From a young age, younger than five, I was in love with the globe, with language, and with its many cultures. I would beg my parents to buy me atlases and globes, and to put me in language schools. I noticed things about other cultures and nationalities that most people wouldn’t. My favorite pages in children’s encyclopedias and atlases were always the anthropology ones. I would read them over and over, fascinated by simple articles about early humans. 

I was raised in a Christian home, but when we moved to Canada, I slowly started drifting away. I never doubted that Christ was Lord; I just wasn’t walking with Him. I went on to study International Relations, Linguistics, and Cultural Anthropology because of my deep love for the humanities and social sciences. I never imagined that global NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and international affairs could be connected with faith. In fact, I often scrunched my nose at the thought of working for a religious humanitarian group or faith-based NGO whenever I was job-hunting after graduating.

Fast forward to 2019, when I moved to South Korea to teach English. Part of that decision came from frustration, since it was almost impossible to find a job in my field in Calgary without a master’s degree. I felt lost, aimless, and confused, watching everyone around me seem to thrive in their passions while I couldn’t even get a job in mine. I knew I eventually wanted to pursue my Masters, but I struggled intensely in my undergrad, so I had zero faith in myself that I could ever be a high achiever (part of my spiritual attack story). I longed to go abroad again, as I had ever since we moved to Canada when I was a child. So I decided to take the leap and teach English overseas. I would have rather not gone abroad this way as it wasn’t related to my field, but it would at least get me abroad, which was what I longed for. 

During my very first week in Korea, I began to have a series of intense spiritual experiences. Alone on the other side of the world, far from my family, I had many radical encounters with God (and demons). After years, maybe even a decade, of spiritual attacks and searching, I came alive in faith. My conversion was real and life-changing. I was shocked that I had never before seen how my faith and my love for the humanities, global development, and culture could be connected. God had finally removed the scales from my eyes and radically transformed my heart. 

Over the next few years, as I continued to have deep encounters with God and walked through ongoing spiritual warfare, I realized I could no longer separate my faith from my passion for culture, language, and global work. I knew that whatever God was calling me to do, it had to involve global missions or faith-based humanitarian work. That same year, in a radical way only God could arrange, I was offered a fellowship at a Christian humanitarian NGO that fights human trafficking, all while I was still living in South Korea during COVID. It felt like confirmation that the Lord was shaping me for His purpose.

A few years later, at the beginning of last year, after a series of back-to-back trials in 2023, I knew God was ushering me out of South Korea, my spiritual home, where everything had begun. It was clear that He had brought me there so that I could truly come to know Him. Now, I am back in Canada, working at a Christian international NGO focused on disaster relief and global development, all for the sake of the Gospel. It couldn’t be more fitting. I am also studying at Tyndale for my master’s in Global Mission. Looking back, I am so grateful I didn’t pursue a master’s earlier, because I likely would have gone down a purely secular path in international affairs or anthropology. God truly redirected me toward something so much better—the gospel-centred version of what I had always loved. I just cannot see a future in the humanities if it’s divorced from the Gospel. 

Still, there are many days, like today, when I wrestle with doubt about what God is doing or whether I will ever live abroad again. It is hard for me to be in Canada. I ache to be overseas. I have always felt somewhat empty and cloudy-headed here, yearning for something more. But now, with a renewed heart and mind in Christ, I have a different perspective. I have a mission, a purpose, and a goal. My life verse is Acts 20:24 which is the year that I moved back to Canada to inaugurate this next training session of my life, possibly for Global Missions. (“However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.” Acts 20:24). 

Whenever doubts come, I remind myself of all the miracles and supernatural testimonies the Lord has done for me. I remind myself to let go of my own dreams and desires, which so often try to take precedence over God’s will, and to become an empty vessel He can fill. When I do that, He always fills me with better desires than I could have imagined. I never wanted to move to South Korea to teach English. That wasn’t my plan. I wanted to use my degree to work abroad in my field. But God had other plans. Infinitely better ones. Whenever I doubt, I think about how the Lord prepared good works for me before the beginning of the world (Ephesians 2:10). I think about everything He has done for me: how He saved me from sin, allowed me to experience an insight to how real the spiritual world is for my own spiritual training, I think about how radically I was saved and give Him the glory, and how the years of supernatural experiences (though often terrifying) drew me closer to Him and His Word. I think about how my love for languages, cultures, and the world, and my deep desire to see it transformed by the Gospel, are likely gifts from above. God made me this way for a reason, and I rarely meet others who share the same mix of passions. So I will continue to trust God in this season, even though part of me longs to be somewhere else, already living out the mission. I know His ways are higher. He is training me and preparing me. My job, as His child and servant, is to trust, obey, and abide.

So, with that—welcome to my blog on Globe & Gospel: Global Mission. I haven’t been on a mission trip yet, but I have no doubt that I will someday. And when I do, I plan to use this space to document and share all that I witness God doing across the Globe, for His Gospel & His Glory.