We did not set out to become a religious family.

For a long time, we weren’t one at all.

I grew up Southern Baptist, but somewhere along the way that part of my life quietly faded. By the time I was living in New York, my Sundays had taken a different shape — singing, performing, moving from one church to another not as a participant but as a guest artist. That felt like enough for a long time.

Erjon came from something entirely different. He grew up in Albania during a period when religion had been almost completely removed from public life. There was no framework, no inherited rhythm of belief, no real sense of what faith looked like lived out day to day. So when we met, neither of us was really looking for church.

And for a while, that worked.

It wasn’t until we had children that something began to shift. When Michael was very little — two, maybe three — I found myself visiting churches again. Not with a clear plan. Just a quiet sense that something was missing and I wanted to find it before my boys were old enough to notice it wasn’t there.

Eventually we found our way into a non-denominational church. It was easy to enter. Welcoming. Simple. That mattered. It felt like a place where Erjon and the boys could begin without pressure, without needing to already understand everything.

And then we found a small group. People in our own neighborhood. We met in homes, shared meals, prayed together, studied scripture in a way that felt approachable. These were good people — genuinely good — and Erjon was drawn to that. He had no blueprint for faith, but he could recognize sincerity when he saw it. And what he saw in these people was real.

Then one Halloween, Erjon came down with a very high fever. I took him to the emergency room, and after some tests they told us it was appendicitis. That same evening he was in surgery — his appendix removed, part of his colon infected. What followed was a blur of hospital visits, scrambled logistics, family stepping in to get our three boys to school and back while I commuted back and forth trying to hold everything together.

And those same people from our small group showed up.

Meals. Help. Presence — day after day. More than kind. The kind of thing that stays with you.

A few months later, Erjon decided he wanted to be baptized.

I understood why. These people had shown him something he hadn’t seen before. He was inspired by their love and commitment to each other and to Jesus.

What happened next, though, stayed with me for a long time.

In our church — as in the Southern Baptist tradition I had grown up in — baptism was treated as an outward sign of a decision you had already made. When Michael was eight and wanted to be baptized that Easter, there was a whole Saturday class beforehand. About fifty children and their parents gathered to learn what baptism meant, why Jesus asked us to do it, what they were declaring. I sat there proud and moved, glad that my son was making this decision with some real understanding behind it. Michael talked about his dad’s baptism a few months earlier the whole way there — how much it had meant to him, how much he wanted to follow his father’s lead.

But when Erjon signed up a few months earlier, no one ever spoke with him. No class. No meeting. No materials. Just a brief phone call from a pastor a couple of days before — a few questions, a quick confirmation — and that was it.

I remember feeling alarmed. And then quietly heartbroken.

Not because the people weren’t kind. They were. But Erjon was so genuinely open — so willing to learn, so hungry to understand — and nobody gave him anything to hold onto. He had no inner blueprint, no history, no sense of what came before or what came next. Just a sincere desire to become a Christian because these wonderful people had been so kind to him.

But kindness alone can only carry a person so far. Eventually there would be dry spells. Hard seasons. Questions that needed more than warmth to answer.

And he was already a father. Michael looked up to him so much. Already watching. Already learning what it meant to be a man of faith by watching his dad figure it out.

I wanted more for him. For all of them.

So I started looking things up on my own.

I didn’t know where it would lead. I just knew that what we had wasn’t quite enough — I felt like we had just scratched the surface of our faith, and there was more. I was going to find it.