Bowie, Maryland

I threw myself onto my bed and burst into tears. My dad had just announced that we would be moving to Papua New Guinea (PNG), a mountainous island country north of Australia. We were going to be missionaries. My dad would teach at a Bible college in the Highlands region, training national pastors from all over that country. As a 12-year-old on the cusp of adolescence, the idea of saying goodbye to life as I knew it was a bitter pill to swallow.

I loved the concept of missions. Our non-denominational Bible church was very missions minded, and, as an ambitious homeschooler, my mom had read to us dozens of missionary biographies. We were extremely active in church. When the church doors were open, we were there.

As a result, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t believe in God, that He was real, that He loved me, and that I was supposed to love Him in return. I was four years old at a Backyard Bible Club when the teacher went over the gospel story, emphasizing that if we didn’t explicitly ask God to forgive us our sins, we would go to hell when we died. Terrified, I repeated every word of the Sinner’s Prayer as earnestly as I could. I would repeat some variance of that prayer many times over the next few years, just to make extra sure that it worked.

Although I doubted my own salvation often, I never doubted the truth of the gospel or the urgent necessity of spreading that news to those who had not heard. So, when my dad said we were going to the mission field, I was undeniably sad, but also proud. I respected my parents deeply for their decision to leave behind the comforts of American life and a decent government salary for the rugged highlands of PNG—a land that had only come out of the Stone Age within the last century.

Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea

The first few months were hard. I was lonely, and I struggled to connect with peers. My younger brothers could disappear for hours at a time, exploring the bush with their bows and arrows. As a girl, I had to stick closer to home, both for safety and cultural reasons. After six months, my parents decided to send me to boarding school at a Wycliffe mission center in another province.

I ended up loving boarding school. I had an incredibly tight-knit class—all fellow missionary kids from more than 30 countries. We tended toward being overachievers with lofty ideals and dreams of changing the world one day. It was an incredibly stimulating environment spiritually, relationally, and intellectually. I loved how the mission center was a diverse microcosm of God’s multi-ethnic kingdom. Although we still had teenage drama and immaturity, we were all there because our parents had chosen to forsake the things of the world to pursue that which was everlasting. That reality made an impact on us.

When my family and I went back to the States for a six-month furlough when I was in ninth grade, I was shocked at how vapid and foolish so much of the standard American teenage life seemed to me now. Many of my friends at my old church were drifting from their faith, never to return. Looking back three years, I was overwhelmingly thankful that God had sent our family overseas when He did, although it had felt like a hard providence at the time.

Cairo, Egypt

Fast forward a few years. I was a junior in college. After graduating from boarding school in PNG, I had decided to go to Taylor University, a small Christian school in Indiana, and was majoring in international studies. I spent the spring of my junior year in the Middle East, studying religion, politics, and culture with other students from Christian colleges in the U.S.

Debates about the nature of Islam and Christianity, and whether Muslims would go to heaven, would often pop up in our class discussions and mealtime chats. Many classmates concluded that a loving God could not condemn earnest Muslims to hell, and that there must be a better way to understand Jesus’s teaching so that we didn’t have to recognize such exclusive claims.

I was horrified. I empathized with their concern for our Muslim friends’ souls, but I could not see how watering down the gospel was the solution. I wrestled deeply with how we could come to such different conclusions. Acts 4:12 was seared in my brain: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

In my mind this truth was so foundational, so self-evident. I could no more easily neutralize Jesus’s claims than I could stop the sun from shining. Both were immutable realities. I felt like Simon Peter in the book of John: “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68). It was another experience God used to impress on me deeply the eternal, unalterable nature of His truth.

Duluth, Minnesota

A few years after that, I was married and living in Duluth, Minn., with a new baby. My plan to be a world changer had fizzled. Yet these years in Duluth included some of the most meaningful, though unglamorous, periods of Christian growth in my life.

Until then, most of my life experiences had reinforced the absolute bedrock truth of the gospel message, but the gospel had not touched my own heart as deeply as it needed to. As a hard-working, likeable student in high school and college, I had managed to breeze through life without feeling the weight of my sin too closely.

Having gone to boarding school at age 13, it had been many years since I had to deal with the daily grind of family life, which is an excellent environment for revealing deep-seated vices like pride, selfishness, and irritation. Although I shudder to say it out loud, as a young adult there were many days I would go to bed wondering if I had even sinned that day.

Then I got married. And then we had kids. I discovered that I did, in fact, have an anger problem, that I was sinfully dependent on other people’s approval of me, that I was prone to self-righteousness, and that my heart was deceptive—among many other things. While studying Paul’s epistles for a biblical counseling class I was taking, I discovered that, while Paul didn’t have much to say about changing the world, he did have a lot to say about putting to death our sinful desires, loving each other with a sacrificial love, and not thinking of self more highly than we ought.

Providentially, it was around this time that the Lord led us to a confessionally Reformed church. Although we had always been Calvinists, we began to learn more about Reformed worship, the Lord’s Day, and the ordinary means of grace. I began to look forward to corporate worship more. I started to read my Bible as a necessary source of spiritual sustenance, rather than a duty. I felt a renewed dependence on God’s saving grace.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

We are now at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, pursuing a call to full-time ministry on the mission field or to pastoral ministry stateside. It is common for someone like me to say that I don’t have a good testimony: saved at age four, followed by a slow, laborious journey in sanctification with what feels like two steps forward, one step back. Yet as I look back, I see God’s preserving hand present at every step of the way.

As a young child in Maryland I learned the basic building blocks of biblical truth. In Papua New Guinea, I saw the beauty of God’s kingdom contrasted with the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures. In Egypt, He showed me that the exclusivity of Jesus is in fact good news. Domestic life in Minnesota gave me a deeper conviction of my own sin and need for a Savior. Through it all, God brought me to a deeper understanding of Himself: His goodness, justice, mercy, grace, and love.

Recently, I have been struck anew by the fact that none of this is my doing. I cannot take any credit for how the Lord used these experiences to draw me closer to Him, while other friends with similar backgrounds have chosen a different path. It is all a testimony to God’s preserving power in my life.

As R.C. Sproul says: “My confidence in my preservation is not in my ability to persevere. My confidence rests in the power of Christ to sustain me with His grace and by the power of His intercession. He is going to bring us safely home” (“TULIP and Reformed Theology: Perseverance of the Saints,” Apr. 22, 2017, Ligonier.org).

Krista K. lives in Pittsburgh, Pa., where her husband, Robert, is in his second year at RPTS. They have three children aged five and under. Krista enjoys reading, being active outdoors, traveling, and hosting others in their home.