My husband and I married in a Presbyterian church in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on the banks of Seneca Lake. It was June 2006, three months before he started seminary and five-and-a-half years after I had quit the sex industry. I considered our wedding the marriage of the former stripper and the future minister.

After the wedding, I followed the contours of his career with the flexibility and accord of a synchronized swimmer. I left my job at a Vermont newspaper and moved to Boston, where he had enrolled in theological school. While he studied, I read books that told me how to read The Book, how to live The Book.

To cross the Jordan, I read, we must die, symbolically. We must give ourselves up, let go and be embodied by Christ. I let go of all my friends, gave up my Blues music (too sexy) and Celtic music (too many mentions of whiskey) and my tight iridescent clothes.

My sex toys and handcuffs dropped straight into the garbage. The furniture I had owned was expunged from our lives, the wood buckling on the back porch before we tossed each piece into the trash. Purged of my former life, I started over, guided by this 22-year-old man, seven years younger than I, who was making Jesus his business.

He thought he was saving me, and I thought I needed to be saved.

In my experience, sex work and Christianity were not incongruous. I only danced for a few months, in San Francisco and New York, to make my rent payments between college and my job as a web developer, but the shame and guilt I felt about stripping pivoted neatly to my role as a good Christian wife. In both cases, I relied on the perceptions of others to define my value.

Our first baby was born in the winter, and the next summer we lived at a Baptist summer camp where my husband was employed as the waterfront director.

Each day I traversed the camp with the baby in a jogging stroller, juddering down the rocky path to the lake where my husband stood on a dock all day watching the water. After dinner he jumped inside an octagonal pen and played gaga ball with 11-year-old boys while I retreated to our room to nurse the baby because I was not allowed to breastfeed in front of campers.

In the evenings, staff gave testimonies of their Christian journeys and led singalongs, campfires and talent shows. By the time my husband came to bed, the baby and I were asleep. When we woke at 7 a.m., he was gone.

I read the Bible that summer, Genesis to Revelation. I memorized scriptures. One night I came to the chapel where my husband was preaching to campers and heard him lecture from Leviticus Chapter 11. It is OK, he said, to eat crickets and grasshoppers, but not flies. Locusts are an acceptable snack, but shrimp are forbidden. If you pick up a dead pig, you must wash your clothes.

The campers were rapt, and I thought, “He is brilliant, the way he relates the Bible to children.”

I didn’t tell anyone I was terrified the Christian community would reject me if they knew I used to be a stripper. My husband told me his career depended on our collective reputation.

The camp director’s wife ate meals at our table. She was stout with a round face and creases under her eyes, and she was accessible, meaning she acknowledged that I existed and greeted me in a grumpy but cheerful way.

“If I give a testimony,” I asked her, “how much of my story am I supposed to share?”

My testimony, I had gathered, was the story of my Christian journey, with answers to these questions: When was I baptized? When did I give my life to Christ? When did I accept Jesus as my Lord and savior?

I was baptized as a baby and again with my husband, full immersion, fully clothed, a month after our daughter was born. I had given my life to Christ at the Mission Church in Somerville, Mass., two years earlier.

Did the testimony also include the question: When did you conclude there must be a light to lead us out of this dense darkness? When did you feel so wrong you decided to turn around, to repent? Was it in the basement of the Paradise Club, when a man yanked you down and groped you?

The camp director’s wife rolled her eyes and said, “Well, that’s up to you to decide.”

My full testimony, I thought, might have a shock value similar to the story a man from the kitchen staff told to the new campers about putting a gun to his head and hearing a voice say, “I love you.” I wondered what kind of shocks they were willing to accept. Did they believe strippers could be saved?

Some jobs are water, and some are wine. Some evaporate without a trace, and some leave a stain.

The Bible studies were segregated by gender, so I went to the women’s Bible study and told them that I was lonely, that I needed a mentor or someone I could talk to about my spiritual path. They listened with wide eyes, then closed them and prayed that I would find someone. By “someone,” they meant someone else.

In the lonely vertigo, I found Jesus. Every morning, I sneaked into the back of the log chapel, raised my hand in the air and sang love songs to Jesus. I stood in the last pew, separated from the campers, bouncing my baby if she was awake or, if she was asleep in the reclined stroller, praying that the praise would not wake her. Along with the girls and boys in tie-dyed T-shirts and shaggy hair, I sang quietly over an electronic accompaniment, “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.”

It worked. The eyes of my heart opened, and they wept. My heart ached, and all of it — the isolation, the anonymity, the worry, the pain of seeing but never being seen as I pushed the stroller from road to forest to road, swatting horse flies that dived at my head, even the shock that this life had settled over me like a blanket and smothered my spark — all of it I attributed to Jesus.

I was sad because I had sinned. I was lonely because I was cut off from God. Every morning I stood at the back of the chapel and sang, “Here I am to worship,” one hand reaching for the stained glass.

If I could humble myself enough to take Jesus into my heart, to die to this world and be reborn as a pure, sinless ray of light, the resurrected me would be a gossamer membrane illuminated like a lantern whose radiance is uneclipsed by an immolated moth carcass.

If I could submit to Jesus, maybe I could submit to my husband, like the Bible recommends.

I tried so hard to be good. Quieting the babies at night so he could sleep soundly before his exams. Smiling politely when a man would say, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” instead of asking why they stand right in front of us.

I felt invisible. From the hyper exposure of bare skin on a spot-lit stage, I had repented and repackaged myself as a pastor’s wife. The pendulum had swung from one extreme to another, and neither felt authentic.

I don’t know how the Christian community at the camp would have reacted to my brief stint as a stripper because I never gave a testimony. My fear of them pre-empted their judgment of me. I never allowed them the opportunity to accept me.

Stripping is not inherently shameful; by thinking in polarities of good and bad, I ascribed it with shame. In both extremes, I felt incomplete, preferring to categorize my behavior as all bad or all good. In both cases I felt incomplete and looked to my husband to be my “other half.” When I felt naughty, he seemed holy. When I thought of myself as virtuous, I only saw his faults.

The marriage lasted 15 years. As a divorced mother, I have relaxed into my body and learned to see through my own eyes — to look, not to look like; to be, not to pose. I no longer adjust myself according to my reflection in others’ eyes.

My body has changed since I danced in clubs more than two decades ago. Birthing four children has stretched my belly from a six-pack to a boule of unbaked bread. It is a mother’s body. It is my body, to embrace and be embraced with love.

Attention College Students

We are pleased to announce the start of the sixth Modern Love College Essay Contest. What has love been like for you during these difficult times? We want to know. Go to nytimes.com/essaycontest for details. Deadline is March 27th.

Amy Mevorach is a writer who lives in eastern Massachusetts.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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