iRetire4Him 163: What If Your Address Was Your Assignment?

Jim Brangenberg: Your retirement years can be 30 years filled with meaning and purpose as long as you connect your faith and your retirement days.

Martha Brangenberg: Welcome to iRetire4Him. We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brandenburg. Check us out online at iRetire4Him.com.

Jim Brangenberg: So when you retire, you have to live somewhere, right? For years we've talked on the show that we need to live with intentionality in our neighborhoods. We talk about it in our book, iRetire4Him. Whether we're working or retired, our neighborhoods are a fantastic mission field.

So what if you're mission-minded, retired, need a reasonable place to live, and you wanna reach some of the most lost people in the country? We have the answer for you: apartmentlife.org. 10 years ago we were connected with Sean Bailey from Apartment Life out of Orlando, and he came on the iWork4Him Show to tell us about this incredible opportunity to be up on mission right in your neighborhood, your local apartment complex.

Fast forward 10 years and CEO Pete Kelly sends out an Apartment Life email highlighting the story of Ken and Patti Sandel out of Gallatin, Tennessee. A retired couple living on a mission in an apartment complex, making an impact by building community with their neighbors.

On mission in retirement, living a life of meaning and purpose by pouring their lives into the lives of their neighbors. Ken and Patti are here to tell us more and perhaps inspire you to think about where you should be living in the next phase of your life. apartmentlife.org has needs for apartment complex missionaries all over the country. So let's hear from Ken and Patti. Ken and Patti, welcome to iRetire4Him.

Patti Sandel: Thank you.

Ken Sandel: Thanks for having us.

Jim Brangenberg: Oh, we're thrilled to have you here. You guys could have lived anywhere when you retired. You had successful careers in the insurance industry. Why didn't you retire and move to the mountains or the beaches and just check out of life?

Patti Sandel: We actually did go to the mountains and to the beach. When we first went in the mission field, God took us to those places. We were not with Apartment Life. We were with other agencies, but we did the mountain and we did the beach and it was lovely to be able to do our ministry in those places, but for two years we were on the road in our motor home. We had a loss on our motor home and our insurance coverage was not enough to totally replace it. We did not wanna go in debt, so we said, okay, what next, God? We were staying with our son and daughter-in-law in Atlanta for a few days.

And one morning I got up and went to the kitchen and my daughter-in-law says, are you familiar with Apartment Life? And I said, A little bit. Not a lot, but some. And she said I think you need to look into it more. And so I spent the next day, hours and into the night, until one o'clock in the morning reading everything I could about Apartment Life, and so I took it to Ken.

And when I had showed this to him years before, when we were first going to go into the mission field, he said, I don't wanna live in an apartment. And I said, that kills that idea.

Jim Brangenberg: Oh, he was telling God what he thought. (laughter)

Patti Sandel: But this time when I showed it to him, he said, it's not about me. It's about where God wants to plant us. Apply. So I did, and we were immediately contacted by Dewan Brown in Nashville. We went through a series of interviews and they decided that we were a fit. However, our son in Atlanta said, y'all are too old to do this.

Jim Brangenberg: He obviously never met Abraham and Sarah, Moses, people that started their jobs at 80.

 (chuckles)

Patti Sandel: So his wife said, no, they are not. They have all the skills that are needed. Do not discourage this. And we moved to Nashville first. We were in our first community. We were in our first community for a year and a half. And then they knew that we had children in Gallatin and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And this community had actually had a couple of other couples to look at it and had said no. We are living in a place that is much different from any place that we've ever lived. This community was a Section 8 community and had a lot of disorder and a lot of crime and was not what you would choose in our time of life, if you were doing the choosing, but we were not doing the choosing. God was.

So we looked at it and said, this community needs the love of Jesus more than most. These children need to be loved on. These adults need to know that there's more to life than the struggles.

Ken Sandel: Can I interject?

Jim Brangenberg: Of course you can.

Ken Sandel: We had, they gave us two weeks. We didn't know. They kept calling, said, have you come to a decision? I said, no, I'm not, just not clear on it. I'm not sure we're through with where we are. And finally after about two weeks, I finally felt clear and I said, okay, honey, if you are with it, I'm with it. I'm ready to go wherever he wants us to go, even though it's not being one of the places that we would choose. But we're here and we love what we're doing.

Patti Sandel: And in 1 John, it says that when you let the Lord place you, that you are fruitful.

Jim Brangenberg: We're gonna hear a lot more about that fruitfulness.

