The Scenic Route
My faith journey has felt like taking the scenic route. Some of the roads have been pretty out of-the-way, others have not been the ones I intended to take but have gotten me to where I needed to be, and others have turned a corner into an unexpectedly breathtaking view.
Church was one of my first human experiences (I was born on a Tuesday, and my parents took me to the church they were serving in northern British Columbia the following Sunday), and has remained one of the most consistent things in my life ever since. As a pastor’s kid, I spent my early childhood living next door to a church, which felt like an extension of our home – as the parsonage was in some ways an extension of the church. I became a follower of Jesus in Sunday school (we had moved to North Dakota by then) when I was quite young, so my memory of it is very vague. At age 11, I was baptized by my dad in a country church in Nebraska.
When I was 13, my parents became missionaries, moving from the middle of cornfields to a city in Nigeria, where they served as house parents at a hostel for students boarding at an international mission school. This was a pretty sharp curve in the road, but I soon made friends. My classmates were of other religions – Muslim, Hindu, Sikh – as well as a variety of Christian traditions, and from all over the world. The exposure to so many people whose backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs were very different from mine made me look at my own faith in a new way; instead of challenging my faith, it gave me a better understanding and deeper appreciation for the Gospel, as well as a broader perspective as school chapel services included people from Lutheran, Baptist, Reformed, Mennonite, and many other traditions. My faith became something I thought about rather than just took for granted.
Moving back to the United States at age 17 was unexpectedly bumpy, as no one had warned us that culture shock also happens when you’re returning to a parent culture after several years. But church again was a source of consistency. While attending the University of Sioux Falls, where I met Brian, I joined Trinity Baptist Church. Trinity was home to several retired missionaries to Nigeria and Cameroon, including some of my extended family, so I had people who helped me navigate the transition from being a third culture kid living as an expat to living in my “passport country”. Living thousands of miles from my parents in a country that felt very strange to me, it was a great blessing to have such a loving, supportive church family.
Right after Brian and I got married, we moved to Wisconsin, where we served at Memorial Baptist Church. I had intended to teach high school English, but the local district had no openings at the time, and eventually I took over as church secretary “temporarily” (which turned out to be 17 years). A few years after I started working at the church, I also took a position at a ministry to young adults, where my job description was to “find out what needs to be done and do it”; this came to included helping to start a downtown coffee shop, which I managed for three years. Brian worked one night a week at Connect Cafe, and we developed friendships with staff and patrons that still continue after nearly 20 years. After the Cafe closed, some of the young adults who were part of the Cafe community got together weekly for late-night pizza, and it was from these gatherings that a Bible study group emerged, which met at our house for the next seven years. During this time, I was also part of a team that started a small nonprofit called SHARDS, which focused on funding mental health services for people in need, and I served as the administrator for several years. A connection we made through SHARDS, along with conversations with a pastor friend in the Milwaukee area, led a group from Memorial Baptist to start Stone Soup, which shared a meal every Saturday in the parking lot of the local library with anyone who was hungry. Strangers ate together, people who were homeless were an essential part of the team, a feast could appear unexpectedly from a bike basket in the nick of time, and there was somehow always more than enough to go around. It was a little taste of the Kingdom of God.
I never got around to teaching English, but over the years I’ve found that my heart is in nonprofit work, and that I really enjoy the behind-the-scenes details of administration. So a few years after Brian and I moved to Bloomington Normal, after I had gotten settled into new roles in church life at First Baptist (church kitchens have felt like home to me for as long as I can remember) – and then resettled after the pandemic shook up the whole world – when a church member said that she was looking for someone to do some administrative work for her nonprofit counseling practice, I felt a nudge to ask for details. The job description included coordinating the practice’s domestic violence intervention program, which is mostly administrative, but also involves group facilitation and working with student interns. So in a way, I did get around to teaching in the end, though in a different context than I imagined; sometimes we end up on a road that runs parallel to the one we thought we were going to take. I also get to do nonprofit administration, and I get to hang out with young adults.
Throughout the journey, one of the things I’ve learned is that, when I feel the Holy Spirit nudging me to do something, it will usually lead to something bigger, and often something completely unexpected.
