Missions has always been a part of my life. My grandparents were missionaries in Germany and Spain when my mother was a child. I grew up learning about other countries and cultures, studying Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, and when I was 9, my whole family went on a missions trip with our church to Mexico.
I loved it all, but my childhood dreams were first to be an archaeologist (I wanted to dig up the Parthenon…) and then to be a heart surgeon. Until I was 11 or 12 and I read a book about Mark Buntain. I don’t remember which book, but I think it was “Mark,” by Ron Hembree. What I mostly remember is that the story of the devastation in lives in Calcutta stirred me deeply. I wanted to do something like that, give people hope in hopelessness.
I spent the next year or so begging God to let me be a missionary, never recognizing that intense desire as a call itself. All I knew was that it was a Christian’s responsibility to be submitted to God’s will for her life, and I really wanted His will to be missions. Thankfully, He soon settled the question in a service at Glacier Bible Camp, and since then, my whole life has been headed one place: missions.
Missions, however, is a very broad field. It can be in any country, including the United States; it can be doing anything, from preaching on the street to fixing airplanes. The journey in the last twenty years has been figuring out where and what.
Unlike the initial call, which was sort of all-of-the-sudden, the rest of it has definitely been a journey of gradual discovery. Originally I thought Central or South America would be the place for me, since I’d been studying Spanish most of my life, but after a missions trip in high school was rerouted from Colombia to Romania, I discovered that Europe was the place for me. Originally I thought I wanted to work with children, but after being a nanny for nine months after college, I learned that that was not the direction my life ought to go.
Over eight years of theological education, I learned that I was made for learning and teaching. After five weeks in a small Evangelical Bible college in Osijek, Croatia, I realized that the whole world comes to small Bible colleges in Europe. I met Croatians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Macedonians, all gathered for one purpose: theological education for ministry. I want to be the person who gives them that education.
Over the last few years I’ve become passionate about this. And now…here I am.
