I crouched at the starting line, poised, every nerve taut. This was it. No turning back. The shimmering heat and starting gun rose slowly, silently skyward… CRACK!

I took off like a shot, running as fast as my 13-year-old legs would carry me. My hand a vise on the baton, I bolted toward the second member of our relay team. She shifted into my line of focus as I conquered the first curve. Timing was everything. The stakes were high and precious seconds would be lost if I bungled this transfer. Runner number two started at a lope, our eyes locking as I gave her a definitive nod. Closing in, I reached forward, releasing the prized tube into her outstretched hand. She fled like a hunted gazelle.

I stood gasping, sweat streaming, time seemingly suspended as that all-important baton transferred to the third and then the final runner. Alternately holding my breath and screaming, I watched my teammate burst across the finish line just ahead of her competitors. We had done it! It was gold medal time at the Valley Nine League meet! We’d won! We. Not me.

Queries about my testimony often trigger this collaborative track and field memory along with my more recent participation in 5K competitions. Here’s why: my walk with Christ has largely reflected the biblical visual of a race. My parents’ “carrying of the faith baton” through their faithful teaching and example has channeled my life’s direction with staggering import. And amid the series of life’s challenges designed to test our spiritual fitness, my brothers and sisters in Christ have proven to be my oasis at countless junctures. Smiling faces offering the refreshment of reprieve to my weary, fallible steps have proven critical impetus to press on, not to give up, and to train well. Oh, and these supportive saints, persevering paradigms, champion cheerleaders? They are anything but frozen.

Warming Up

My story’s beginning tracks back to my mother and father, whose emboldened commitment to serving God wherever it took them meant I spent the first 9 years of my life as a missionary child. I watched them walk an arduous path as they cheerfully ministered Christ to those struggling around them, day after ordinary day, in our remote northwestern Ontario locale. Everyone was a welcome guest in our home—the more in need of respite, the better. I’m confident that my mother has entertained a disproportionate number of angels unawares, her six glaringly ineligible offspring notwithstanding.

My father served in the pastorate—an inerrancy-defending marathon in its own right. The core of his ministry’s strength lay in his faithful preaching of the gospel, a message that sailed blissfully through my early childhood ears, leaving little noticeable impact.

Changing Course

Then, my race unexpectedly rerouted. We were moving. God was calling my dad to new pastoral and teaching positions near Hutchinson, Kan., in his sprawling rural community of origin and the home of our supporting Amish Mennonite churches. I stopped in my tracks, lividly defiant, a foot stomp (or three) for added emphasis. How dare callous sovereignty change my pleasant, perfect, predictable course! Life was tracking straight south on every conceivable level.

It was precisely this monumental shift God used to change my heart. As I struggled to make the transition to a new home, church, and school, He showed me my need for strength greater than my own. His Spirit, ever gracious, was drawing me to the realization of my abject status as a sinner. Oh, I had heard it all my life, but now He had my attention. I’ll long remember that thunderous night in our old farmhouse, tucked among the amber waves of Kansas wheat fields, when a triune God miraculously transformed the stony heart of a 10-year-old girl as she knelt in sobbing contrition.

Some of the changes were instantaneous. I was no longer just reading Bible verses; God now spoke to me through His living Word. I wasn’t simply attending church every Sunday; corporate worship was engaging me in praise to my Creator, Lord, and King. Prayer didn’t merely mean bowing my head, closing my eyes, and hoping the amen came sooner than later. I was speaking to my Savior and He was listening, honed to a young heart desperate to beat with His.

He sent me a stellar Sunday school teacher named Sue. She challenged me to hide God’s Word in my heart through memorization. It was then that I found my life’s verse from Isaiah 40:31: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

Time’s passage brought my graduation from high school, return to the mission field in Canada for two years, and the pursuit of dietetic collegiate studies in Florida. The Comforter unfailingly brought motivators alongside me. People from all walks of life: peers, stay-at-home moms, lawyers, physicians, business owners, educators, nurses, farmers. They inadvertently cheered me through their faithful modeling of endurance, patience, and hope.

