I trained to be a missionary to Mongolia. God sent me back to the marketplace instead. It took me years to understand that was not a consolation prize — it was the assignment.
I grew up in Sunday school. Marinated in the Word of God since I was nine years old. So when I found myself in my twenties putting customs officials on payroll so that containers could clear without full duty declarations, I could not make peace with what I was doing.
In the Philippines logistics industry, this was just how things worked. A lot of people envied my position. But I had grown up knowing better. And knowing better, while doing otherwise, is its own kind of slow death.
THE ROOM NOBODY EXPECTED ME IN
Being a young woman in a male-dominated industry came with a strange kind of privilege. I could walk into a customs office and get accommodated over others — doors opened, calls got returned, requests got processed. That was the advantage.
The disadvantage was everything that came with it. They saw the age, the gender, and assumed those things told them everything about what I knew and how far I could be pushed. I was the Barbie in the industry — easy to underestimate.
I learned quickly that the only response to being underestimated is to be undeniable. I became sharper, more direct, less willing to soften edges that did not need softening. That sharpness cost me warmth in some rooms. But it kept me standing in all of them.
What I did not have the language for then was this: God had placed me in that specific tension for a reason. A young woman who could get in the room and could not be moved once she was there. That was not accidental. That was preparation.
THE CROSSROAD
By 2006 I was at a crossroad. Successful by every measure the industry used. And completely hollow inside. I felt like a workhorse assigned to perform in a circus — in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, for people who did not share a single value I held.
Deep in my heart I simply wanted to serve God. So I acted on it. I left my position at Hitachi Transport, enrolled in a theology program, and joined a mission training course. I was preparing for deployment to Mongolia. It felt clean. It felt like the exit I had been looking for.
What I did not realize then was that I was not running toward a calling. I was running away from one.
THE REDIRECTION
After completing the training, the head of mission at ACCM in Valero, Makati sat with me, prayed over me, and said something I was not prepared to hear.
He told me my calling was not Mongolia. That God would use me through the skills and influence I already had. That the marketplace — the very industry I wanted to escape — was my mission field. No matter how corrupt that industry was, it still needed God. And the person best positioned to bring that was someone already inside it, who understood it, who could not be dismissed as an outsider.
He said: there are a lot of others who can go to Mongolia. But God will use you in the environment where you already are.
I was devastated. I had completed a long and serious training. I had mentally and spiritually prepared for a specific assignment. And now I was being told to go back to the thing I had been trying to leave.
THE PRAYER MOUNTAIN
I spent several days on the prayer mountain after that conversation. And the more I sat with it, the more uncomfortable the truth became.
Going to Mongolia had felt like obedience. But as I reflected honestly, I began to see it for what it was: escape. I had no empathy for the people in the industry I was leaving. In my heart I felt they deserved judgment, not ministry. I thought of Sodom and Gomorrah, not of grace.
And then I thought of Jonah.
Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh either. Not because he was afraid — but because he did not think those people deserved what God wanted to give them. The corrupt, the compromised, the ones who had normalized what should never be normal. He wanted out. He found a ship going the other direction.
The corrupt industry I was trying to escape was my Nineveh. And Mongolia was my ship.
There is a verse about leaving the ninety-nine sheep to find the one that is lost. It never made logical sense to me from the outside. But God did not ask me to understand the mathematics. He asked me to remember that I had once been the lost one. That someone had left their ninety-nine for me.
God did not give me a plan on that mountain. He simply asked me to trust Him and stay. I came down with no clarity on what to do next. Only a confirmation: this is where you are called. Figure out how to do it right.
THE MISSION
That redirection changed everything about how I understood my work. Ministry was not something I would do after business hours or on a Sunday. It was what I was doing every time I made a decision in a room where everyone expected me to compromise and I did not.
It was in the contract I refused to sign. The certification I would not give. The deal I walked away from. Every one of those moments was a sermon that nobody heard me preach but everyone around me has witnessed.
The marketplace does not need more people who talk about their faith on LinkedIn. It needs people who carry it into the room where the real decisions are made — the negotiation, the customs declaration, the product certification — and let it change the outcome. That is harder than a mission trip. It costs more than a Sunday offering. And it lasts longer than either.
Every broken industry has people inside it who know it is wrong and do it anyway because they believe they have no other choice. The mission field is not the absence of those people. It is their presence. You cannot reach Nineveh from a ship going the other direction.
WHAT I AM BUILDING NOW
The businesses I am building today — are extensions of that same calling. Technology that gives the clinic in the Philippines, the distributor in Indonesia, the small manufacturer across Southeast Asia the same intelligence layer that well-resourced businesses take for granted.
Not because it is a good market opportunity. Because there are two kinds of evil in the world: the one who does evil, and the one who sees it, has the opportunity to do something, and refuses. I saw the problem. I had the capability. Walking away would have made me the second kind.
I did not go to Mongolia. I went back to the marketplace. And I have been doing missions there ever since.
The mission field is not always where you expect it.
Sometimes it is exactly where you are.