Laura Calhoun was born in Elizabethton, TN. Her dad was a student at Moody Aviation preparing to go to the mission field as a missionary pilot.  Laura grew up in a variety of places such as Honduras, Cameroon, France, and Zaire. She moved back to the States when she was in sixth grade and graduated from Science Hill High School in Johnson City, TN. Next,she spent her freshman year of college at Moody Bible institute learning more about God and His Word. Then, she transferred to East Tennessee State University. While at ETSU she became active as volunteer youth staff with the middle school youth group at her church and with Campus Crusade for Christ at ETSU.

   Laura’s father was a flight instructor at Moody Aviation for ten years, which is where I first met him. I didn’t meet Laura, however, until after my first summer of training in TN. She had graduated from ETSU and gone on a summer mission trip in Daytona Beach, FL with Campus Crusade. The first time that we met was after she returned at a college get together where we went water skiing. Over the next several months I got to know Laura through college group at church.

   After getting to know Laura, I started to like her as more than a friend. She didn’t know it of course, and neither did anyone else. Until one day my African friend from the Congo at Moody asked me what I thought about her, and I had to confess that I kind of liked her. He got excited and motivated me to continue to pursue this interest. The problem was that Laura was about to go to Hungary as a missionary for a year, and I didn’t want to start anything with her before she left.

    I didn’t know what would happen while Laura was in Hungary. We faithfully emailed and shared prayer requests with each other. Eventually she began to wonder why I was so faithful in my emails, especially when she found out that I was socially insufficient when it came to keeping in contact with people.  So somewhere down the line around late October 2000 I confessed my intentions. We both prayed and thought about it over the next couple of months. She returned to the states in March 2001 and we have been dating until we were engaged on Nov. 17th, 2001. We were married on May 25th, 2002.