I decided that, you know, I think my parents’ faith is theirs and it’s not necessarily mine. And I don't know if I believe it and started to live in a really different way. I’ve sunk into addiction and a life of a lot of darkness. So my brother was gone on his mission, and he would write me letters about how amazing he thought I was. And I was just sick that he thought of me like that when that wasn’t how I was or how I saw myself. At my lowest time, certainly—and he was coming home from his mission— I was really scared to go to the airport and face him and have him look at me. When he got off that plane and looked at me, and when I got to actually be with him and see him again, I was blown away by the love and the light and the power that he had, and that he immediately wrapped me up in. He was like the Savior. He was everything that I wanted and I didn’t know I wanted and that I had rejected. And I felt so good.

I had a speech prepared for him to tell him I found happiness in my way, you found it in yours. Never had to use it. He just wanted to love on me. I thought the only reason why he was loving me that day was because he didn't know everything that had happened in my life. And so at the end of the day, I got really real with him and said, “Jeff, this is what’s been going on.” And he just looked at me with so much love, nothing changed on his face.

There's nothing I could do to wipe that look off of his face. And I thought, “He doesn’t get it. Oh, great. Now I have to be more specific. Now I have to tell him this is how bad my life’s gotten.”

And even then, no change, only more love. And he just said, “Emily, those things are not you.”

God doesn’t condemn me to stay there. God certainly cares about how I lived. He wanted me to be happy. I definitely wasn’t. And that I could leave it and that those things weren’t me and that I was everything Jeff said and saw me as, that that was me all along. And the way opened up for me. Suddenly it was a possibility. I’m like, “I can leave this life, I can go. This isn’t me. I mean I can just go.” And I did, I did. I left that world and I moved and I became a completely different person. I immersed myself in it, and I changed, I live again, and I am spiritually alive. And my family sees it, and it's a miracle to them.

And I am so grateful for a God of miracles who sent my brother, who was a miracle for me, to see that way of life and knowing that I wanted to be close to God.