HOW I GOT TO CHIANGMAI
It’s been 11 years since I moved to Chiangmai, Thailand. It’s now home for me, (along with Pennsylvania and Virginia, of course!) I remember when Scott Ross visited with a CBN group soon after I arrived and said, “Girl, you’ve landed!” An epiphany! I have felt at home here since the first moment I landed. But all that came as a surprise.

Rewind to 1973 and Bible school. I’d just heard a sermon about how we’d better be careful not to tell God we didn’t want to do something or go somewhere – because it just might be the place God wanted us to be. At the time, my relationship with God was based more on fear than on love and my interpretation of the sermon was that whatever it was that I really wanted to do, most certainly God would not want me to do it.

I distinctly remember leaving the auditorium with a few friends and telling them that God better not ask me to go to Southeast Asia (particularly, of course, to Vietnam or Cambodia) because I wouldn’t go! I had no interest in Asia and with the wars always in the news at that time I was frightened. I pictured myself riding a bike beside the rice paddies, a single woman in a foreign land, doing a job I didn’t want to do. I wanted none of that. God must have laughed, knowing that I hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.

Back to the future—to the late 90s. A difficult time in my life. I had left CBN in 1995 and was working at the Travel Channel in Atlanta. My mom was sick with ovarian cancer. I felt alone and scared, discouraged about my life and about a job that I didn’t really enjoy. Then something good happened. I was laid off. The Travel Channel was up for sale and they couldn’t afford to keep the staff at the same levels. With 6 months severance pay, I was able to move home and be with my mom for the last two years of her life. I was also able to travel a bit, visiting my sister Kristen in Tanzania and joining 2 friends for a tour of Italy and Greece.

For a time it was great. I was so happy to have that time with my mom and I enjoyed working around the house, something I’d never really done. Painting the walls, restoring old furniture, planting flowers in the garden. All very therapeutic. But I didn’t know what it was I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was burned out from my many years in production. Still, I applied to all sorts of broadcasting want ads. I don’t know if I got more than one response to all the resumes I sent out. With 20 years of experience in TV production, I was discouraged and beginning to doubt that God had a good plan for me.

Then I wrote to a friend at CBN to congratulate him on his recent promotion and asked him to keep me in mind should any jobs open up in the international division. It wasn’t long before one did open up – CBN WorldReach needed a production trainer who could travel to all the new offices around the world and train foreign staff. I said yes and began to work on curriculum. Within a few weeks, I got a second call from CBN. Was I interested in taking on an additional short-term project, to produce a pilot program for broadcast in Thailand? Yes, most definitely, I was!

What I assumed would be a short-term assignment and a few trips to Thailand turned into eleven years…and counting. The happiest and most fulfilling years of my life!