Shared Triumph
By Carlson Wakefield
July 12, 2024

When Krystal Minatta found out she was pregnant with her daughter Starla at age 19, many of the people closest to her encouraged her to consider ending the pregnancy. “I wanted to be a doctor my whole life, and I had people saying, ‘you’ll never go to school’ and ‘this pregnancy is going to ruin your life,’” said Minatta. “I said, ‘Absolutely not.’”
On May 4, over two decades later, Minatta walked across the commencement stage in JBU’s Bill George Arena to receive her nursing program diploma. Her daughter, Starla Lawrence, wasn’t sitting in the audience. Instead, she was on the edge of the stage, waiting to hear her name called to claim her nursing diploma.
Minatta started her college journey as a full-time mom and a full-time employee. “I got accepted into Grand Canyon University’s College of Nursing and did my prerequisites in a very short period of time,” she said. “I was taking 20 credit hours, working 60 hours a week and trying to be a parent to three daughters. It was nuts.”
However, due to issues at home, Minatta had to put her education on hold. After separating from her then-husband and getting remarried, Minatta became a stay-at-home mom. “I knew I wanted to go back to school, and my husband supported that, but I kept finding reasons not to do it,” she said.
In 2018, Lawrence decided to pursue a nursing degree at a school in Arizona while Minatta’s husband started working with Sam’s Club’s Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the family moved from Chicago to Arkansas. “After my first semester, I was away from my family and not doing well mentally, and my mom’s like, ‘Oh, we’re moving to Arkansas,’ and I said, ‘Oh no we’re not, that’s funny,’” Lawrence said. “But during my Thanksgiving break, I helped my mom move from Chicago to NWA and fell in love with it.”
Lawrence moved to Arkansas with Minatta and the rest of the family and took a semester off to reacclimate and center herself. Then, she enrolled in Northwest Arkansas Community College (NWACC) to complete her nursing prerequisites. Minatta also applied to NWACC but was denied.
“I got my first decline, and it crushed me,” she said. “I just kept pushing forward and applied for the second time, but I got declined again. I thought maybe God didn’t want me to go into medicine.”
In an unexplainable turn of events, at five o’clock that same evening, Minatta got a call from an admissions counselor at JBU inquiring if she was interested in attending.
“I can only attribute it to being a God thing because I said, ‘There’s no way I can afford it,’” she said. “But the counselor asked me what my grades were like. I said I was a straight-A student and that my education meant a lot. By the end of the day, everything was in place.”
But her daughter’s decision to attend JBU wasn’t as easy as Lawrence had been working through tough questions regarding her faith. “I wasn’t questioning it necessarily, but just trying to understand it,” she said. But thanks to Minatta pushing her to try JBU, Lawrence finally agreed.
Lawrence and Minatta graduated in the same cohort, spending countless hours together studying and being college friends while maintaining their relationship as mother and daughter.
“One of the greatest things that we learned was how to be students together,” Minatta said.
Lawrence and Minatta will also start their careers together at Northwest Medical Center in Springdale, Arkansas.
“It wasn’t even a conscious thing,” Lawrence said, laughing. “She [Minatta] wanted to be at a different hospital, and I wanted to be in a different department, but it’s all God’s plan, and I need to follow him.”
The same child that Minatta was told would ruin her life ended up graduating from university with her, and now they both want to serve others with the gift and education God gave them.
“Not only was my life not ruined, but neither was hers,” Minatta said. “Here she is, thriving and succeeding, and I couldn’t be prouder of both of us. The glory is entirely God’s. After everything he has done for us and given to us, we seek to glorify him as we serve him in our communities by serving those who need the skills he blessed us with.”