In my first passport picture, I am perched on my mother’s lap, a tuft of hair coming to a point at the top of my head. My mother is twenty-one. Her hair is in a neat beehive, she wears cat-eye glasses, large metallic ball earrings, and a wide smile.

I traveled internationally for the first time when I was six months old. We flew across the Atlantic to join my dad, who was stationed in Norway during the Vietnam War. I went to preschool in Oslo, and as a four-year-old had a larger Norwegian vocabulary than my parents. We moved back when I was four and a half, and over the next seven years, we were economic migrants, my parents U-Hauling our growing family—I am the eldest of four— as my father worked in the mobile home industry. We moved in and out of cities and towns in Florida and Georgia, to South Dakota and Wyoming, from Texas to Ohio, and finally, to Indiana.

We usually received gifts from the welcome wagon; I remember a growing collection of shoe horns and plastic combs. We often needed help. Sometimes we received gifts like the Thanksgiving turkey from next door neighbors in South Dakota and the Baptist pastor who added our isolated mobile home to his Sunday morning route. Other times, we drifted in and out, managing on our own. Nowadays, when my family gets together, we sometimes compare memories of what happened where and when; we try to get it all straightened out.

I was twelve when we moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a few months into seventh grade. In those days Fort Wayne was going the way of rust belt cities as stable companies moved out or closed up, and people slid out of the middle class. My family struggled with the outer pressure of the economic downturn of the eighties alongside the inner reality of my dad’s alcoholism.

I was tall for my age, with long brown hair and hand me downs, shy and awkward after all that displacement. I never completely settled into that comfortable feeling of belonging, of home. At fourteen, I started to walk over to a nearby church on Sunday mornings.

Epworth United Methodist Church had wooden pews with kneelers and a several-story-high stained glass window of the resurrected Jesus in the front of the sanctuary--his arms held out in what I saw as a gesture of welcome. This bright and beautiful image of Jesus was the backdrop every Sunday to the words of Jesus preached, sung, and prayed. I stayed. I found my home in the church, in the safe arms of the resurrected Christ.

In college, I held the conviction that working cross-culturally would be my vocation. I moved away for a teaching job in Houston, Texas. Scott had spent four years in Paris and wanted to work in the French-speaking world, so it seemed like a natural thing to learn another language, move to another continent and culture. We lived in Paris for a year where I went to language school, and then moved to Gabon, an African country with the Atlantic as its western border and the equator running through its forest. Gabon was to be a short-term assignment—three or four years. We planned to have children there, to build our home from the inside out before we would move somewhere else in the French-speaking world, while the children were still young, and truly settle down.

I had a plan for my life. My plan did not include years of infertility in a place where infertile women were seen as cursed. It did not include eleven years in Gabon when the work my husband was doing imploded after three years, and he had to start again. It did not include burnout and mental health struggles. It did not include moving to France, a place where I had often felt foolish and humbled as a language learner. It did not include moving back to the US when the dollar continued to fall, and we were out of solutions for our daughter’s struggles with the French school system. And it definitely did not include the years of waiting rooms and that would last for years.

I wrestled with fairness and a dark night of the soul during those years of infertility in Gabon when God seemed distant. I was eventually able to not only acknowledge God’s love, but to feel it and walk in it. Though the hard places in the journey since then have sometimes felt like the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23, I have experienced God’s presence, beside me, around me, and behind me.

Whether it’s coaching, speaking, writing, or leading retreats, my work flows from my experience of God through this journey of life.