I wasn’t looking for God in my psychology textbook.

I was actually just trying to get through homework.

I’m taking an adolescent development class right now, and lately we’ve been learning about identity: how we figure out who we are, what we believe, what we value, and what we actually want our lives to look like.

There’s a certain irony in learning about identity at a point in my life when I feel like I’m still learning so much about my own.

One of the things I’ve learned about is “emerging adulthood,” the period between adolescence and fully settling into adult life. It’s supposed to be a time of exploration. You try things. You figure out what you believe. You explore relationships, education, careers, values, and what kind of life you actually want.

And every time I read about that, part of me thinks:

I don’t feel like I ever did that.

With the way I was raised and the religious values I grew up with, the path in front of me always seemed pretty clear.

You got married. You had a family.

And to be fair, that was what I wanted.

I got married when I was 19. I had my first child when I was 21.

And let me not downplay how much I love being a mom.

I love my children more than I could possibly explain. Being their mom has shaped me in ways I wouldn’t trade. This isn’t a story about wishing I had chosen a life without them.

But motherhood became my life.

Being a wife became my life.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I never really got to figure out who I was outside of those things.

What do I like?

What do I believe?

What do I want to learn?

What am I good at?

What kind of career would make me happy?

What parts of the person I became were choices I consciously made, and which ones were simply the next step on a path I had always been told was the right one?

So here I am at 27 years old, two and a half years into college, apparently having my emerging-adulthood era a little late.

And somehow, that has led me to Martin Luther.

I knew who Martin Luther was, at least in the vague way you know people you learned about in school. The Protestant Reformation. The 95 Theses. Lutheran churches. Somewhere in the back of my brain, all of those things were connected.

What I didn’t know was much about the person behind them.

My textbook talked about Luther’s struggle with his own worthiness before God. He became deeply religious, but instead of finding peace in everything he was doing, he became increasingly consumed by the feeling that nothing he did could ever make him holy enough.

And for some reason, that stopped me.

Because I know that feeling.

I grew up LDS. I don’t attend anymore, and my relationship with religion since then has been complicated.

I still believe in God.

I still believe in Jesus.

I haven’t lost my faith so much as I’ve struggled to figure out what my faith actually looks like when I’m the one choosing it.

I’ve attended Catholic churches. I’ve tried non-denominational churches. I’ve walked into places genuinely wanting to feel at home and walked back out knowing that, for whatever reason, I didn’t.

So I’ve existed in this strange in-between place.

I believe.

I just don’t quite know what to call what I believe.

Then, of all places, my adolescent development textbook introduced me to Martin Luther.

The more I learned about what he struggled with, the more interested I became.

Luther eventually came to believe that salvation wasn’t something we could earn by becoming good enough. We are saved by God’s grace through faith in Christ. Good works still matter, but they aren’t currency we collect until we’ve purchased our way into heaven.

They come afterward.

We don’t do good things so God will finally decide we are worthy of saving.

We do good because we have already received grace.

That distinction might sound small to some people.

To me, it felt enormous.

Because one of the questions I have wrestled with in my own relationship with religion is this idea of worthiness.

Am I doing enough?

Am I being good enough?

Am I praying enough?

Am I living the way I’m supposed to?

Have I checked the right boxes?

And if I haven’t, where exactly does that leave me with God?

There is something profoundly different about asking all of those questions and then encountering a theology that turns the question around:

What if the point was never whether I could become good enough for God?

What if the point is that Christ is enough?

I’m not writing this to announce that I’ve suddenly become Lutheran.

I’ve spent approximately one psychology lesson and one evening falling down a Martin Luther rabbit hole. I probably need to do a little more research before making any dramatic theological declarations.

But I want to learn more.

And maybe what fascinates me most is how perfectly this happened while I was studying identity.

Erik Erikson was interested in Martin Luther because he saw Luther’s religious struggles as an important part of his identity development. Luther questioned beliefs and expectations that had shaped his life, wrestled with them deeply, and eventually developed convictions of his own.

I was supposed to be studying his identity development.

Instead, somewhere along the way, I started thinking about mine.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing in this season of my life.

At 27, I’m learning things about myself that perhaps other people had the opportunity to explore at 18 or 19.

I’m going to college.

I’m discovering subjects I genuinely care about.

I’m questioning things I once accepted without much thought.

I’m figuring out what I believe because I believe it, not simply because it was handed to me.

And I’m learning that being a mom can be one of the most important pieces of my identity without having to be the entirety of it.

Maybe I can love the life I chose and still wonder who I might have become if I’d had more time to know myself before choosing it.

Maybe those two things can exist together.

And maybe questioning my religious beliefs doesn’t mean I’ve lost my faith.

Maybe sometimes questioning is how you discover which parts of your faith are actually yours.

I don’t know whether Lutheranism is where this road leads. Maybe I’ll learn more and discover that it isn’t. Maybe this is simply one idea from one man who lived 500 years ago that happened to give words to something I’ve been carrying for a long time.

But I want to keep asking questions.

About God.

About what I believe.

About what I want.

About who I am when I’m not answering to “Mom” or “wife.”

About who I’m still becoming.

There is something almost ridiculous about the timing of it all.

Here I am, 27 years old, two and a half years into college, sitting at my computer learning about identity development and Martin Luther when I was supposed to just be doing my homework.

Instead, I seem to be learning about myself.

Sometimes you go looking for information about who someone else became and accidentally discover a question about who you’re becoming.