There was a time when I was filled with pride and self-promotion, but God showed me my identity through Christ, and now I walk in assurance that he is guiding my every step.
I grew up in a Christian home with parents who are both pastors. They did a great job helping me understand the Bible, who Jesus was, and the sacrifice he made.
As I got into high school, I realized it was really a projection of my parents’ faith that I claimed as my own, but it wasn’t necessarily my own. I spent the first three years of high school living a double-sided life. I acted and behaved one way with my family and church friends, but when I was at school with my friends who didn’t follow Jesus, I acted differently.
My hypocrisy showed up at church, too. While I served in the children’s ministry and led worship, there was so much pride and self-promotion. I appeared to be pursuing Jesus in all these different ways, but there was a hidden side to me that was not following him.
One day, I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends who did not know Jesus, doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, and my pastor’s wife saw me. She met with me the next day and told me I would no longer be serving in any capacity in ministry. She explained that if I truly understood that Christ died to forgive me of my sin and rose again to give me a new life, there would be no two-sided element to my life.
I was completely devastated because my pride and my gifts were my whole identity, and now they were stripped away. After confessing everything to my mom, she reminded me that Jesus is enough. She preached the gospel to me and told me that Christ had already taken the punishment for me. He just wants to know me and have a relationship with me. I learned that my identity is in being a follower of Jesus, not in my capabilities and talents for serving him. She presented a decision for me to make: “Are you going to live for Christ or are you going to live for the world?” Right then and there, my mom led me to Christ.
At that point, I wanted to do everything I could to live for Jesus. I started asking God what he would want for my life moving forward. I ended up going to a Bible college to major in children’s and family ministries and biblical studies. In that time, the Word of God was so formative for me. I really grew in my understanding of who Jesus is in my life and grew in dependence on him.
After meeting my husband in college, we both ended up on staff at a church in New England and served there for seven years.
When COVID hit in 2020, we were struggling with infertility. We found out the week before shutdowns that we biologically couldn’t have children, and that was devastating to us. Ministry became very hard after we were asked to oversee young marriages and families—all of the couples were having kids, and we couldn’t.
Processing in isolation because of shutdowns was really hard. I eventually stepped down from my role as Children’s Director because, physically, fertility treatment was so hard on me, and emotionally, I was not in a place where I could serve families.
I began to seek the Lord and ask him, “Out of this discouragement and heartache, what are you doing in our lives?” I started to get this impression that God was going to move us somewhere—I could sense something was changing or shifting. I prayed that if God really wanted us to move, he would have to tell Bobby.
The following April, in 2021, Bobby came to the Church Leaders Conference at Watermark. Over the next three days, Bobby kept sharing everything from the conference with me and was so excited about the authenticity and vulnerability he was experiencing.
On the last day of the conference, he called me and said, “Nina, I don’t know why, but I think we need to move to Dallas.” My response was quick, “I’m in! When do we leave?”
When he came back, we really sought the Lord together and asked him if this was really what he wanted for us. Together, we decided that God was leading us to Dallas and to Watermark. While I taught at a nearby school, Bobby attended the Watermark Institute, a 10-month program of hands-on ministry experience.
One of the biggest ways CLC impacted me was the timing. We were in a really deep place of discouragement in both life and ministry. But when he came home, that joy came with him. It started to impact me, too, and I began experiencing joy again.
You don’t always know what pastors and leaders are walking through when they come to CLC. But for us, it made a real difference. We were at a point where we were questioning whether we should continue in ministry, and CLC reignited Bobby's love for ministry. As his wife, I felt that shift too. There is a lot of hard in ministry, and this was one of the ways God gave us the hope we needed to keep going.
After I stepped down from my role at our church, I never thought I’d work on a church staff again. Now, both Bobby and I are on staff at Watermark. It’s been really sweet to see the Lord’s faithfulness in his guiding and leading, and how he used CLC to redeem our stories.