From Shattered Career to Two Continents: How Elaine Lankford Let God Build Something Bigger

When Everything You Built Gets Taken Away

It was two o'clock on an August afternoon when the doors closed forever. State officials walked into Elaine Lankford's pain management practice and told her and the physician she worked with to see their last patient and shut down. No warning. No negotiation. Just an end.

For a woman who had known since sixth grade that she was called to nursing — who had spent decades in oncology and pain management, earned her nurse practitioner credentials, and poured herself into caring for patients who had nowhere else to turn — this was more than a professional setback. It was a dismantling.

"It was so disheartening to go through all that education and then be told and accused of things that were not true," Elaine recalls. The accusations, she would later learn from a former DEA agent, were the result of political pressure that had been building in Virginia for years. Complaints spread across seven years had been leveraged against pain physician she worked for. She was caught in the crossfire.

And then it compounded. That December, her father died. The following May, her husband Darrell — at 47 years old — was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Elaine, with her oncology background, knew exactly what that diagnosis could mean.

They fought the state board for a year. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on defense. Eight physicians wrote letters on her behalf. The community rallied. It didn't matter. The proceedings ended in a consent order — no agreement, no vindication, and a damaged reputation. Elaine walked away from her nurse practitioner career to protect her family and focus on her husband's recovery.

Darrell's cancer, caught on a single sample in a twenty-sample biopsy, turned out to be stage one. He came through surgery. They were, as Elaine says plainly, "very lucky" — though she'd be the first to call it something else entirely.

The Two Years Nobody Sees

What followed wasn't a dramatic pivot or an immediate calling. It was grief.

"For two years, I kind of sat. There was nowhere to go," Elaine says. "I was in a dark place as far as depression and sadness, grieving my career." She doodled. She studied. And she dove into Scripture with the urgency of someone who needed to know, not as doctrine but as survival, whether God was actually who He claimed to be.

She had only been actively pursuing her faith since 2006. The collapse came in 2008. The timeline felt cruel. But she leaned in rather than walking away — a choice she now names as the turning point for everything that followed.

Around 2010, her church began taking mission trips to Nicaragua. Elaine went. She kept going for nine years. And it was on a porch in Nicaragua, early in the morning with roosters making their presence known, that she heard what she describes as that still, small voice.

He said, 'I need you to go home and raise up My daughters.' And I didn't know what that meant at the time.

Her first reaction was honest and, frankly, relatable: "I don't like girls. They were mean in high school. I'm not the sorority chick." But when she returned home and looked out at the congregation she had served alongside for years — women whose stories she knew, women carrying God-sized dreams they hadn't yet acted on — the confirmation landed hard.

"That's what He meant. He meant for me to be a catalyst to push them forward. I will push them to the front. I will be in the back."

Elizabeth, Mary, and a Biblical Blueprint for Women

When Elaine began building what would become She Steps Forward, God gave her a story. Not a strategy or a business plan — a story from Luke chapter one.

She studied the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary, the mother of Jesus, with the careful eye of someone looking for architecture, not just inspiration. What she found reshaped her entire understanding of mentorship and calling.

Mary didn't take her time. When the angel told her about Elizabeth, Scripture says she "got up with haste and she went." In the context of first-century Judea, that meant a 70-mile journey on foot from Galilee to Judea — likely in a caravan, almost certainly on a mission she couldn't yet fully explain.

"That tells me something about Mary that we've never been taught," Elaine says. "The bravery. The urgency."

And when Mary arrived, Elizabeth — who had no advance notice — heard her voice, was filled with the Spirit, and felt John leap in her womb. The miracle forerunner recognizing the miracle maker, even before birth.

Then there is the verse Elaine calls the foundation of everything she does.

Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." — Luke 1:45

And the detail that most people pass over: Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months. Three months before walking 70 miles back home to face a community that could have condemned her, equipped by whatever Elizabeth had poured into her during those weeks together.

"That whole story is God's wink to women," Elaine says, "of how we're supposed to come into relationship, how one is supposed to pour into the other."

From Suffolk to Nairobi

In 2019, Elaine launched the first She Steps Forward conference. She was building something she thought was local, even regional. God had a different radius in mind.

