Episode Details

What does it mean to leave everything behind — your country, your career plans, your language — and build a life somewhere else? And what happens when that life is suddenly torn away?

In this episode of Complex Creatures, Rev. Dr. Jarrod Longbons sits down with his friend Jonathan "Boo" Powell — Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Christian Campus Fellowship (CCF) and a former missionary who spent 22 years in Berdyansk, southeastern Ukraine, before the war with Russia forced him and his family home.

Boo's story is one of radical rootedness and repeated uprooting — from a Georgia Tech student who expected a career in business, to a missionary learning Russian in an immersive crash course with an unlikely teacher, to a man returning to America without a credit score and rediscovering his calling right back where it started.

Together, Jarrod and Boo explore:

• How a mission trip to Juárez, Mexico sparked a life-changing call
• The hard, beautiful years of learning language, culture, and belonging in a foreign land
• What struggling Ukrainian villages taught them about the raw, unadorned gospel
• The grief of exile — and the unexpected renewal that followed
• How God was already at work before the missionaries arrived
• What a generation of Georgia Tech students is teaching him about faith, mission, and fire

This is a conversation about the courage it takes to follow a calling — and the grace it takes to follow it again.

"I look up to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord." — Psalm 121

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