A Staircase, a Ring, and a Promise
Their life together began in a simple setting, a narrow staircase at Trinity Western College. Darwin had just arrived from Iowa in 1973 and was hauling students’ trunks upstairs when someone introduced him to Darlis, the student council secretary with a clipboard in hand. “I was a big farm kid,” he laughs. “Somebody said, ‘Here, carry this big strong Iowa boy.’” He started up and down the stairs with those trunks.
At the time, Trinity Western was still a small two-year college with about 385 students. Darlis was pursuing an Associate of Arts degree in General and Biblical Studies, which she completed in 1974. Darwin only stayed for one year, 1973 to 1974, taking Bible and pre-med courses, but that was all it took for their paths to intertwine.
They soon found themselves walking to chapel at the same time and meeting in the cafeteria without planning it. “I just enjoyed his company,” Darlis says. “Tall, blond, a beautiful singing voice, and serious about the Lord.” She remembers telling him early, “I am not going to get married. I am going to be a missionary in Venezuela.” Darwin grins at the memory. “I had promised God I would not date for six months. That commitment lasted about twenty minutes.”
Friendship quickly followed. “We would walk out to the bridge and talk about what kind of marriage we hoped for and the kind of parents we wanted to be,” Darlis says.
That summer Darwin toured with a TWU chorale group, “B.C. Sonlight,” across North America. While on Staten Island, after a concert, he received his stipend, fifty dollars a week for five weeks. He walked to a small jewellery shop, bought a diamond, and tucked it into a piece of tissue in his pocket. Weeks later, he proposed. They were both nineteen.
Decades later, their affection remains tender. “I have never lost the feeling of, wow, I get to be married to him,” Darlis says. For Darwin, the gratitude is mutual. “It was amazing to me that God had given me this woman with such depth and quality in her life,” he says. Through challenges and relentless travel, they call their marriage their greatest earthly gift.
A Detour that Became a Calling
After college, Darwin went into dairy management, a job he loved. “It was just everything I had ever wanted in life,” he says. But when the Berlin Wall began to crack, a friend invited him to come along on a trip to Eastern Europe to see how they might support local churches. What he witnessed there changed him. “The Lord just really challenged me,” Darwin remembers. “If I took away everything that you consider a blessing, would you still worship me?”
Soon after, he left dairy work and accepted an invitation to help launch a small mission agency. What was meant to be two years became three decades of leadership, friendships, and God’s provision.
Those years were marked by deep friendship with Bob Rasmusson, the founder who had first invited them into the work. Bob was more than a colleague. He was a mentor and a brother to them. When he passed suddenly in an accident, the loss was profound. In time, the missions board asked Darwin and Darlis to step into leadership. With humility, they accepted, trusting that God would continue the work through them.
Sharing Mercy in Egypt
After several years of working in Eastern Europe, in 2012, God opened another unexpected door. Their first invitation to Egypt was daunting, but they went anyway, praying on the plane that God would meet them there.
The work was deeply human. They taught marriage and parenting camps for couples longing for change. Some came carrying hidden hurts. In one gathering, Darwin asked the men if they knew they needed mercy that day. Almost every hand went up. Those honest conversations became the beginning of healing.
Over the years, dozens have come to faith through those camps. “We had eight or nine this summer that made a first-time decision for Christ,” Darlis says. They have watched husbands and wives move toward one another, sometimes for the first time in decades. One of their own team members told them, “We have a new marriage,” after thirty years.
Their posture of mercy shaped the mission agency they led. “We became the mission of the second chance,” Darwin says. Workers who had stepped away from other agencies found welcome and renewal. The Andersons listened, trained, and encouraged them to return with fresh strength.
Training was intentional and thorough. They have four training centres around the world for those wanting to go into missions full-time. “That is a three-to-four-month program,” Darlis says. “Language learning, translation, prayer, spiritual perseverance, conflict resolution.” All practical preparation because the work is practical.
The staff has become truly international. “Our mission agency has about 70 percent non-North Americans,” Darwin says. “We have 21 or 22 nations represented.”
