Yvetta grew up in Santa Rosa, California. When it came time to plan for college, she decided to go to Tulane University in New Orleans. Yvetta’s mother went with her in the fall of 2004 to help her daughter get settled into the dorm.
One afternoon as they were eating beignets (donuts) in a small café in the French Quarter, they heard a musician singing and playing a trumpet outside. As they left the eatery, they stopped to purchase a copy of his CD. The musician asked them if they were Christians. The two women said, “No.” When the musician asked if they would pray with him, Yvetta’s mother was uneasy, but Yvetta said, “Sure.”
Yvetta prayed to accept Jesus as her Savior. “That was when I asked Jesus to come into my life,” she said, “But the prayer in itself would not have made me a believer, because I knew absolutely nothing about Jesus or the gospel, and I had never opened a Bible. But I know that God had been preparing my heart over the previous year to accept Jesus, and that was the moment that He finally grabbed me.”
During new student orientation at Tulane, Yvetta saw a flyer about an InterVarsity large group meeting and decided to find out more about the fellowship. The next week she went to the meeting and even attended a Bible study. “But I was completely lost in the Bible study because I was ‘Bible illiterate,’” Yvetta admitted. “There was a whole language and knowledge that I’d never been exposed to.”
Then Myron Crockett, the InterVarsity staff member at Tulane, and Corrine, an InterVarsity student, spent time with Yvetta, teaching her about Jesus and how to live as a Christian. By the end of her freshman year, Yvetta had settled into the InterVarsity group, and it felt like home to her. “Now I feel comfortable and confident in my faith in Christ. It amazes me to see how far InterVarsity has guided me from a little over a year ago when I prayed with a stranger on a street corner, knowing nothing of the God I was talking to or how he would transform me.”
Before Yvetta could return to Tulane for her sophomore year, the campus was evacuated because of Hurricane Katrina. As she looked for a place to continue her education, Yvetta found that Cal Poly, a local California State University campus, offered an environmental engineering major and would accept her for a year as a special student. Once on campus, Yvetta found the InterVarsity chapter. “They were very welcoming and when I went to the first large group, I realized it felt just like ‘home,’” Yvetta commented. “It was very comforting for me to have InterVarsity, even if it was with different people and a different school. The message and the programs and the style were the same so it felt right to me.”
When asked about her plans for the future, Yvetta said, “I’ve discovered in the last couple of years that my plans are rarely ever God’s plans for me, so all I can do is wait and see. Right now I know that I am not going back to Tulane because they have cut the environmental engineering program. I have not yet been accepted as a permanent student at Cal Poly; but if it is God’s plan, I will finish up at Cal Poly. After college I feel like God is calling me into mission work. I’m tri-lingual, and I have a passion for learning new languages, so I think I might want to go abroad and share God’s love in an area where people have a need for both the gospel and technical things I can share with them, like running water.”
InterVarsity has chapters on campuses across the country offering an opportunity for new Christians to grow in their faith and for older Christians to find fellowship and a place to serve. Yvetta is happy that she found the chapters at Tulane University and Cal Poly.
