When my friend Rosemary Gibbons was 51, she started a whole new life, completely different from her old one in every way. She left her own company, she left her children and grandchildren, she left her possessions and her home and moved to Malawi, a landlocked country in sub-Saharan Africa.

She went to teach at a Christian college in Lilongwe, the capital, ended up marrying over there and opening an orphanage. As Rosemary likes to say, "It’s never too late!"

She grew up in farm country, in one of those "last picture show" kind of towns, Slater, MO, which sees more people leave every year than are born there. No one was surprised when Rosemary herself left for the big city. She taught school in Kansas City. She got married, had two kids, divorced; married again, had two more kids and divorced again. "It just seemed that every seven years or so I needed a new challenge."

Eventually, she started her own business, a consulting firm running workshops and conferences on leadership, team building and productivity. She was happy. She loved her job; she had her dream house. Life was good.

Then she heard about a group going on a ten-day trip to Africa to build a church, and she signed up. "It struck a chord," she told me. "I grew up hearing about the poor children of Africa." So off she went to Malawi with 30 or so others from all over the country, and a variety of denominations. It was 1998.

Click here for photographs from The Prime of Rosemary Gibbons.

With fate in command, Rosemary got sunstroke, and was taken to the local Christian college for treatment. While she was there she came to see that if ever there was a country that needed leadership and team-building training, it was Malawi. And so she was invited to teach a five-week course.

When she got home, she thought she’d sink back into "one of the best times of my life. For once, I wasn’t in search of something new." And yet, Malawi sat on her heart. She yearned. "I knew more and more that was where I was supposed to be. It was a God thing."

One morning she woke up with an intense feeling: "I’m supposed to sell everything." By Friday one week later, she had sold her house, parsed out her precious antiques to her kids and sold everything else. Her possessions in this world reduced to just two suitcases, Rosemary, grandmother of five, was on her way back to Africa. 

Her daughters were enraged at her. But there was a force stronger than she can explain. "Everyone I knew thought I had lost my mind, and that I’d get over it. But I felt it so clearly."

The first year she taught leadership at the college on a volunteer basis. "I just showed up. They didn’t pay me." She lived on campus with the only other American woman there; they ate in the cafeteria.

Soon she was expanding beyond the school, giving workshops to women in prisons and then organizing wealthy women to fight for better prison conditions. "There was a flow. People there were so open, and I was making a difference."

One day a man she didn’t know came to see her. He said he’d had a dream that she should marry Moffat Phiri, a student in his late 20s. She knew very little about him, except that he was a special person, a charismatic leader who people on campus looked up to.