“Did you know the owners are Korean?”

That’s the question that Sara Kyoungah White and her fellow Korean American friends would ask one another as they perused purses and bought blouses at Forever 21 in the mid-aughts. They felt pride at their shared heritage, buoyed all the more by the fact that the bottom of every Forever 21 shopping bag had “John 3:16” stamped on it.

White recounts these memories and others in “Yesterday, Today, and Forever 21,” a reflection on the closing of the once-shopping-titan’s US stores. While millennials have watched many of their childhood haunts shutter or pivot to online-only, “This one hit different.”

“The story of Forever 21 is also my story: a story of Korean immigrants, like my parents, succeeding in America,” she writes “It’s a story of Christians making a mark on the world, imperfectly and sometimes even harmfully, and of God’s unlikely redemption.”

White shares some of her own stories of fashion, faith, and family, explores the faulty promises of the prosperity gospel, and considers the ways that founders who claim Christ have, at times, failed to match their actions to their stated beliefs. Even still, White concludes, God grows faith from the smallest of seeds.

As we stumble about in our efforts to share the good news of Jesus, and as we confess our shortcomings in aligning our behavior to our beliefs, may we remember that the gospel goes forth not because of our performance, but because of faithfulness of a perfect Savior. Our words will one day fade, but God’s will stand firm forever.