Following God's Path to Success By: Tammie Polk
I wanted the families in my community to know what
“Tammie, you’re too smart to be working for other people,” was the first piece of business advice that I received it from a strong Christian neighbor back in 2007. God blessed me with a sense of creativity that I have been able to use for His honor and glory for most of my life. Although I didn’t see His plan for me at first, I knew that there was something that I was supposed to be doing for Him. In high school, I said that I felt God was calling me to be a youth director. Even as a teenager, I took my calling seriously, spending my summers teaching backyard Bible clubs in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas for years. I was different but in a good way. I was the one who could get on a child’s level and still be an adult… most of the time! Unfortunately, my early walk with my calling was met with a lot of church hurt and rejection. In 2000, I left a church for the first time in my life and I struggled after that. I never lost my faith in God, but I did lose my faith in His church and His people because of how I’d been treated. However, God still gave me chances to use my gift of creativity. In my work with children, I was always creating some type of game or activity that no one had seen and I loved doing it. When I became a substitute teacher, this went into overdrive because it was something that schools needed. Even though I immensely enjoyed the work, I would have never thought that my biggest impact would be made with adults. In May 2013, I left the classroom to become an entrepreneur. My husband and I have been homeschool parents since 2008 and we were asked questions left and right. People couldn’t understand how we made that work when he worked at night and I worked during the day. I created a one page newsletter of our path to homeschooling and my husband gave it to anyone who had questions. Next thing I know, I found myself taking a course on building a consulting business, which was exactly what I did.
their options were right there in our hometown. I spent my days going to meet every homeschool group or entity that wanted to reach homeschoolers, gathering information for the parents I wanted to serve. Choice Home Education Consulting was born in September 2014. I became indispensable to the education community, being called upon to even help public school families with their options. It was the first time I’d ever worked with grown people, so God had to show me VERY clearly that this was what I was meant to do. Soon, I was being called to speak at different parent events, speak at homeschooling conferences, and even told I was being spied on by my former employer! In all this, God blessed me because I was able to help hundreds of families choose the best options for their children. I even had a 100% reentry rate for families who had to send their children back to school. Not one of the families I helped had a child to be held back a grade! But God wasn’t quite done with me….
16 | Hope Is Now Magazine
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