God has blessed my wife and me with opportunities to experience the wonderful truth about foreign lands becoming homelands-and vice versa-as described in the ancient Christian quote on this page, Jean and I have been world travelers, both as teachers and as tourists with “homelands” in Africa, Germany, Bangladesh, India, China, and Australia; as well as stateside in Illinois, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. But as the quote says, we often felt more at home in other lands than in our native land!

The closest place to home for us has been Bemidji, Minnesota. We lived there for 26 years, and there we raised our three daughters: Christy, Cheri, and Heidi. Bemidji was a great place to raise a family— except for the winters! We were blessed to be part of a wonderful church which became our family.

Before moving to Bemidji Jean and I spent nine years as missionaries with SIM, serving in Monrovia, Liberia, West Africa. I taught Bible classes at Tubman High School. Jean taught Bible at an elementary school and literacy classes for women. On our second term we switched to church planting, starting the Monrovia Evangelical Church.

Returning to the States we settled in Bemidji, where I served as a missions teacher and as academic dean at Oak Hills Christian College. During those years we took part in missions trips to Utah, to Mexico, to Hong Kong, and to Bangladesh.

Taking mission trips kept my desire to serve God in foreign lands alive, and so, after 25 years we moved to China. For four years we taught at SIAS University in the city of Xinzheng, Henan province: a place with good times, good friends, good food, and amazing sites, Less than a mile from our university campus was an old city wall built during the time that David was king of Israel.

Meanwhile our children had grown up, got married, had children (we have 11 grandchildren) and relocated around the world. We visited Christy Haman and her family in Germany; Cheri Mullet and her family in Australia (which is an amazing country!); and Heidi Holland and her family in Minnesota, Texas, and Oklahoma.

After returning from China, I served for three years as the superintendent of Corn Bible Academy, a Christian junior and senior high school in Corn, Oklahoma.

Jean and I now live in a retirement village in Cordell Oklahoma. We both have parttime jobs at Corn Heritage Village, a nursing home.

During the period of isolation at home due to Covid 19 I started writing a book about wisdom. This became a four-year hobby, with several re-writes along the way, concluding with working with Wipf and Stock publishers to produce the book, Wisdom About Wisdom.