Someone on our mailing list sent an e-mail asking about how we ended up where we are and I thought I’d share our story here, too. Some of you may know our story and some of you may not. Or you may just know bits and pieces.  This should give you a pretty good overview of it all.

Toffer and I first met early on in our junior year of high school. I had just moved to Knoxville, TN, from Iowa. I grew up as a Navy brat bouncing between southern CA and northern VA, then to Iowa for five years while my dad got his PhD. Toffer lived in the same house in Powell, just outside of Knoxville, until he went to college.  We definitely had different lives growing up.

In high school we were part of the same group of friends.  Most of us scattered throughout Tennessee for college, but saw each other during holiday breaks.  Not long into our sophomore year of college Toffer and I connected online through e-mail and instant messenger, as was the way at that point in time.  We began chatting more and eventually talked on the phone.  Toffer decided to visit me on his way home (which was a little out of the way) the first weekend in November and our friendship really began to grow at that point.  We continued talking, chatting, and visiting throughout that year, waiting on God’s timing for the next step in our relationship.  I went overseas that summer and after I got back, we both felt like the timing was right.  We had been together at most six months when we started talking about marriage.

The summer between our junior and senior years of college we both went overseas for about six weeks for mission trips.  We knew that summer would be make it or break it for our relationship. We talked two or maybe three times in eight weeks and couldn’t even exchange e-mails.  Yet once we were both home and coherent, we knew that God intended for us to be together and had something different for us than the typical American life.  We got engaged in January 2003 and married in January 2004.  Not very many months into our marriage the idea of our future became frequent conversation.  What did God have for us?

We prayed and talked through most of that year and in November we attended several events that were part of our church’s missions conference.  At that point we felt God leading us to apply to the International Mission Board with the Southern Baptist Convention. We talked about, prayed about it, and looked into some things, but didn’t apply for over a year.  We went through several levels of applications and did an interview a couple months after our second anniversary.  While the International Mission Board ended up not being where God was calling us, one result of that process was Toffer starting seminary.  So, we looked some more.

No particular organization really caught our hearts or seemed to be where God was leading us.  Our pastor began talking about really wanting to invest somewhere internationally. Of course this piqued our curiosity as we love our church family and would have really liked to work with the church somewhere.  We talked with a couple pastors and eventually ended up on the first vision journey to the Dominican Republic in October 2007.  It was quickly apparent to us that the church may be called to the Dominican, but we certainly were not. However, we talked with a missionary there and she suggested HCJB Global to us an option because of Toffer’s skills and talents in media.

We looked into the organization and liked what we found.  Our worship pastor at the time had done a world tour the year before and one of the organizations he worked with happened to be HCJB Global. We asked what he thought and I remember distinctly him telling us to run toward HCJB Global and any work we can do with them.  It was several months of looking at everything and praying before we finally applied mere weeks before Samuel was born in the fall of 2008.  We continued through the process and in April 2009 we interviewed and became missionary appointees with HCJB Global for the Asia-Pacific region.

So far our journey has not been a quick one, but it has always been in God’s timing and His way.  We want to honor Him and glorify Him in all we do, including timing of events in our lives. We look back and see why things happened in the timing and way they did and use that to remember that in our current state, God’s timing is perfect.