Natasha Sistrunk Robinson is author of Mentor for Life: Finding Purpose Through Intentional Discipleship and founder of the nonprofit, Leadership LINKS, Inc. She is passionate about discipleship and developing future leaders who will positively impact their culture and communities. Sistrunk, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a former Marine Corps officer, also writes about racial reconciliation.
What is your passion and calling? You seem to be involved in many things.
I look at how God has gifted me, how He has positioned me, and then the giftedness in how He’s designed me. So the design is that I am Black, I am female, I am from South Carolina, and there’s a lot that goes with that. A lot of good and some bad is associated with that. Then I think the placement is—having started off in Christian environments and having been exposed to various Christian environments, [in] what some people would call progressive or liberal and that some would call very conservative. I’ve just been exposed to different things and I feel like my faith is richer and my relationship with the Lord is deeper because I’ve been able to witness and experience and journey with people across the Christian faith and tradition in that way. So when you ask about my calling and my purpose, I think it’s very clear, you know, it’s leadership. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve known that from the time I was a little child. It’s not something that I was striving for [or] thought out, it was a very natural part of just who I was and people saw that. …
So leadership is a large part of my purpose and I think the work that I do now in ministry is…just all that coming together. I write about race and reconciliation because I’m Black and female and a Christian who loves Jesus and because there’s a need for it. I care about human trafficking because I understand the history of being Black and coming to America and a lot of people don’t know it’s still going on and know that people are still being bought and being used and being worked and not getting the benefits and fruit of that labor. I cannot not respond to that given my history… So what I do, to me, just feels very much like a calling and a passion but it feels very natural.
