I’ve been a blogger for almost 4 years. It all started when I was bound to first
leave the States as a 19-year-old. I was
in the middle of my biology/religion undergraduate degree at Hamline University
and God led me to take a break. I kept
getting the hankering that I needed to go.
With little clue of what that meant, I signed up for Discipleship Training School in Winnipeg, MB, Canada, a program that would take me through
different facets of God, myself, and people.
It granted me 10 great friends and my first third world experience in
Eastern Uganda.
It was quite the year.
When you finally have time to focus on yourself, when you can actually
soul search, it’s astounding what comes to your mind, your heart. I was able to zone in and actually think
about where I was going in life. Few of
us take the time to do that. We just …
go to college. Because that’s what you
do. Don’t get me wrong, college a good
thing to do – I went back to school when I returned from Canada – but we rarely
think about why we’re doing it.
Knowledge is power. But what will
you do with it?
I went back to school to finish my Bachelor’s because on
DTS, my passion for wildlife was affirmed.
I struggled with loving large cats all my life. Gosh, it even sounds weird now. I had a hard time loving creatures so much
when it’s clear to see that God’s people are hurting. There are invisible children, and involuntary
prostitutes beyond former number. There
are cases of cancer in every family, and malaria and HIV/AIDS are taking the
African continent by storm. Hell, Betty
down the street needs a hug. And in our own neighborhoods, there is abuse, there is homelessness, there is loneliness. And I’m
called to love … wildlife?
Animals? I asked God 4,519 times
and still, He said Yes. And again,
Yes.
So I transferred to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and
got my Bachelor’s in Zoology. I studied
a semester of Wildlife Management in Kenya and Tanzania. And I am still, still trying to figure it out, but you gotta love me for
trying. I find myself now recently
married to a man as adventurous as I am.
Can you believe he wants to return to Africa with me? We live in Yokosuka, Japan and he works as Gunnery
Officer on board the USS Shiloh. Life is
Navy. So though our world is exciting now, living
overseas and struggling to learn the language and survive in the Navy, it looks
forward to the day I can work on safari.
So this is the story of the here and now, but mostly, this is the story
of my crawl to something great.
I left off at my first blog, The Adventures of Kernal. Since my last name is no longer KERN, I’ve
decided to take on my married name and start a fresh, new blog. If you want to see my history, there it
is. Enjoy.
