There was that unmistakable sinking feeling in my stomach as the massive jet gathered speed, thundered down the runway, and then somehow—against everything my nervous mind believed to be reasonable—lifted into the Alabama sky.
I was terrified.
Just one day earlier, I had sat in my office and written a goodbye letter to my mother.
Yes, a goodbye letter.
I was flying to California for the first time on business, and I was afraid to tell her.
My mother had always possessed a tremendous fear of flying, and somewhere along the way she had apparently decided that if she wasn’t getting on an airplane, neither should I. She had repeatedly insisted that I never fly.
Unfortunately, my career had other plans.
Our marketing team from Jack’s Restaurants was headed to San Diego for a conference. When Mom asked where I was going, I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her the truth.
“West of Louisiana,” I said.
Technically, I wasn’t lying.
California is certainly west of Louisiana.
The goodbye letter was sealed and left with a trusted friend, with instructions that it be delivered should my maiden voyage across the country end tragically.
Looking back, I realize how ridiculous I was.
Days later, I returned safely to Birmingham and visited Mom carrying a beautiful blanket I had purchased in Tijuana. She admired it for approximately five seconds before narrowing her eyes suspiciously.
“You’ve been on a plane!”
There are moments when mothers simply know.
I laughed and confessed. Yes, I had flown. Yes, I had survived. And yes, I had gone considerably farther west than Louisiana.
She made me promise never to do it again.
Dad, although perhaps more concerned that his son had somehow ended up in California, tried to reason with her. Travel was becoming part of my career. Flying wasn’t something I could realistically avoid.
Sure enough, within a few years my job involved nearly seventy-five percent travel, much of it by airplane.
And something unexpected happened.
I grew to love it.
The fear disappeared and was replaced by excitement. For a young executive in his late twenties, it felt like a jet-set lifestyle. Airports became familiar. Hotels became temporary homes. Rental cars, boarding passes and restaurant receipts became part of my everyday existence.
Mom never learned to love it.
Her rule remained firm: I had to call her immediately before boarding and again as soon as the plane touched the ground.
Despite the dramatic relationship between my mother, airplanes and me, those years allowed me to see this magnificent country of ours. I crossed America from one side to the other and was blessed again and again with safe departures and safe arrivals.
There were, however, a few memorable flights.
One particular trip from Oklahoma City to Dallas remains near the top of that list.
Storms caused a three-hour delay, and when we finally departed, the flight was filled with turbulence. The airplane shook and dipped while nervous passengers exchanged those uncomfortable looks strangers give one another when everyone is thinking the same thing but nobody wants to say it aloud.
We finally landed in Dallas, only to discover that I had missed my connection to Birmingham.
I was stranded for another night.
My luggage remained somewhere in the mysterious bowels of the airline system. All I had was a carry-on containing my laptop and Franklin Covey planner. The airline placed us in a motel near the airport and provided disposable toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and conditioner.
No deodorant.
Apparently, there are limits to compassion.
The storm raged throughout the night, and I didn’t sleep a wink.
By six the next morning I was back at the airport, exhausted and desperate to get home. When I finally boarded the Southwest flight to Birmingham, I grabbed the first seat I could find. It had wonderful legroom, and as we climbed above Texas and eventually glided toward Louisiana and Mississippi, I decided to close my eyes.
Somewhere along the way, I fell into a deep sleep.
Midway through the flight, a sweet, shy flight attendant with strawberry-blonde hair tapped me on the shoulder. She squatted beside my seat and spoke in the tender voice one might use to awaken a sleeping child—or perhaps tranquilize a bear.
“Sir, you are stomping the floor in your sleep like you’re trying to stop the plane. And you’re snoring so loudly the entire plane can hear you. Do you think you can stay awake until we get to Birmingham?”
I wiped the drool from my mouth and looked around.
The expressions on my fellow passengers were not encouraging.
I was embarrassed for approximately twenty seconds.