At that very first conference, a woman named Teresa arrived — a pastor who had traveled from Nairobi, Kenya. By the end of the week, Teresa looked at Elaine and said simply: "I need you to come back to Nairobi. Our women need this desperately."

She described widows stripped of dignity. Single mothers abandoned. Women in poverty with no pathway forward. Girls in remote villages caught in child marriages. Women with disabilities who had no advocate.

Elaine flew to Kenya in February 2020. Sixty women from five countries — Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, and the Republic of the Congo — showed up for the first She Steps Forward conference on African soil. COVID shut the world down weeks later. She had made it just in time.

In the years since, despite the lockdowns and the logistics and the distance, she has kept going back. She met Miss Grace, who runs a 65-plus child orphanage in one of Nairobi's poorest neighborhoods, sustained entirely by faith since the 1990s. She met Phyllis, a mother of two who was simultaneously teaching girls about health, fighting to get pregnant students back into school, and traveling to remote villages to rescue girls from child marriages. She met Wilson and Mary, who run a disability center now serving over 300 clients, most of them women.

I thought, I've got to come back. I don't know how we're going to do this, but I have to come back.

She came back. And she kept building.

Beauty From Ashes, Built Into a Business Model

Today, She Steps Forward operates on two tracks — a private coaching practice for one-on-one clients, and She Steps Forward International, a nonprofit with a four-pronged model: annual conferences in the US and Kenya, a six-month group coaching cohort for zero-to-three-year Christian female entrepreneurs, an online membership community, and a seed grant program providing $500 to $1,000 in startup capital to women who complete the cohort.

The decision to charge for the programs — even in Kenya — is intentional and deeply held.

"We believe in teaching them to fish, not just giving them the fish," Elaine explains. "And they respect that greatly."

The results have been remarkable. At the 2024 Kenya conference — the first ticketed event in country — all four ticket tiers sold. Three female government officials attended. Elaine was invited to the State House the following day to meet the woman who oversees all of Kenya's women's affairs under President Ruto. One hundred women came. Thirty expressed interest in the cohort. Ten invested. Those ten are set to graduate this July, and Elaine is currently fundraising for their seed grants.

Back in the US, a small but committed group of women from multiple states attended the most recent conference. Five of the six attendees are joining as part of an internal writer-speaker team — getting platform access they couldn't yet build on their own.

"Now we've got the right people," Elaine says, with the quiet confidence of someone who has learned to trust the slow work of God over the spectacle of fast growth.

The Faith That Holds When the Bank Account Doesn't

Elaine doesn't wrap her story in a tidy bow. She is candid about the ongoing tension of funding a God-sized mission while the finances haven't yet caught up to the vision.

"We keep pouring into this thing we know He's called us to do," she says. "And I'm like, the breakthrough is coming. But I hear that tension: 'Will you believe Me or will you believe the bank account? Will you believe Me or will you believe the bank account?'"

She has seen God provide in moments that defied the math — weeks with barely $50 in the account that somehow turned into a mortgage payment. She has seen doors open in Kenya faster than in the US and accepted that God sometimes works things in the opposite order of our expectations. She has lost a brother to illness after a hard-won reconciliation, cared for a mother through a severe stroke, and stepped away from a well-paying remote healthcare job because her mother needed her more than the paycheck did.

At every turn, she has leaned in rather than walked away.

You cannot have a testimony without a test. I had been a bubble-wrapped Christian. That was my test.

What Elaine Lankford is building is not a brand. It is not a platform in the way the word is typically used. It is the lived-out answer to a question she was forced to ask in the rubble of a career she loved: Is God actually who He says He is?

The women in Nairobi launching their businesses this July are part of that answer. So are the women across five African countries who showed up to a conference planned by a nurse practitioner from Suffolk, Virginia, who had no idea she was going to Africa. So is every woman who hears the verse from Luke 1:45 and feels, perhaps for the first time, that the thing God spoke over her life might actually be fulfilled.

Blessed is she who believed.

For more information on coaching, visit Elaine's website shestepsforwardcoaching.com.