One was intellectual.
The other was relational.
And as is so often the case, the deeper one turned out not to be the one she could argue, but the one she had to receive.
Stephanie grew up in France in a deeply secular environment, with atheism not merely as a default setting but as a serious worldview. She did not come to faith because she was vaguely spiritual, dissatisfied with modern life, or shopping for meaning. By her own account, she was doing quite well without God. She was self-sufficient, ambitious, disciplined, and convinced that religion was a crutch for weak people.
This matters because it strips away one of the laziest caricatures about faith: that belief is mainly for those who cannot cope with reality on their own. Stephanie’s story does not fit that frame. If anything, her resistance to faith came from strength as she understood it—strength of will, strength of mind, strength of self-definition. She did not need rescuing, or so she thought. She needed no one, least of all a God who might claim authority over her life.
And yet what began to unsettle her was not first a doctrine but a people.
An American Christian family took her in as a foreign exchange student, and what confronted her was not sentimentality, anti-intellectualism, or the brittle religiosity she expected. It was something far more disruptive: a way of life in which thoughtfulness and love were joined.
They met her arguments.
They answered her questions.
They did not check their brains at the door.
And they loved her well.
That combination mattered. It still matters.
A great many people will listen to your ideas only after they have seen your life. Stephanie did not merely hear Christianity explained. She saw it embodied. She watched a husband and wife argue and reconcile. She watched parents discipline their children with firmness but without contempt. She watched a household ordered by something deeper than impulse, ego, or power. And for someone raised in a relationally fractured world, that witness carried its own force.
This is one reason the question she eventually raised is so penetrating:
Does God actually like you?
Most Christians have some language for the idea that God loves them. But “love” can remain abstract. It can become theological wallpaper. Many people will say, “Yes, God loves me,” while secretly imagining that his actual posture toward them is disappointment, irritation, or bare toleration.
He loves me because he has to.
He saves me because that is what grace does.
But enjoy me? Delight in me? Like me?
That feels harder to believe.
Stephanie’s whole framework of delight pushes against that hidden suspicion. Her point is not shallow positivity. It is not an invitation to religious cheerfulness. It is something much more searching: if I believe God loves me but cannot believe he delights in me, then I may spend my whole spiritual life relating to him out of duty, fear, performance, or exhaustion rather than joy.
That is not a small distinction. It is the difference between servitude and belonging.
In The People of the Sign, I wrote in various ways about what happens when outward forms, structures, and claims of truth are severed from the deeper reality they were meant to serve. Stephanie’s story runs along a similar fault line. She had inherited one picture of religion from the outside: weakness, irrationality, dependence. Then she encountered a very different reality from the inside: strength shaped by love, conviction joined to gentleness, and faith lived as relationship rather than mere system.
That movement—from signs to substance, from appearance to living reality—is part of what made her story resonate with me.
There was also, beneath it all, the question of fatherhood.
Stephanie spoke candidly about coming from a deeply dysfunctional family and about how that distorted her ability to trust. That too is familiar terrain for many of us. Long before people reject God for theological reasons, they often struggle with him for relational ones. A damaged experience of fatherhood does not stay in childhood. It becomes interpretive. It colors authority, belonging, safety, and love. It makes grace difficult to receive because grace feels dangerous to anyone who has learned that affection must be earned or that power cannot be trusted.
That is why her testimony is not just about belief but about re-learning what it means to belong.
And that is where delight becomes more than a mood. It becomes a theological claim. It says that God is not merely tolerating us at arm’s length, waiting for improvement. It says that in Christ we are not negotiating for scraps of approval. We are being welcomed into relationship.
That first half of Stephanie’s witness—delight instead of duty, belonging instead of suspicion, divine fatherhood instead of earned acceptance—carries a trajectory that mirrors much of what I was reaching toward in The People of the Sign. But then the conversation took another turn, and it touched something else that has shaped my own work, especially in Hardness of the Heart.
Because Stephanie did not come to faith by abandoning thought.
She came, in part, by thinking more honestly.
One of the strongest moments in our conversation was her description of becoming intellectually convinced of the resurrection while still resisting its implications. That is a profoundly important distinction. Intellectual conviction is not the same as surrender. A person can conclude that something is true and still not want it to be true. In fact, that may be one of the most uncomfortable places a human being can stand.
