Unequally Yoked is a story about two young eggs from warring chicken farms who fell in passionately in love and…no wait. Wrong story.

Unequally Yoked came from the time I fell hard for a guy but couldn’t actually commit to a relationship with him. He was perfect in every way except for one thing: he was agnostic and I was Christian.

This all stems from the widespread Christian belief that believers should never be partnered with nonbelievers, especially in romantic relationships. Growing up in the Church, I knew this rule backward and forward, and so found myself in quite the predicament.

Through my relationship with him, my eyes were opened to the journey I had already been on for some time: one to discovering that my faith, though deeply rooted and connected to Christianity, no longer aligned with what’s being preached from the pulpit on Sunday mornings or taught in midweek Bible study groups all around America.

This is my honest story about stepping back from a faith so personal to me and discovering something outside the lines of American Christianity. It’s not about abandoning faith but deepening it as I struggle with doubt, questions, and new realizations about our great, big, chaotic, beautiful universe.

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About me.

By day, I’m a copywriter and content strategist for a marketing agency in Austin, Texas. My husband is a physicist which is a fancy way of saying he’s a mad scientist changing the world. We talk to our dogs way too much. We try to eat vegan but hi, have you met pizza?  We love creating together, cycling together, telling corny jokes to each other, and sitting around the fire together with our people and some whiskey. He is the inspiration for the Unequally Yoked Blog and the man who makes me better every day.

I believe in making a difference: in hearing stories, telling stories, and giving a voice to those who have been silenced. I hope you will hear my story and share yours too.

“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness. This is neither. This season is about becoming.”

-Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet

This work by Carrie Hokanson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.