The Law I Couldn’t Keep

Plebe Summer tested everything I thought I knew about my body and my will.

The academic year tested something else entirely.

I was up before dawn for swim practice. Even after validating some courses, the math and science requirements were formidable. A roommate conflict added friction to the hours I was supposed to call rest.

But none of that was the heaviest weight.

The heaviest weight was private.

---

I heard myself curse.

I heard myself talk about people in ways that didn’t honor them. I was drinking in ways I wouldn’t have chosen in the light of day. None of it was dramatic. None of it would have surprised anyone around me.

But I had grown up believing I was a good person, someone who loved God, who loved attending Mass, who loved the order of a life shaped by faith.

And here I was, slipping further from that life the harder I tried to hold onto it.

The more I reached for who I wanted to be, the further away she seemed.

---

My first class squad leader had introduced himself, early on, as a Christian.

That word had snagged on something in me. Aren’t we all Christians? I had thought. I had been to Mass my whole life. I knew the words. I knew the teachings. I loved them, genuinely, the way you love a home you’ve never had to examine because you’ve always lived inside it.

But one night, I found myself walking to his room.

I told him what I couldn’t say anywhere else:

I don’t understand why I do what I do. The more I try to do what is right, the further it seems I slip from that standard.

He didn’t offer advice.

He opened his Bible to a letter written nearly two thousand years ago, by a man who had written about the same struggle with the very same bewilderment:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? — Romans 7:21–24 (ESV)

I sat with those words.

Wretched man that I am.

Wretched woman that I am.

It was shocking and somehow also a relief to find my exact confusion written plainly in an ancient text. I was not uniquely broken. I was not failing in some way that no one else had ever failed. This was a known condition of being human: wanting goodness, and yet being unable to manufacture it through wanting alone.

I asked what the answer was.

He read further: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

---

I excused myself and walked back to my room.

I climbed to my top bunk.

And somewhere in the dark and the quiet, something shifted. A light came on, not the lights of Bancroft Hall, not any light I could have switched on myself. The kind of clarity that arrives uninvited and stays.

I had been trying to live rightly on my own. I had been treating faith like a performance standard. Like a PRT. Something I could pass through discipline and effort alone.

And I had been failing it the way you do when you’ve entirely misunderstood what it is.

That night, I gave my life to Christ.

---

I want to say a word about what I grew up with, because it matters to what happened that night.

My earliest memory of any specific mention of God was in elementary school, reading a handmade sign on my father’s door in his basement office. He had titled it “Why I Believe in God.” He had written several items, but the one I still remember was at the top of the list.

Maxine.

My mother. Coming into his life in the midst of loss, after the death of his first wife while he was still in the Navy, left him as a single parent to their five children. I am the first child of their marriage.

That note. The faithfulness with which they took us to Mass. My dad talking about the homily on the drive home. Their commitment to Catholic education.

All of it was real. All of it was foundation.

But that night in my squad leader’s room, and then in the dark of my bunk, I moved from inheriting a faith to choosing one.

---

The rest of my time at the Naval Academy was shaped by a clarity I hadn’t had before.

I was beloved. I was saved. Not by my own effort. Not by how well I kept the standard but by grace.

That identity held me through that time and what came after: naval service, a cancer diagnosis, losing a child, the long work of parenting, and accompanying others as a spiritual director through their own nights.

It continues to hold me.

Almost fifty years later.

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One conversation.

A faulty, jumpy, ever-deepening line of understanding: in community, in Scripture, in the good, beautiful, and true God.

That line began in a top bunk in Bancroft Hall.

It has never stopped.