For Such a Time as This

by Anneliese Rider

Seventeen-year-old Kelli Kolesar—now Kelli Worrall, a Today in the Word author and chair of Moody Bible Institute’s Music and Media Arts Division—never would have dreamed her parents’ disabilities, her own miscarriages, and numerous failed adoptions would help others. 

 “To see how God has been able to use it and how I have the opportunity to speak to women, to counsel women, to walk with women through their seasons of loss—that is an honor and a privilege,” says Kelli, whose latest devotionals for Today in the Word were featured in January 2025.

‘God can use our stories’ 

Both of Kelli’s parents had cerebral palsy—a fact that teenage Kelli never would have shared.

Then, as a high school senior, Kelli developed an uncomfortable feeling when her English teacher assigned the entire class to enter a writing competition.

“God was impressing it on my heart that I should write about my parents being disabled,” Kelli says. “But I didn’t want to because as a teenager it was something I was kind of embarrassed about.”

However, feeling strongly that she was supposed to, Kelli wrote and submitted the piece. It won second prize and was published in the Guideposts magazine.

“I got letters from all sorts of different people who had read it, and that was very eye-opening,” Kelli says, “just seeing how God can use our stories and the power of writing.”

On the path to teaching

Thinking that she’d become an English teacher, Kelli went to Pillsbury Baptist Bible College for two years before transferring to Cedarville University, where she switched to the communication program to pursue professional writing instead.

But her career path wasn’t exactly clear.

“A lot of my peers in that professional writing program were getting jobs at places like IBM to write computer manuals,” Kelli says, mentioning her own desire to use writing as ministry. “I did not want to write computer manuals. It sounded terrible.”

Instead, in 1991 Kelli took a job at Regular Baptist Press writing children’s curriculum for churches. While working there, she earned her master’s in religious education and served in her church’s youth ministry, which reignited her dream of being a teacher.

Through a friend who worked at Moody Bible Institute, Kelli met David Fetzer, then the head of the Communications department.

“I remember asking him, ‘If I want to teach at a place like Moody one day, what do I need to do? How do I get there?’” Kelli says.

He coached her through it, and, even better, gave her a foot in the door. Kelli’s first adjunct position was to cover the six-week maternity leave for Jamie Janosz, now the managing editor of Today in the Word.

She loved it, and the next year when David offered her a semester-long class to teach, she eagerly accepted. When a full-time teaching position opened in the fall of 1998, Kelli jumped at the chance to apply.

Love, marriage, heartbreak

One month after beginning her full-time teaching career at Moody, Kelli Kolesar met a man from Great Britain named Peter Worrall. He’d just begun a master’s program at Moody, and over the fall semester, he started regularly walking with her to the commuter train.

“At Christmas, he broke my heart and said he didn’t want to hang out anymore,” Kelli says, but in January they started talking again. In August, Peter asked Kelli’s boss, David, if it was appropriate for him—still a graduate student—to marry Kelli, a faculty member.

With David’s wholesale approval, Peter proposed, and now they are approaching 25 years of marriage. Peter also teaches at Moody in the Education and Counseling fields.

Shortly after Peter and Kelli married, they began a long struggle with infertility. As Kelli miscarried baby after baby, they tried to adopt with no success, and both of Kelli’s parents died within eighteen months of each other. Kelli entered a crippling season of grief and longing, but also growth.

“God really used the miscarriages, actually, as painful as it was, to bring me back. I wrestled hard with God,” Kelli says. “But eventually I saw myself for who I truly was. And even more importantly, I saw God more clearly for what He was actually doing rather than how I wanted Him to work.”

One of the books that she wrote later, Pierced and Embraced, was borne of that season and the time of healing she spent in the Gospels. Kelli was captivated by how Jesus loves women so personally and specifically. Her experiences have also provided the foundation for Kelli to help countless other women learn to trust God’s plan through their own bittersweet journeys.

Finally, after years of wishing and waiting for children, Peter and Kelli finalized both of their children’s adoptions on the same day: March 26, 2012. Amelia came from China, and Daryl came to them through the foster care system—“And each of their stories of how they came to our family just has God’s fingerprints all over it,” Kelli says.

‘My favorite thing to write about is God’s Word’

When Jamie Janosz reached out in 2019 and asked Kelli to write for Today in the Word, it was a clear choice. Kelli, an avid writer, had earned her master of fine arts in creative writing in 2011 and already had two books published. She wrote a few sample devotions and then began to study for her first issue on the book of Esther for February 2020—which went hand in hand with her Founder’s Week 2020 session on Esther 1 and 2.

“It just was a very intentional season of work that God was doing for me and in me,” Kelli says, sharing that at that time, she was also considering declining an offer to fill the chair position for the Music and Media Arts Division at Moody. But studying Esther made Kelli feel that, perhaps, God had prepared her “for such a time as this.”

“Esther stepped into this very foreign situation,” Kelli says, referencing how this mirrored her own journey into leadership. “God kind of grew her up in that role and used her in important and strategic ways.”

Sensing that same prompting from God that she’d felt in high school when she wrote about her parents, Kelli said yes to the chair position and all of the added responsibilities. But she continued to write for Today in the Word—and it’s a decision she will never regret.

“Being in the chair role has meant I haven’t had a lot of time to do my own writing,” Kelli says. “Today in the Word is such a blessing in that it’s a manageable amount of writing for me in these last few years. My favorite thing to write about is God’s Word.”