During the summer of 2003 as a fresh graduate from Messiah College with a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing, I helped lead a short term missions trip from my church to Monterrey Mexico with TIME Ministries. It was a great trip and I figured I’d love to go back for a week sometime. A few months after that trip, the missionary director from Monterrey came and visited our church. He showed a picture of the mountains and neighborhood surrounded the church in Monterrey as he talked. My heart started to break while he talked and tears came to my eyes (something that doesn’t often happen after growing up in reserved PA Dutch Lebanon County). I didn’t know why, but I needed to figure it out. What resulted was a lot of prayer and thinking that led to a one week spring trip by myself to Monterrey in 2004 where I felt more at home and more peace and joy than I’d felt anywhere else and was encouraged and strengthened. God really started work in my life revealing that perhaps missions was somewhere he was leading and it was something I could do through his strength. I took a leave of absence from my job at the hospital and spent the summer of 2005 in Mexico because I had to see where it would lead. That summer I saw and felt God in brand new ways. I didn’t know how or why but I truly thought God was leading me to serve Him in Monterrey. Ephesians 3:20-21 states “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever, Amen!” I realized I had never dreamed about what God might have in store for my life or the ways in which I could be used of him. That summer it clicked and I was challenged to dream big for God. That although he wouldn’t have to and I still don’t understand why he wants to; his power in me gives me the confidence to dream amazing dreams of what I can do for him. No matter what anyone else thinks, I can step out in confidence without the fear of what other people think because I am following Him. I returned to Mexico in the summer of 2006 praying that if this was not where God was leading me he would close the door. He didn’t, and through more prayers and some struggling I still felt an overwhelming desire to be in Monterrey, Mexico, to live there, and to do whatever I could through God’s strength to help further His kingdom in Mexico, in the States, and around the world while working for TIME in Monterrey. I went before TIME’s mission board in September of 2006 and am currently living in Monterrey and working with the Elim churches in and around Monterrey. My prayer is that I would be available to be used of God in whatever way he sees fit.