That was the summer of 2011. Little did we know that helping to lead that first group of Grace Christian students would subsequently result two years later in our selling our house, leaving our jobs, saying “good-bye” to our puppy at the time, Phoenix, and heading to Cambodia for a year of service. In all that has happened since then we have have come to experience Prov. 16:9 intimately: “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.”
At that time I retired from the Anchorage School District, where I was a Training Specialist in the Professional Learning Department, and Kirsten took a leave of absence from Grace Christian School, where she had been the elementary music teacher for the previous 9 years. Kirsten and I both have backgrounds in education, mentoring, and administration, and so we spent the year working with Cambodian teachers, both at Salaa Hope in Battambang and for the Asian Hope Teacher Training Program. That’s also when we designed our Biblical Integration training program: Teach Like a Christian.
In 2014, though, we returned to Anchorage. I resumed work on a contract basis with the Anchorage School District and Kirsten resumed work on her Masters in Photography and running a portrait business, all the while continuing to make short trips twice a year to Cambodia, serving primarily with the Asian Hope Village Development Project. And then in the winter of 2017, we headed back again to Cambodia full-time, serving at Logos International School, a mission of Asian Hope, returning to Alaska, once again, at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, where we completed the ‘19-20 school year online.
Now we are engaged in our new project, partnering with Christian education in Cambodia and providing much needed teacher training, empahsizing Biblical Integration. We call the program Teach Like a Christian. We started in the spring of 2024 by partnering with two organizations. The ministry has grown every trip, though, so that now we partner with 7 organizations, representing a dozen schools and about 3,500 students.
We currently go back and forth between Cambodia and Alaska, making three trips per year. In the States we have two grown children. Our daughter, Heaven, and her husband, Mike, live in Anchorage with their two children adopted from Ukraine, their toddler daughter, Lilah, and their newborn, Cooper. Mike is a flight paramedic and Heaven is a flight attendant. Our son, Wayland, and his wife, Brandi, live in Washington and have two children. We also have an extremely cudly "fur-baby" in our family, Zinnia, an 85 pound Rhodesian Ridgeback lap dog.
