Born in Los Angeles County, CA, I met & married Howard Gard from Nebraska in1969 in a church in Burbank.  We spent our honeymoon traveling east where we attended Zion Bible Institute in East Providence, RI.  My background is in education and I have taught in both public and Christian schools in CA, in NE, and overseas, also serving as a principal and helping to start Christian schools. 

 In 1988, we had opportunity to travel behind the Iron Curtain with an experienced courier, taking Bibles into Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary.  God put a burden on our hearts to start a ministry, Church Triumphant, to get help to the suffering Believers we met on our journey.  In 1989, I resigned my position as Principal of a Christian School in CA to devote full time to our ministry.  Soon after, the Berlin Wall fell as nation after nation in Eastern Europe threw off communism.  Romania went through a bloody revolution in December of that year and opened to the Gospel.

In February, 1990, we traveled back to Romania with a Romanian couple we had met at a Christian TV station.  God opened the door for us to bring the Christian school movement to Romania and the rest of Eastern Europe.  We made several trips to Romania, actually moving there in 1992 to equip the Romanians to reach their own people with the Gospel.  The Christian High School we helped start in Timisoara expanded to include a preschool, elementary, College of Nursing, College of Computer Science, & Bible School as well as a church where Howard served as Co-Pastor with our Romanian Director and I taught English at the preschool, high school, and College of Computer Science as well as teaching multiple courses at the Bible School. 

In 2001, we turned the ministry over to the Romanians and God sent us to southern Mindanao in the Philippines where we started a Bible school to train workers to plant churches among the unreached mountain tribal people on Mindanao.  We made multiple trips to the Philippines to oversee the work, returning home first to CA then to NE.

Each time we returned from overseas, our burden for America continued to increase as we saw the church losing ground to the secular culture.  I became involved with a prayer group in Antioch, CA that was praying for the Mayor and planning for the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast.  That grew into a burden to pray for the Governor and Legislature.  I became involved with a State Prayer Call, then a Regional Prayer Call.  When we moved to TX for a year, I learned of a National Prayer Call praying for Governors and continued to be a part of it after we moved back to Omaha, NE.