Faith guides career choice

Hannah Stevens wants to change the world.

After graduating from Three Springs High School, Stevens, 17, plans to move on to a life of missionary work and become a pastor, sharing her faith with people around the world.

Stevens said she grew up going to church and liked it. When she was in the eighth grade, somehow her faith changed – instead of church being something she was brought up in, she made it her own and now always wants to be a part of it.

She’ll attend Ignite Missionary Training on the campus of Life Pacific Church in San Dimas, Calif., this fall and will start making missionary trips during her training.

She said she’s not too worried about living far away from home when she moves into the dorm rooms of campus. She said she feels that the 70 other students she will be training with are all fairly like-minded and all have the same goals of serving as missionaries. It will be a family away from home.

When Stevens started her freshman year, she found out she needed to have surgery on her hand and started having other health issues. She started having to miss a lot of school and transferred to Three Springs, the alternative school in Cheney.

Once she began to feel better, she didn’t want to go back to Cheney High School.

“I just loved this environment,” she said.

The environment seemed to work for her, too. Stevens is the class valedictorian and she has served as the student adviser to the Cheney School Board.

“I apply myself in every aspect of my work,” Stevens said. She said that even if she is in a class she isn’t very excited about, she still feels like she can learn something from it. “I feel like I’ve worked really hard.”

During her junior year, school counselor Lisa Staub approached her about being the student adviser from Three Springs on the Cheney School Board. Stevens figured it would be a good opportunity. Although she thought maybe the school board directors would be intimidating, she found that they were a group of caring people.

“They just want to help kids,” she said. “They just love kids.”

She enjoyed this experience so much she volunteered to do it for her senior year as well. As valedictorian she has to give a speech, but she will be joined with three of her classmates on stage. She said that all 10 members of her class started at Three Springs in different places, but all had the same goal of graduation. Over the years they have all grown very close.

“Every single one of us is going to change the world in our ways,” she said. “We’re all going to be world changers.”