I had a strange thought the other day while watching an episode of Sex and the City (for the umpteenth time): What if Carrie Bradshaw had gone to church and gotten saved?
I mean, with all her other antics, was a Sunday morning revelation and baptismal pool really that far behind?
Carrie Bradshaw was the late 90s early 2000s poster child for “doing it for the plot.” Every trainwreck heartbreak became a story for brunch. Every terrible decision became material for her column. Every wrong man was another lesson on the way to finding “The One.”
Carrie wanted what most of us want: to be known, chosen, and loved by someone who sees all of our humanness and stays anyway. And the wanting is okay. It was where the wanting kept landing that was the problem.
Which brings me back to my strange thought: What would actually change if she’d gotten saved?
Not the performative version of saved. Not longer skirts, fewer martinis, and swearing off men. I mean like the decisions, the conversations, the grasping for anything or anyone to cling to - what happens to that? And what, if anything, disappears?
There’s a woman in Joshua 2 named Rahab, and Scripture never cleans up her résumé to make her easier to talk about. She’s introduced plainly, by occupation: a harlot. Later, she shows up in the genealogy of Jesus as Boaz’s mother. Then Hebrews 11 puts her in the hall of faith, where she’s still called “Rahab, the Jericho harlot.” Her story gets bigger, but Scripture never has to pretend her past wasn’t part of it.
I think Rahab helped surface my real question. It wasn’t what if Carrie got saved?
It was: Where does the heaux go when we get saved?
My take? She doesn’t go anywhere.
We tend to imagine salvation as an editing process. It deletes the old material. Replaces wanting with holiness and quietly removes the desires we’re embarrassed to admit we still have.
But Rahab’s story suggests otherwise.
Her past isn’t scrubbed from the text. It’s preserved right next to her faith, in the very same sentence. Her transformation wasn’t about pretending she had never been that woman. It was about what she did with the same womanhood, the same instincts, the same capacity for courage and risk, in her next chapter. It was about what God did with and through the stigma of a sorted past.
And maybe that’s the part our “I got saved” stories skip.
Sadly, there is no switch. Desire doesn’t flip off the day you say yes to God. You don’t suddenly stop wanting to be desired, chosen, seen, remembered. You don’t become immune to loneliness or attention or the particular vulnerability of a “hey stranger” text from someone you know you probably shouldn’t answer.
Salvation doesn’t erase the appetite, it teaches you to recognize the real craving.
That matters because the slippery slope rarely identifies itself with road signage. Indulgence can become dependence. An occasional escape can become a pattern. A little attention can become emotional entanglement. A harmless conversation can become a place where you start looking for something you were never meant to find there.
The danger isn’t the thing but what we’re asking the thing to do for us.
And that’s what I think Carrie gets wrong, even if she never has the language for it. The shoes, the trips, the men, none of those things were inherently the problem. None of those desires were bad. They were human. And salvation hasn’t made you or me any different in that regard.
We still crave the same things. We’re all vulnerable to the same temptation that comes from confusing attention with intimacy and chemistry with confirmation.
Getting saved didn’t make any of my vulnerabilities disappear. But it did give me somewhere to take them.
Now I can pray, What I’m feeling isn’t wrong, but it has the potential to derail your promise. Help me cling to your promise.
That’s the difference. Salvation gives us someone to bring it to that has the strength to hold it…and the lamb in the bush to escape it.
So if Carrie Bradshaw got saved, baptized, and filled with the Holy Ghost, my guess is we’d still recognize her. Her decisions may not change at all. But maybe she’d understand that the great love she kept trying to find wasn’t designed to carry her the way only God can.
That’s what salvation does for all of us.
You don’t have to feel guilty for still wanting the Manolos, the Mr. Big, or the pre-war Manhattan penthouse. You just have to stop handing those desires to things and people that weren’t built to hold them.
Affirmation
I am proud of the version of me that got me here. I am proud of who I am. I look forward to how God will use every part of my story.
I love you.
Coi Marie
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