Then I realized I would probably never see any of those people again.
So I went back to sleep.
My friend Deborah Burroughs understands the necessity of sleeping on an airplane.
For her, however, the destination isn’t California, Dallas or Birmingham.
It is Tanzania.
And the journey can take eighteen hours.
Deborah is a missionary, traveling across oceans and continents to serve God in communities far removed from the comfortable world she knows in Alabama. Sleep becomes her refuge during those seemingly endless flights, particularly when she finds herself squeezed into a middle seat between two strangers.
But eventually the airplane descends.
The doors open.
And Deborah steps into Africa.
After spending nearly an entire day confined inside airplanes and airports, there is something almost sacred about placing her feet upon the earth again. The exhaustion of travel gives way to anticipation because Deborah knows why she has come.
She has come to serve.
She has come to listen.
She has come to tell people about Jesus.
And when evening settles over Tanzania, the African sky seems almost too enormous to comprehend.
Away from the glow of American cities and the artificial lights that compete with the heavens, darkness stretches across the landscape like a vast curtain. Stars emerge in numbers that can make a person feel incredibly small and yet somehow intimately known. The horizon seems farther away. The heavens appear wider. The night possesses a stillness that invites reflection.
Deborah can sit beneath that sky and remember another sky thousands of miles away.
An Alabama sky.
A childhood sky.
A sky reflected in the waters of Lake Wedowee.
Perhaps that is one of the extraordinary things about God. He can take us halfway around the world only to remind us where we came from.
Deborah’s first missionary trip to Tanzania was not immediately comfortable.
She watched experienced missionaries follow the training and protocols established by the group’s leaders. They seemed confident and prepared. Deborah, by comparison, felt inadequate.
The methods didn’t feel natural to her.
She questioned whether she could do this.
Then, after several days and time spent personally in prayer, something changed. Deborah began to understand that perhaps God had not carried her across an ocean so she could become someone else.
He wanted Deborah.
Her words.
Her personality.
Her voice.
Her heart.
So she began ministering in the manner that felt genuine.
She would walk through a village calling out a greeting and hear a welcome in return.
The homes she approached were nothing like the comfortable houses that populate the communities of Alabama. Small huts and humble dwellings stood against the African landscape, simple structures sheltering lives that could easily be judged by American standards as lacking.
Yet Deborah began to see something beyond walls and possessions.
She saw people.
A woman might be tending a garden. Someone might be hanging clothing beneath that enormous sky. Children might move nearby while the ordinary rhythms of family life continued around them.
Deborah would be welcomed.
Sometimes her seat might be a simple mat.
Sometimes an old bucket.
There might be no upholstered chair, climate-controlled room or carefully decorated sanctuary.
And none of that mattered.
Because the Gospel did not require stained glass.
It required a willing heart.
Sitting there among people whose material possessions could be counted far more easily than her own, Deborah discovered the freedom to speak about Christ in her own words.
Something began changing inside her.
She had traveled to Africa believing she was going there to minister to others.
God was ministering to her.
Deborah has returned to Tanzania many times through the years, and each journey has revealed something new about herself and about the Lord she serves. Trading American conveniences for a tent beneath the African sky has given her a perspective she could never have acquired from the comfort of home.
There is beauty in the simplicity.
There is holiness in the stillness.
And there is conviction in witnessing people who possess so little materially yet demonstrate joy that people surrounded by abundance spend fortunes trying to find.
Perspective.
That word has become important to Deborah.
She loves encouraging people to think outside the box, to move from the familiar place where they have grown comfortable and look at life from another angle.
She even jokingly tells Christians to change seats in church occasionally.
Sit somewhere else.
Look at the sanctuary differently.
See people you don’t normally see.
Change your perspective.
Deborah understands something about perspective because long before she ever slept beneath an African sky, she was a little girl growing up near the riverbanks and waters of Lake Wedowee.
