Tori’s Story: God Carries Us Across All Kinds of Journeys

How I Moved My Family to North Park

Tori: 
Hi, my name is Yoshisa. friends also call me Tori. I am graduating with my Master’s in Divinity here at North Park Seminary.

I’m here with my whole family. We moved here from Kentucky to study in person here on Chicago’s campus. So my journey started a long time ago. I had discerned the call to pursue my Master’s in Divinity. , but life hit and so I started and then there was a long gap before life settled down for me again, it was kind of starting over again. for me, as far as my education, journey By then I was married with a house full of kids. And so really trying to figure out where would be the right place to come study, where would it be safe for me and my family to be?

Um, those were the things that I had to consider and pray through. So my children were entering middle school. Um, and so. I had three that we had to uproot. We had to uproot our lives. we were worried about what kind of a neighborhood would we be in, schools, transportation, Chicago is way different, from the city that we came from. And so we had to think about life completely different.

And our children were definitely number one on our list as far as making sure they had everything that they would need to be able to settle and adjust and to acclimate and. All the things that just come with that when you think about your children and changing their lives in such a drastic way for them.

But, it worked out. This neighborhood was everything that it was described. It’s, diverse. the school was walking distance,so, it was a bunch of new surprises and fun surprises along the way for our entire family. when we made the transition, in fact, our first year here we sat and we just.

Noted and took notice of everything that we had experienced in our first year so that we would have some kind of way to kind of mark the time and really think back on the faithfulness of God during our journey.

Never thought I would say this, but one of my favorite classes was Greek, especially the exegesis and being able to see how the scriptures play out in real life and practical theology and how do we come out of the textbook and engage in the world around us. Definitely a high point here for me.

My final advice would be, leave with curiosity. I came here wanting to know for certain what my path would be, and instead I feel like I’ve been gifted with just more curiosity about the world around me and how God desires to use me in the world.