She was a small woman.
I mean that literally — physically small, the kind of person you might not notice walking into a room. Except you always noticed Becka walking into a room. She had a presence that had nothing to do with her size and everything to do with who she was. The air changed when she arrived. The conversation got better. People laughed. People leaned in.
She ran a family tour business. Took kids to Gettysburg. To Washington DC. To the places where the American story actually happened — where the ground still holds the weight of what was decided there. She didn't just organize trips. She understood what she was doing. She was putting young people in front of something bigger than themselves and trusting it would leave a mark.
It did.
I never went on one of her tours. I didn't need to. Some people build a business and then try to fit their faith around it. Becka never seemed to have that problem. The faith came first. Everything else followed from it. Not as a strategy. Not as a brand. Just as the natural order of how she moved through the world.
She never let the business get in the way of who she was.
Most of us have it backwards.
I'll be honest with you.
I've spent years building walls I didn't always know were there. The work on one side. The faith on the other. The business version of me and the everything-else version of me, operating in the same body but not always in the same direction.
And the masks. We all wear them. The work mask — confident, decisive, in control. The family mask — present, steady, holding it together. The faith mask — doing fine, growing, no serious doubts worth mentioning. We put them on so naturally we sometimes forget they're there. We become so practiced at the version of ourselves each room requires that we lose track of whether there's one person underneath all of it or just a collection of performances.
My masks aren't the same as they used to be. They're getting closer to each other — closer to the actual face underneath — but I won't pretend the work is done. It's taken time to get here. It doesn't happen all at once and it doesn't happen without intention and it doesn't happen without some painful honest conversations with yourself about what you actually believe and whether you actually live like you believe it.
Becka seemed to have figured that out earlier than most of us.
Or maybe she never built the walls in the first place. Maybe for her it was never two things — the faith and the work — but always just one thing expressed in different rooms. The same woman who worried about Revelation and what she'd say when she knelt at the feet of Jesus was the same woman putting kids on a bus to Gettysburg because she believed they were worth the investment.
That's not a small thing.
That's actually everything.
Here's what I want you to hear.
You don't have to quit your job. You don't have to walk away from your career or sell your business or move to the mission field. For most of us, following Jesus was never about leaving the work — it was about changing who the work belongs to. Building something has a place. Ambition, when it's properly ordered, has a place.
The question was never whether to work. The question is who you are while you're working. Whether the mask you wear on Monday is getting any closer to the face underneath. Whether the person your colleagues see and the person your family sees and the person your God sees are moving toward each other or further apart.
Becka didn't have a perfect life. She had a whole one. The faith and the work and the family and the worry and the humor from nowhere — all of it together, all of it hers, none of it compartmentalized into a version of herself she thought the room required.
When you lose someone like her you realize two things simultaneously.
That it's possible. To actually live that way. She did it. It's not theoretical.
And that the best possible life — the one worth building, the one worth showing up for every single day — is the one where you're always moving toward who Jesus was. Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just moving. Visibly. In a way the people around you can see without you having to say a word.
Becka's light is still shining. It's shining in every person who knew her and is sitting with this right now wondering if they can close the gap a little more between who they are on Sunday and who they are on Monday.
Close the gap, friend. She'd want that for you.
She always wanted that for the people she loved.
Rest well, Becka.