For Michal Montana (14), being a leader of Spring Break Build and Ministry with Mexico laid the groundwork “for a lot of the ways I viewed ministry, and also viewed my profession,” she said. Now an OB-GYN physician in Bend, Oregon, the ways Montana treats patients with compassion and works to be the “hands and feet of Christ” are things she learned while at Point Loma and especially through Ministry with Mexico.
This past spring, Montana and her husband, Ryan, went back to Spring Break Build to serve as leaders.
“We went [on the trip] because we wanted other students to be able to have that experience we did and help foster that in any way we could,” she said. “We just want to be able to allow students to see the beauty of this trip and the beauty of what these relationships can look like.”
Montana grew up in Huntington Beach and was raised in a family of missionaries. She explained her grandparents “always had mission work going on,” and she would often go on mission trips in high school where she went to Tijuana to build houses.
She also knew she wanted to be a physician from a young age, so she chose to study biology at Point Loma.
“My motivation to pursue medicine has always been missionally-focused,” Montana said. “I wanted to follow the pathway that my grandfather set ahead of me and serve others globally. I initially thought that always meant serving transcontinentally, yet my involvement with Ministry with Mexico showed me that service starts in your backyard.”
Her freshman year, she saw an ad for Spring Break Build and decided to go because it was “something that I loved to do in high school,” she said. “I jumped on that trip and it was a really cool opportunity for me and a way to get out of my little bubble. It was just so life-changing.”
Melissa Tucker, who ran Ministry with Mexico at the time, was an incredibly important mentor to Montana. “She helped me see a different view of working with someone, versus going to someone,” Montana said.
Tucker told Montana about “the gringo wall” — a story about a group of students who went to the same place in Mexico every year for a mission trip. “They just showed up, they didn’t really ask the church how they could serve best or what they needed,” Montana said. “The church would have them build this wall every time, and church members called it the gringo wall. After the group would leave and feel great about everything, they’d tear it down for the next group to come.”
That story stuck with Montana, and reminded her to focus on the outcome of the work, not just the personal experience. “Whatever I’m doing, whether it’s in medicine or missions, I don’t want to go and be like, ‘I did this great thing.’”
As Montana began to lead more Ministry with Mexico trips, she shared that wisdom with younger students. “Look at what we can do as the church, together, when we cross the border,” she said. “In what ways are we similar and in what ways are we different? Mel [Tucker] would always say this: ‘It’s not weird, it’s different.’ [My husband and I] teach our kids that now.”
During Montana’s junior year, she led La Iglesia, a construction-based ministry within Ministry with Mexico. They worked with a Nazarene pastor in Tijuana, and Montana got to know “people who became mentors in my life, whether or not they were professors or the president of the university, but also maintenance workers, people who you still glean so much spiritual guidance from.”
On that trip, Montana met her now-husband, Ryan Montana. When she was in med school, during her spring break, they got engaged and drove to Mexico to visit the Spring Break Build team and tell PLNU President Bob Brower, Ph.D., that they got engaged. “It’s so fun to see how our relationship has gone through that,” she said.
After undergrad, Montana moved to Michigan for med school, and she and Ryan got married. Spring Break Build trips spurred Ryan, who was a kinesiology major, to go into construction. “He always loved building; he grew up building skate ramps and carts and bikes and all these crazy things,” she said. “And so he went on this trip and was like, ‘oh my gosh, I love working with my hands too.’”
When they were living in Michigan, Ryan got an apprentice job with a construction company and is now a general contractor and owner of Moniker building company. Montana said it was really special for her to go back on Spring Break Build this spring.
“[You can] watch students serving and worshiping and creating bonds with each other and with other church members,” she said. “You have these kids who are like, ‘Yeah, I’ll pay money to go work all day long, eat when I’m told, get dirty and be uncomfortable.’ I think it’s such a good representation of what it looks like to be the hands and feet of Christ.”
As an OB-GYN physician, Montana embodies and lives out this ethic of “serving and loving people unconditionally no matter where they’re at,” she said. “I have patients who are like, ‘wow, people don’t take the time to talk to me like that. Thank you for being so compassionate.’”
In the medical field, workers can quickly get jaded, Montana said. “You see really hard things. I’ve seen some really tragic things that I think the average person would be like, ‘oh my gosh, how do you recover from that?’ You just do because you have to, because you have another patient.”
Physician burnout and “huge amounts of depression and anxiety” among physicians is a real problem that continues to grow, Montana said. “I really can’t attribute my ability to cope with this to anything else besides my faith in Christ and the support of Ryan, my husband,” she said. “God wants me in the hard places.”
As an OB-GYN physician, Montana embodies and lives out this ethic of “serving and loving people unconditionally no matter where they’re at,” she said. “I have patients who are like, ‘wow, people don’t take the time to talk to me like that. Thank you for being so compassionate.’”
Montana and Ryan have two young daughters. When she graduated residency, the family moved to Bend, where she is a practicing physician.
“I just want to help women walk through some of the best and worst times of their life,” Montana said. “I feel like within OB-GYN, you have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.”
Montana accompanies women through births, losses of a child, struggles with infertility, cancer diagnoses, and more. “You have women going through things and are embarrassed — they don’t want to talk about bleeding through their pants because their periods are so heavy, right?” she said. “So a lot of my job is interacting with the most intimate parts of people’s lives. Being able to be a voice and empower them, and say, ‘You don’t have to suffer with this. Thank you for showing up.’”
Reproductive health isn’t talked about enough in schools or other spaces, Montana said, which leads to people feeling shame or embarrassment. Being able to “teach [people] about basic physiology and what’s going on in their body [is] so empowering,” she said.
The faculty of PLNU’s biology department were a huge influence on Montana — she said they modeled how working in the science and healthcare fields can further the gospel. She also learned to not feel defined by test scores.
PLNU equipped Montana to be a physician spiritually and emotionally, she said. Physicians have to have the knowledge-base and skill-set to serve patients well, “but it’s [also about] your bedside manner, your empathy and compassion and ability to connect with people. The knowledge will come; that’s easier to learn. Learning how to care for people—that’s really important.”
Montana and Ryan want to continue to be a part of Spring Break Build and also have long-term goals of building and staffing clinics around the world. As leaders on Spring Break Build trips, Montana and Ryan have had lots of meaningful conversations with students who are continuing to figure out who they are and what they are called to do.
“We encourage students to keep moving forward,” she said. “Keep doing things that you feel the Lord is putting on your heart — it may not be linear, but the Lord will lead you there.”
