When Karren Ransom and her husband Timothy moved to Hawaii in November 2007, they sold their house and belongings, packed one suitcase apiece, drove cross-country from the Midwest to Oakland, Calif., and hopped on a plane to Oahu.

The Ransoms had been to Hawaii every year for the previous five years to visit their daughter and her family. “[But] this time we were buying a one-way ticket, which was really extreme,” Karren said. “Basically we’re starting our whole lives over again.”

That fresh start includes Ransom’s new job at the Diocese of Honolulu where she will become Bishop Larry Silva’s administrative assistant on Nov. 3, almost a year after she moved to the islands.

Ransom comes to the diocese with almost 30 years of administrative and clerical experience. She says she looks forward to aiding “what every church’s goal should be, to help our community” and “seeing things come together” as assistant to the bishop.

Ransom was born in Detroit but after her parents died when she was seven, she moved with her four siblings to the town of Chatham near Windsor, Ontario, where she was raised on her grandmother’s farm.

Karen earned her business diploma from St. Clair College in Ontario. She worked for 25 years as an administrative assistant at J.P. Morgan Chase in Detroit while commuting from Windsor, just across the Detroit River. After a company merger resulted in her being laid off, Ransom took a job working as a secretary in the Tribunal office of the Archdiocese of Detroit in 2006.

Raised a Baptist, Ransom considers herself a nondenominational Christian and says that her archdiocese job was where she learned the most about the Catholic Church.

“It really opened up a lot of understanding for me,” she said. “You never fully learn unless you experience it yourself what everybody’s religion is like.”

After her husband was laid off from the Ford Motor Company, the two prayed about, and decided to follow through on, their dream of moving to Hawaii to be closer to their daughter Nicole and her husband and two young daughters. Karren also has a stepson who lives on the Mainland.

When she started looking for a job in Hawaii, Ransom sent her resume to the Diocese of Honolulu since she had liked working at the Archdiocese of Detroit. There were no openings at the time, and she took an office coordinator job at Honolulu staffing company POI Employment.

It was through a newspaper ad that she found out about the opening in the bishop’s office. She replaces longtime bishop’s assistant Patricia Tossey, who retired in September.

The Ransoms now share a home with their daughter’s family in Mililani and with them attend Word of Life Christian Center in Honolulu. Karren also received her first-year diploma from a theology course at Word of Life’s “Life Christian University of Hawaii,” which she attends one night a week.

Ransom says it was “stepping out on faith” that brought she and her husband to Hawaii and she looks forward to “putting down roots” here.