She could hardly wait for church to end.


As soon as her family returned home after the service, she would trade out her frilly dress, matching hat, white gloves, tights, and patent leather shoes for shorts and a T-shirt; tie up her long, blonde hair into a ponytail; and then race out the back door barefooted — like that early scene from “Te Man in the Moon” — to find trees to climb and mud to play in outside of her family’s home in Fairview, NC, located near Asheville in the heart of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.


“I was the only girl in the family, so my mother took every opportunity to put me in a dress. She especially loved taking it to the next level for church,” Dr. Constance Wright explains, then owning up to her reputation back then as a tomboy. “I hated every bit of it.”


However, that sentiment changed when Wright was around 14 and they asked her to fill in for one of the Sunday school teachers who was sick. She prepared for her lesson, put on her “Sunday best,” and headed to church. Wright felt nervous at first, up in front of a room of children, as she’d only recently become a Christian herself.


After a few lessons, though, she discovered she loved her new role and began to sense her calling to become a teacher.


“It was deeper than loving the children,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.’”


NGU.EDU | 15


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