When I was in kindergarten I thought I had to show all of my teeth when I smiled for a photo. It didn’t matter what clever technique my mother tried to use, I wasn’t going to grasp the concept of a natural smile. Needless to say, she didn’t have to worry about spending a ton of money on school pictures that year.

But as I got older, I actually became pretty good at smiling. Scratch that. I became great at smiling.

In fact, I became so great at smiling that I eventually decided it had to go hand-in-hand with my Christianity. I believed in God with every fiber of my being, and I knew He saved me. So how couldn’t I smile?

If I wanted others to know this God, they needed to see how happy He made me…right?

Then freshman year of college hit.

And my world fell in on me.