God's Way Is Best

     My teen years were spent preparing for a career in first response. Started out wanting to become an EMT, developed a love for the fire service and switched to that, but by the time I was nineteen I ultimately felt called to law enforcement. This was a dream that had evolved over time but at its root remained the same: to help others in an immediate, obvious way. It was very clear to me that law enforcement was where God wanted me to be, and I did everything right up to actually applying to the police academy – the one thing holding me back was that my father did not feel peace about it. It was a huge spiritual struggle for me but the LORD convicted me of continuing submissive to the authority he had placed over me – my parents – and that unless they could give me their blessing, I couldn’t do it. I’ll probably write more about that but we’ll leave it there for now.

     I made that decision during the summer of 2018, and I was still pretty shaky in my resolve to it when I booked a visit to my sister Rebecca and her family in bush Alaska that winter. On my previous summer Alaska trips, I had fallen in love with the state, and I wanted to experience what everyone thinks of when you say Alaska – the snow!

     I arrived in St Marys, Alaska on the 27^th of December, after a lot of travelling which included an overnight at a friend’s house in Anchorage then a several-hour flight delay at the airport there. It was quite the adventure, being the first time I had flown by myself, and I loved every minute of it. Of course I didn’t know it then, but that date would go down in personal history as the day that changed my life. That being because it was when I met Job Hale, this pilot guy my sister had talked about for a few years, who would come bring them groceries and help with the ministry and things. She had described him as thoughtful and sweet, and we had even joked around about matchmaking him with my twin sister (at the time she was interested in aviation). When Rebecca mentioned that he was spending Christmas with them I had the fleeting thought that I’d like to meet him, but he was supposed to be gone once I got there so I thought nothing more of it. Through a series of events he ended up not being gone when I got there, and so it was him who handed me a pair of my sister’s winter boots to put on my ice-cold, sneaker-clad feet at the St Marys airport (he had come with my brother-in-law and niece to pick me up).

     Without going into the whole story (some other day;)), that was what set the wheels in motion to eventually land me where I am right now: living in a rural Alaskan village as a preacher’s wife, mother to a little boy, and doing the million other things that I find myself involved in. I never in the whole wide crazy world would have imagined all of this happening to me and it certainly was not in the picture I had drawn up for my life. But the prevailing theme has been, God’s way is BEST.

* me on my "first moose hunt" - January of 2019, I tagged along to watch my brother-in-law subsistence hunt for his family. That was an awe-inspiring experience.