During COVID, when everything shut down and I unexpectedly found myself off work for two weeks, I called my sister and told her to pack for a week and come over. At the time, that was pretty much the entire plan. Somehow, within a short amount of time (the very next morning), we had loaded five kids into my van and decided to take a road trip across the country. We drove west to Utah, made our way down through Texas, traveled across to South Carolina, and eventually headed back home to Ohio. We slept in the van at night, cooked meals on a portable grill in parks, and decided many of our stops while we were already on the road. It was not a carefully planned vacation, but it became one of those experiences that I still think about years later.

I have always been somewhat comfortable figuring things out as I go. That does not mean I never plan. In fact, there are plenty of things I research and plan in great detail. However, I do not usually need to know exactly how something will turn out before I am willing to try it. The road trip with my sister is probably one of the more extreme examples of that. We knew we had two weeks, we knew we wanted to go somewhere, and we knew we would eventually need to make it back to Ohio. Everything in between was something we could figure out along the way.

As I look forward to October, I have been thinking about how often life works the same way. There are times when careful planning is necessary, but there are also times when it is impossible to know every step before taking the first one. Sometimes the information needed to make the next decision comes from actually doing something, meeting people, asking questions, or discovering that an idea does not work quite the way you expected it to.

This month, I will be attending a missionary conference in Fort Worth, Texas. I am excited to have the opportunity to spend several days around missionaries, ministry leaders, and others who are involved in missions in different ways. I have plenty of questions I want to ask, and I am interested in hearing about their experiences, the challenges they face, and the things they have learned through actually doing the work. I am sure I will take plenty of notes, but I am not attending with a specific outcome that I expect to accomplish by the end of the conference.

Part of the reason I am looking forward to the conference is because Compass Missions is still developing. When I started Compass Missions, I knew there was a problem I wanted to address. People can feel called to missions and still have no idea what to do next. There are organizations, sending agencies, churches, training programs, and countless other resources available, but having resources available does not necessarily make the process easy to navigate. I wanted Compass Missions to be a place where people could find support as they worked through those decisions.

What I did not know when I started was exactly what that support should look like. Over the last several months, I have tried different ideas and learned from them. Some things I thought people would want have received very little interest. Other ideas have developed as I have talked with people and learned more about what missionaries and prospective missionaries actually need. I also have ideas that I would like to pursue but simply do not have the time, money, or capacity to develop right now. None of that means the original idea was wrong, but it does mean that I have to be willing to continue learning and adjusting.

I think that can be difficult when we are looking forward because it is much easier to imagine progress as a straight line. We tend to see organizations after they have become established or hear people’s stories after they already know how everything turned out. From that perspective, the steps that brought them there can seem much more intentional than they probably felt at the time. In reality, most people make decisions with the information they have available, learn something from the result, and then make another decision. Some ideas work, some need to change, and others eventually need to be abandoned.

I often think about how many things Jesus did “on the way.” There was a destination, but so much happened between where He started and where He was going. People were healed, conversations happened, questions were asked, and lives were changed along the way. I think there is something important in that for me because I can become so focused on where I am going that I forget God can use everything between here and there too.

Joseph’s story reminds me of the same thing. The Joseph who was thrown into the pit was not the same man who eventually stood in Egypt with tremendous responsibility. There was a lot of life between those two places, and much of it probably did not look like progress at the time. The pit, Potiphar’s house, prison, and eventually Pharaoh’s court were all very different places, but God was still present through the entire process. Joseph was being shaped long before he could see where his story was going.

I cannot help but believe God still uses the “on the way” as a tool of sculpture. The places I go, the people I meet, the things that work, the things that fail, and even the times when I have to change direction can shape me for whatever comes next. That changes the way I think about needing a complete map. I am grateful that God is leading me and that He is already present in every place I will visit. I do not need to know the entire route ahead of time. I need to be willing to step into the places He has prepared for me and allow Him to use what happens along the way.

That is how I am trying to approach Compass Missions right now. I do not need to decide this month exactly what it will look like five years from now. I need to understand the people I hope to serve, continue learning about missions, pay attention to what is and is not working, and make good decisions based on what I learn. Attending the conference in Fort Worth is one opportunity to do that. I may come home with new ideas, or I may come home with a better understanding of ideas I already have. I may even discover that I have been thinking about something completely wrong. I am open to all of those possibilities because learning something that changes my direction is still useful.

When I think back to that road trip with my sister, we certainly could have planned more before we left. At the same time, we did not need to know every stop before we pulled out of the driveway. We made decisions as we went, changed directions when we wanted to, and eventually made it all the way back to Ohio with five kids and a lot of stories. We had a general direction even when we did not have a detailed plan.

That is what looking forward means to me this October. I do not have a detailed map for everything that comes next with Compass Missions, and I am becoming more comfortable admitting that. I know why I started, I know what I am trying to learn, and I know the next opportunity in front of me. Right now, that opportunity is a missionary conference in Fort Worth.

For October, I think that is enough. I can take the next step, learn from it, and decide where to go from there.

Olivia Tressler

Founder, Compass Missions