I was raised Episcopalian. Although the gospel was imbedded in the liturgy of my church, it was not clearly preached. As a child, I thought that the message of Christianity was, “Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.” So when I was 10 years old, I decided to be good.

At first, I thought I was doing a good job. I was a generally compliant child, a people pleaser. I thought if the grown-ups in my life were happy, I must be all right. However, when I reached junior high school, I realized that being good didn’t make me popular. I consoled myself with the idea that my classmates didn’t appreciate the nobleness of my character. I was on my way to becoming a self-righteous hypocrite when God intervened.

I know that God intervened because one day I realized that I was doing good things so people would like me, not because I loved God or people. And I realized that that wasn’t good enough. Nobody told me this. I didn’t read it anywhere. I didn’t have some horrendous experience that revealed the depths of my sin. One day I thought I was good, and the next I knew I wasn’t.

I had a classic case of repentance. I was crying every night in bed. One moment I’d be begging God to help me, and the next I would be telling Him that I knew He would.

Not long after, my mother made an offhand comment about a book she had read once called The Robe. I thought, “Someday I’m going to read that book.” But I didn’t because I was into science fiction at the time. A year later, in my eighth grade Indiana History class, they mentioned the book, The Robe. The author, Lloyd C. Douglas, was from Indiana. I said to myself, “Oh, that’s the book I’m going to read someday.” But I didn’t.

A year later we were visiting my grandparents in Illinois for Easter vacation and the movie, The Robe, came on TV, but we were leaving to go home. We stopped on the way to visit my grandmother in Terre Haute, Ind. I saw one small exciting part of the movie before we had to leave. If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is not to know how a story comes out. I got the book out of my public school library and read it.

What the hero had at the end of the story was what I wanted. So I begin pulling books out of the spiritual section of my high school library. I read some duds like Jeane Dixon’s A Gift of Prophesy, but I also read a novel by Catherine Marshall called Christy. I liked that book so I read the biography she wrote about her preacher husband, A Man Called Peter. At the back of that book were some sermons. One of them said that if I asked Jesus to come into my heart and change my life, He would. So I asked Him, and He did.

I began to read the Bible, starting with the Gospel of Matthew. One of the first things that happened was that I was convicted of sin. The part that got me was the section in the Sermon on the Mount about not taking the speck out your brother’s eye when you have a log in your own. Up to that time I had been blaming my younger brother for all my problems and trying to reform him. God said, “Stop it!” So I did.

I also began praying and seeing answers to prayer. It impressed me that when I would pray and then try to figure out how God would answer, He would do it in a way I didn’t expect. I had a growing relationship with Jesus Christ, but, being the spacey teenager that I was, it did not occur to me that, if something was written in a book, other people must have done it. As far as I knew it was just me and God.

My conversion took place during my freshman year of high school. I didn’t find out there were other born-again Christians until I got to college at Indiana University (IU). My first Sunday I attended a church that was close to campus. On the way out I ran into a girl from my high school. She was a year older than I, and we had been in driver’s training together. Unknown to me, she had become a Christian the year before. She invited me to a four-week Bible study in the Gospel of John.

I attended the study, and during the discussion I started telling the group how God worked, like answering prayers in unexpected ways. From what I said, they realized that I must be a Christian. They handed me a tract to read (The Four Spiritual Laws). I read it and said, “Oh yeah, I did this!” I discovered I had a spiritual family.

This was my introduction to evangelical Christendom. I had a lot to get used to. There were pastors instead of priests and they wore suits, not robes. There were no processions or candles. There was a whole new set of hymns. Episcopal hymns are rather dignified, but evangelical hymns can get pretty lively. I joined the Navigators and learned how to study the Bible, pray, memorize Scripture, and share my faith. Nobody told me that there was such a thing as Calvinism and Arminianism. However, the prevailing atmosphere was Arminian, so I absorbed it by osmosis.

When I graduated from college, my original intent was to go to the Episcopal church with my family to be a witness to them. However, they had a new priest who was obviously not a Christian and was teaching wrong things. I got my parents’ permission to go somewhere else and went to the only Bible-believing church that I knew about in the Indianapolis area: Second Reformed Presbyterian Church. I knew about it because our Navigator representative at IU spent a year at Second RP receiving training from Dr. Roy Blackwood, a close friend of Leroy Eims, who was a leader in the Navigators. Our Nav rep invited Dr. Blackwood to speak to our group a few times. I had gone to the church during summer vacations to attend the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship meetings held there.

I liked the RP Church. The preaching was great. I liked the people. And singing psalms was no problem at all. They were more dignified, like Episcopalian hymns; and you could learn them by heart, which appealed to my Navigator Scripture memory emphasis. I also liked the way Bob Templeton found the pitch with a tuning fork.

I don’t remember when I learned about Calvinisim and Arminianism, but I remember I was praying about the issue when the following incident occurred at the school in which I taught. I had lunch room duty, and a couple of first graders called me over to settle an argument. The child on one side of the table said one direction was “right,” and the child on the other side of the table said the opposite direction was “right.” I realized that there was a bigger concept that they did not understand. Each knew how to find his right hand and from there to find the direction “right,” but they did not know what the direction “right” really was. They thought it was a direction like north and south. So I said to myself, “We know God is sovereign because the Bible says He is. We know man is responsible because the Bible says he is. We just aren’t mature enough to know the big concept that draws them together.” So I decided to believe God is sovereign because the Bible says so and believe man is responsible because the Bible says so, and I would wait on God to enlighten me with the bigger concept.

I joined the RP Church, and God has been enlightening me on bigger concepts ever since. I think 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 applies to my testimony.

For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption—that, as it is written, He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.

I’m glad God knew what He was doing, because I was clueless.

—Karen Carr is a member of Immanuel (West Lafayette, Ind.) RPC.