, I said, hold fast to those who believe similarly, and things will keep making sense.
After she left, I sent her an email. I thanked her for the questions she raised, for reminding me of things I used to think about constantly when I was her age. I encouraged her not to fear the answers, even when they’re not black-and-white. I told her to trust the process and God’s providence in her life. This was a timely reminder for me, too.
Yet what happened today wasn’t really about me. It was about a young woman at a crossroads witnessing what integrated Christian vocation actually looks like—not in theory, but in flesh and blood.
She saw the fractured skull model from my injury sitting on my desk.
She saw my wife and children in photos.
She saw Bible verse flash cards functioning as working documents rather than decorative inspiration.
She saw evidence that trauma doesn’t disqualify you, that early marriage doesn’t derail you, that children don’t limit you, and that faith doesn’t compartmentalize from professional excellence.
She saw that providence is real, even when—perhaps especially when—it upends what seems impossible.
I don’t know what Josie will do with all this. Maybe it’ll shape how she approaches her own career and relationships. Maybe years from now she’ll mentor someone else the same way, multiplying the pattern of pilgrimage and witness. I learned this kind of mentorship from Matt Schad, the attorney who hired me when I had nothing but a slurred speech and a high school diploma. He taught me that people matter more than credentials.
Or maybe Josie just needed to see, for one hour, that integration is possible. That you don’t have to choose between the sacred and the secular, between devotion and ambition, between covenant and calling.
Or maybe she needed to see how faith in a sovereign God can turn impossibilities into testimonies, and that those testimonies later become the ordinary architecture of a life surrendered to something bigger than all probability.
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