It took Monique an extra three years to complete her degree in architecture. So when the work began to bore her after just four years, she started to panic. With her two kids just starting school, she also couldn’t help feeling resentful as the endless stream of suburban blueprints slowly ate away at the limited time she had with her young family.

One night her husband showed her a video he’d found online. Her heart quickened as the narrator described how a think tank in Asia was helping find creative solutions to overcrowding in rapidly growing megacities. She found their website and began poring over their samples—designs more intricate and innovative than anything she’d seen in American architecture. She read story after story of struggling communities that had been transformed by these ideas. But after weeks of searching, she couldn’t find a single company doing similar work in the United States. “This is hopeless,” she finally said to her husband, “the only way I’m ever going to get to do this is if we move to Asia.”

“Okay,” he said.

“What?”

“Okay. Let’s move to Asia.”

It took nearly a year of planning alongside their local church, but now Monique and her family are happily installed in a micro-home in Asia and working as a part of a missionary team there. His event-planning business is beginning to take off, and she is able to do the work she loves directly from home. People often ask why Monique would give up a high-paying job to help build homes for the impoverished, and she is quick to tell them about the One who was sent to proclaim good news to the poor (Luke 4:18–19).