My sister, who is two years older than me, was converted at that time, although the word converted meant nothing to me. I just knew there was a change in her. She was reading the Bible, and I thought that was odd. I kept asking her all kinds of questions.

As a new Christian, she didn’t have the answers or know how to deal with this sister who kept asking her so many questions. So, in frustration, she said to me, “Look, there’s somebody speaking at a mission in town. I think you should go to that. I’ll take you.”

The speaker was John Wesley White, an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. For the first time I began to understand what it meant to become a Christian, what it meant to be a follower of Jesus Christ. I started to understand that we were sinners and that we needed to be cleansed.

As John Wesley White spoke, I thought, “This makes sense. I know this makes sense.” And when he gave the invitation, I stood up immediately. I knew that I wanted this. And I knew what I’d seen in my sister.

In the years that followed, a teacher in my school had a phenomenal influence on me. He explained what happened when I accepted Christ, and he encouraged me to get involved in a small group at the school so I could grow in my faith.

I began to understand that God had a purpose for my life. God was interested in me. I was part of His family, and this was the beginning of a journey. God was teaching me what it meant to be His child.

Around the same time, a number of my friends at school were also converted, and they came from backgrounds similar to mine. We had a fantastic sense of fellowship and a lack of fear to talk about what had happened to us.
That was a pivotal time in our lives when God moved into that school. He changed people’s hearts, including the person who is now the bishop in the Church of Ireland, and the impact is still being felt.

After high school, I went to college to become a teacher of physical education, and at the end of my training, I applied to an organization that sends young people to Third World countries to work in their area of specialty. They sent me to Pakistan. My friends thought I was mad. No one else was doing this, and it was so unlike me. I wasn’t a particularly adventurous person, yet I knew my desire was from God.

I taught in a school in Karachi for two years. It is a Muslim country, and it’s not easy as a woman to work there. About 80 to 90 percent of my pupils were Muslim. It was a great growing experience as a Christian, because I was working and living in a country where Christians were a tiny minority, and most of them were missionaries.

After I returned from Karachi, I continued to teach and I met Norman, the man who would become my husband. We had three sons who are now grown. We live on the north coast of Northern Ireland, and over the past 10 years we’ve become involved in a work called Exodus, which is a work among young people in the north of Northern Ireland, though we have now expanded to Belfast.

One part of our journey as a Christian couple has been that our middle son took a detour from his faith when he was 16 or 17. He decided he didn’t want anything to do with what we were involved with, and he walked away from God. He went off to the University of Aberdeen, which is probably about as far away as he could get within the British Isles.

This was a difficult time for us because we were involved in this Exodus youth work, where kids were being discipled in their faith. Yet we had a son who was far away from God.

But God graciously brought him back. One day, about 5 o’clock in the morning in a London nightclub, he felt God saying, “What are you doing here?” That was the beginning of his walk back toward God.

Often we have met other parents who have been in that situation. When we say, “I know what you’re talking about; we’ve been there,” it opens up amazing conversations with people because their hearts are beating the same way as ours. We know what they’re talking about when they speak of the heartbreak of seeing a child walk away from God, and it gives us amazing opportunities to encourage them.

The Celebration of Hope in April came at a time when there was a downturn in the economy of Northern Ireland. This time last year, in this province, house prices were rising sky high. Within the last four or five months they’ve completely stopped, and so a lot of people are suddenly asking, “What are we putting our faith in?”

I was delighted to be involved in the Celebration. It has made me think back to when I was converted at 15, going to something and not really being sure what it was about. I am still in contact with a number of my Christian friends from those years. It’s time for people to be faced with eternal questions, to be given an opportunity to commit their lives to Jesus Christ. I’m delighted that many hundreds made that decision.