A 1,200-mile relocation – to serve as volunteers
It was 4:30 in the morning, and Ken Goodman couldn’t sleep.
Schlumberger, the energy company where he had worked for 18 years, had told him he’d have to either take a new position he didn’t want or retire.
He was almost 60. He and his wife, Debbie, had raised three children. Married 35 years, they could afford for him to retire, if it came to that. But then what?
It bothered him that it bothered him.
“I was stressing about it even though I had no reason to stress,” Ken recalled during a recent interview. “I know God’s got this under control. Why am I so afraid?”
The answer came to him in a verse of Scripture:
Ken found peace. His education as an electrical engineer and years of experience in research and development would not go to waste. God showed him a direction he had never considered before.
“‘Schlumberger is not retiring you, I am,’” he heard God say. “‘You need to go to work for me.’ So that is when I first started to think about doing missions. Then, amazingly, my stress level went down.”
That wee-hours struggle was the beginning of a sequence of events. It led to Ken and Debbie selling their home in Houston and moving about 1,200 miles to North Carolina, where they knew nobody and where now both volunteer for TWR.
It almost ended much closer to home, in Dallas. Not knowing what sort of role there might be for a missionary engineer, Ken began his search on Google, which took him to MissionNext, an online clearinghouse for adults interested in serving in missions.
“That’s when I started finding out there was a huge need for engineers,” Ken said.
He talked to six or seven organizations, Ken said, including the one in Dallas. It had a connection to one of the Goodmans’ daughters, a missionary linguist with Arctic Barnabas in Alaska.
That was when he got a call from Carol VanDyken, who then was a recruiter for TWR. “I said, ‘Well I’ve never heard of TWR,’” Ken recalled.
But as they learned about TWR, Ken and Debbie became intrigued. During a weeklong visit in August 2021, their interest solidified. It didn’t hurt that a cold front had come through, and weather conditions in central North Carolina were sunny and pleasant.
Although Ken had lived all of his life in Texas and Debbie had spent 45 years in the Houston area, they weren’t committed to stay in the Lone Star State. In addition to their daughter in Alaska, their other two children are in Louisville, Kentucky. The Goodmans are mountain lovers and would have considered a move to Colorado.
Cary, where the TWR Americas office is located, isn’t in the mountains, but it’s not far away. They were enchanted by the forested look of the Triangle region, they said. When they rented a house, in the town of Apex, they were delighted to discover it was a block away from one a greenway, a system of bike-hike paths.
“When this came up, I’m like, ‘Oh, North Carolina. It’s way prettier than Dallas,’” Debbie recalled with a laugh.
They made the move in October 2021, and Ken quickly settled into a full-time volunteer role serving in data management. The last three or four years of his career, Ken had been assigned to process improvement at a manufacturing plant – specifically, collecting data and making it usable. That’s exactly the sort of work TWR needed from him.
“It’s like God knew what he was doing when he put him in that position before he retired,” Debbie said.
His first project was to standardize data collection so TWR now can have a global radio-monitoring system. TWR has multiple internet radios in various places around the globe to determine how effective its transmitters are, he explained. The database he developed holds all the information in one place so that, for example, the effects of space weather or the seasons on radio reception can be evaluated. He developed a web application that gives analysts ready access.
Ken does most of his work from home, but Debbie works out of the office in Cary for her volunteer shift two days a week. She serves wherever needed but mostly in donor services, scanning paper records so they can be shredded.
“I really felt like we ‘hit the jackpot’ when God brought Debbie Goodman to our department,” wrote Suzanne Sadler, her supervisor, in an email. “She jumped right in and began scanning our backlog of gift documentation, a rather monumental task. She works very diligently, asks good questions and troubleshoots when problems arise.”
Did friends and family think they were crazy to leave home behind for the sake of volunteering 1,200 miles away from everything they knew?
“Almost everybody, that was their response,” Debbie said. “The people that we know and our friends, they’re believers, they understand the process, but they’re still like, ‘I don’t know if I’d do that.’
“Well, if God told you to do it, I bet you would.”
Image: Ken and Debbie Goodman left their home in Texas to volunteer at TWR in Cary, North Carolina. [ photo by John Lundy/TWR ]
