“Faith is not just coming to church on Sunday morning,” Derek Gora says. “It started that way for us, but when you surrender yourself – your body, your mind, your soul – to what God might have in store for you, you’re going to hear from him. You’re going to see him work.”

“And when that happens, you are going to be willing to say yes to whatever he tells you to do.” 

“The first couple of years at Calvary, we knew we belonged here, but we just sat back and watched,” Dannette Gora says. “Once we got into a small group, I think that’s when things changed for us. We put down roots in the church, and it became ours.”

“We both felt this tug from God saying, ‘There’s so much more I can give you,’” Derek says. “There is a moment that I look back on. We were watching Sons of Anarchy, and there was a rape scene. We look at each other, and we’re like ‘What are we watching?’ We turned it off, and we were done. We were making changes. We started to simplify. Our hearts told us that we didn’t need the stuff that we thought we needed.”

Dannette continues, “It was like the world had crept into our faith, and we were just trying to keep up with the best of them. God was showing us parts of ourselves that were just small, turned in, and more vain than we were willing to admit to.”

Derek was asked to usher and Dannette served in Calvary Kids. “In little ways, we just stepped in. Met more people,” Derek says. “That led us into Student Ministries so we were coming here every Sunday night and doing life with students.”

“At that point, we were so nervous to be doing that kind of stuff,” Dannette says.

“Yeah,” Derek agrees. “Who am I? I am nothing. I know nothing.”

“We were scared to death,” Dannette says, “thinking we were not the kind of people that should be doing this. But God was like, ‘Love. Serve. Dig in.’ and we did. Each time, he stretched us and a little more. Then it was like we were touching all over the place because we kept asking, ‘What can we do?’ We had to jump in slowly and find our way. We were never prepared for any of it, but God grows you.”

“Because of the way that we put ourselves out there at church, we built the community that we eventually needed,” Derek says referring to the time in 2014 when what initially seemed like the flu turned out to be a serious illness that nearly killed him. He was in a coma, all of his organs septic and machines keeping him alive.

“Leading up to that time, we sold our house and closed on this old farmhouse,” Dannette says. “We changed our budget and our lifestyle so that we could be involved and give and be part of the church in a way that changes the world. And all that time, little did we know Derek’s slowly dying.”

Derek picks up the story. “We wouldn’t have survived without the church. I wouldn’t have survived physically, but she wouldn’t have survived emotionally being alone next to me for a month, away from the kids, pregnant. The church community comforted her and helped her make the hard decisions when I couldn’t. The community reached out, came to the hospital, sat in the waiting room, prayed, offered anything she needed. It was so humbling to hear that when I came out of the coma. I didn’t realize we were loved so much.”

“I was alone with two kids in an old house on land I couldn’t take care of,” Dannette says, “with a baby who was going to be born in a couple months, and a husband who was most likely going to die. I had to rely on God and grab onto the people around me in the church. They held us up.”

The road to recovery was long, and the church community kept showing up to help. “The main thing I got out of this is it’s not about coming here every Sunday,” Derek says. “It’s building a community within the church.”

“That experience of being up to our elbows in mess,” Dannette adds, “and our church suffering alongside us and pulling us out of it, that makes saying yes to serving easy. Mission trip? Okay, here I am. Send me.” 

“Before our mission trip, it had been building in both of us for a while that maybe this was something we wanted to do. When someone asked who wanted to sign up for a mission trip, I was like, ‘I do.’ Then I found out it was India, and I was like, ‘Ooh. Maybe I don’t.’ But God stretches you.”

“I fell in love with India the first time,” Derek says. He’s been on two mission trips there having just returned last November from the second. “Fell in love with the people, what Abraham [Thomas] is doing, what the culture is. The whole thing. My heart went out there and it stayed there. Weeks can’t go by without me thinking about India – flashbacks of the kids smiling, the staff, how engaged people are with you. I think it’s beautiful.”

“There’s a kindness and openness in the culture there that we didn’t expect,” Dannette says. “There are some internal biases about Muslim and Hindu people that are part of our culture, and discovering we had those completely humbled us. We saw the commonality; they have the same need for Jesus we have.”

“Now when I’m anywhere – a restaurant, a gas station, on the street – and I see someone who is Indian, I think to myself, ‘I kind of love you.’ It’s weird, I know. But we know a piece of them, and it connects us to the other side of the world and gives us compassion.” 

“People ask – and I said this too – ‘Is it worth giving money to people to go to another country and do mission work? Is it worth it?’” She pauses, then answers her own question. “We’ve fallen in love with a part of the world that we will be invested in for the rest of our lives because we went. We got the chance to look in people’s eyes and make relationships with them. Just a few people, but that’s what matters. We don’t have to do the big thing.”

Derek adds, “I was with a group of 10 students, and I asked, ‘How can I pray for you?’ They started telling me things, hard things. One guy puts his hand out and there is a giant burn scar on it like his hand was melted. I’m like, ‘What’s this?’ He goes, ‘This is because I came here [to Logos College]’ His father did that to him.”

“These are kids – young men and women – dealing with persecution, being ostracized from their families, abandonment.”

“They’re giving up so much to follow Christ,” Dannette says. “And they’re hungry to be seen and known. They ask, ‘What’s your name?’ and tell you theirs because they just want to be seen. It’s enough to hear their stories, pray with them, encourage them to stay the course.”

“They need that support,” Derek says, “because when they are done with school at Logos, they are preparing to embark on what could be the beginning of the end of their life. The students are being prepared to be missionaries in their own country, and in India, that’s dangerous work. But it could be there will be 10 more followers of Christ because of them. It could be 100. But it’s going to be hard. They’re going to struggle. They’re going to be persecuted on a level we don’t experience here.”

“They need prayer, support, encouragement to stay with it, and to hear, ‘You keep doing what you’re doing. Do what God is preparing you for.”

“That’s what the apostles did in the Bible,” Dannette says. “They went around and encouraged believers. Christians in other parts of the world need to hear from us, and we need to hear from them just as much. We need to put eyes and flesh to people that are different than us and encourage them.”

“One of the things I learned when Derek was sick is God doesn’t give us what we need before we get there. People say, ‘I couldn’t have done what you did.’ I couldn’t do it either! But when you step foot into it, God gives the grace you need. But you have to move your feet.”