The Friendship I Almost Missed Because She Didn't Look Like My People

I'll be honest — when I first walked into Lead with Light, I scanned the room and didn't see anyone who looked like me. I almost turned around. I'm Vietnamese-American, grew up Buddhist, came to faith my senior year of high school, and still felt like an outsider in most Christian spaces. But I stayed. And the girl who sat next to me that night — a Black woman from Atlanta named Imani who grew up in a megachurch — became my closest friend at Rice. We couldn't be more different on paper. But we both knew what it felt like to not quite fit the mold of what a "Christian girl" was supposed to look like. We gave each other permission to be complicated. That's what Lead with Light has been for me — not a place where everyone is the same, but a place where everyone is welcome to be exactly who they are becoming.