A Providential Address
When the season of leading the mission agency came to a natural close, the Andersons sensed that God was not finished with their calling. They dreamed of a quiet place where they could still invest in people, a home where their years of experience could be poured back into missionaries who needed strength to keep going.
Their search began with prayer and a phone call to Sandy Nordine, a longtime friend whose late husband had once discipled Darwin as a teenager. Sandy had been a realtor in Rapid City. When they asked if she knew of a small town where they might settle, her response surprised them. “I could,” she said, “but I would really like you to buy my place.”
The house was far more than they expected: spacious, with an overlook of the city and a walkout basement that opened to a canyon of whispering pines. It was more than they could afford, and they told her so. But Sandy called back within days with such a low offer that they were stunned. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. “I am pretty sure we are supposed to move to Rapid City, South Dakota, fairly quickly.”
What had once been only a dream became reality. The house was not just a place to live. It was a place to keep serving. They had visited them in the past and remembered the lower level and saw what it could become. “It is a walkout over a canyon of pine trees, and it is just dead quiet back there,” said Darwin.
Quiet is part of the care. This would not be a house just for them. It would be a sanctuary where missionaries could sit on the back deck and hear the wind in the branches, where they could sleep and pray and heal. “It is just a wonderful restful place back there for missionaries to regain their footing again,” Darwin says.
They count the years as grace, even the difficult ones. “We have really had very little to do with everything that has gotten done,” Darwin says. “It has just been the grace of God working ahead of us and around us.”
They are grateful first for a marriage that held. “He has kept our relationship sweet,” Darlis says. “We are really grateful.”
They speak to younger workers with a kindness that comes from long miles. “We have a tremendous freedom to fail,” Darwin says. “If we take a wrong turn, it is not going to derail our lives. Twenty years later, it will not look like a wrong turn at all. It will look like part of His brilliant plan.”
A Refuge with a Name
At the edge of Rapid City, a home looks out over a canyon of pines. Below the main floor, a walkout apartment has been prepared with care. The space has a name: The Hills Abide and Rest. It is stocked for the weary and the faithful, for the missionaries and leaders who have poured themselves out in service and now need a place to be restored. Today a couple from Poland arrives with two young children. Lunch is waiting, broccoli carrot cheese soup simmering quietly in a crockpot.
The Andersons know what it is to arrive worn thin. For three decades they spent forty weekends a year on the road, speaking, training, and listening. They led a mission agency that sent workers across the globe, led Evangelistic English Camps in Europe and marriage camps for the villages of Upper Egypt, and walked alongside their staff and teams through demanding seasons. Now they turn their attention to those who shepherd others, offering space where the shepherds themselves can rest. “We are hoping that we can say we understand, we have been there,” Darwin says. “Let us just debrief together,” noting that more about their ministry can be found at www.abideandrest.org.
Abide and Rest is not simply a room with clean sheets. It is a ministry of presence. Some guests need prayer before returning to the field. Some need counsel or simply space for tears. Some need to rediscover laughter. The Andersons have a lengthy list of names, hundreds of missionaries, and leaders from across the world, who know they can knock on this door and be received.
The Invitation
There is soup on the stove and a couple at the door. There is a website nearly ready and an open house in October. The apartment is not grand, but it is enough. It is the kind of place where a leader can exhale, where a family can sleep through the night, and where a conversation can turn into courage for the next flight out.
If you are looking for a way to begin, start where they did. Offer friendship that becomes presence. Listen before you advise. Remember the young faces at your school who carry quiet wounds, and care for your people with tenderness. Leave space for laughter and tell the stories that remind you God is near- the diamond wrapped in tissue, the summer evenings, the whispered prayers on airplanes.
If reluctance is what you feel, bring that along too. God has a way of getting you where you need to be, Darwin says. So, keep saying yes to the small steps of faith. And when the doorbell rings, do not brush it off; open it. It just might be the sound of God’s next assignment arriving at your doorstep.