Someone You Should Know: Connie Morgan

In our Someone You Should Know series, we interview Faith members to help us get to know them, see how God is working in their lives, and make new connections within our community. In this episode we get to know Connie Morgan.

Meet today's podcast guest: Connie Morgan

• Automated Transcription

• Seth Weber 0:00
  Today on faith matters, we have someone you should know, Connie Morgan.
  
  Seth Weber 0:11
  I'm Seth Weber, and you're listening to faith matters, a podcast designed to help you think biblically in matters of the Christian faith and update you on matters of faith, Bible, church. You
  
  Seth Weber 0:38
  Ian Connie Morgan, it's good to have you here? Good to be here. We had your
  
  Seth Weber 0:50
  husband last week. Got to hear a little bit of his story. Now it's time to hear some of your story. Tell us about where did you grow up?
  
  Connie Morgan 0:57
  Okay, well, I'm a California girl, okay, I grew up in Southern California, LA County, Pomona, California, and I lived there till I was five years old. My father was a Lutheran minister, and he had a church there for a number of years, and then we moved to Napa, California. Oh, okay, that's a beautiful area. Yes, I grew up in the beautiful valley of Napa. After that, then when I was just starting high school, we moved to Vancouver, Washington. Okay, so I became a northwesterner and fell in love with the Northwest. Nice. Yes. Do you
  
  Seth Weber 1:38
  have any fun memories from your childhood to share lots.
  
  Connie Morgan 1:44
  Okay, just one or two. Okay, well, this will feature a lot in my story, but I was born an identical twin last two of a family of three girls. My parents tried one more, one more time for a boy, double girls. Anyway, we were the favored little twins. I guess we were cute and shy. Anyway, we like being played with. So yeah, being a twin figures a lot into my life and who I am. We had wonderful family vacations every summer, always go off to the mountains and the Sierras or national parks, and so that figures greatly into my past, too, an appreciation of and love of nature, bird watching, things like that. Nice.
  
  Seth Weber 2:36
  Are there any funny stories of someone mistaking the you and your twin?
  
  Connie Morgan 2:40
  Okay? This probably the most traumatic was a sister, one of my sisters, she just thought it would be cute when I was about maybe three or four years old, anyway, to look at me and ask me what my name was and I'm Connie. And she say, No, you're Kathy. That just messed my mind so badly that you've been traumatized ever since. Worked really hard at forgiving her, yeah, but anyway, my identity was so tied in with her, with my sister, twin sisters, that I would answer to either name. So call me Kathy, call me Connie, whatever.
  
  Seth Weber 3:24
  All right, well, tell us about your education. Where'd you go to high school? Did you go to higher education after that?
  
  Connie Morgan 3:30
  Okay, yes. Well, first of all, I went to a parochial school in Napa, California for eight years. Lutheran School, good education, and then when we moved to Vancouver, Washington, I went to high school, public high school in Vancouver, and after that, then I went two years to a community college and in Vancouver, and then finished my degree up at Western Washington State in Bellingham. Okay, so that was nice, yeah, what did you study special education? I wanted to be in a helping field, and so I was really drawn towards special needs and that kind of thing. And so then I ended up teaching special ed for a year after finishing college, okay? And then that led into some other things as well. I discovered after that first year that I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a classroom teacher, but I decided, okay, let me just see where this is going to go. And so I had some interim years of working at a hospital in their kind of an admin assistant position at a hospital in Portland, and I did that for, I don't know, just a short number of years, up into my mid 20s, let's say, and then I felt the strong leading. The Lord. I came to know the Lord, I would say, intellectually, as a child, I had very, very good Bible teaching and training growing up. And I went through confirmation class, which is, as I suppose you know, but you you go through a couple of years of of just really studying the basic truths of the Bible, catechism. Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah, my dad was the teacher. So I sit up straight and not talk too much. So I went through confirmation and and really declared, you know, who Jesus was, profession of faith and all this. And I I knew in my head who, who Jesus was, and I had such a respect for God, and knew so much about foundational truths. Yeah, I didn't realize how inconsistent my life was socially as a teenager, it was I could really live one way during the week and during my social times with friends. Yeah, so when I was finishing high school and going through my first year of college, two years of college, it really started to bother me a lot, because I was there was, you know, I was taking risks in my life that were not good, and the friends I had chosen were not Always good. And through this time, the Lord was just creating in me a real hunger to know him. I just remember going with my youth group to we had to do street evangelism in Portland, and I remember just wanting to hide out because I didn't know what I was going to say to people on the street, and that was very convicting. And I this was all part of a journey. My parents had always had a very strong faith, a good Biblical faith, and I realized that I couldn't go to heaven on their shirt tails there. But there had not been an emphasis in my upbringing on receiving Jesus as your Savior. Was if you're trained and you, you know, you're taught this, then you're, you're in the kingdom. And so I was starting to think this all through, so how do I really get close to God and him close to me? And so when I left to go to school up in Bellingham, it was a conscious prayer that the Lord would show Himself to me. And so I can remember very distinctly having a conversion experience in my at bed one night in my dorm room, pleading that God would reveal Himself to me.
  
