My story begins well before my training at GRTS.  I had godly parents who took me to church for the first time when I was five weeks old.  My mother thought I was too tiny to go out before.  From age four through 12, I was in church three times a week and in Sunday school twice each Sunday.  After I'd been in the ministry 21 years, I phoned GRTS one Friday and was welcomed with, “Classes begin Monday!” I drove the 1200 miles and was in class Monday morning!  David wrote in Psalms, “He leads...”

For almost 15 of those early 21 years I'd supplemented my salary from rural and small-town pastorates by secular employment and had taken night classes toward my master's degree in education.  The fourth pastorate took us back to Canada where we'd lived for eleven years when I was at my first church. 

Before we left for Canada, the Lord had blessed our ministry by doubling the size of the congregation and leading us through two major building campaigns, and I had been promoted three times in my secular job. I thought, "I wonder what the Lord has been preparing me for!"  After almost five years back in Canada, I found out. I received a phone enquiry from an old friend who had recently become the pastor in a Winnipeg church and wanted to open a school.  In 45 days, we had sold our home in Ontario, moved to Winnipeg, fashioned Sunday School rooms into CDS classrooms, enrolled 37 students, hired teachers, and opened the school!  I was the principal as well as the teacher of our seventh, eighth, and ninth grade classes.

At the end of that year I made a call to GRTS. My training there made my administrative responsibilities much easier, which made it possible for me to also have time to continue the duties of classroom teaching.  My daughter was in my classroom from grade 7 through 12, and when she graduated, I handed her diploma to her.  That summer we moved to another CDS back in the USA.  My GRTS training in CDS administration has been of immeasurable help to me! 

My training and experience in education at GRTS has given me the opportunity to work with hundreds of GED students in classes and in individual tutoring.  Also, after a few years of classroom substituting, I have begun tutoring public school students who cannot be in school because they were either suspended or expelled. It is especially exciting to have opportunities to witness and to meet them years after I've worked with them!  I often marvel at the obvious truth David expressed so well!  In the flesh and apart from the training by godly teachers like those at GRTS, I would have little understanding that, "He leads..."