My life needed redirection

As a burnt out special education teacher, I was desperate for anything different. At this point, I was wondering if maybe I was too desperate.

“What do you want to do after you graduate?”

I laughed nervously. I had been asked this several times during my senior year of high school, and I had no clue what I wanted to do. And graduation was just a few months away!

Every day, I am reminded of the power of God. Experiencing God's love and grace in my life began when I was born. When I came into the world, my lungs collapsed. I was rushed down to the ICU and given oxygen through tubes in my chest. While my mother was in a hospital room, my father was in the waiting area, hoping everything would be okay. After some time the doctor came out, gave my father a hug, and told him that I didn’t make it. My lungs had stopped working, and there was no sign of life. My father then told the doctor that day, "No matter what happens, God is still good."

Growing up, I loved worship and music. In the ninth grade, I bought a guitar so that I could create my own sound, my own worship for God, and not just sing along with someone’s CD. Although I tried (unsuccessfully) to lead worship a couple times my senior year, I didn’t really have any aspirations to be the next Chris Tomlin or Hillsong United. However during my DTS, God spoke clearly to me through my school leader that He was calling me to be a worship leader, which set me on a journey that would change my life.

Every day we are bombarded with a seemingly endless onslaught of self-help mantras, get rich quick schemes, and “7 steps to becoming a better you” trivialities, all of which seem to be numbing our collective ability to actually interact as humans. If you take a minute to look up from your cellular device and simply observe how everyone else around you is totally absorbed by their cellular device, it’s actually kind of harrowing.

In 2012 I reluctantly attended the School of Evangelism (SOE) at YWAM Tyler, which traveled to Greece, Germany, and France for outreach. You see this school was part of the launching in becoming a missionary; however, I had no desire or plan to do that at all. I was back and forth with God about what He wanted me to do in the future, but because I love Jesus and because I wanted to honor Him, I obeyed and did this school.

In July of 2015, David retired from working forty-five years in the IT world. Our grandchildren were moving away, and we were still healthy with plenty of active years ahead of us. With a wide-open schedule, one question loomed in our minds: what do we do now? We had lived typical American lives focused on our family. When missionaries came through our area, we had always been supportive but never thought about missions for ourselves. Upon retiring, we knew it was important to spend this next season of our lives serving the Lord but were still very unsure of what that would look like.