Martha Brangenberg: So let's talk about that. So, you guys are 70 and 83, and you are now just launching this new ministry in the August Oaks Apartments. And so I guess you've been there about a year, I believe. Is that correct?

Patti Sandel: Yes. Uhhuh.

Martha Brangenberg: So what was it about that neighborhood that made you say yes? Was it something about the neighborhood or your obedience? Tell us.

Patti Sandel: It was obedience. But it was also knowing that these people needed what we had to give with Christ leading us. They were hurting, they were distrustful. We couldn't hardly even get the children to speak to us at first. And we are the minority here. Number one, being seniors. We are the minority being Caucasian. We are the minority. And so we knew that this was a place that Jesus would have come to. If he was walking on Earth today as a man, he would have come here. He would have loved these people. He would have healed these people and that's why we came.

Jim Brangenberg: And he is walking on this earth as a man inside Ken through the Holy Spirit. So that's fantastic. We're gonna take a break here. Just hear from one of our sponsors.

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Ken Sandel: I think you were gonna cover that. You remember?

Jim Brangenberg: You can't read it.

Ken Sandel: Just talk from you took mine and I took hers.

Jim Brangenberg: Just talk from your heart. Okay. Go ahead Patti. If you've already got it memorized, whatever.

Ken Sandel: Our mission is to connect with the people, to get the people to connect with each other, to build a family. That means that we'll live among them. We participate with them, we play with them. We love on them. And we invite them to be part of what Jesus wants.

Patti Sandel: Our ultimate goal is to introduce them to Jesus, but we do that through all the other things that we do, building relationships with them.

Jim Brangenberg: If I remember correctly from our interviews over the years with Apartment Life people, is that the unreached people in apartment complexes, people not even going to church in the apartment., It's like somewhere around 80 or 90% of the people living in the apartment complex aren't going to church.

Patti Sandel: That's true.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay. So that's a huge mission field. It's a huge mission field. So you guys plopped right down - and people say you gotta go overseas to go in mission field. No, plenty of places right here. And you jumped in a, into an apartment complex.

Martha Brangenberg: Yeah. So I want to hear what does that look like? So for the listener who is listening to this and watching you guys right now and leaning in and saying, okay, they're in their apartment right now. This is a place where they're living on purpose. And what does it look like to interact with your neighbors and to love on them, the things you were just describing?

Ken Sandel: Just yesterday we were out in the backyard and it was a beautiful day, finally.

Martha Brangenberg: Yeah.

Ken Sandel: The kids were out playing in the back. So they were throwing the football and they were riding their bikes. And so we went out there and we started playing with 'em. Patti started talking to the women. I started talking to the men and to the kids, and then all of a sudden the kids and I were playing and I got some more games out. And they turned around and loved on us.

Patti Sandel: Yeah. Wanted hugs before we went in and, I've prayed for God to fill our building with children and I counted yesterday and there were 10 children in my backyard.

Martha Brangenberg: Wow.

Patti Sandel: And like he said, just the interaction with them, inviting the lady that lives up the hill to come down and visit, and she spent four hours. She's the mother of six with twins.

Jim Brangenberg: Wow.

Patti Sandel: She just needed a break. (laughing)

Jim Brangenberg: I bet she did. I need a break just thinking about it.

Patti Sandel: And we do two events a month.

Jim Brangenberg: What are those events like, Patti?

Patti Sandel: So like next Tuesday night, we're going to have a newcomers reception, and invitations are going out to everyone who has moved into the community in the last 12 months. And that happens to be St. Patrick's day. And so I'm going to decorate with green

Ken Sandel: and have green punch

Patti Sandel: and a party.

Jim Brangenberg: What about corn beef? You're gonna have some corn beef and hash, I hope.

Ken Sandel: No.

Probably not. (chuckles)

Jim Brangenberg: oh, okay.

Patti Sandel: We're going to play games and we're going to ask each head of household or whoever shows up to introduce their family and tell us something about them, how they came to live here and hope that by doing this, that the people don't just connect with us, they connect with each other. And they start friendships because so many times people live in apartments and they never meet their next door neighbor.

Martha Brangenberg: Yeah.

Patti Sandel: They never know who, they hear the baby crying, but they never see the baby.

Jim Brangenberg: Right.

Ken Sandel: People are afraid to come out. They're afraid to invite us in their home, and that's been the hardest part here. We've never had a problem before, but this has been our biggest challenge is to get into their home. They'll come out, they'll crack the door. But then we feel like the connection with the kids is gonna be the answer.

Jim Brangenberg: Have you been able to get 'em into your house to have cookies and Kool-Aid or anything like that?