  Seth Weber 8:17
  Praise God, he does it. He answers those prayers. Yes,
  
  Connie Morgan 8:22
  he does. I would say my life really turned 90 degrees, and he just gave me a heart for different things. And so I ended up, for the next two summers, being a camp counselor at a Christian camp, and that was that was pretty pivotal in my spiritual growth, as well guiding teenagers and their faith journey and and then I can just remember so strongly wanting to grow in my faith even more one particular year. And I'm in my mid 20s now, and it was New Year's Eve, and I just remember committing the Lord to to him that he would take me wherever he wanted. Yeah, so I should probably shorten this a little bit, but the Lord opened up the door for me to go to India for a year. Okay, so I had an opportunity to teach at an international Christian international school in South India. And I did that for a year, and I was and I was teaching in small groups international students. They were kids, a lot of non Christian kids that were attending the school. So I had exposure to Islam, Hinduism, different world religions while I was there. And I was really drawn to the life of a missionary. And I was really observing single women who were serving on the mission field. What that looked like. And so after a really fantastic year there, then I came back to the US, and I was yielding my singleness to the Lord. I had had a lot of young men in my past, but I was really yielding that part of my life to the Lord, and said, Well, Lord, I'm tired of looking for someone myself, but if you have someone for me, could you just, could you show me, make it really clear? And PS, could he be a missionary? Yeah. So, so anyway, that's what happened. Shortly after returning, I met Gary, and then it was, yeah, then the Lord was definitely leading us together. Our mission agency that we went with required a year of Bible, and the wives had to have year Bible. So I took some seminary classes and got up to speed there.
  
  Seth Weber 10:59
  So you guys go to the mission field. You guys are both basically working as full time missionaries. Is that? How that works? True?
  
  Connie Morgan 11:09
  That was true. We were, we were appointed each as full time missionaries. So I of course, by this time of few years into our career, there, then we had our child. So that changed my life a bit, having a child, but and we lived in a village that was non electrified, and I decided to be one of those moms that did not home school because we had a very, very hot little house, and it was sweaty and it just and I wanted to be involved in ministry as well. So our daughter, Christina, ended up going to little, I would say, little international schools, which was very good for her. Nice. Tell us about your daughter a little bit. She is, like Gary said, she's a miracle child. With some extra medical help, we were able to conceive and have her on a home assignment. So she was born in Portland, and then took her back as a souvenir, six month old. Yeah, six month old. And I just remember how I had to trust the Lord in the village, because one of our the villagers greeted us when we got back and, you know, it was always a custom to, you know, open a bottle of orange Fanta or Coke or something. So she's bouncing our little six month baby on her lap, and she's a woman is drinking out of this orange soda, and then pops the soda bottle into the.my daughter's mouth. So Ever After that, I said, Lord, this child is yours, you know, and we, we just had to pray protection over our home in so many different ways. You know, from we had bugs, scorpions, snakes, things that, you know kids have to sleep under a mosquito net because of weird things that are flying around and crawling and stuff. So it was an adventure, but it was very faith strengthening, and I really learned how to pray on the mission field. Because it wasn't just, oh, Lord, I need this, But Lord, I need this. I need your protection. I need you know, we didn't have easy ways to communicate with spouses when they were off on a trip or something, and so it was very faith growing time for me living those years in Kenya.
  
  Seth Weber 13:39
  Okay, so tell us, sort of how you guys ended up coming home from the mission field, and what sort of was next for you guys, and how you ended up then here at Faith, Bible
  
  Connie Morgan 13:48
  Church. Sure. Well, when we left Kenya, we were at a junction in our lives, because our work had wrapped up where we were living on the coast, and Gary had gotten some advanced degree, so he was qualified to teach at a higher level. And so there were different options for us to come to the US. And in my heart, I I really wanted our daughter to not be a complete outsider when she came to the US, because she was, you know, Third Culture kid. She was, you know, comfortable in Kenya, probably more than she was in the US. And so Gary accepted the position at Northwestern in Twin Cities. It was a great place for our daughter to be, yeah, so she went to high school. She was able to go to high school in Minnesota, and then on to college right there, where her dad was teaching. And she got involved in youth group at Bethlehem Baptist, where we were attending, and so.
  
