As a Christian missionary in Japan and Australia beginning in the late 1970s, Sarah Young kept a prayer journal. Writing down the daily focus of a prayerful mind is common, but what became of Young’s journal wasn’t common at all: It was eventually published and by the fall of 2013 had begun outselling Fifty Shades of Grey. Written in the voice of Jesus, Young produced a gently heretical Christian phenomenon. Young’s unlikely journey ended last week when she died at 77 from leukemia in Tennessee.

Tennessee is also where that journey began. Born there in 1946 as Sarah Jane Kelly, Young grew up in various Southern states before heading north to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. A self-described “non-Christian searching for truth,” the future author studied philosophy, graduating one year before more famous alumna Hillary Rodham. Though future schooling would take Young to Tufts, Georgia State, and Covenant Theological Seminary, Wellesley would prove foundational. Happening upon Escape from Reason, a 1968 tome by Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, the recent grad found that her training had stood her in good stead. As Young would later tell the Christian Broadcasting Network, her philosophy classes “helped [her] to understand [Schaeffer’s] reasoning.”