Patti Sandel: We have not.

Ken Sandel: Candy, they come the door for candy.

Patti Sandel: The children come to the door. And the children will come in. The only way we can let the children in is if there's multiple children, when they come in together. And we have that happen and we give them candy and love on them. We had a little girl last week, 16-year-old who, something happened in her home and she was afraid to go home and so she came to us.

Martha Brangenberg: So you are starting to build a level of trust where they know that they can come to you. You are a safe place to go. And I think that's one of the things when people live in an apartment and they don't know their neighbors, you immediately have distrust because you just don't know them.

And so I wanna talk a little bit deeper about Apartment Life, and do they help you, give you ideas on things, ways to reach out? How do they support you guys and help you to do what it is you're there to do?

Patti Sandel: Okay. Absolutely. We have a webpage and there's ideas for events. There's information on different cultures and different religions and all for us to be able to be educated, to know how to reach others. They give us technical support. And we have a program director that if we need anything, he's there. He sends encouraging emails once a month. And so yes, there is a support system and a training system, but now I will say this, being a missionary can sometimes be lonely. You can be in the midst of doing what you do, and yet you feel like you're the one that needs the connection, even though you're working to connect people.

And you're doing it, but. It still can be a lonely place, and so you have to build relationships with other people who know and understand what you do, so that when you hit those periods, you have somewhere to reach out to.

Martha Brangenberg: Thank you for being vulnerable about that because it's important for people to understand the reality. It sounds like we're playing and doing games and candy and all of that, but there is challenges that comes with it.

I'd like to go back to something that you said earlier that we didn't really dwell on, and I think it's important for our listeners to hear: you guys decided to be missionaries. Yet you decided to be missionaries in a different way than most people would think. Can you just real briefly walk us through that, because I think this is pivotal in the conversation because you're living in intention, you're still in America, you're in somewhat of a culture that you know. You're learning things and all of that.

But what was it that you guys experienced or decided that said, after we're done earning a paycheck or whatever that pivotal moment was, this is, we want to live on purpose this way. How did that happen?

Ken Sandel: Yeah. We have been on numerous overseas mission trips and in our lifetime, in our marriage life, and it's expensive and so it's in my blood. And matter of fact, when we met, first thing I asked her, I said, what would happen if God would call your husband to the mission field? What would you say? And she said,

Patti Sandel: If he called my husband to the mission field, he would call me too.

Ken Sandel: I said good answer.

Jim Brangenberg: That's a great answer.

Patti Sandel: Yeah, but I will say this too. My mom pulled out something that I wrote when I was 10 years old. When I grew up, I was gonna be a missionary. So God planted that in me from a very young age.

Jim Brangenberg: What's really cool about Apartment Life is that there's a need for a hundred thousand couples like you that this mission field is really, you're just learning to live with intention in an apartment complex, where we all need to live with intentionally, no matter what our neighborhood looks like, whether it's an apartment complex, a mobile home park, a Florida mobile home park, or a Tennessee Mobile home park.

I mean there's an HOA. I don't know if you can live intentionally at an HOA (laughing) it's like purgatory on earth.

Martha Brangenberg: We did. (laughter)

Jim Brangenberg: But it could regular or a neighborhood of homes or whatever it may be, or town homes, whatever it could be. What's really cool is that the apartment complexes that sign up with Apartment Life, they know that if you build community, so I'm talking to the business owners that are listening today or people that have friends that are business owners that have own apartment complexes: when you bring in an Apartment Life couple, it increases your retention of your people, through creation of community. And that retention, that makes you more profitable. At the same time, the people that are living there feel more safe. They are happier and they love living there because they've made connections.

Martha Brangenberg: And respect the property.

Jim Brangenberg: And they respect the property. You have less turnover. You have less damage, and it's a win-win for everybody involved. And that's why we wanna bring it up on iRetire4Him, because this is a way to live reasonably, have purpose and meaning and do every moment of the day. Obviously - you mentioned when we're getting set up at you a recliner, so obviously some part of the day is taking a nap in the recliner, i'm sure. (laughter)

You know, when the kids are at school and when the kids are, when it's a rainy day, maybe they're not out back playing. Talk to me about the ice storm this year. You guys had a wicked ice storm in Nashville this year. Did it get up to Gallatin too or not?

Ken Sandel: Oh yes.

Jim Brangenberg: Okay. So those are often days when you're locked in by ice or snow, where the community comes together, 'cause everybody's trapped. And I saw pictures from other friends in northern suburbs of Nashville and yeah, you guys had a lot of ice. You could ice skate on the roads. How did that ice storm help you break down some bridges or break? How about build bridges, break down walls. That's what I meant to say.

