The Curb Where My Story Pivoted

Forty years ago, I stood on a curb at Washington Dulles International Airport, hailing my first taxi ever. A woman named Jeanette stood on the same curb near me, seeking a cab to—as it turned out—the same hotel as me. Hopping into the car together, mere sentences into our taxi-sharing relationship, we realized to our surprise we were headed to the same hotel because we were both entering the very same program: a summer work experience abroad on farms with the Future Farmers of America (FFA). She was going to France, and I to northern Norway.

Checking into our hotel, we were both astonished to find out that we had been preassigned as roommates! The two of us, who had just met on an airport sidewalk and shared a taxi, were going to be roommates for these first many days during the training and launch of our summer adventures.

At the time, I could never have imagined the profoundness of those moments in the timeline of my life. Four decades later, I still marvel at the kindness and grace of God for that day, for that woman, and for the glory He was about to begin revealing to me. I believe holy, sovereign God—omnipotent and omniscient—smiled down from heaven that day as He looked upon me with Fatherly joy, declaring, “This one, she’s mine.” He alone knew what would unfold from that taxi-hailing sidewalk moment to the hotel check-in to the conversation we would have that first evening—a conversation God had planned from eternity past.

Before she left for France, Jeanette’s sister had given her what would become MY life-altering, life-changing challenge. Her sister said she would support Jeanette financially on this summer FFA adventure “if” she would share her faith in Jesus with just one person on that trip. Furthermore, her sister challenged her to give that person a Gideon New Testament. Oh! The depth of God’s mercy that He would choose me to be the person with whom she shared the hope of His glory — and yes, that little Bible. My first Bible.

There were two other girls assigned to our room who would share a double bed for the next cozy couple of days. I can’t remember their names or which countries they were visiting for the summer, but I imagine they couldn’t help but overhear the conversation that transpired from Jeanette’s and my side of the room.

As I was slipping into bed that first night, I remember Jeanette sitting on our bed, reading. I noticed and was intrigued that she was reading a Bible. I said something like, “That’s neat that you’re reading a Bible. I didn’t think to pack one,”—which was a crazy, odd thing for me to say because I didn’t even own a Bible!

I don’t recall how our conversation got rolling that evening, but I remember her sharing with me about our sin and our need for a Savior, Jesus. She told me that Jesus was God and that He died for my sins, that He was buried, and that He rose on the third day and appeared to many, many people. She shared with me about the need to put my trust fully in Him.

Jeanette couldn’t have known, but I had been wrestling privately for years with deep and confusing thoughts about what happens to us when we die. Just five years before, my dad had died suddenly in front of me, and in our family of non-communicators, we had never—not once—spoken of his death or what happens after death. For the first time in five years, with my brand-new but already trustworthy friend, I tearfully asked the heavy questions I had been bearing alone.

In a multitude of ways, that evening, that friendship, that tiny New Testament which Jeanette gifted me, were God’s stunning, timely, and sweet providence. Jeanette was so gentle with me and so careful and sensitive with her words as they touched the raw ache of my heart. She gave me that Gideon Bible that her sister had challenged her to give, and she encouraged me to start reading it and we could talk more.

Until my dad died, we had been a church-attending family. From this, I had a reverence of sorts for God and knew that if what Jeanette was telling me that night was true, then this was a very, very big deal. I told her I needed to think about what she had told me.

While we traveled as a large FFA group together through Central Europe before departing for our individual countries and farms, Jeanette loved me like a big sister is supposed to. I asked her a few more questions, but mostly I just observed her. I saw a difference between her and the others, and a consistency between the way she acted and what she told me she believed.

God met me in such a beautiful way that summer in the land of the midnight sun, in northern Norway. I read that little Bible I was given as I looked out over the fjords of Norway, and God gave me faith by His grace to believe what I read.

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It was upon returning home to central Wisconsin, the beginning of my senior year of high school, that I fully surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. Exactly forty years ago tonight, I knelt at the side of my dad’s bed and read as an earnest confession the little prayer on the back page of the Gideon Bible.

I had never heard the term “born again.” I didn’t know a single person besides Jeanette who had a deep, committed faith in Jesus Christ. I didn’t even know that there was an Old Testament that went along with that little New Testament she gave me! But God.

If I told you more of my story—more of this messy yet miraculous story that God has authored and is unfolding—you would hear over and over again of His faithfulness and steadfast love, and of His astonishing grace that is greater than all my sin.