Born in Menlo Park, California into a Christian home, Roberta grew up loving Jesus and loving sports! At age seven, when a missionary to Japan, Irene Webster Smith visited her Sunday School class, God did double-duty in her life by bringing her salvation and giving her the desire to become a missionary someday. What struck Roberta to the core was the missionary’s statement, “If I hadn’t gone to Japan, many children might not ever have heard the story of Jesus.” Roberta couldn’t imagine that there were people in the world who had not heard the wonderful story of Jesus. All through her years in school, her favorite place to be was at church camp. She gained her love of the out-of-doors there and through camping experiences with her family each year. This influenced her decision to major in Recreation and Park Management at the University of Oregon.
It was in college that she was able to meet and develop a relationship with students from abroad. Her desire to go abroad as a missionary was heightened. She determined that even if God wanted her to quit college in order to go as a missionary, she would be willing. Such immature thinking was proof of her determination but not of God’s way!
God still hadn’t seemed to open the doors by the end of college so she got her first job in Pomona California at a state hospital for mentally disabled. For six years Roberta worked as a Recreation Therapist, teaching the mentally disabled to swim, bowl, run, camp, and SMILE! She became a specialist-of-sorts with the mentally disabled who were also visually impaired, helping them to become more mobile, and conducting seminars for nursing staff on the subject.
Moving to the distant town of Pomona was quite difficult for her but before long, she was able to see and be assured that God was still at the helm. She began to attend Pomona First Baptist Church where she found out that there was a fledgling program of outreach to international students. For the next seven years she helped assist Maureen Brians, the minister to international students. A Sunday school class was started to meet special needs of internationals, a calling program, summer camp and a yearly banquet featuring an evangelistic speaker. What great training it was! Twice during that time, there were opportunities to do volunteer work in India. On the 2nd trip Roberta was confronted with several problems all at once; wanting to go to India, when the fact was that the Indian government was granting fewer visas to missionaries; insisting that God would only use her skills in recreation therapy on the field; feeling the need to be more dependent on God, rather than on her own occupational skills.
These came to a head as she returned to the USA, with the result that she prayed that God would send her anywhere God wanted and in a position where she would be dependent daily on divine guidance. This prayer was key to her being eventually led to Japan.
After a year at Fuller Seminary (remaining classes were completed on succeeding home assignments with her graduation with an MA Th in June, 1987), she headed with American Baptist Foreign Mission Society to Japan in September, 1977. Was this the right thing for her? Doubts swept over her as she prepared to go. But God soon showed her that it was right. On the second day in Japan, the mission correspondent, Jerry Gano, was showing her how to use the trains. They stopped in to the Ochanomizu Student Center where her language school was. There to her utter surprise and amazement she saw the picture of a very familiar-looking elderly woman displayed in the entryway. It was someone she hadn’t “met” in 21 years, Irene Webster Smith, the founder of the student center! God’s timing is perfect, and if left to us, we would all end up “missing the train.” Roberta knew then that Japan was the right place to be.