Sophia Joplin
I grew up in a Christian household and learned a lot about Jesus from a very young age. I accepted Him as my Savior when I was around four or five years old, but at that age, I didn’t fully understand the weight of the cross or what it truly meant to be saved.
When my parents divorced in high school, my world unraveled. I spiraled into severe depression, an addiction to self-harm, suicidal ideation, anxiety, a sexual identity crisis, and deep shame. I felt completely alone, emotionally numb and disconnected from everything and everyone around me. A shell of who I once was as a child. For years, I felt far from God. Therapy and medication helped me stabilize over time, but my heart still felt restless and unfulfilled.
In the years that followed, I searched for love and validation in relationships that only left me more broken. I poured everything into people who couldn’t hold me, and in the process, I lost who I was. Who God created me to be.
During my final year of high school, I entered my first same-sex relationship, which led me into a deep internal struggle. I wrestled with the question of whether God could still truly love and accept me while I was living that way. The shame I carried built walls between me and God once again. Through college and the years that followed, I found myself in two back-to-back same-sex relationships that spanned nearly eight years. Both were marked by emotional manipulation, anxiety, infidelity, addiction, depression, and unhealthy dependency.
Those years were filled with constant restlessness. I moved between five different states over eight years, never staying anywhere long enough to feel at home. I wasn’t in tune with God’s voice, so I wandered, desperately searching for belonging but never finding peace and happiness.
Yet even in my wandering, God never stopped pursuing me. After my last relationship ended in abandonment, I found myself truly alone for the first time in many years. It that silence, God began to stir my heart again. One quiet day, I came across a video that reignited my longing for closeness with Him. I felt a deep hunger to know Jesus. Not just to inherit faith, but to truly choose Him for myself.
He so gently knocked on the door to my heart. As I began to let him in, I started rediscovering joy in my own company, pouring into passions I had long neglected, and slowly finding my way back to who I was created to be. God began placing desires within me, one’s I never imagined I would have, and revealing the unique gifts He had woven into me all along.
And when I did, everything changed. God broke chains I thought would never fall. He delivered me from identities I once clung to, restored the parts of me I thought were lost forever, and set me free in every way imaginable. Desires that once defined me instantly lost their hold. God rewrote my story, freeing me from shame, restoring my identity, and leading me into a new life in Him.
I believed I had gone too far, that I had messed up too much for Him to ever want me again. But right in the middle of my mess, Jesus met me. The moment I stopped running and laid my life at His feet, I encountered a love and grace deeper than anything I had ever known. He didn’t shame me. He didn’t reject me. He redeemed me. He never stopped pursuing me. He restored my heart and set me completely free.
Now, my life is fully His. I’m deeply rooted in my church community, surrounded by godly friendships, and walking in the calling He’s placed on my life. I was baptized last fall as a new creation in Christ and recently began Bible college. After so many years of running, searching, and wandering, I can finally see that God has planted me where He wants me and He is faithfully fulfilling every promise He has spoken over my life.
Sophia Joplin
Photographed in Chicago, IL
