Karen Dillon Profile

By Karissa Martin

A young woman with curly brown hair and an infectious smile hurried around the dining area cleaning up plates of spaghetti while her fellow shipmates ate and talked over their meal. For Karen Dillon, adjusting to kitchen duty had been a challenge, and that night was no different.

She carried a big stack of plates she had just cleared from the tables when, suddenly, red marinara sauce began to ooze down her front. Everyone seemed oblivious to her distress as she looked down to see the crimson paste soaking into her clothing.

“Nobody cares,” Karen Dillon, 32, laughed as she recalled her thoughts during this incident on the ship on its journey in the Pacific Ocean as part of the Operation Mobilization program. “I’m covered with spaghetti sauce and nobody cares.”

Dillon, a graduate student at Moody Theological Seminary, spent three and a half years with 350 fellow missionary workers on a ship with Operation Mobilization, an organization that sends missionaries around the globe on ships to meet people and spread the word of God. They travelled to about 16 different countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific during that time, she said.

According to the Operation Mobilization website, the organization “seeks to demonstrate and proclaim the love of God through evangelism, church planting, discipleship, and literature distribution and also by providing relief and development in many areas of the world.”

After quitting her professional job as a social worker at an alternative high school working mostly with teenage mothers, Dillon had to adjust to her new work, which included kitchen duty, personal assistance to the director, and ministry duties.

Dillon said that she had always known about God, but He had never really been a big part of her life until she was overcome with devastation and loss driven by the suicide of a close friend. God “lifted me up in a time when I was really broken,” Dillon said, “and that just completely changed my life.”

She said she decided to join Operation Mobilization to help spread God’s word and learn how to live her life for Him instead of just for herself.

“I gave everything up, and I was going across to the other side of the world,” Dillon said “and I was freaking out,” she laughed.

Dillon also said that it was difficult for her to transition to life on the ship; especially when working in the kitchen. “I come from a professional job, and here I am scrubbing floors,” she said, “and nobody appreciates it.”

But, it wasn’t all spaghetti sauce and soap.

“In our own free time we’d also just go out and meet people,” said Dillon. “I did things with people that I would never do here in the States. I would go out and meet complete strangers and go home with them.” She laughed. “For some reason, in these other places we had a lot more freedom, in a way, to build relationships with people.”

“God’s favor was just on us and he opened doors for us to build relationships with people and open their hearts to us, so it was really beautiful to see,” Dillon said. “And it’s something that I kind of miss.”

According to some of her friends and classmates, building relationships is one of Dillon’s greatest strengths.

“One thing that stands out to me is that she cares for the women around her in her life,” said Jeff Pan, a fellow graduate student at Moody Theological Seminary, of Dillon. “She invests her time and genuine care into their lives.”

“Her delight is in the Lord, and it shines as she spends time with the people around her,” said Christina Mueller, a close friend of Dillon’s. “She has a servant’s heart.”

Upon returning, Dillon said that the experience changed her and her views on God. “He is working and he is interested in what’s going on all over the place,” she said. “He can’t be contained in a box, so I think that that is one huge shift in my perspective.”

“Working in another country and seeing different things does kind of mature you and change the way you think about things,” Elizabeth Koenig, a fellow graduate student at Moody, said.

For the time being, Dillon said she plans to continue with her Biblical studies at Moody and hopes to go back overseas to continue the work God has planned for her.

“Instead of trying to make us all the same,” Dillon said, “we should just really be who God made us to be because it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing that we’re different.”