The decision to become a missionary and
to join Wycliffe Bible Translators
was actually many years in the making for me.
I was the little girl on the front row at
church thirty years ago who was just
riveted by the stories that were told by
the missionaries that came
to visit, learning about Bible
translation at a very young age.
I had parents who were involved in short term
mission trips 
for as long as I can remember and I
sat under the preaching and teaching
of a grandfather who just saw
so clearly the role of the local church in raising up missionaries and sending
them out.
When I was in my teenage years I
began 
dating David, and my mother at that
time quite prophetically said
that I should invite David to hear
the Wycliffe speakers that were speaking at
our church because she thought that 
he would be interested
and that she could see him doing
something like that someday.
What made that truly prophetic is that
David was not a Christian at the
time
so God has planted a lot of seeds
along the way in both of our lives.
My call into missions and involvement
with Wycliffe really started about
ten years ago when we moved to our
current church in Ohio. It was there
that God really put a desire in my heart for
the first time to know Him
by reading and studying His Word. So for several years after that I just
immersed myself in the Bible. I immersed
myself in the many different books about
the Christian faith. It was then that I felt
Him calling into some kind of ministry. I 
wasn't sure exactly what,
whether it was missions or something
else, but I knew that whatever He was calling
me to
I needed to get more training for. So
in the summer of
2010 I started to take classes online
through Reformed
Theological Seminary. It was in the church
history class
at RTS where I first felt God's specific call
to
Wycliffe and Bibleless people. It was
shortly after that that I saw the video
online
of a New Testament dedication ceremony
in Papua New Guinea
and I remember just seeing the joy and
excitement of those people
as they saw the plane come in, land on
the airstrip,
and to see those boxes opened and
then
to get their Bibles for the first time, 
just how joyful they were and how
fortunate I felt
to have the Bible in not just one
translation but many different
translations that I could go to.
I just remember thinking that everybody
deserves
to have this experience of having the
Bible in their own language, and I felt
really then that 
this might be where God was leading me. So I
remember saying to Kelly,
you know, what about Wycliffe? It was
actually about nine months ago
that we watched God really just
bring all of the
practical concerns of our lives, our
financial concerns,
just logistical things, He just really
brought it all
into harmony and put everything in place,and it was
at that time that we really just had a
strong sense that it was time and that
God was
calling us to join Wycliffe and to take
that step,
and so we did.