The Alabama of her childhood possessed a beauty all its own.
Lake Wedowee spread beneath Southern skies, its waters slipping along wooded banks where pine and hardwood trees leaned toward the shoreline. In the mornings, mist could soften the landscape, and by evening the lowering sun painted the water with reflections of gold.
It was beautiful.
But beautiful surroundings do not guarantee an easy childhood.
Deborah grew up in a trailer park with her siblings, Eddie and LaFonda. Her father, Ed, struggled with alcoholism and could become abusive. There were nights when their mother, Betty, gathered her children and took them to the home of a relative to escape his rage.
For Betty, God was a refuge.
And she taught her children where refuge could be found.
Deborah learned early that faith wasn’t merely something discussed inside a church on Sunday morning. Faith was something a frightened family could hold onto in the darkness. It was something a mother carried with her while protecting her children. It was believing that turmoil did not get the final word.
And Deborah had music.
She, her sister and cousins sang together as the Singing Sunshines, traveling almost every weekend to churches throughout the surrounding communities.
Imagine that young girl riding along Alabama roads toward another little church, her voice waiting inside her.
Some churches were tucked among trees along winding country roads. Others sat in small communities where generations of families had worshiped beneath the same roof. Inside were wooden pews, hymnals and people who understood that Sunday singing was not a performance as much as testimony.
Then Deborah would sing.
The insecurity she sometimes carried disappeared into the music.
Her voice rose into those sanctuaries, blending with the voices of her family. Songs of heaven, deliverance, faith and hope traveled across congregations filled with people who had brought their own burdens through the church doors.
Perhaps someone was grieving.
Perhaps another family was struggling financially.
Perhaps a mother was praying for a child.
Perhaps somebody simply needed to hear that God was still there.
And there stood Deborah, a girl carrying troubles of her own, singing hope to someone else.
There is something profoundly beautiful about that.
At school, Deborah’s popularity was growing, but popularity did not erase insecurity. She noticed girls on the cheerleading squad who lived in larger homes and seemed to possess nicer things. From Deborah’s perspective, their lives appeared easier, their families less complicated, their worlds more secure.
She compared.
Most of us do.
Yet what Deborah could not fully recognize as a girl was everything God had already placed within her.
She possessed charisma.
Beauty.
A remarkable voice.
And a light that could not be measured by the size of a house.
That light remains visible today. Deborah has aged with a youthfulness that seems to match her spirit. Beautiful locks of wavy hair fall softly around her shoulders, framing a face that still carries the energy of the girl who once traveled from church to church singing with the Singing Sunshines. There is a warmthabout her, but also determination.
Life would require both.
As an adult, Deborah married Rusty and became the mother of two daughters, Madison and Alex.
For a while, life seemed to assemble itself into the perfect puzzle she might once have dreamed about along the banks of Lake Wedowee.
Rusty rose through the coaching ranks in their small town. Athletics brought recognition to the family, and with recognition came status and prestige.
Deborah built a career she adored.
She became an elementary school teacher.
Teaching was never going to make her wealthy, but it fulfilled her. There was purpose in the classroom, joy in the children, and identity in being needed.
Then life changed.
Rusty was suddenly removed from his head coaching position.
For Deborah, the world she had carefully assembled seemed to crack.
Prestige was replaced by rumors.
Recognition was replaced by questions.
The family moved forward without fully understanding why it had happened.
And Deborah eventually began looking at the experience differently.
She saw that she had made an idol of status.
Something she valued enormously had been removed, and the loss forced her to examine where she had placed her identity.
What initially looked like a valley became a place where she encountered God more deeply.
But God wasn’t finished changing her perspective.
Deborah poured herself into her children. She wanted them to succeed. She wanted them to have everything they needed to be happy and accepted. Grades mattered. Achievement mattered. Their futures mattered.
And once again she began to realize how easily even good things can move into a place that belongs to God.
