From Rule-Based Faith to Authentic Love
Dear Friends,
One of the greatest gifts of this “Created in the Image of God” journey has been encountering others whose stories echo the shape of our own.
This past Sunday’s conversation with Alysha Lee (née May)—her spiritual upbringing, trauma, and ultimately, her transformation—reminded me just how universal the path from “rules” to “relationship” really is.
Alysha’s story begins as many of ours do: born into a faith tradition—hers the LDS Church—marked by weekly worship, a loving family, and a deep sense of obligation to “do what is right.”
She shared candidly:
“A lot of my early beliefs did stem from just feeling like God was a lawmaker and a checklister and someone that I had to… just follow out of fear and obligation.”
For those who know my work, this struggle will sound familiar.
The People of the Sign, my first book, traces my own journey through this terrain—a sincere, sometimes stifling, fidelity to doctrine, and the struggle to move beyond checklists to something deeper.
Alysha describes how, in her youth, “there’s a pretty strong pressure to marry young… I felt like this is what God wanted me to do.” Yet even as unease stirred within her, “I hadn’t had the conviction yet that I could receive that personal revelation for myself.”
This is a familiar crossroads: When the law outside clashes with faint, inarticulate intuitions within, what comes next? For many—Alysha and myself included—divorce is the testing ground.
Anyone who’s read The Hardness of the Heart knows that Jesus’s words about divorce (“Moses allowed it because of the hardness of your hearts. But from the beginning, it was not so…”) have haunted and guided my reflection.
As in Alysha’s case, our lives can spiral into pain even as we “keep the rules.”
It’s easy to scapegoat the law (“If only the standards were different!”) or ourselves (“I messed it all up!”), but true education is found in holding fast both to God’s law and to the possibility of moving beyond mere compliance. If we learn—truly learn—the lessons of love and loss, we are not doomed to repeat them. But, as both of our stories show, that “if” is not a given.
Alysha’s trauma was real. Control, manipulation, and profound isolation broke her marriage, and she found herself separated, judged, and angry—“especially at God.”
In my own experience, divorce meant not just the end of a marriage, but also a shattering of certainties. But here is the miracle: the rules were not thrown away.
Like Jesus, whose entire ministry was to “magnify the law” and write it on the heart, Alysha gradually discovered the law’s deeper logic. Over time, and through bitter experience, she came to know love as something organic, genuine, and—most importantly—divinely inspired.
She describes her turning point with humility:
“I just didn’t feel like it was a place I wanted to be until I understood that my relationship with God has nothing to do with what anyone else thinks or what anyone else’s opinion of me is. That God knows me and… that I can separate the people and the culture from God because they are separate.”
It is a stance mirrored in my trilogy, and especially in the shift from the hard “dos and don’ts” to a faith animated by the Holy Spirit—a faith that loves within God’s law, not in spite of it.
This movement from external obedience to mature, inward discernment is ancient.
In Eden, Eve and Adam insisted on their way because of desire; they “grasped”—justifying rebellion with a tangle of motives. But, as the Apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians, maturity is found when “by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (cf. 1 Cor 2:15, Hebrews 5:14).
True wisdom is not mere compliance or unchecked liberty—it’s discerning, with our own senses, goodness and truth.
This is echoed in the first and second Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh—a “curriculum” for the soul:
- “O Son of Spirit! My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting.”
- “O Son of Spirit! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor…”
Alysha didn’t abandon God’s justice in her journey toward healing.
Instead, she learned to see it not as an external threat, but as the pattern in which authentic, resilient love grows. Through honest self-examination, taking personal responsibility and—above all—opening lines of real communication (with herself, with God, with her children), she has built something new on the other side of heartbreak.
In both our stories, divorce is not the end. It is—sometimes—the hammer that breaks open the shell, so that a greater love, and a more mature faith, can form.
Education, then, is not the static keeping of endless rules, nor the reckless tossing away of boundaries. It is the lifelong, often stumbling, growth into a love that discerns, learns, forgives, and persists—inspired always by God’s law, but led by the Spirit into the fullness of relationship.
Tonight’s Episode: The Truth, The Way and The Life
Before you go, don’t miss tonight’s live episode featuring Vic Baklayan — a powerful story of resilience, faith, and redefining success. From surviving his family’s losses in Lebanon to starting over in America, Vic’s journey will inspire you to reflect on what truly matters.
Join us live and drop your questions in the chat as we explore how faith, ambition, and purpose collide in the search for a meaningful life.
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And as always—share your thoughts, your story, your wisdom below. We were all created in the image of God, and the education of the heart is never finished.
—Wade Fransson
