Joyce Brown:  

I went to Linn Benton Community College for 2 years and received my AA in Data Processing (computer programming). Got married to a wonderful man that loves the Lord and was in my Data Processing class. We moved to Portland were he got a job. I then got a job working at Freightliner Corporation (the company that builds Semi-trucks). I worked there as a computer programmer and then advanced up to Systems Analyst. I started in April 1980 and was there until January 2006. They decided I was no longer useful to them and they fired me. They never gave me a reason. I'll fill in a little of what ELSE went on during those 25 years. Tom and I attended East Hill church for about a year I think, then a neighbor told us of a closer church and we started attending Open Bible Church. Tom had a son by a previous marriage and he was living with his mother. Tom's ex-wife died after we had been married for 3 years and at that time, Nick, Tom's son, came to live with us (at 8 years old). The youth pastor from Open Bible Church was feeling called to start a church and we felt called to go with him. In 1987 five families from Open Bible started Tuality Valley Church in Wilsonville. For 14 years approximately 50 of us met in the grade school in Wilsonville. In 2001, we felt the Lord was calling us in a different direction, as well as a few other families in TVC. So, in the late summer the pastor called a Sunday for remembrance and we remembered the wonderful things the Lord had done over the past 14 years and then the families feeling called to move on were released. That very Sunday, as we were driving to our last meeting at TVC, at the end of the street we live on, we saw a sign...'Destiny Christian Fellowship' with an arrow pointing back the way we had come. "Huh? I didn't see any new building. Maybe God is trying to tell us something." We had a little trouble finding the place (signs were put out later than we were looking), but we discovered Destiny Christian Fellowship was meeting in a grade school (does this sound familiar?) two blocks from our house. The church is an offshoot from City Bible, pastored by Joel Hjertstedt, and had just began the Sunday we saw the sign. We have been with them since September 2001. I was pretty burned out from the stress at Freightliner, so since my husband's job paid him quite well, I decided to change careers. I took 6 months to unwind and some training in voiceover intending to get into narrating audio books. I was also doing volunteer work for the church; taking people unable to drive to doctor appointments and other errands. Well, the volunteer work was taking up a lot of time and it won out over the voiceover. In 2004...well even before that, we had been having various people live with us in our house after we moved from West Linn to Gladstone in 1990. If you are interested, ask me to tell you the story about the Asher Rock Inn. As I was saying, in 2004, we asked an elderly lady in our church if she would like to come live with us. She accepted and stayed with us until just this last week (June 2011). She had a car accident around 2006 and totale...Expand for more