Kinsey Jarrett started taking Spanish because her brother told her it was fun and it would look good on applications. She was after a good grade, a resume line, something practical. "That's really why I took it," she said. Then she kept going — four years, the Illinois State Seal of Biliteracy, and a five-minute video presentation for a Global Seal of Biliteracy conference — and somewhere in that stretch the practical became personal.

She's a senior at Salem Community High School, and she's heading to Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri, this fall to study children's ministry and intercultural studies. Her brother is already there — two years ahead of her. She'll follow him there, as she has in a few things.

The path clarified itself in stages. Kinsey had always wanted to be a teacher and a missionary — two things she thought might be separate. Her friend Rachel Williams went to Thailand for two years on mission work, and watching that unfold changed the shape of what Kinsey thought was possible. "When she went on this mission trip, it kind of opened my eyes to a whole new possibility for a career," she said. This past November, Kinsey went to Japan on a mission trip with Rachel and two other church members from First Christian Church, where her father, David Jarrett, serves as creative arts pastor. Rachel showed her what she's come to call "loving people well through missions."

When Craig asked her to define that — how would you explain it to someone from Mars — she didn't hesitate: "Going out of your way, putting your pride aside, and just being able to serve people, think about their needs before yourself, and being okay with the fact that you're not going to know everything in a new culture. And stepping out of your comfort zone." Language, she said, is a big part of it. It's hard to care about someone you can't hear.

This past summer, her mother pushed her — she'd been undecided — to go on a mission trip to Ecuador. She went and discovered that four years of Spanish had prepared her for something real. She got to work with children, speak directly with them in their own language, and translate. She met a girl, ten or eleven years old, and they still text each other. "I just get to build that community and relationship," she said.

Ecuador, she said, showed her a culture that is "so family-based. They love community. They love family. Even though they don't have a lot, they still love people and love the Lord. They can put that aside and still have so much joy."

Japan showed her something different. It's 1% Christian, which struck her. But Japanese hospitality — the patience, the welcome extended to a group of Americans doing cultural things wrong — gave her a different kind of text to read. "They have the right principles that we find in the Bible," she said. "They just don't know who to point that back to." She also went to a tea ceremony.

At home, her family is its own thread in this story. She has four siblings; the two youngest are adopted. "Caring for the orphans and the widows — that's what the Bible says," she said. "I was just reading it last night, actually." That verse and those siblings are part of why she wants to work with children in the places she goes.

The biliteracy presentation that sparked this story was almost a coincidence. Mrs. Toth, her Spanish teacher, emailed her about an opportunity to be a student presenter for a Global Seal of Biliteracy conference. Kinsey had already decided not to do it. Then she reconsidered. "It's my senior year. Why not take this opportunity?" She wrote a script, made a five-minute video in Canva, emailed it directly to the conference director, and received good feedback from people at her school. The message was simple: "There is a reason I'm learning Spanish. It's not just to get an easy A."

She named the teachers she'll carry with her: Mrs. Toth, who created the opening; Ms. Schuler, who several Salem students have mentioned in the same breath; both of them "people who really care about the students more than just the grades, more than just getting their job done." That quality of caring, she said, is what made her want to teach in the first place.

She said she definitely has a gift for language from God. The way she said it — not as a boast, but as a matter of fact — made it sound like she'd simply noticed something true about herself and decided to be honest about it.