This was God’s way of initiating a new journey for us
Justin (at “Justin’s Blog” appropriately enough) shared part of his story with me in an email. He’s also published the story in a post called “This is my story,” again, appropriately enough.
Justin and I began communicating via email a couple of years ago, and his story was well worth the wait. I encourage you to jump over and read the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:
My life was pretty typical of the average young person who is passionate about following Jesus and who feels called into full-time ministry. I was born in South Africa but I was living in California, church planting a cell church, when my freedom story really started.
I felt discipleship and worship had always been in my heart and was starting to feel like God was calling me into some sort of worship pastor type role in the church. (You’ll often hear me talk about God initiating things in my life, here is where he started with me). So I knew what that looked like, and I knew what type of churches had worship pastors, so I began pursuing this call. No problem right?
Well no sooner had I landed a call as worship pastor, my lawyer informed me that our visas weren’t going to be renewed/extended. This meant we had 2 months to pack and ship our lives back to South Africa. We were devastated, in South Africa the only churches that can afford worship pastors are the rich mega-churches, and our hearts were just not into that. I prayed and asked God what he was doing and he said “just go back and get a regular job, don’t chase a ministry position just for a pay check”. As it turned out this was God’s way of initiating a new journey for us, one I would never have conceived of or chosen.
Justin ends his story with this:
God then in the last year has been doing more of a constructive work in us as he has redefined for us what he means by the cross, prayer, the Gospel, bible reading, church, community, leadership, grace, calling, ministry, parenting etc. He has also been giving us language to be able to describe and share what he is doing with us. In the last month or so there seems to be another shift as I feel him leading me to engage other people along this journey.
I’m hoping this means that he plans to write more about God’s constructive work in his life and about the people that God has led him to engage along the journey.
If you’re interested in sharing your own journey, please send me a link at alan [at] alanknox [dot] net. Or, if you don’t have a blog or website, send me the story, and I’ll be glad to publish it for you.
Thanks for posting these, Alan. So inspiring and encouraging. It is good to hear the stories of what God is doing in the lives of people all around the world to lead them in new directions.