My decision to give away ownership of Hobby Lobby: I chose God over “The Right of People of Convential Descent to Own Property”
By the time I was 17, I wanted to be a lawyer. I had always had a love for the law and the justice system, and I wanted to pursue it in a very systematic way, even if I didn’t end up becoming a lawyer. I had seen my first trial at a church youth conference and the experience left me emotionally and physically exhausted.
At 17, it seemed like it would have been a good time for me to become a lawyer, a career I had imagined as my calling throughout my life. I knew I was good at math and science, and I had a lot of innate intelligence, so I had no reason to believe I would ever be in law school. However, at an early age, I had made a decision to give up on my goals of becoming a lawyer, and I had begun to focus my life on my vocation of religion. I had done my best to embrace my “other” identity within my family and church. I had been raised Baptist, but my mind had been molded by my time at an Episcopal seminary and a Baptist church. Growing up, I never attended a public service of any kind, as I had been taught that our sins should be laid on God’s shoulders as the first resort. I had always thought of the church as a place I could be myself in, without judgment or condemnation. Therefore, my focus at the time was on God and becoming a believer. I was looking for a faith or a religion that would make sense for me, and that included getting into law school.
At 17, my friend and I had decided we wanted to start a family, but we never discussed what we would name our child, because we knew we wanted to be a family for the next 20 years. My friend was from California and we were from Connecticut. Our families had not attended church together for years