You don’t always lose your calling. Sometimes it just changes arenas.
Guys.
It is good to be back.
Truly — I’ve missed you.
If I’m honest, when my husband retired from the military, I felt like I lost my identity the moment the farewell lunch ended.
The ceremony wrapped. The applause faded. The plaques were handed out. And just like that, the base was no longer ours.
I stopped going to post.
I stopped seeing the same faces.
I was suddenly raising teenagers full time.
And I lost all sense of time management somewhere between trauma recovery and transition paperwork.
To say I’ve been in survival mode for the last two (ten?) years would be an understatement.
Military spouse transition doesn’t just affect the service member.
It disorients the entire ecosystem.
What I Was Doing Before Military Retirement
In the final years of our military life, my full-time work was launching military spouses as missionaries.
I founded MilSpo Co., a nonprofit focused on discipling the military community in partnership with local churches. We were running university cohorts, equipping spouses with theological education, leadership training, and real career pathways. I was deep in church planting, ministry leadership, Bible study publishing, teaching, speaking across the country.
I was mobilizing women into leadership.
Training changemakers.
Building pipelines.
If you had asked me then what my future held, I would have confidently told you it involved more of that.
Strategic partnerships. Cohorts. Ministry expansion.
What I would not have predicted?
High school wrestling coach.
The Unexpected Pivot
Two years ago, after my husband completed an eight-week partial hospitalization program for PTSD, our oldest son joined his school wrestling team.
At my first-ever wrestling match, I saw something I didn’t expect.
My quiet, steady husband — the man who had been buried under transition stress and trauma — was hanging over the railing, screaming like his life depended on it.
“Ride the leg!”
“Go for the half!”
“SQUEEZE!”
When he told me on our first date that he wrestled in high school in Ohio, I thought, “Cool.”
In the deep South in the 90s, we didn’t have wrestling programs. I didn’t understand what that meant.
But when our son threw the meanest hip toss and pinned that poor child to the mat, I watched my husband light up like a Christmas tree.
Wrestling brought him back.
It gave him something to celebrate.
Something structured.
Something hopeful.
For the first time in a long time, he looked fully alive.
That season, he began volunteering as an assistant coach. Coaching gave him purpose. But the most beautiful gift was watching him rebuild his relationship with our children on a wrestling mat.
Especially when our daughter joined the team.
The mat became sacred ground.
When It Fell Apart
Unfortunately, that season didn’t last.
Tension grew between my husband and the head coach. My husband had wrestled in Ohio. He had spent two decades inside military systems where rules, structure, and standards mattered.
His definition of a well-run room didn’t align with a football coach who signed up to oversee wrestling.
Eventually, he was terminated as a volunteer via text message on his last day of service.
It was abrupt.
It was unprofessional.
It was painful.
And what followed was worse.
Our children were singled out. They were bullied by coaching staff. Eventually, they quit.
It was not great.
The Birth of Missi Wrestling Club
But here’s the thing about me.
I am a serial entrepreneur.
A career community builder.
A woman who refuses to let good soil go to waste.
So I told my husband to grab his shoes and a whistle.
I would keep us on the mats.
Missi Wrestling Club was born in February 2025.
We started with two kids.
A borrowed mat.
And not much else.
We hosted a small gathering to celebrate girls in wrestling — and nearly 50 showed up.
By 2026, the state competition hosted approximately 120 girls. Nearly half were Missi Club members. Thirty-two of them stood on the podium.
We didn’t just build a team.
We built a pipeline.
Today, I’m a high school wrestling coach and an advocate for growing girls’ wrestling in Mississippi. I’m on the mat four days a week and in a van most weekends with a carload of wrestlers chasing something bigger than medals.
And if I’m honest?
It’s an absolute blast.
What Church Planting and Wrestling Have in Common
People laugh when I say this, but there isn’t much difference between church planting and building a wrestling club.
Both are about community.
Both are about leadership development.
Both require systems, vision, grit, and a stubborn refusal to quit.
And both are about launching people into who they are meant to become.
I’ve always been passionate about training women to lead, mobilizing changemakers, and building structures that outlast me.
The arena changed.
The mission didn’t.
The Lesson in All of This
If military transition has taught me anything, it’s this:
You cannot always predict where you’ll land.
The job title may change.
The arena may shift.
The uniform may come off.
But the core of who you are — the builder, the mobilizer, the leader — remains.
Sometimes God doesn’t remove the calling.
He reroutes it.
So if you are in a season where your old life ended abruptly…
If the farewell ceremony felt like a cliff…
If you don’t recognize your current job description…
Take heart.
Find what gives you life.
Let the people around you shape how that mission unfolds.
You don’t have to cling to the old blueprint.
You just have to stay in the work.
For now, you can find me on the mat.
And honestly?
I wouldn’t have guessed this plot twist in a million years.
Debrief complete.
Rebuild accordingly.
— Megan