Through these years of transition and change, my study of God’s Word remained a rich, stabilizing anchor. As I dug deeper in my quest for truth, however, unsettling questions surfaced. Mounting mysteries conflicted with what I had been taught. The more I pursued answers, the more they eluded me. I could not shake the growing confirmation that something was stirring my heart. I mulled long and hard over what God might be saying to me. Was He calling me to walk a different path? Was the Author priming me for a completely new chapter? Had my race reached yet another crossroads?

A Running Partner

Enter Steve. Initially, I agreed to meet him only to appease some “noble of intention” types. They broached genuine concern that I was still single at 30, so I acquiesced to dinner, yea even dessert, with a Presbyterian stranger.

Admittedly, I was intrigued to meet a real live Calvinist whose doctrinal positions stood diametrically opposed to the tenets of my Anabaptist faith. Steve may well have been my blind date, but his vision and powers of perception proved remarkably astute. From our first encounter, God used him to grant critical resolution to my multitude of rising questions. This truest of gentlemen logged countless hours in his patient introduction to foreign-sounding terms like Reformed, TULIP, and exclusive psalmody. He familiarized me with theologians like John Owen, J.G. Vos, and R.C. Sproul.

I sat in quiet, absorbent amazement as he’d take a verse I’d read all my life, turn it 180 degrees, and shift it from an enigmatic blur to one with razor resolution. My eyes were being opened to the resilient beauty of the doctrines of grace.

It didn’t come without significant struggle. Seeing God’s choosing, drawing, and preservation of me was one thing. Facing the unpleasant reality of my total depravity was quite another. My pride rankled. This slashed long, dark, and deep. I had labored hard. Religious adherence to prescribed conduct and dress codes included that I “work out my salvation.” I was a pastor’s daughter, former missionary kid, and missionary. Nothing in me was remotely redemptive!?

God transformed this looming, ominous hurdle into a stepping stone to freedom. The lifelong, unrelenting, unanswered question of whether or not I’d “done enough” was taking its toll. Was salvation truly a gift graciously lavished on the wholly undeserving, not one whit enhanced by one’s performance or diminished by one’s lack? Had Christ’s power alone enabled me to receive this unsurpassed love? Did His sacrifice irrevocably robe me in impeccable righteousness, atoning not only for my past, present, and future sins but the sin that was my very core? Hope rose in me.

The immeasurable comfort of embracing this truth for the first time laid my head on a pillow of indescribable peace, preceding one of the sweetest nights of sleep I have on liberated record. It gets better. Remember Steve’s decidedly unorthodox introduction to Sincerely Miss Guided? He never flinched. He continued calling (quite effectually, I might add) and graced me with a nuptial surname nine months later.

Transition to Coaching

We, the newlyweds, undertook a three-year scholastic sprint at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary. One of the blessings I enjoyed during that time was the camaraderie of other seminary wives, whose friendship and support I still treasure. I never tire of telling people that Steve and I mastered divinity together, watching as the old secondary meaning registers. The inevitable eruption is as prolific as it is predictable.

My husband and I have ministered in Lisbon, N.Y., since 2002. The voluminous support from this congregation is incalculable. Indeed, despite our navigating numerous dark valleys via faltering steps, these saints continue to shower us with undeserved kindness, votes of confidence, and a bewildering absence of pink slips.

We have five of our own up-and-coming runners—the oldest already off and running solo as an out-of-state college freshman. The rising confirmation that the Savior who transformed our hearts is now working the same transformation in our children’s hearts garners perpetual celebration. Indeed, our stumbling parental efforts can never transmit our faith to our children. The “passing of the baton” is our Father’s great and merciful gift, His power alone applying its benevolence from one generation to the next. In my family, He has been pleased to extend it across multiple generations of staunchly faithful Anabaptists. That same God now takes equal, inexplicable delight in this first-generation Reformed Presbyterian.

So, I run the race set before me, praying to be the encouragement I’ve known in such abundance and confident that He who started a good work in me will finish it. Above anything else, though, my gratitude rises boundless to Him who, in utter humiliation, laid down His life and forever secured a spot on His victorious team for one, small, skirts-flying-as-she-blazed-a-trail-around-that-track girl.