Our Story – Her Perspective

5 years ago, after our first hangout just 3 days before, Vinayak asked me where I thought this was going, and all I could say was “um, I think you’re cool”. I was intrigued by him and wanted to get to know him more, but the reality was my internship was ending soon and I was heading back to Berkeley.

Vinayak’s considerateness was what caught my attention in the early days of our interactions on the team. Our manager was blind, and so every time our team went to lunch or a meeting, someone had to help our manager get to our destination. Vinayak was the best at this, and our manager even mentioned so himself, because Vinayak was always hyper-aware and focused when guiding our manager, giving helpful cautions about the environment that typically go unnoticed by people who can see but are extremely helpful for someone who cannot see to be aware of. Our interactions increased once Vinayak convinced our friend to turn against me in a strategy board game our manager had started for the whole team. At the time, I had been away at an intern conference, and once I returned, my country in the game had nearly been wiped out and I had no choice but to try to get Vinayak to ally with me. Our friendship grew, and we ended up hanging out for the first time on a random Sunday.

Just three days later from our first hangout, Vinayak decided he wanted to change our friendship into a relationship, and though I wasn’t quite ready for that yet, his confidence, intentionality, and initiative made him stand out even more to me as I had grown up in a culture where the norm was that you hung out for at least a month before you became ‘serious’, and even then, it sometimes took a few months.

Because we grew up in such different cultures with such different family backgrounds, the majority of our early conversations were precisely about those differences. I loved learning about how differently he was raised from me, but it was soon apparent that there were two major obstacles for us to face in our relationship – 1. I was not an Indian and 2. he was not a Christian.

Obstacle #1 – I was not an Indian. For context, arranged marriage is still the norm in India and typically in arranged marriages, parents set up their children with someone of a similar economic and academic background from a similar region of India. So the idea that Vinayak would possibly not only choose his own partner, but choose a partner who wasn’t just not from his area of India, but entirely outside of India, with an entirely different cultural background was not going to be easy for his family to accept. Not only are family approval and acceptance incredibly important in Indian culture, but it was especially so for Vinayak, who has always been a model son in the way he fiercely loved and cared for his parents. So early on in our relationship, Vinayak made it known that his parent’s acceptance of our relationship was important to him. How we overcame that obstacle can really only be attributed to Vinayak’s unceasing and persevering efforts, and will be left for another blog post.

Obstacle #2 – He was not a Christian. Christianity serves as the basis for my world views, my perspective on life and morality, and permeates all aspects of my life, whether relationships, family, work, or school. So Vinayak not being a Christian meant that while we may share a lot of the core values on right and wrong, what it meant to be a good person, and what not, we were different in what the goals of life were, what was worth living for or pursuing, and how we wanted to live out our lives. This difference of ours wasn’t just difficult for our relationship, but also for my relationship with my parents and friends.

My parents, being both pastors, were upset, especially as they had seen and counseled so many marriages between Christian and non-Christian that did not turn out well. My friends, though well-meaning, did not hide their shock, disappointment, and disapproval. I appreciated the honesty, but it was difficult feeling like I was rarely heard, and that I was likely the topic of disapproving conversations. While there were a handful of people who I felt I could genuinely turn to, the journey was largely a lonely and difficult one. But surprisingly (or not?), the journey made me more serious about my faith and my beliefs, it pushed me to think more critically about why and what I believed, and it led me to learn as much as I could about different religions and life philosophies, so that now I can give an even more holistic answer to why I believe what I believe.

There was no way of knowing if Vinayak would become a Christian; Christianity isn’t something you can just will yourself to believe in – it’s a whole worldview that shapes every part of your life and how you live it, and what’s more, he was a Hindu and while Hinduism allowed the inclusion of all beliefs and gods, Christianity did not. So while Vinayak made no promises that he’d become a Christian, he did promise to at least take a genuine look into its claims and decide for himself what he believed in. Over the next ~3.5 years, we read a lot of books together, including the Bible and the Gita, went to church, and had a lot of honest discussions around different religions and philosophies. From the outside, it seemed like it was just through discussions and books that led to the change in Vinayak, but from my perspective, it was a lot of answered prayers and watching God work through unexpected circumstances and seeming coincidences.

