Our Calling

One night after Brent Harrell, Pastor of CC Rome, taught at our church in 2009, Mike couldn’t stop talking about it all the way home. He said we needed to start praying for Italy, so we started praying for them. Then, two weeks later Mike told me God wanted him to get a passport….

All this led to our 1st short-term mission trip to Rome with CC Boise in the Spring of 2010. That spring all I could think about was the question, “What is God going to do with this passion that He’s placed in our hearts for the people of Rome?”

Ever since I was a little girl I had wanted to be a missionary. In high school, I wanted to go to Multnomah Bible College and then use my artwork to help translate God’s Word for people who didn’t have a Bible in their own language. Then in the last month of my senior year I fell in love with Mike Kardos. We were married a couple years later and started raising a family a year after that.

To make a long story short, over time I let go of my dream… sort of. I decided that if God wanted to do anything with my desire to be a part of His global mission, He would need to speak to Mike about it. In the back of my mind there was always a prayer that God would do just that. So you can imagine the excitement I felt when we went together on our first short-term trip! I was filled with anticipation when we came home!

But then God started doing something different in our lives. Something that came way out of left field… Our Children’s Ministry Director was moving into the associate Pastor position and they were looking for a CM director. As soon as I heard about it, I started praying for that person, because I had been very invested in Children’s Ministry for over 20 years. When I started praying, I couldn’t imagine what God would do next. As I prayed, the thought started to form that God might want me to apply.

I was very resistant to the thought at first, because… #1 – I knew I wasn’t qualified and #2 – we had just taken the first steps in answer to a lifelong prayer of mine. I knew that the commitment involved in being a Children’s Ministry Director would not allow us to continue down that path. At first I put my hands over my ears, so to speak, but when Mike told me that he thought I was supposed to apply, I knew I needed to listen. I reasoned that maybe God had something He wanted to teach me through the application process. So after spending hours and hours praying to be sure I was hearing correctly, I put in an application. By the time I was being interviewed, I knew that it was God’s will for me to be the Children’s Ministry Director at our church.

It seemed like God had started taking us down one path and then out of the blue, He put us on another and I couldn’t figure out what He was doing. Then He reminded me…

Isaiah 55:9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

He told me that they were not two paths, but one path and to stop trying to figure out what He was doing. “Just trust Me,” became the answer to all my many questions.

So I started serving as the Children’s Director in September 2010. A couple months later, God had another surprise for me… Our Pastor came up to me at our Kudos dinner and asked, “What would you think about doing a VBS in Tuscany?” I seriously thought he was joking at first! So I laughed and said, sure that would be fun! He wasn’t joking! A month later we were planning Calvary Spokane’s first short term mission trip to Italy.

Over the past years, God has grown and stretched us in so many ways we could never have imagined. God uses serving, in any capacity, as His training ground. Along side all the fun, amazing adventures, there have been constant trials as well. Yes, God’s plan is exciting, but we are in spiritual battle and God has allowed us to experience it in ways we never had prior to being in full time ministry. I am so glad that God chose to teach us how to navigate the minefields of full time ministry right here, rather than in a foreign country!

I feel like I’ve experienced a lifetime of growth this past 8 years and I’m more aware of my inadequacy than ever before! So I constantly cling to the fact that it’s not about me. It’s all about Him. He alone makes us competent!

2 Corinthians 3:5-6 ” Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant.”

In January 2013, Mike told me that he believed the Lord was calling us to serve in Rome full time. It confirmed what I believed the Lord was telling me as well.

Long story, short… after receiving many confirmations that this calling was the Lord’s will for us, we moved to Rome, lived and ministered there for a year, then we had to return to the states because Michael was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. (You can read more about this in our 2016 posts.) Since then, God has miraculously healed Michael, but his doctors want to see him every three months for the rest of his life, so after much prayer we’ve decided to remain in the states and make short term mission trips as the Lord guides and provides.

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