and all mine is colliding right now!! I’m gonna be talking about that on my first YouTube video since March…. Wanna be tagged when it goes live?

I’m Joyce, born in Guatemala to missionary parents. I was raised an MK, then married a man who also has the call of God on his life for missions work. We are career missionaries (40+ yrs) and even though we are retirement age we are not ready to quit. So we live and do missions work part of the year in Guatemala & Central America, as well as France & Spain. We have 4 children (all raised as MK’s too) and now they’re grown, married, with kids of their own — our beautiful 9 grands, the delight of my life. So part of the year we live at our cabin in the North Georgia mountains and spend our days traveling to visit our family as well as deputation missions fundraising, speaking at churches, etc. I don’t have a community or business… yet. I am still praying, studying, learning and hoping for connections and suggestions. Looking forward to getting to know you all better in the community.

Ashley is actually the reason I’m here, so when she told me about Lisa and this community, I thought I definitely needed to come check it out. I’ve heard little bits and pieces from Ashley about some of the conversations Lisa has been part of, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know everyone here. A little about me… I’m married to Kevin, we have two grown kids and a grandson who calls me Grammie, and we live in the North Georgia mountains. I spent a lot of years as an elementary school teacher and then almost 18 years running childcare from my home, so helping people learn, grow, figure things out and finally have that little “ohhhh, now I get it” moment has probably been woven through most of my life in one way or another. The online business part of my story came later. And like a lot of women, I spent quite a few years learning, taking courses, trying different things, promoting other people’s products and wondering exactly what all of those pieces were eventually going to become. Ashley and I met somewhere in the middle of all of that, and over time we realized we both wanted to stop only helping build things that belonged to somebody else and start creating something of our own from what we had actually lived and learned. That eventually became The Build Lab, which we created as a place for women to bring the idea they’ve been carrying around — even if it’s still really messy — and actually start doing something with it. A lot of what I personally love is helping a woman recognize that the thing she knows, the experience she’s had, or even the season she fought her way through may have a whole lot more value than she realizes. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons I’m excited to be in this community too. I’m still building. Still learning. Still figuring out what God is doing with some of the pieces of my own story. I really enjoy being around women who are willing to talk about the real parts of business and life while we’re figuring it out rather than pretending we already have everything tied up with a bow.