The best place to start any story is at the beginning. And the beginning of this story goes back many years. Clear back to a sunny October morning in Arkadelphia, AR in the year 2000. That was the moment when God had a little conversation with me that went something like this.

“Will you serve me overseas?”

“YES.”

And that’s where this all began. At that point I didn’t know where, when, or what I’d be doing, but I knew that God was asking me to go. After some time spent praying and searching the internet, I found myself pursuing opportunities in Africa. Thus followed applications, meetings, interviews, more applications, more interviews, graduating college, lots of personal stuff thrown in, support raising, three weeks of orientation, an exhausting and emotional plane ride, and then there I was in Nigeria, West Africa about eight months after that initial conversation I had with God.

I spent the next year teaching 9th and 10th grade English at Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria. It was an incredibly difficult year but profoundly transformational. And while I was struggling through cross-cultural living and my first year of teaching (American curriculum in a non-American setting poses it’s own set of challenges) and national instability, I fell in love with Africa. They told me, “Africa gets in your blood,” and they weren’t wrong. I also discovered that maybe the classroom wasn’t where God was asking me to impact young people.

This discovery sent me on the path over the next several years that I couldn’t have planned, but all the while I was still dreaming of returning to Africa. My time spent with the kids who were boarding at Hillcrest while their parents served as missionaries or in business in other parts of the country, sparked a desire to stand in that gap. To support those families as a house parent (or hostel parent or dorm parent) tugged at my heart and I knew it was something I wanted to do with my family. But when? where? how?

In 2005 when I moved to Bartlesville, OK and got engaged, of course I began making plans. I figured we’d stick around for two more years and then head overseas. Yeah, that isn’t at all what happened.

Instead, it was six more years with K-Life, three kids, another house, and seven years as the youth pastor at the church.

In all that time and change, though, my heart was still beating for Africa, and in the meantime I began pursuing what it might look like for our family to move to a school called Rift Valley Academy (RVA). Adam humored me by listening to me read blog posts from parents of kids at RVA or watching the same videos on youtube over and over. He even went along as I began the application process and set up preliminary meetings. But his heart was not there. So I waited and prayed and waited and prayed.

Just over a year ago, Adam came home from work and said, “I think it’s time we go to Africa.” I tried to contain my excitement in case he wasn’t being serious, but over the next several months we filled out applications and had interviews and filled out more applications and traveled to Atlanta for a week of connecting with our sending mission, Africa Inland Mission, which ended in an invitation to step into the role of dorm parents at Rift Valley Academy!

This is real. We are finally doing it! Even as I type this I’m a little amazed that we’re actually going to Kenya to live as dorm parents. God planted that desire in my heart as a young 20-something single girl, and I am so grateful for the journey He’s taken me on to prepare me to step into the role of dorm mom to a bunch of teenagers. I am so much better equipped now. God always knows what He is doing, and we need only trust Him to lead us in the way we should go.

“Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out.