Where do we even begin? I guess we’ll start with how we came to know the Lord, where our journey really begins.
Andrew: I first came to understand the gospel in Connecticut after my grandfather died when I was eight. Shortly after that my family moved to South Carolina where I was not involved in a local church on a regular basis. During high school my goal was to become a fighter pilot in the Air Force. I pursued my civilian pilot license and passed my check ride the summer after high school graduation. I attended the Citadel my first year in college still pursuing my Air Force dream. The next summer, after my freshman year, I was invited to a lake day with a college Sunday school class and started attending Sunday School on a regular basis. I realized that I had not grown in my faith very much from when I was eight. I felt that God had something different for my life than my plan to fly in the Air Force. I started attending a local technical college to continue my degree. During my classes I started working at Bell Aviation. While I was working at Bell, I met a missionary pilot from Alaska who was a friend of my boss. The next summer I spent three months in Alaska with Kingdom Air Corps working on airplanes and helping at the Bible camp north of the Arctic Circle. I started to see how aviation could extend the reach of the gospel and help missionaries get to people groups that are very difficult or expensive to reach. After I returned to SC I started taking classes at Columbia International University (CIU). While at CIU I was still attending the college Sunday school class and working at Bell Aviation. I was able to build up enough hours working at Bell to take my FAA Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) mechanic test. Most missionary pilots are also A&P mechanics because there are usually no local repair stations in most remote parts of the world!
Angie: I grew up going to church every time the doors were opened. But I really only went to church when I was younger because that’s just what we did as a family- it was our normal weekly routine. When I was 8 years old I attended a Christmas program put on by some college students at a local church. It was that night that I first learned what it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I realized that I could not get to heaven based on my parents’ faith. Jesus wanted a personal and intimate relationship with me! That night I gave my life to Christ for the first time and started my walk with the Lord.
As a teenager, I had several opportunities to go on short-term mission trips. When I was in 9th and 10th grade, I went to Mexico with our Spanish class to minister to some children doing a VBS program. Then when I was a junior in high school, I had the opportunity to go with my family on a construction trip to the Ukraine. Starting in high school, I had begun to develop an unexplainable burden for the people of India. I had never been there before, but I just felt like God was leading me there. So I was just waiting on Him to open a door for me. As you can see, missions has always played a pretty big role in my life and I knew God had laid it on my heart for a reason, I just didn’t know what He was doing with it. After high school, I really felt God leading me to pursue a degree in Bible and Nursing at an extremely missions minded school in SC: Columbia International University.
Andrew and I met at the college ministry at our church in SC in 2005. We got married July 11, 2009 at our home church, Northside Baptist of West Columbia. We both knew when we got married that God had put a special desire in our hearts for missions. So we decided to pursue the different places that we each had a burden for, India and Alaska, to see if the Lord would reveal to us where He would have us serve full time.
In the midst of preparing to go to India and Alaska, God laid this whole Haiti opportunity in our laps. Our church brought the band Audio Adrenaline in for our Global Missions Conference February 2010. We knew that AA had started an orphanage in Haiti several years back, so we thought it would be really neat to hear some firsthand experiences about how God has been working since the earthquake that had just happened a month prior to them coming.
At the end of the concert, some of our friends really wanted us to meet Mark Stuart (lead singer of AA). So we ended up talking to him for a little. He quickly found out that God was leading us to the mission field, so he started to “recruit” us for Haiti. We totally had our walls up, because we were already planning on going to India or Alaska, we didn’t need another country to think about. Anyways, so we listened to him talk for a little. He began to tell us that his parents are getting a little older and need a younger couple to help in running these orphanages. Through the conversation, we found out that in January, Mark was unloading earthquake relief supplies that had been flown in an airplane that belonged to Bell Aviation, the company that Andrew worked for. What a small world! Then he found out that Andrew was a pilot and began to brainstorm all the possibilities and explain the tremendous need for pilots in Haiti, especially with all of the dangerous mountain roads. Mark then shared about the ongoing need for medical help and teaching about basic sanitation issues- little did he know that I am an RN. He then went on to talk about how this “ideal couple” would have to be good at construction. We then told him that my parents build houses in NY, so I’ve grown up with a construction background. And Andrew is an A&P mechanic and extremely handy with anything electrical. If that wasn’t enough, he said that of course, the couple would need to have a love for children. I don’t know how many of you know this but Andrew has this running joke about having 12 kids J.
Needless to say, it seemed pretty obvious to us (and all those standing around listening) that Haiti was probably a really good fit for what God has gifted us with. So we thought we would pray about it and see what happened with it. Then Mark said that if we were ever in Nashville, TN that we could hook up with him and talk about it some more. It just so happened (God is so amazing!) that Andrew was going to Nashville, TN that next Monday, two days from then, for an A&P test prep for two weeks! That’s when Mark’s mouth dropped! We then realized that God was totally opening a door for us and that we should check it out.
We still went to India in March with our church. We felt like they had a lot of willing people to go out and preach the Gospel, their biggest need was for finances. When we got back from India, we didn’t feel like God was leading us to live full time there. So then we planned to take a trip in April to the Hands & Feet orphanage in Haiti. We absolutely fell in love with the kids there, but we still had to check out Alaska in July. After we got back from Alaska, we spent several weeks really devoting ourselves to praying about this HUGE decision. During this time of seeking His will, we were really torn between these two great mission fields: Alaska and Haiti. They both seemed to be a good fit for us! They couldn’t be more extreme though- blizzards or hurricanes? Then we both began to feel like God was leading us to serve as a husband and wife team, side by side on the mission field. We didn’t really feel like we could do that as well in Alaska because Andrew would be off flying all day and I would be back at home with the 12 kids J. We really felt like we could serve as an entire family, side by side, at the Hands and Feet orphanage in Haiti. It was then that we realized that God has uniquely equipped us to serve full time in Haiti.
