My Education at the Passport Seminary

I had my feet on the dashboard of my husband’s (then fiancé) truck and in my head I was running the numbers. As the sun shined on my legs, tears started down my face. I had just realized that I was going to have to drop out of seminary because we didn’t have the money.

We were broke when we got married. Both of us in grad school, and both of us with part time jobs. As we merged our lives and bank accounts together, it became clear that we couldn’t eat and both be in grad school at the same time.

The good news is, his tuition was covered. His grandfather did that for all the grandkids, and we were grateful. Otherwise neither of us would’ve been able to go. So our two part-time jobs got us a small apartment, one fancy home-cooked meal a week, and a whole lot of sandwiches.

But no seminary for me.

I remember one incidence when I was young, maybe five or six years old — maybe younger, when my mom walked into the living room. I had an open Bible on the square, black coffee table and imaginary friends around it. She asked what I was doing. I said I was preaching.

Something in me knew even then that some kind of ministry would be part of my life (though I’d argue we all are meant for that too), but for most of that life, I leaned more into my talents than my callings. I went to journalism school and dreamed of being a writer at a magazine, until God caught my attention and affection more deeply again my last semester of college.

Suddenly I knew, I had to go to seminary. I turned down two job offers and followed even though I didn’t know what kind of ministry I was there for. So you can imagine my disappointment when just a year and a half later I realized that it wasn’t in the cards at all anymore … before I got clarity on that ministry or the education I thought necessary to put it into practice.

A couple of years later, another heartbreak would lead me closer to that calling in a different way. My husband had graduated and landed his dream job at the time. We celebrated with a new tv and a new place. We changed apartments to one without roaches (or at least roaches with the decency to not stick around during the day when we were looking).

Before his training was even over, he was let go with the words, “You’re just not a great fit with our culture,” and “It’s not personal.” He was devastated, and I was shocked. I had only heard how much he was enjoying the work, and now it was 10:00 am on a weekday and he’s the one in tears feeling the worry of what’s next and how will we handle it — alongside the pain of being let go.

Like any other person, I go into crisis solving mode. I hit up every job board I could find, and I applied for every job I thought I might be capable of doing. Though my current job was part-time cheerleading coach, I still had my writing and leadership skills from college. So I went with it.

One place I looked at was the seminary’s job board for students. There was a small missions organization in the area that had an opening for a part-time assistant to do some editing, some graphic design, and mostly a lot of printing and cutting promotional materials in-house.

In my desperation, I applied, and it turned out to be the job that changed my life.

I hadn’t traveled much, let alone for missions, but I always desperately wanted to. In sixth grade, we had an assignment to write a letter to a friend about our summer. It was really just to practice the letter writing format, but I decided it was my chance to tell about what I wished had happened.

While the other kids were done in mere minutes, I was pulling out encyclopedias and writing about a castle in Germany, a broadway show I saw in New York City, and no doubt some other locale that little girls dream of. That heart for travel was always in me. I’m not sure how it got there, but there I was.

As I got older, I traveled some — but I decided to forego studying abroad for finishing college faster. And I always found a reason to delay travel for something that seemed more appropriately ambitious.

It was purely God’s grace that found me a job in an environment where the two merged beautifully. Before I knew it, I had become the copywriter and part of my job description was to travel the world a couple of times per year and capture what God was doing through the missions organization I worked with.

It was this travel that changed my life and altered my faith forever.

I could no longer be the same Southern Baptist woman that I had grown up to be. I had to come to terms with what I was seeing, experiencing, and learning from our brothers and sisters overseas. I had to untangle within myself what was cultural to America and what was global and biblical.

It turns out that I didn’t get the education I wanted, but I got the education I needed. One where my only textbooks were a passport, a Bible, and the lives of believers living in what felt like a different time and space.

I can’t say that I’ve come to a completion of untangling my faith from my culture or from everything else, but that’s exactly why I am writing these words now. These are the words I hope to use to untangle my brain and to inspire yours to think bigger than where you are … to catch God’s vision for the world … and to see just how beautiful and powerful faith is when you see it through the eyes of someone else who lives somewhere else.

I want to take you with me into the stories of the people and experiences that changed me and the truths I’ve learned along the way.

As we journey together around the world, my hope is that these stories and lessons both challenge and encourage you, because that’s exactly what the people in them did for me. But I also hope that these stories don’t leave you cynical or hardened — though they may for a time as they also did for me.

Instead I hope you find your faith stronger and your heart more open than before … and most of all, your vision for what the Kingdom can be on earth even more thrilling and compelling.