A year earlier, I was attending the morning service at my church when God first planted the idea of missions in my heart. I had attended an open luncheon that day hosted by seasoned missionaries from Chad, and during the meeting, the missionaries challenged each person to seriously consider quitting their jobs to pursue missions in places where most missionaries don’t even go—the unreached, the unengaged. I was shocked. No one had ever challenged me like that before or told me of billions who have little or no access to the gospel. I wish I could say I quit my job, but I didn’t.

It wouldn’t be until a year later that those stirring thoughts culminated after a layoff, a series of conversations with friends, a season finale of The Chosen, and an intense night of soul-searching. It was then that I found myself crying—still with no desire to be a missionary—yet resolved to pursue missions to unreached people until God told me otherwise.​

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Since then, my life has been marked by several mad dashes of wildly unexpected adventure, backdropped by a normal-looking life. Two days after my resolution, I was invited on a short-term mission trip to Africa, leaving in just two weeks. Two weeks after that, I found myself chasing down a FedEx truck in my minivan to get the visa I needed to catch my flight to Africa in three hours!