It came as a shock to the system—being raised in an unchurched family with only vague memories of a few vacation Bible school classes, then finding myself in high school worshiping in a jumpin’, jivin’, tongues-speakin’ church. How had I gotten here, and how was I ever going to find a church home I could relate to?

The journey started as far back as junior high school, that awkward time when we all felt misunderstood, especially by our parents. Venting about this to friends in the 1970s meant passing notes in class and study hall, and I have vivid memories of many notes from my friend from Girl Scouts, Chris, in which she encouraged me. She assured me that, although my parents clearly didn’t understand me, God did. I can still see her “God loves you!” notes in my mind 40 years later.

When I was in high school, my nominally Christian mom began attending a Moravian church for reasons I still can’t fathom, and I often tagged along with her. But after a while I begged her to stop taking me with her. I couldn’t explain it, but I could no longer stomach sitting in the teen Sunday school class, hearing and discussing Bible passages. Every week in that class, my heart raced and a terrible fear and anxiety seized me. I dreaded it. Eventually I stopped accompanying her and felt some blessed relief. For a while. The Spirit was already working.

Fast-forward to tenth grade study hall, the last class of the day. Chris and I were in this study hall together, with our gym teacher, Mr. Yaworski, as the proctor. Everyone knew Mr. Y was one of those Bible-thumping believers—a member of the Church of the Nazarene, as I recall. He and Chris had plans to sit off to the side of the classroom and talk to our friend Cheryl about the gospel. Chris asked if I wanted to listen in, perhaps thinking I was already a Christian. I had nothing better to do, so I sat with them.

Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict was a hot book, and that style of proselytizing was popular. So, Mr. Y rattled off statistic after statistic charting the likelihood of Jesus fulfilling various Old Testament prophecies. The one I still remember equated the possibility of a fulfilled prophecy to finding one specific coin in a pile of coins a foot deep—a pile the size of Texas.

Now, whether or not the math on that is any good (and I suspect it isn’t), the effect of that statement was striking. The effect not on Cheryl but on me. Poor Cheryl sat shaking her head throughout most of that study hall—nothing sinking in, nothing affecting her. Meanwhile, I sat behind everyone, not participating but merely listening in as they talked, and my heart was being changed. The Spirit was still working.

I said nothing to Chris or Mr. Y that day. I simply headed for the school bus after study hall was over. Everyone else was goofing off, as usual. I found this frustrating because I wanted to concentrate on coming to terms with what I had just heard. I wondered why I was the only one on the bus who was busy considering important, eternal things. I fought an urge to shout, “Hey, you need to hear what I just heard!”

I arrived home to an empty, quiet house. Both my parents were working, and my brother was somewhere else after school. Sitting on the couch in the living room, I silently asked God to show Himself to me. I knew nothing of the things of faith and boldly asked God for a sign. Just then, the phone rang, rudely breaking through the silence I desperately needed.

In the days before caller-ID and even voicemail, I had no choice but to answer the phone. After all, it might have been an important call for my parents. It wasn’t. It was my best friend, Jeannine, who lived a few miles away.

“Go out your front door and look down toward my house.”

My mind, though, was preoccupied with wanting God to show Himself so I could make a decision about Him—because I knew what I had heard demanded a decision, a change, if it was true. Jeannine’s phone call was a bothersome interruption of my important thoughts, but I told her I’d go look.

Best. Decision. Ever.

I’ll never forget standing on our front porch that day, gazing toward Jeannine’s house and seeing a brilliant rainbow in the sky though I had seen no rain that day. And I realized then that I had no memory of ever having seen a rainbow before that day. I wouldn’t understand until much later that God has a certain fondness for rainbows.

I made it back inside before having my miniature breakdown on the couch. God was real. Everything I’d just heard about Jesus, the cross, and salvation was true. He was right there with me, for me. He always had been. The decision was unavoidable. I was saved. The Spirit had just done some amazing work.

For the next year or more, Chris and I did a lot of church-hopping, trying to find a theological home. But finding a truly Bible-believing church in Easton, Pa., at that time meant enduring tongues-speaking, pew-popping, and any number of other crazy spiritual fads. We attended some services that embodied every bad parody sketch of televangelists. Bad toupees, white three-piece suits, thick Southern accents. (How did preachers in Pennsylvania end up with Southern accents?)

I have an uncomfortable memory of one such preacher walking around the congregation during prayer time and then grabbing both sides of my head, loudly praying for my quiet time. Briefly I thought, “Wow, how did he know?” Then I realized everyone thinks their quiet time needs help.

I stopped attending that church. I remained unhappy.

As our high school years came to an end, and Chris and I scattered for college, I became engaged to a hometown boy and headed off to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After one year there, he and I took a year off in Easton to work and save money to get married and go back to college. During that year, my fiancé and I attended more theologically questionable churches and worked at a local second-run movie theater. One day, a new pastor named Jack Kinneer, who was planting an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation nearby, asked to rent the theater to show the film Joni.

When Jack heard we were searching for theological moorings, he talked to us about the Reformed faith. Finally the things of faith were making some real sense to me. We joined Jack at New Life OPC until he married us in August 1981, just before we headed to Pittsburgh.

We had been encouraged by friends at New Life to seek out a Pittsburgh church called Covenant Fellowship situated east of the city, but after we settled into our third-floor efficiency apartment in the East Liberty section of town, we could find no OPC congregation with that name. We found a congregation called Covenant OPC and assumed that was the right one.

We never felt welcome there. Folks barely noticed us, and when we gave up and stopped attending a few months later, no one contacted us.

When we visited Easton at Christmastime, we learned that our friends at New Life had meant a completely different church called Covenant Fellowship, a Reformed Presbyterian Church. Once we were back in Pittsburgh, in January 1982, we located Covenant Fellowship, which was meeting then at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary. During my first worship service there, I was charmed with the a cappella psalm singing, and a guest preacher named Renwick Wright preached an inspiring, fiery sermon.

And nobody grabbed my head. I never looked back.

Fast-forward again, 13 years later: I now had four children and was going through a painful divorce from a man who threw off his Reformed mantle for a more divorce-tolerant Episcopalian congregation. The support I needed then came from Covenant Fellowship—friends who picked me up, dusted me off, and helped me move forward, despite their having almost no prior experience with a situation like mine (which I considered a sign of their collective good spiritual health).

The men of the congregation often asked me for a list of small home improvement projects I needed, and then showed up en masse carrying tool bags and expertise to help me improve my modest home. I learned the Reformed Presbyterian Church was not only a place to learn sound theology. It was also a place to learn loving accountability and humble self-sacrifice.

I may not have known what I needed or wanted back in the 1970s when I first came to faith. I may not have realized I would need to be among strong believers when the major crises in my life hit. All I know is that I’ve never felt such a sense of extended family as I’ve found among my brethren in the RPCNA since those early days in the 1980s.

And I think I’ve found the pot of gold at the end of that beautiful rainbow.

Linda Au Parker is a humor and fiction writer living in New Brighton, Pa. In 1999, she married Geneva College engineering graduate Wayne Parker and is now a member of First (Beaver Falls, Pa.) RPC.