Some things don’t arrive wrapped in clarity. They just show up raw, unfiltered, full of questions you didn’t know you needed to ask. That’s kind of how love happened for Jenny. And I guess, how faith keeps happening for all of us.
I was reading this story — Rocky Testimony by Taffie Adams— and found myself sitting quietly afterward, not because I had answers, but because I realized I’d been carrying questions that hadn’t yet made it to the surface. The kind of questions that don’t really get solved, just lived through.
The book opens like a whisper: mountain air, morning coffee, a woman alone with her thoughts, praying out loud into a sky that answers only in stillness. “Father, Good morning…” she says, as if she’s said it a thousand times. As if her spirit was already kneeling, even before her words reached God.
What I didn’t expect was how quickly that sense of peace would be tested.
See, Jenny moves across the country to help her best friend run a mountain-town café, thinking maybe this is the fresh start she’s been praying for. And it is — but not in the way she imagined. The kind of faith she’s always carried gets met with another kind, softer spoken but rooted in something altogether foreign. She meets Brad. Handsome. Grounded. A believer, too. But of a very different sort.
Brad isn’t just a nice guy. He’s LDS — a Latter-day Saint. Mormon. And suddenly, Jenny’s well-worn relationship with God is sitting across the table from a whole other theology.
There’s this moment early on where Jenny orders iced tea, and Brad’s reaction is a little too quick, too visibly uncomfortable. She doesn’t get it at first. And I wouldn’t have either. I mean… iced tea? That’s your spiritual red flag? But that’s how it starts — this gentle unraveling of assumptions. Not just about doctrine, but about compatibility. About what it means to love someone whose compass points to a different True North.
She starts to ask, not out of judgment, but genuine curiosity. “You’re serious,” she says when Brad tells her tea is against his religion. He tries to explain something about the Word of Wisdom, about modern revelation, about prophets and temples, and the gold plates. She listens, but her soul flinches a little. “But Jesus said His Father was Spirit,” she gently replies. You can feel the collision — not of anger, but of devotion. Two people, equally sincere, kneeling at very different altars.
And yet… she doesn’t run. She doesn’t preach. She prays.
That’s what moved me most. She doesn’t try to win. She asks God for wisdom, for timing, for the right words — or the restraint to say nothing at all. “Let your faith shine,” she hears in the stillness. And she trusts that voice.
The story, at its core, isn’t about who’s right or wrong. It’s about how we hold our faith when love challenges it. It’s about how we hold each other, even when belief systems tremble beneath us. Jenny never stops being anchored in Jesus, but she also doesn’t close the door on Brad, not even when the theological gulf widens.
There’s something so human about that. So painfully beautiful.
I think we all have our own “Brad.” Some idea, person, or encounter that doesn’t fit into the neat blueprint of what we thought we were building. The real test of faith isn’t how we handle people who agree with us. It’s what we do when someone’s gospel rubs against our own, when love walks in with contradictions.
Do we double down on being right? Or do we double down on grace?
Jenny chooses grace. But she doesn’t water down the truth. That’s the tightrope she walks — asking questions, listening, standing firm without being rigid. She doesn’t compromise her convictions, but she doesn’t weaponize them either.
I don’t know how their story ends. Not yet. But maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe the real testimony isn’t about conversion. Maybe it’s about presence. Patience. Staying close to God while sitting across from someone who sees Him differently.
So many of us pray for love. Few of us expect that love to come wrapped in spiritual friction. But maybe that’s where God hides the real work — not in easy compatibility, but in the holy tension that makes us dig deeper, question harder, and love fuller.
If you’ve ever loved someone who didn’t believe what you believe, tell me how you stay open without losing yourself?