The College Fix contributor Samantha Watkins, a student at Point Loma Nazarene University, tells a fascinating story of one New York professor’s journey of faith discovery.

As a tenured lesbian professor at Syracuse University, Dr. Rosario Champagne Butterfield set out to study and ultimately expose the “Religious Right” as fanatical bigots, but a funny thing happened on her proverbial road to Damascus.

She accepted Jesus Christ into her heart, stopped having sex with women, and is now in the midst of telling her conversion story to the masses, including at colleges nationwide.

The story of Dr. Butterfield is chronicled in her book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith. And as some might have guessed by now, she is no longer a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University.

“After her conversion to Christianity in 1999, she developed a ministry to college students,” her website states. “She has taught and ministered at Geneva College and is a full-time mother and pastor’s wife, part-time author, and occasional speaker.”

…

And then, “one Sunday morning, two years after I first met (the pastor and his wife), I left the home of my lesbian partner and sat in the pew of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church.”

It was there she had a vision: “The image that crashed like waves of a raging sea was of me and everyone I love suffering in Hell. It vomited into my consciousness and gripped me … not primarily because we were gay, but because we were proud, we wanted to be autonomous.”

“It was our hearts first, our bodies followed. I got it. I heard it, finally. I counted the costs and I did not like the math. This was my crucible, and it is my crucible.”

From that point on, she prayed for “obedience before understanding,” and prayed to become a Godly woman, she said.

“I still felt like a lesbian, but what is my true identity, I wondered?” she said. “The Bible makes clear the difference between real and true. What is bigger, my lesbian identity… or God’s authority over me?”

God won.

“One ordinary day I came to Jesus,” she said. “We were singing from Psalm 119:56 … After I sang the words, something shifted. This Bible was not mine. I had scorned it, cursed it … but had been reading it and reading it.”

She said it was two years of laborious Bible reading, a process and a journey, to reach that final conclusion….