One night when I was seventeen, I drove my car into a torrential Texas thunderstorm. I was going nowhere, trying to navigate both the slick highways and the treacherous transition from adolescence to womanhood. With the ranks of protective forces thinned, home was no haven. June and Ray were grown, and Helen had moved to the SMU campus, ten minutes from Mt. Vernon. For the first time in my life, I was alone sitting at the long table with my parents at dinner each evening. It wasn't safe to discuss my day. Society was lurching forward, pulled by the new relativism of the sixties, but my father's anticommunist crusade and my mother's evangelical religion declared unchanging truths. I was confused. I needed traction.

The windshield wipers were slapping back and forth as I began to pray aloud, confident that God was listening in the darkness. My thoughts drifted to Mark, standing on a stage, leading the Youth for Christ rally. He'd made the scriptures come alive. He was funny but earnest as he talked about God's love in spite of our sin. I felt he was speaking just to me. I wasn't so presumptuous as to hope that his attention would actually fall on me, but even watching him from afar gave me a sense of possibility.