Uncharted waters

For several months now I’ve been giving some serious thought & prayer about the direction I’m headed in life. This has been something that's been building and building to the point where I guess it can be said I’m facing a crisis of faith. No I’m not talking about the Dawkins challenge, so you can breathe a sigh of relief (or if you happen to be an atheist you can despair over my so-called delusion). Ironically I found Dawkin’s book just reinforced my thinking about God’s existence. But that’s another post. What I’m talking about is the pursuit of church leadership and vocational ministry. It’s complicated, and for reasons I can’t easily explain or rather not go into great detail for the whole World Wide Web to see I’ve decided to leave the leadership team at Calvary and put my pursuit of becoming a pastor on the shelf.

I know that this may come as a surprise to many and I know people will be asking me why. The best way I can sum up why is because I’ve come to a place where I need to lay down my ambitions and dreams before God and let them die. Let me tell you, this is not a pleasant experience; in fact it’s been like the death of a thousand cuts. For various reasons I’ve arrived at a dead end as far as becoming a vocational minister is concerned. But I don’t feel a sense of despair. Yeah, I feel a little sad that I’m no longer an elder in my church; being involved in leadership has taught me a lot about God and myself, and at the time it was supposed to be a stepping stone on the road to becoming a pastor. But I also feel a sense of freedom, partly because church leadership carries a lot of responsibility. But mainly I feel I’m in a place where I can focus on just being God’s child and nothing else. Maybe in all the effort to become something that I may have never been intended to be I lost sight of the simple truth that I am someone special in Jesus’ eyes.

If leadership is truly about character and influence, then my being in a position of leadership is irrelevant. As I said in a previous post, I can still pastor people without having a degree to earn, a sermon to preach or another meeting to attend. If I do have a destiny involving all of these things it will come to me. Right now I’m happy to just sit at the feet of Jesus and soak in His presence, and if others can be drawn closer to Jesus by what I’m doing then maybe that’s how my destiny is being fulfilled. As I was preparing to meet with the elders this week to discuss where I’m at I received what I believe to be a dream from the Lord (how I know this was a dream from God I’ll talk about in another post). What was discerned from the dream is that I’m supposed to embrace my journey of learning to belonging to Jesus and others, to take on Jesus’ character and then from there God will use me to set people free by His power.

So as they say, today is the first day of the rest of your life. I’ve also heard that the day after tomorrow is the second day of the rest of your life (LOL). But seriously, I’m sailing into uncharted waters and while there’s a grieving process of letting go of desires and dreams, there’s also a sense of anticipation. Even though things are now more uncertain than ever I feel a strong sense of love and guidance from God. So for now I’ll let go of the wheel and see where the wind blows.