Stephanie described exactly that discomfort.
She did not discover that Christianity required her to shut off her mind. Quite the opposite. She discovered that the Christian faith could meet her intellectually, even as it unsettled her existentially. The problem was not that the claims of Christ were irrational. The problem was that they were comprehensive.
If the resurrection is true, then Jesus is not a lifestyle accessory.
He is not an add-on.
He is not a private preference.
He has a claim.
That was where the real struggle began.
In Hardness of the Heart, I wrestled in my own way with how often human beings resist truth not because it lacks evidence but because it threatens sovereignty. We do not mind truth so long as it stays manageable. We welcome insight until it asks something costly. We enjoy the parts of religion that affirm us and recoil from the parts that expose us.
Stephanie captured that beautifully. The issue was not merely whether Christianity made sense. It was whether God could be trusted.
That is a deeper question than modern debates often admit.
And in my conversation with Stephanie two parts to this question came to the forefront. One is the discovery that faith does not require the surrender of intellect. The mind need not be, in fact should not be, switched off. But also—sometimes before or after realizing we must fully engage with this—comes the discovery that even once the mind bows to truth, the self still wants to earn what can only be received.
That second part is often harder.
It is one thing to be persuaded.
It is another thing to stop striving.
Stephanie’s “one-week experiment” with God was, in its own way, a perfect expression of that struggle. She would give God one week. She would suspend the endless internal argument. She would test trust the way she might test chocolate—by tasting it, not merely analyzing it.
It is such a vivid image precisely because it reveals the limit of abstraction.
You can study chocolate.
You can describe chocolate.
You can lecture on its origins, chemistry, and craft.
But eventually you have to taste it.
And what she discovered in that week was not coercion but peace.
Not humiliation but grace.
Not domination but belonging.
Not the collapse of self into religious machinery, but the loosening of a burden she had carried so long she scarcely knew it was there.
This is where her insight becomes especially important for a culture that oscillates between pride and exhaustion. We are trained to achieve, defend, optimize, compare, and prove. Even our spirituality is often colonized by that same instinct. We turn prayer into effort, obedience into performance, and devotion into metrics. We do not know how to receive what cannot be earned, so we either fake it or flee from it.
Stephanie’s witness cuts through that.
She is not arguing for anti-intellectual faith.
She is not arguing for anti-moral faith.
She is not arguing for a God without demands.
She is arguing that the deepest Christian realities can only be entered as gift.
That is a crucial distinction.
Truth matters.
The resurrection matters.
Doctrine matters.
The life of the mind matters.
But all of these, properly understood, are meant to bring us not into self-congratulation or legalism, but into surrender, delight, and love.
That, I think, is why Stephanie’s language lingers.
There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.
There is nothing you can do to make God love you less.
Those are simple sentences, but they strike at some of the oldest forms of hardness in the human heart. We do not easily believe either half. We want to earn the first and fear the second. We want to imagine that our goodness secures us or that our failures disqualify us. Grace offends both instincts.
And yet grace is the only thing that finally makes delight possible.
Stephanie Rousselle’s story is compelling because she does not offer delight as a decorative spiritual extra. She presents it as what becomes possible when truth and grace meet—when the mind is honestly engaged, when the wounds of belonging are gently rewired, and when the soul finally stops trying to earn what was always meant to be given.
That is not a small adjustment to faith.
It is a different atmosphere entirely.
And many people, including many religious people, have never breathed it.
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, the conversation continues in two directions that connect naturally with the themes Stephanie raised about delight, embodiment, nourishment, public faith, and the shape of a more faithful life.
On Sunday, October 25 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Kendall Vanderslice—baker, writer, and theologian—about the connection between food and faith, and how the simple act of baking bread can become a practice of rest, prayer, and spiritual formation. From the kitchen table and the rhythms of making bread to discovering nourishment, community, and God’s grace in ordinary life, it promises to be a rich conversation.
Then on Tuesday, October 27 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Vincent Bacote—theologian, author, and professor of theology at Wheaton College—to explore how Christian faith shapes our engagement with public life, especially amid questions of race, culture, politics, and evangelical identity. From theology and public responsibility to imagining a more faithful, thoughtful, and gracious Christian witness in the world, this should be a timely and important exchange.