  Seth Weber 14:52
  And then she ended up in Spokane before you guys, she
  
  Connie Morgan 14:55
  did okay. She did because she was going to grad school at Eastern. I. Yes, right, right. You guys followed her here. Well, that was part of the story. So okay, so, because my twin sister and I had been living apart for years, and she was my soul mate, you know, she also came into a personal faith with Christ as well. So we were double sisters, and we were so close and so but our husbands had kind of had this little agreement that in retirement, well, the twins really have to live together. So we got to, we got to figure this out, how we can do this. So in the meantime, before we moved here, they were in Spokane, and he was teaching at Whitworth, and he developed brain cancer, and it was incurable, and so we just made the decision that we should move to Spokane and be near them towards the end. Okay? And so it was actually just within a year of after we moved here that he passed away, and we have been so, so thankful to be near
  
  Seth Weber 16:00
  her. So, yeah, kind of a lot of family here. Then
  
  Connie Morgan 16:04
  we have, yes, our only daughter and her husband and their two kids, and so I'm involved in taking care of them. Is your sister still here too? Then she's still here? Yes, she is.
  
  Seth Weber 16:14
  Yeah. How have you been involved in ministries at Faith, Bible, church? Yeah.
  
  Connie Morgan 16:18
  Well, my heart has always been drawn towards internationals. I mean, all my whole life, it's been that way. And so I, I guess that was would be my main area of plugging in the international ministry and being part of a good neighbor team. And that has involved various things and talk time through the valdos Women's Bible study, the morning Bible study I've participated in. I like being part of us, our growth group. I really like being part of a group that is multi generational. Oh sure, yeah, very much. I really love that and makes me feel young. And also I like connecting with the young women.
  
  Seth Weber 17:09
  Yeah, that's why I'm I'm sure the the young people in the group appreciate having wisdom as well. So yeah, I know that we appreciate the folks in our group that are, you know, a little bit past us in Ian, it's wonderful to have sort of input that's not just a bunch of 20 year olds talking to each other or giving each other bad advice.
  
  Connie Morgan 17:28
  Yeah, same could be said about groups that are just gray haired too, that talking about their aches and pains.
  
  Seth Weber 17:37
  What has God been teaching you lately?
  
  Connie Morgan 17:39
  Yeah, he's been teaching me to remain faithful till death, because I've always, you know, thought about the seasons of life, there are different seasons, and I think about what you do when you're in your 20s and when you're in 30s, and life is just full of promise and and adventure and, and what does God have for us? And then you get to the third quarter, fourth quarter of your life, and then you're thinking, Okay, what? What is this going to look like? And am I going to be serving self? Am I going to be serving others, and in the capacity that I have? So my capacity is not the same as it used to be, so I'm accepting that. But how can I serve the Lord and serve Gary and my my children, grandchildren? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that the Lord has been teaching me and just to to stay focused in the word all the time,
  
  Seth Weber 18:33
  yeah? Then how can we be praying for you? Yeah? Um,
  
  Connie Morgan 18:37
  to remain Yeah, to me, remain strong in my walk with the Lord, just to be in love with Jesus, just to honor Him and love Him and depend on him, and yeah, and to have a life of to still be bearing fruit in old age, that's what I would say. Very
  
  Seth Weber 18:59
  good. Very good. Are you ready for the speed round? Okay,
  
  Connie Morgan 19:09
  cats or dogs? Definitely. Dogs, pineapple on pizza. No pizza at all, please. Favorite
  
  Seth Weber 19:15
  book besides the Bible,
  
  Connie Morgan 19:16
  I love spiritual biographies, one that stands out to me. It's called a chance to die. It's the story of Amy Carmine, Michael and by Elizabeth Elliot, favorite musical group or band right now I just I like listening to smooth jazz, favorite movie or TV show. I like Agatha Christie movies. Her detective stories are just marvelous, best
  
  Seth Weber 19:40
  surprise gift you've ever gotten. My
  
  Connie Morgan 19:43
  sister, twin sister and I always used to have to have half of a cake. My mom would bake a cake, and she would cut it in half, and so I just remember how thrilled I was when I had my own birthday cake. How
  
  Seth Weber 19:58
  old were you when you finally got your. Own full cake,
  
  Connie Morgan 20:00
  I don't know, seven or eight. Okay, all
  
  Seth Weber 20:05
  right, if you didn't have to sleep, what would you do with all the extra
  
  Connie Morgan 20:08
  time? I really like gardening. I like, Yeah, I like walking, hiking, anything nature
  
  Seth Weber 20:15
  related. Favorite place to eat out in Spokane, karma,
  
  Connie Morgan 20:19
  the Indian one on Monroe, anything Indian Thai, but yeah, like it's spicy. Or Yes, definitely, we are spice people nice, yeah, and yeah, don't give me bland food. Give me spice.
  
  Seth Weber 20:32
  Well, it's been a pleasure having you here.
  
  Seth Weber 20:34
  Connie, thank you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Seth,

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