There were three unexpectedly defining time periods for us –

Vinayak’s 2 years in Chicago: When Vinayak was applying to MBA schools, I prayed so hard that he’d stay in the Bay Area. It made the most sense – he’d be able to stay close by, we could go to a church and Bible study together, and we’d also be able to spend more time together. So when he ended up going to Chicago, I was very unsure of what the next two years would be like for us. It wasn’t going to be easy for us to do long distance + figure out this religion thing + handle our respective graduate programs. What’s more, it was common knowledge that many long distance relationships don’t survive through MBA due to it being like a second college experience, where there were so many new people to meet and bond with, and new experiences to be had. But surprisingly, those 2 years in Chicago became the most formative for Vinayak in his faith journey, and even our friend pointed out to us once that every time Vinayak shares his faith journey, Chicago is where many of the defining moments in his journey took place. It was because he was in Chicago that he had to take his own initiative and independence in his exploration of Christianity instead of just relying on me; it was due to Chicago Booth’s flexible MBA course selections that he was able to take a few courses around ethics and life philosophies that led to him reflecting and learning a lot; and it was at Booth that he also became good friends with a few Christians that really stood out to him in their character and personality that led him to ask them what and why they believed what they did.

Summer at Reality SF: When Vinayak accepted his summer internship offer in SF (read more here of how that was an unexpected answered prayer!), I began looking for a church where we could go together that summer. Around the same time, a good friend invited me to check out Reality SF with her; I went to check it out largely because I wanted to accompany her in her search, but wasn’t too seriously considering it for myself because I thought it’d likely be too big and hipster for me. Instead, after that first sermon, I went home and told Vinayak I had found our church for the summer! That summer, the sermon series went through the book of Ecclesiastes, exploring questions around the meaning of life, and of Daniel, exploring what it meant to live as a Christian in our society and culture. The sermons gave us both plenty of food for thought and discussion. We still look at Reality SF as our first church that we went to together – it played an important role in our individual faith journeys as well as our relationship, and we even did our premarital counseling there.

Summer in India: After Vinayak graduated and before he started his job, he went home to India to spend time with family. About 2-3 weeks before he was suppose to fly back to start work, he went in for his visa appointment and received a 221g, which basically meant that his application was put on hold, for an indefinite amount of time. It ended up taking ~5 weeks for his visa to be approved, and though it was a hard and frustrating time because there were so many things he had to move around, including the start date for his work and all his booked flights, those extra 5 weeks in India made a huge difference in his faith journey. In those 5 weeks where he literally had nothing to do, he was able to spend a lot of time reading, researching, and reflecting on the past 3 years. What had seemed like a frustrating, unnecessary roadblock that we just prayed would end, ended up becoming what he still points back to as pivotal in his faith journey and relationship with God.

Looking back, these three time periods of growth taught me that it is in the most unexpected and sometimes even difficult time periods that God can do much more than what we could have thought. In two of those time periods, our prayers were not answered the way we would have hoped; we prayed in the way that our common sense and reason told us to pray, but thankfully, God answers not in the ways that we want but in the ways we need and according to what he knows is best.

My relationship with Vinayak led to a deepening of trust and relationship with God. The key thing I learned repeatedly was that I could do nothing but let go and trust God. There were so many things outside of my control. I couldn’t will Vinayak into believing anything; I couldn’t make him or expect him in the midst of his busy MBA schedule to read as many books as I did on religion; and what’s more, even if I could have made him do everything according to what I thought would be best in his exploration of faith, it didn’t mean he would end up with the same desire as me to live a life of faith. And so all I could do was to trust and pray that if it were going to somehow happen, it’d have to be God doing the work in Vinayak’s heart. And somehow God did work. One of the moments that stand out to me in which I still have no explanation as to how it happened other than that something happened outside of my doing/control was when Vinayak, out of the blue, told me that he had decided to go to church on his own. Whenever Vinayak visited me or I visited him, we’d go to church together, but on his own, he never did – he was too busy, and what’s more, going to a new church by oneself where you knew no one and when you aren’t even sure of Christianity yet was intimidating. And yet about 1.5 years into MBA school, he suddenly told me that he’d decided to go to a church in Chicago. It was a surprising decision – he’d never gone to church without me before and I hadn’t asked him to, but he consistently went by himself for the rest of his MBA, even despite his roommate making fun of him for it.

I look back on our relationship with a lot of awe and gratitude. It wasn’t an easy one for either of us, our parents, or even for some of our friends. It was full of so many obstacles that at times we really wondered if it was worth it to put ourselves and our parents through so much. There was not much certainty in our relationship; when he went to Chicago for MBA, we couldn’t even determine if he’d come back one day to the Bay or if I would even be in the Bay after I graduated. But the one thing that was certain for us was that we did want to make our relationship work, and I am grateful that not only did God answer our prayers in that we are now actually married, but that our parents are now both our number one supporters and we share a faith that permeates all aspects of our lives. The one verse that I’ve personally gone back to time and time again throughout our relationship and even now is Ephesians 3:20 – “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…” – because every time I consider our relationship and how we got to where we are today, it has been immeasurably more than all I had asked or could have imagined, and it was all due to God’s power and work within us and our circumstances.