Ken Sandel: Number one, I walk my dog. He doesn't, he's not potty trained in the house, so we walk and they see us visibly. And they speak to us and they want to pet the dog. He is the little missionary dog.

He's a six pound mixed breed longhaired Chihuahua and Pomeranian. And he loves on the kids. The kids love on him. That's a opening. That's like a common ground thing. And I'm visible. Patti and I are visible. We walked a lot and that's one of the things that even during the ice, I tried walking on it. It wasn't too fun. (chuckling)

Patti Sandel: So another thing that we did is we took food to neighbors and we had something happen that really surprised us. We took food to a neighbor. And a few hours later there was a knock at our door and it was the daughter and she had a bowl of pineapple soup, which is, it was a Spanish dish. It's a Spanish dish. And she said that her mama said that we had given a gift to them and they wanted to give a gift back for us.

Jim Brangenberg: Very cool.

Patti Sandel: And we have a couple that we had to be there for them when they needed it most. The wife, her 21-year-old son was murdered in front of her.

Martha Brangenberg: Oh dear.

Ken Sandel: She was a little bit cross with the church. She's mad at God right now. So we're trying to bridge that.

Patti Sandel: But she went with us to church on Christmas Eve, which was a huge breakthrough. But I had to be there for her when she needed to cry and say, why did God let this happen to us? Why did God take my son? And so it's not all just events and playing and parties and being the smiling face always. No, it's meeting the people where they are in their need, whatever that is.

If it's a new mama with a baby that needs food or it's somebody who's been in the hospital, or one of our neighbor's dog that they had for years died and we sent a sympathy card. Because dogs become a part of your family. And they were hurting.

Jim Brangenberg: You're pastoring your community, you're ministering in your community. You are full on missionaries, and we want everybody to know about Apartment Life. I don't know we've ever done on a show on iRetire4Him about Apartment Life. We want to have everybody hear from the two of you right now, for everybody listening, why they should consider the mission of Apartment Life in their local community, in an apartment complex near them. So, Ken, you first, why should they do it?

Ken Sandel: Number one, I would recommend that they live among the people and not just be a daytime artist. Some of the people do that long distance. They do it and not live among the people, and I think that is one thing they're missing.

Because it's hard to connect if you are not face to face with these people on a daily basis. And I would challenge 'em because we're enjoying this. I don't want people to treat me like I'm that old. I don't tell people unless she tells 'em - she gets a kick out of it. (laughter) But I don't tell 'em because that, I don't want them treating me that old, 'cause I don't feel that.

Jim Brangenberg: They especially don't wanna know that when you were graduating from high school, she was going into kindergarten. They don't wanna know that. (laughter)

Ken Sandel: I had my first date when she was born. (laughter)

Martha Brangenberg: That's great.

Jim Brangenberg: But you don't wanna tell 'em that. But it's a beautiful thing because you guys are getting a chance, you're getting a chance to be - Patti, a mom to those who are motherless and Ken, a dad to those who are fatherless. Patti, why should people listening today consider the mission field of apartment living?

Patti Sandel: If you want purpose, if you want to be the hands and feet of Jesus, if you want to understand life in a totally different way, to know the heart of God and see the heart of God as he nudges you into those places where you normally would not choose to go, I recommend that you look at Apartment Life and the opportunity that it is. We are blessed beyond measure to be missionaries with Apartment Life.

Ken Sandel: They have to love people or it won't work. You can't do it as a job or just because to have a place to live. You have to live it. You have to enjoy. What were you doing? If you don't, the people sense it. They sense if you are not genuine. Kids, you can't fool the kids.

Jim Brangenberg: For sure not. No.

Ken Sandel: They just share it like it is.

Jim Brangenberg: Yeah, they do. They do. Ken and Patti Sandel, thank you so much for sharing your Apartment Life story. Thanks for being transparent with us. Thanks for being on the mission field in the quote unquote retirement years, 'cause you're in full-time ministry during your retirement years. Thank you so much for being here on iRetire4Him today.

Patti Sandel: Thank you for having us.

Ken Sandel: God bless..

Jim Brangenberg: You've been listening to iRetire4Him. I wanna make sure I say apartmentlife.org. apartmentlife.org. We'll put it in show notes. You've been listening to iRetire4Him. We are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. In this retirement phase of life, we all want our lives to be full of meaning and purpose so we can say, iRetire4Him.