I blinked in the light as the sun shone on the floor. The sunshine streamed through the windows in our congregation’s newly purchased building while our pastor, Bruce Parnell, called us to celebrate the Lord’s supper. Eating the bread and drinking the fruit of the vine together is a sign and seal of our commitment to the Lord Jesus and to each other. It’s also a tangible sign of Christ’s promise to us, sealed in His body and demonstrated by His resurrection. That communion celebration, practiced regularly in our congregation, declares that God has forgiven our sins and made us His children with a place in His eternal plan.

Whenever I see the people in my congregation celebrate the Lord’s supper, I humbly rejoice. I’m humbled to think that a sinner like me can belong to this local assembly of God’s family, and I marvel that God enables me to see this body of believers with my own eyes. Each time I see another person baptized or transfer membership to our congregation, our church is being beautified. And it is His work.

Planting Churches is Hard Work

In 1990, our congregation became a mission church of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. The planting of this congregation took about five years and was hard work. But seeing the church survive and grow has been meaningful work that I could not have imagined when I first became a Christian at age 14.

Is the Gospel Preached in Mainline Churches?

My mom and dad faithfully took my brother and me to their Presbyterian Church (USA) in San Antonio, Tex. At an early age, I begged Mom to take me to worship services instead of the nursery. My mother saw to it that my brother and I learned the books of the Bible and recited the Lord’s Prayer. My grandmother encouraged me to memorize Psalm 100. My father was quick to buy me the paraphrase of the New Testament, Good News for Modern Man, which I began reading when I was 8.

I asked our minister questions about the contents of his sermons and joined his weekly classes about piety (I am not sure I knew what piety was before that class). His sermons and Scripture readings followed the church calendar so that I learned about the significance of Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. I learned about the importance of caring for the poor and oppressed. If one listened carefully, one could hear the gospel at our liberal mainline church thanks to our minister.

Can Any Good Come from the Death of a Beloved Grandfather?

As a very young child, I learned about death when my pets died. I wondered how Christian faith would have any bearing on my own death or that of my family members. When I was barely out of training pants, my friend, Christina, and I speculated about death and heaven. When I was 8, my good friend, Michele, got very sick, and I was not allowed to see her for almost a year. When I was almost 10, a woman at church, who was a special friend of our family, got sick. She and I carried on a correspondence until she was too sick to write anymore. Then she died.

During my freshman year of high school, my grandfather grew frail with heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis until he finally died. At that point, I began to wonder, Why am I here? Why are people here? What is the purpose of life? Do we all come from an organic goo such as evolution would claim? When we die, do we simply decompose to dust? Is that all that human life amounts to?

My father, a gentle man with great integrity, was a biology professor. I’ve been told by former students that he was a great teacher. He did an impressive job teaching me the wonders of the natural world. I continue to be entranced by the beauty of life wherever I see it. He was also good at convincing me that evolution is more than a simple theory; he believed it was acceptable to think of it as fact. Was he also a Christian? I think it likely, but he was never one to talk openly about his faith.

My familiarity with and interest in evolution, a theory that has led many to deny there is a Creator, was never a barrier for me to believe what the Bible said. My resistance to the truth claims of the Bible came more from my own pride and unwillingness to accept that Adam’s fall had rendered me unacceptable to God. I realize now that as a youth I was convinced the world revolved around me. It wasn’t until I read Colossians 1:16–17 that I understood that Christ Jesus is the center of all things, not me: “For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things and by him all things hold together.”

After reading that passage, it became clear to me that I must turn to Jesus in faith and believe that He is who He says He is, the divine God-man whose death was necessary to pay the terrible price for my sin. I was 14 when God opened my eyes of faith to believe Jesus is the Son of God and that, by His blood, He has saved me. Later, when I was in college and studied Romans 5, I came to understand experientially that Christ has freed me from guilt and shame.

What Came from Reading a Missionary Biography?

Perhaps five years later, when Alan and I had been married only a few months, I read my first missionary biography, Uncle Cam, by James and Marti Hefley. Our church, Westerly Road Church in Princeton, N.J., had a large selection of biographies in the library; so I began reading as many as I could. Our church also had a midweek prayer meeting at which we prayed through a long list of missionary prayer requests. I began to desire to be involved in missions and began to write letters to the missionaries we prayed for. When we moved from Princeton, N.J., to Pasadena, Calif., I told Alan that I wasn’t interested in joining a church that wasn’t mission-minded. At David Weir’s recommendation (he was one of our friends in Princeton), we visited Los Angeles Reformed Presbyterian Church. After taking a look at their library, I was convinced that this church might be mission-minded, and so it proved to be.

While we lived in Pasadena, I spent a year volunteering at the US Center for World Missions, which is now called Frontier Ventures. There, I wrote for their prayer guide, which was known in 1984 as the Global Prayer Digest. That prayer guide has merged with the Joshua Project, an online resource promoting prayer for unreached people groups.

In 2018, I was asked to allow Reformed Presbyterian Global Missions (RPGM) to nominate me to join the board. I have learned that being a board member for RPGM requires a lot of work, as well as some travel, but it is meaningful work for God’s kingdom. I know that RPGM is helping missionaries with the work of beautifying God’s church—adding to the numbers of brothers and sisters in His family and helping them grow in His truth and grace.

What Did You Do with Your University Degree?

God gave me the privilege of becoming a wife when I married Alan in 1981 and then to have children when our first child was born in 1986. He also blessed me with the opportunity to study chemistry at Texas A&M and biochemistry at the University of Texas. The degrees I earned enabled me to have jobs at Princeton and Caltech, where I was a laboratory technician. Those degrees also enriched my ability to help our four children pursue their interests through homeschooling and prepare for their callings. Now, all four of our children walk with the Lord and are members of Reformed churches.

Don’t Stop Learning!

Once we were empty nesters, I became a self-taught teacher of English conversation skills to adult internationals. God also enabled me to mentor women with unplanned pregnancies at a local pregnancy help center.

Recently, I began learning to be a grandmother. We have two two-year-old grandsons, an infant grandson, an infant granddaughter, and one unborn grandchild. Two of the grandsons live in New Zealand, another grandson lives in New Mexico, and our granddaughter lives in Indiana. In a few weeks, I will go back to teaching Sunday school to the young children at church, something I have been doing on and off since our children were small.

In the past few months, God has given me the joy of starting to facilitate a women’s Bible/book study at church. It is a pleasant thing to learn Bible truths and grow in grace while in fellowship with other believers. In all of this, may God receive all the glory and His bride be beautified.