You're correct in thinking it's been a while since I've talked about linguistics. While the topic rarely surfaces in conversation, God has been bringing this part of my life back to the forefront. Let's pick up the story in the early 2000s when I was attending college.
2005 - 2011: Linguistics Education
After completing high-school I felt God directing me to attend a Bible College. I was living in my family's home and didn't have an email address, let alone internet access. But a friend from youth group gave me several flyers from different Bible Colleges in Western Canada, so I picked Prairie College and began my studies there in 2002. During my first semester, the college announced a new linguistics program in conjunction with Canada Institute of Linguistics which operates at Trinity Western University. That sounded neat so I signed up knowing nothing about linguistics except that it involved languages.
I took my first linguistics courses in 2005 and discovered that I both enjoyed language study and was pretty good at it. I graduated with my Bachelor's degree in 2006 and started graduate studies in linguistics in 2008.
I completed the course work for a Master's degree but in 2011 I stepped away from linguistics to just get a job. At this point, there was no particular area of language study that I was passionate about, and I didn’t sense any real call to serve as a Bible translator.
2011 - 2025: Data Entry to Data Scientist at Reinvent Technology
When I accepted an offer for an entry-level position at a technology company, I could have never guessed how much this job would transform me. I have been happily employed at Reinvent for the past thirteen years, and in that time I’ve enjoyed many fun staff trips, I’ve forged some healthy habits around diet and exercise, and I’ve developed considerable technical skills.
Several years into my tenure at Reinvent, I taught myself programming over a winter break. My main goal was to automate some of the tasks that I was responsible for completing. Over the next few years I continued to write programming scripts to help with my tasks wherever I could. I loved how hours of repetitive manual work could be completed automatically with the click of a button. In 2019 I was tasked with solving a business problem which was far too large and complicated for my regular analytic processes in Microsoft Excel. At this point I knew I had to lean on my budding technical skills and develop a fully programmatic solution. I officially ditched spreadsheets in favor of command-line data frames and I’ve been coding full-time ever since.
Seeing first-hand how proficiently computers solve complex problems, I now had a clear vision of what I wanted to do if I ever returned to linguistics: I would combine linguistics theory with programming to develop systems for automatic Bible translation into minority languages.
I had figured out the “What?” part of my linguistics future, but I was still fuzzy on the “When?” My job as a data scientist was always so central in providing for my family that moving on from this position seemed downright foolish. Bible translation would be something for the future, but for now data science paid the bills.
2023 - 2024: A Change In The Winds
My life turned upside down in 2023 when my marriage ended. With the future so unclear, I began to think about a possible career shift. I thought to myself, “Perhaps working in Bible translation could start sooner rather than later?” Knowing that a move into full-time missions work would be years in the making, I decided to reach out to Wycliffe just to get a sense of what this work could look like.
I met with a Wycliffe missions coach regularly for around five months. At the end of our time together, I was certainly excited about pursuing Bible translation. However, it was plainly obvious that it was not good timing to introduce any additional life changes: at the time I had to move, sell a townhouse and await an eventual divorce.
In the last year the dust has settled in my personal life. George, Max and I moved 12 minutes southwest from our home in Guildford to our new home in Fleetwood (Surrey, BC). Alisha and I sold our townhouse this past summer, and our divorce was finalized in December.
In October of last year I learned of a short-term missions trip with Wycliffe scheduled for May of 2025. This seemed to be a perfect opportunity for me to dip my toes into the world of Bible translation and step into a season of discerning future work with Wycliffe.
So here I am! I have been accepted as a team member for the missions trip and we are headed to South Africa and Namibia from May 2 - 22. For more detailed information about this trip, you can view my introductory post here.
Would you partner with us? Like all other missionaries we are looking for people who would pray fervently and give generously to this work. If you are able to give financially to our team, you can do so here:
Thank-you to each friend and family member for being a part of my story and for joining me in this process. I have a growing excitement for where this work could take me. I’ll be sharing specific prayer requests and more details soon.