If you somehow wind up in northern Oklahoma, you may find yourself in the city of Bartlesville.  While you’re there, you may be blessed to encounter a woman named Danika Joshua along with her husband Roy and their three high energy children ranging in age from 5-9.  Danika migrated from the cold white north of Minnesota where she grew up in a tiny town where the complexions of most of the people matched the frozen precipitation that surrounded them each winter.  Danika attended church with her grandmother, and at about the age of six, young Danika made the decision to follow Jesus.  As she entered her teen years, she felt a calling into ministry, but she wasn’t quite sure where God wanted her to serve.  Because of this uncertainty, she tried everything to see what might work best: a camping ministry, an internship at a church in youth ministry, and serving in residence life during college.

Danika continued on this pathway following God’s leading by attending and graduating from Bible college in St. Paul, MN.  Upon completing this, she spent some time attending a discipleship training school (Youth With A Mission) and then went on a short-term mission trip to Asia.  During this time in her life, God met with her in a radical way and really opened her eyes and heart to frontier missions and areas where people did not yet know the name of Jesus.  What was intended to be a “gap” between college and grad school became a life calling for her.  She moved away from the whiteness of Minnesota to the more colorful and diverse part of the world: Central Asia, where she worked with a non-governmental organization utilizing her skills to teach English and work in educational development in this war-ravaged area.  After that experience, Danika moved to Eastern Asia and began to really study the Bible on a deeper level than she ever had before through an intensive study with the School of Biblical Studies.  Think of going through the Bible about five times in ten months!  This fabulous learning experience led to an opportunity to travel around to other parts of Asia facilitating Bible and leadership training.

During one of these trips, Danika met her husband, who is from India.  They relocated to the United States, and she helped to start an outreach program that connected churches to reaching out to refugee families.  Now, even while living in an interior and somewhat remote place like Oklahoma, her heart is still invested in this way, and she is still involved with the central Asian nation where she used to live, as well as with more newly arrived refugees coming into the U.S.  When Danika and Roy began to have children of their own, they got to come along to many of the refugees’ homes.  This role of motherhood helped Danika to connect with and build bridges with other women as it was a place of common ground despite other differences that existed, such as culture or language.

Danika became a life coach because she saw a need for this type of ministry especially among the women that had become a part of her life.  Because of her overseas experiences with other cultures as well as her partnership with various Christian organizations and networking with churches, she felt God had brought her to this decision for such a time as this.  Often the resources available to mothers are limited or even unknown.  Access to a coach and support for women in leadership, especially for busy moms, is challenging to find.  Motivated by her own ministry experiences, Danika wanted to come alongside other women also in ministry and to help them live with intention and thrive as they served.  Through her experiences of being coached herself, she saw that buying into the coaching process could unleash immense amounts of potential.

A few years ago, while Danika was going through a coach training time, she met Heather Robey, who was just starting a ministry called Joyful Journeys.  During their conversations and in the relationship they formed as peer partners in one of their training courses, Heather would share about the development of her ministry and her passion for supporting women working in ministry.  Danika really connected with Heather’s focus as well as sharing a similar passion.  Both women take great joy in using the tool of coaching to encourage, support, and witness other women stepping into their God-given purpose and calling regardless of their current stage of life.  How powerful that God took these two women’s lives, brought them both to Oklahoma, and has now connected them in uniting in ministry together through Joyful Journeys!