Wendy Gade left her home in New York when she transferred with her company for an assignment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While attending a Calvary Chapel Church, she heard the gospel and received Jesus as her Savior in 1994. She has always likened her conversion to the words of a Keith Green song, “Like waking from a dream that I thought was reality.” Soon after, Wendy met her husband Marcus at church. At the time, he was working as a software engineer. They were married in 1997.
A few years later Marcus left engineering to pursue a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. They moved to Columbia, South Carolina in July 2001 where he attended seminary at Columbia International University. After Marcus graduated in 2003, they moved to the Asheville area in Western North Carolina.
There Wendy enrolled full time at the local community college to study emergency medical science. She became a paramedic in 2007. During her studies, she prayerfully began to do research and write papers on the H5N1 Influenza Virus. While still in school she earned several academic awards including an award from USA Today for the technical paper, “The Avian Flu and the Pre-hospital Healthcare Provider.”
Wendy continued her research and work. For several years she represented the faith based community while serving on a committee with her local health department to ensure vulnerable people would be reached during a pandemic event. This led led to writing the book “Pandemic Flu Plan for the Church, Ministering to the Community in a Time of Crisis.” It was published by WestBow Publishers in August 2016. It is a comprehensive plan to prepare the Body of Christ for a pandemic thus enabling the Church to safely care for the community and bring the gospel into the event.
While working in the healthcare field, Wendy went on several medical mission trips including twice to Haiti in response to the 2010 earthquake; Tacloban, Philippines after the typhoon in 2014; and in February 2018 to Bundibugyo, Uganda. The Lord spoke to her profoundly while she was ministering to His people who were suffering from the effects of disasters and poverty. In her words, “I thought it was my skills as a paramedic that was going to make a difference. Although my skills qualified me to join these medical teams, I learned it is the compassion and mercy shown to others by means of these skills that allows God to flow through me in a wondrous way. He has shown me that the true way to overcome in disasters was not just to prepare physically, but to love our neighbors in the mist of the disaster.”
During her career as a paramedic, she also worked as an EMS Instructor and Continuing Education Coordinator. This gave her many opportunities to teach pandemic preparedness on a college level.
Today Marcus and Wendy Gade live in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Over the years they led several disaster preparedness seminars for churches. It is their heart’s desire to help prepare the Body of Christ and to safely minister spiritually and physically during difficult times.