Q102, Texas's Best Rock. How may I direct your call?"

Getting up each morning at 6 a.m. to answer phones for a rock 'n' roll radio station was not my idea of using my seminary degree. Every minute seemed like an hour. Every day like a year. Each week an eternity.

Just a few weeks earlier I was enjoying a fruitful and satisfying ministry on staff at a large church in southern California. I often marveled at how God crafted my circumstances to land that opportunity right after graduation from seminary. Why me? I had asked God with gratefulness.

Yet after three years there, I was forced to leave the church due to a strained relationship, and I was answering phones for Texas's Best Rock. Now I asked the same question—Why me?—but feeling defeated and broken.

Exit earthquake

As a single woman, I'd always put a large portion of my energies into my profession—prior to seminary a career in the YMCA and then a church ministry. But some undercover enemies had hidden themselves in ...