At forty-seven, during a Bible study, Deborah felt God telling her that it was time to retire.
So she did.
She walked away from a profession she deeply loved.
Another identity was stripped away.
Coach’s wife.
Teacher.
Mother of children still at home.
One by one, the titles she had leaned upon began changing.
Eventually Madison and Alex grew up and left home. Alex married Clay and moved to the coast. Madison moved to the Carolinas to pursue new dreams.
The house became quieter.
Deborah and Rusty became empty nesters.
Any parent who has stood in the silence after children leave understands that strange mixture of pride and grief. You spend years preparing children to become independent, only to discover that their independence leaves an empty chair at your table.
Another valley.
Another change.
Another invitation to draw closer to God.
And then, eventually, Africa.
Maybe the little girl who sang in country churches could never have imagined it.
Maybe the teacher standing before elementary school children couldn’t have envisioned it.
Maybe the coach’s wife living amid the excitement of athletics and community recognition couldn’t have predicted it.
But God could.
Today Deborah shares the Word of God wherever she is given the opportunity—with people who eagerly listen and, occasionally, with people who might prefer she change the subject.
She is persistent that way.
Her ministry has expanded far beyond anything that insecure little girl beside Lake Wedowee could have imagined.
From Alabama church pews to African villages.
From the Singing Sunshines to missionary work.
From a mat or old bucket outside a humble Tanzanian home to conversations within communities back home.
The scenery changes.
The mission remains.
Deborah knows there will be more valleys.
Faith does not promise us a life without them.
What she has learned is that valleys can reveal things mountaintops sometimes hide.
Prosperity can convince us that we are self-sufficient. Success can whisper that we built everything ourselves. Popularity can make the applause of people sound louder than the voice of God.
Then something disappears.
A position.
A career.
A title.
A child from the bedroom down the hall.
A version of life we thought would last forever.
We look around at what remains and sometimes cry out, “God, why did You take this from me?”
Perhaps there are moments when God is asking us another question.
“Now that your hands are empty, will you reach for Me?”
That is the lesson I see woven through Deborah’s story.
She has known mountaintops of career, family, status, recognition and popularity.
She has also walked through valleys when those things changed or disappeared.
But the valleys were not the end of her story.
God was up to something.
I picture Deborah beneath that African sky, her wavy hair resting against her shoulders as darkness settles across the land. Somewhere nearby are humble homes filled with families whose lives look very different from hers. Above her are more stars than she could ever count.
And somewhere in her memory is another body of water.
Lake Wedowee.
She can almost hear the voices of the Singing Sunshines again.
She can remember the little churches.
The wooden pews.
Her mother’s faith.
The frightened nights.
The schoolgirl insecurities.
The cheering crowds.
The classroom.
The daughters.
The empty nest.
Every version of Deborah is still there.
Every mountaintop.
Every valley.
Every prayer.
And all of it has brought her here.
Perhaps that is what perspective finally teaches us.
When we are standing in the valley, we see only the mountains surrounding us. We cannot always see what lies beyond them. We cannot know which road God is preparing or what purpose might someday grow from the thing that currently feels like loss.
But God sees beyond the mountain.
He sees Alabama and Africa at the same time.
He sees the little girl and the missionary.
He sees who we were, who we are and who we are becoming.
Our responsibility is not to convince God to follow the plans we have carefully constructed for ourselves.
It is to follow Him.
And sometimes that requires changing seats.
Changing plans.
Changing priorities.
Changing our perspective.
Deborah Burroughs learned that lesson beside the waters of Lake Wedowee, in classrooms and gymnasiums, in the quiet of an empty nest, inside little Alabama churches, aboard eighteen-hour flights, and beneath the magnificent African sky.
The things she once thought defined her eventually changed.
God did not.
And every time life seemed to bring Deborah down to nothing, she discovered something waiting for her in the valley.
God was up to something.
JustRobby 