Beginnings
“Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”
In 2005, I graduated with a MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, but my life was full of what seemed to be endless discouragement. My mental health was borderline stable. In the summer of 2009, I was invited to serve at Camp Echoing Hills in Warsaw Ohio. This is an amazing, God-loving place for the disabled of any level. Campers get a full camp experience: sleeping under the stars, breakfast cooked over an open fire, swimming, fishing, and many other activities.
My job was to document the camp experience for my church, but God was revealing blessings I had overlooked in my life. Many campers lived in care homes, but I lived at home with my family. I drove to the camp from Maryland, but these campers could not drive. God blessed me in many ways, but I was blinded by my own discouragement. I was there for two weeks, and it was full of joy, fun, and laughter. The following summer, I decided to take pictures for the campers. All day, I served with the campers and took many photos. All night, I worked printing, sorting, and filling small keepsake albums. At the end of the week, I gave the campers the albums as a gift. They cherished this small gift. God showed me what my education and talents were made for.
In 2010, I went to Ukraine for my first out-of-country mission trip. I was among a small group that put on a VBS-style minicamp at two orphanages. I was in the Odessa region of Ukraine. I documented the trip, but also took pictures for the children. On this trip, God revealed how my time in the psychiatric ward would be used on mission. The beds in the guest rooms in the orphanage was a lot like the ward I had slept on. I was comfortable in this out-of-comfort zone. I adjusted to the time zone quickly because I need less sleep. I, who should have had the most problems adjusting, was handling it better than the rest of the group. God had called me to serve.
Little did I know what journey God started. I kept going back, four times in the first year. I was the first person to give the children pictures of themselves. Many others had taken pictures, but no one gave them back. I got the same small albums and put the snapshots in them. The children traded them. They laughed and smiled at them. Later I went to nursing homes. At first, I was not excited and really didn’t want to go. God led me to go. Again, I took pictures and gave them albums. They were just like the children. They smiled and laughed.
Midway through my journey in Ukraine, God led me to share my struggles with mental health. I started with the nursing homes. A pastor asked me to share in his small church in Odessa. The response was overwhelming. People gravitated to the story God wrote for me. No other stranger from America had impacted his church this way. People came to him about their struggles that they had been too fearful to reveal. People private-messaged about their struggles and how God used my story to impact them. At the time, I didn’t know the history of the Soviet Union exploiting mental health as a pollical tool to silence people that spoke against the leadership. As a result of this, the stigma in Ukraine is terrible.
I traveled to Estonia to share my testimony. In a small church in a city near the Russian border was a woman that worked in an asylum. She told me God spoke to her through my story to share God’s hope with the mentally ill. I continued to obey His calling. He led me to a ministry that serves families with autistic children, Wings of Faith Rivne Ukraine. My story is God’s story, perfectly written to serve this ministry. My parents were told to institutionalize me as a toddler, because I would never be educated. Many of the Ukrainian parents were urged to do the same. When they saw a somewhat functioning adult, God illumined hope to them.
God has shown me that He made me wonderfully in His image, for His plan, for His Kingdom. I have grown to lose the shame about my affliction and see them as blessings. My struggles are blessings because everything is a blessing that God uses for good. Afflicted people can be equipped to live on mission, because God calls many “outcast.” The Great Commission is for all to take part; Jesus didn’t have qualifiers other than following Him.