At the top of my list of favorite things I’ve read in 2025 is this piece published in the New York Times Opinion: [My Father Was a Conservative Evangelical Paster. Than I Came Out](My Father Was a Conservative Evangelical Pastor. Then I Came Out.).

What I found in my dad’s journals gave me a deep appreciation for what it takes for people to really change their minds — what it means to confront the limits of their faith, to risk their career, their standing in the community, even to question the foundations of all that they believed to be true.

The story takes us through a father’s journey of reconciling his beliefs against his reality, through his private journal entries. There were two things that stood out to me: the unfettered honesty of the journal entries and the process of truly confronting your beliefs.