I'm twelve... thirteen. Standing in my room... all alone in a foreign country. The voices in the next bedroom are arguing. I hear the words very clearly, "Bert, I want a divorce."

Strange it should upset me, I wasn't very happy there. But life as I know it begins to crumble all around me. Chile is the land of earthquakes, and I feel the floor literally teeter beneath my feet. Then the voice in my head... "God loves you."

I fall on my knees, but then I force myself back up on my feet and shove it away.

"I don't need You! I don't need anybody!"

My father drives me and my mother to the Santiago Airport in silence. An ash from his cigarette falls on my foot and burns a hole in my stocking, reaching the flesh. I wince. No one says anything. My last memory of him...

I hear the voice again some months later after I have come to live with my maternal grandparents in rural Indiana. One fall/winter evening we go to see a movie called In His Steps at the Kingman Christian Church. I know I need to give my life to God.

"OK, but I'm not ready yet," I argue inside my head.

With whom?

Then it's Easter week, 1963 or 1964. Elvis is popular, but the Beatles are gaining with my age group. I idolize and worship TV and movie stars. A small GARBC Baptist Church in Yeddo is having an all-week revival meeting. Friday night my grandfather wants to go. There's a TV show I want to watch. But then something my Sunday School teacher Raymond said at the small Friends Church we attended pops into my head. (Raymond is also my best friend's father.)

"If God gives you 7 days, can't you give Him back 1 hour?"

OK, I decide to be generous and give 2 hours that week. That night at the revival meeting, as the visiting evangelist preaches, my resistance is completely broken down. I start to weep. As the invitation plays, and the people sing, "Just as I Am," I slip out of my seat and go down the aisle to the front. The local minister, Pastor Barnard, takes me to a side room and leads me through a simple prayer. It's almost anti-climactic. All this resisting and fear, and now...

I look at Pastor Barnard and say, "But I didn't feel anything!"

He reassures me that it took, perhaps goes over it again.

I'm sixteen or seventeen. Pastor Barnard is teaching a passage from the Old Testament about Elisha - when he has to flee wicked Queen Jezebel. He thinks he's the only faithful one left, but the Voice tells him that He has reserved a remnant.

"God will always reserve a faithful remnant, no matter how bad things get," Pastor Barnard says. "We draw our truths and beliefs from a faithful remnant called the Anabaptists."

The Baptist Church at Yeddo teaches a strict life-style. No mixed swimming, no movies, no wearing shorts, no drinking, no playing cards, but lots of friendship and singing. Sunday night services and Wednesday night prayer meetings. When it comes time for me to go to college, a Christian counselor at my secular high school influences me to pick Bob Jones University over IU. Bob Jones is a conservative, fundamentalist school in South Carolina. While attending there as a freshman, I am attracted to the field of Interpretative Speech and decide to major in it. Almost right off the bat, I face obstacles and hurdles. Turns out, you have to pass a platform at the end of your sophomore year, to be accepted into the major. I find out that my voice is too nasal, I have a short palate. My voice and diction professor Robert Pratt works with me patiently to overcome the nasality. The upshot is I pass my sophomore platform, but am put into the Speech Education program.

"You'll make a wonderful teacher," they tell me.

They do put me on stage, and I perform in plays, Sunday afternoon vespers programs, operas and oratorios. They tell me I have a good singing voice and should do something with it.

At Bob Jones I don't hear anything about Anabaptists. But I do hear about the Council of Carthage around 300 A.D., the Renaissance and the Reformation. And I hear plenty about modernism and neo-evangelicalism, neo-orthodoxy, and fundamentalism. Those are all fairly recent developments of the early 20th century. At BJU I arrive at my understanding of the Christian Universe, at least the Protestant part of it. Simply put, Fundamentalists are those who believe there is a God, the Bible is His inspired Word, and the events described in it are to be taken very literally, unless the text itself says otherwise. Modernists are those who question all of that. Neo-orthodox/Neo-evangelicals are those who compromise with Modernists.

Bob Jones does not accept black students or allow interracial dating. This bothers me.

"It’s just not a good time to bring in blacks," and, "we intend to build a school for them too," the administration tells us. But I still feel guilty, no matter how they justify it. Only I’m hooked. I want that speech degree more than anything. And...I feel safe here.

My sophomore year, I go with a group of fellow students to minister to black children, and also to a black nursing home in Easley, South Carolina on weekends. Once, we get permission to pick up the kids and bring them on campus to a Sunday Vespers Program. Strange, bringing them to a place where they cannot attend as students.

My senior year I am getting braver. It's 1972. The whole campus has to go hear a speech by some high South African official. He does such a good job presenting his government's position on Apartheid, he gets a standing ovation. Lindsay Austin, my friend from Indiana, and I are seated by an aisle close to the front. As far as I know, we are the only two people who remain seated and don't clap in that whole 2000 seat auditorium. The faculty always sits up on stage in a block of seats, during chapel and special convocations. They look out at us. Lindsay and I just sit there silently looking right back at them.

I wonder, are Lindsay and I a remnant, like the Voice told Elisha, at that moment? Or are we just trouble-makers?

After I graduate from Bob Jones, I enter an inner city youth ministry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I live and work there for three and a half years, then relocate close to my family in Lafayette, Indiana, and end up working at Purdue University. I meet my husband-to-be at a Presbyterian church singles group in town. Benny has been divorced twice, the last time, after adopting and helping raise his wife's children. Naturally he isn't too keen on jumping right back in. We live together for a year before we gather up enough courage to take the leap. The Presbyterian Church in Dayton, where Benny has been a faithful member for twenty-some years, handles all of this very well. They encourage us to attend, but basically mind their own business. Eventually, the minister Bill Beswick conducts the wedding ceremony, and for the first time, at age 33, I am married.

As time goes on, I notice the Dayton Church has some very different attitudes toward things than what I was taught. When I bring this up to Bill, he floors me with the comment, "Yes, but you've outgrown those."

Have I?

The date is Jan 21, 1525. The whole world is in a state of flux and turmoil. People are afraid. The old standbys don't work any more. Over the centuries, demands for reform keep mounting. And then some years back, in 1517, it really starts to happen, when a man named Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. Tonight, in Zurich, Switzerland, a group of sincere men meet at the home of Felix Manz. They have a problem to discuss. At this time, Christianity is a state religion. Mandatory. Every citizen is baptized into the church at birth, no choice, no question. However, these earnest individuals who have gathered tonight have come to believe that joining the church should be the completely voluntary action of an individual who is aware of what he is doing. Their problem is that the Zurich city council has just made it a civil offense for an infant not to be baptized. The reasons are more economic than anything else. The council has appointed a popular major reformer Ulrich Zwingli as their leader, but they are unwilling to make changes which will offend surrounding cantons with whom they trade and do commerce.

The term Anabaptist, I find, means Rebaptizer. These people are soon called by that name. Persecution immediately follows, killing some of these men, scattering others, and the Anabaptist movement is born. Its hallmarks are: Christianity as a matter of personal choice/faith (as evidenced by believer's baptism), nonviolence, separation from the world, and separation of church and state. In place of government enforcement of religious practices, Christians are accountable to one another for living a holy life.

Baptists in the United States eventually split up into the Southern Baptists and the Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery. The Northern Baptists become known as the American Baptists. In the early 20th century controversy over orthodoxy and modernism, the fundamentalist movement is born. A fundamentalist group splits off from the American Baptists in 1932 to become the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, or the GARBC Baptists.

Thus through millions of chances and permutations, in 1964, a young girl decides to give an extra hour to God that week, and go with her grandfather to a GARBC Baptist Revival Meeting... and we complete the circle.