GOD KNOWS MY HEART

An honest autobiographical account of a journalist’s return to faith on her own terms. As the religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Wicker has found she has to meet her subjects’ claims to faith with a mixture of respect, understanding, and a healthy dose of journalistic skepticism. Her own faith journey has been a rocky one. Raised a Texas fundamentalist within the narrow confines of the Southern Baptist tradition, Wicker was told what to believe and how to live—until a rebellious young adulthood led her away from the fold and into the paths of temptation. By her own admission, Wicker made some terrible choices, especially in love, and sank into a deep despair about ever changing her life. She experienced a moment of surrender in a department store when, as the Baptists of her youth would describe it, she gave her life over to God. Along the way, she met and married a man who taught her more about grace and unconditional love than a whole lifetime of sermons. Through that love and a rediscovery of the transformative, quiet power of prayer, Wicker became a self-accepting person who was then able to reach out to others for the first time. She also utilized this new grace in her professional life, seeking to understand how religious conviction has changed people’s lives in Dallas and beyond. Ultimately, Wicker was able to write a long, sympathetic feature story about the specter of her youth: the Southern Baptist Church. While she still disagrees with the pat answers sometimes espoused by down-home Texas Baptists, she realized while doing the story that they all had the same questions, and that the process of seeking might be the most important common denominator of all. Valuable not only for its frank, personal struggles with faith, but also for Wicker’s memorable interviews with religious folks of all persuasions.