A Life of Looking Closer
The story behind the seeing.
Carol Beyer Wilkins is an educator, communicator, and lifelong learner who has spent much of her life helping people look more closely—at words, ideas, one another, and the world around them. Her work has taken her from English and ESL classrooms to college teaching, communication coaching, and organizational leadership. She also spent twelve years homeschooling her daughter and was deeply involved in her homeschooling community.
Across those varied places, Carol came to understand learning as something that happens not only in classrooms, but through experience, relationships, community, and the ordinary rhythms of life. She holds a master’s degree in communication and a bachelor’s degree in secondary education and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Adult Education at Regent University, where her research explores educator flourishing, belonging, and the communities that help people thrive.
Carol is part of the faith family at Meadow Brook Baptist Church, where she serves by leading and teaching the church’s ESL ministry. Life within her church community has shaped not only the ways she serves, but the ways she understands Scripture, sees other people, and approaches her writing.
That same posture shapes the way Carol approaches Scripture. Lord, Let Me See grew from a simple prayer: Lord God, let me see what You see in all things. That prayer became an invitation to linger over familiar passages, notice what is easily passed over, and behold Christ with fresh attention.
Carol writes not as someone who has mastered that way of seeing, but as someone still learning to look—and inviting others to look again with her.
Carol and her husband, Gerrick, have been married for twenty-seven years and live in Alabama. They have a daughter and son-in-law and remain deeply grateful for the family, friendships, church, and other communities that have shaped their life together.
The Story Beneath the Stories
The faith that shapes how I see, write, and live.
I was blessed to be raised in a Christian home and came to know the Lord at a young age. When I was sixteen, I went on my first mission trip, and the experience changed the direction of my life. I already knew I wanted to be a teacher, but I came home knowing something else too: somehow, ministry and missions needed to remain part of my life.
During college, I met the man who would become my husband. Over the years, Gerrick and I have sought to make ministry part of the life we share, even though neither of us became a missionary in the formal sense I once imagined. God has given us opportunities to serve both close to home and farther away, including through ministry in Greece. Along the way, He has shown me that serving Him does not always look the way I expect it to. Sometimes it happens across an ocean. Sometimes it happens in a classroom, a church, a conversation, or in the ordinary work of loving the people He places around us.
Years after that first mission trip, I now have the privilege of leading and teaching an ESL ministry through our church. I smile sometimes at the way God has woven together things that seemed separate when I was younger—teaching, cross-cultural relationships, faith, and ministry. The form is different from what sixteen-year-old me imagined, but the thread was there all along.
My own walk with Christ has certainly not been a straight one. If spiritual formation is a road, mine has had plenty of twists and turns—and, on occasion, a little off-roading. I have wandered, struggled, misunderstood, and had to reconsider things I thought I already knew. Through it all, I have become increasingly grateful for the grace and mercy of God.
Jesus remains the center and the guide. Again and again, He patiently draws me back, corrects what needs correcting, teaches me what I could not see before, and changes my perspective along the way. Whatever growth there has been in my life is not a testimony to my ability to stay on the path, but to His faithfulness in continuing to lead me.
I do not write as an expert in faith or as someone who has arrived. I am a sinner saved by the grace of God, still being formed, still learning, and still walking. I am deeply grateful that God has given me the love and community of fellow believers who encourage, challenge, teach, and walk alongside me.
Perhaps that is part of why I keep returning to the prayer, Lord, let me see. I know how easily I can miss what God is doing, how much I still have to learn, and how often another look changes what I thought I understood. My hope is not that these pages point to how well I see, but that they point, however imperfectly, to the One who sees us fully, knows us completely, and loves us still.
