A Conversation Changed Her Life
Sometimes, the trajectory of a person’s life is drastically altered by one conversation. For Alexandria Smithpeters, that conversation happened at Eastside Coffee Bar in SE Portland a couple years ago.
At the time, Alexandria had stopped drinking, quit smoking weed, was healthier than she had ever been, and had been dating a guy who seemed to check all the boxes. Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.
“I’ve always been an existential thinker, and I had been pondering questions like ‘What is the value of a person?’ and ‘What is love?’” she recalls.
These sorts of questions were swirling in her head at the coffee shop when a staff person came by her table and told her the store would be closing in 10 minutes. Alexandria started to pack up her things when a stranger next to her said, “You don’t have to leave right away.”
The young man introduced himself as Hunter, and the two of them struck up a conversation about the paper he was writing about theology and psychology. He explained that he was a student at Western Seminary and she told him that she was “spiritual but not religious.”
That conversation lasted three hours, during which Alexandria asked Hunter a lot of pointed and aggressive questions about religion. Hunter gently explained that the value of a person comes from being made in the image of God and that love is only possible because God first loves us. He may not have realized it, but he was beginning to give her some answers to the questions that had been consuming her.
“I wasn’t fully on board with the whole God idea,” she admits. “And I just couldn’t fathom what Hunter was telling me about how good God is and what Jesus did for us. I couldn’t fathom that was true for me.”
After that initial conversation, Alexandria started to read the Bible, began listening to podcasts about Christianity, and kept coming back to the coffee shop for follow-up conversations with Hunter. She also began to attend Hinson Baptist Church (the church which runs Eastside Coffee Bar), where Hunter introduced her to several Christian women (including a Western grad) who would eventually help disciple her.
“Everyone at Hinson was so willing to connect, and everybody wants to give you a book,” she says with a laugh. “They are just so willing to talk about the Lord.”
One night she got home and just couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus, but no podcast or book felt sufficient. “That’s when I realized I didn’t just want to know about the Lord – I wanted to have a relationship with him,” she says. “I recognized that I needed a savior and that Jesus was that savior.”
As she began to share her new faith with family and friends, Alexandria faced some heavy criticism and push back. Some were affirming of her Christianity; others told her she sounded crazy. She is grateful for her Christian friends who helped her navigate those difficult first steps in her faith journey.
“There were so many little things that the Lord did as I was growing in my faith that first year,” she says. “Any day that I would be questioning things, I would happen to be hanging out with a Christian friend who would be able to talk through things with me.”
Around the same time, she began to consider a career change and began looking into Western’s counseling program. It took her several months to build up the courage to apply, and when she finally hit “submit” she wasn’t sure what to expect.
“I hadn’t been following Jesus for that long, so I didn’t even know if they would accept me,” she says with a chuckle.
Not only was she accepted, but she even found a job at Western working as an admissions counselor in 2024.
Alexandria and Hunter have had lots of follow-up conversations since that first meeting at the coffee shop. So many in fact, that they got married in 2025.