Lately I have reflected a lot on the circumstances that built up to my decision to follow God to the other side of the world, and I've come up with four significant ways that God subtly guided my entire life toward this path:

1. God blessed me with the opportunity to visit Tijuana Mexico with a group from my church on three separate occasions, each of these reinforcing my passion for Missions and my desire to serve others with my gifts, even though I was still figuring out what my gifts are.

2. God has nurtured in me a passion for design. He gave me eyes to see the beauty of the world around me, and desire to contribute to it. This developed my interest in architecture, and for much of my life, I wanted to become an architect. However, as I neared the end of high school, God gently closed the door of architecture and redirected my passion for design towards structural engineering. 

3. God created me with an analytical/math-y, and placed me in an environment where I grew up around several other engineers - most notably my own dad. This gift with numbers is how God led me from architecture to structural engineering. But as I was entering university, I had no idea how God could use an engineer for His kingdom - I assumed that God's plan for me was just to get a good stable engineering job, and be generous with my money - An assumption that stuck around until September 2023.

4. Recently, God has filled me with curiosity and excitement about the missionary lifestyle. In 2022 I read a book called God's Smuggler about a man with unshakable faith who spent his whole life smuggling Bibles into closed countries, past borderguards with giant machine guns who wouldn't hesitate to shoot Christians. Then I read another book called Ordinary Radical about a community that chose to depend on God for everything, and live purely by love instead of conforming to the regular individualist/capitalist modern way of life. And after reading these 2 books, I wanted SO BADLY to have faith like them. Around the same time, I learned that several of my mentors (staff of the university Christian community, Power to Change) make a living by support raising; depending on God to provide for their financial needs. And even though I was halfway through an engineering degree, I began to seriously consider abandoning a career in engineering to work for Power to Change.