I got a chuckle out of the recent cartoon portraying Jesus’ calling Peter and saying, “No I’m not talking about Twitter, I literally want you to follow me.” Following isn’t always easy and doesn’t always make sense. My wife will attest to a lifetime of listening for the command of God and following when it didn’t make sense. We have experienced downward mobility professionally as we have taken new ministry assignments. Multiple times we have left family and financial stability for the sake of the cause.
Here we go again! We are raising financial support, starting a new church with one other couple and moving away from our resort area home, our children and our granddaughter. Yet we sense that we have been prepared our whole lives for this next assignment. God has prepared us with our spiritual gifts, our acquired skills, our personalities, our passions, our ministry experiences and our lessons learned in the past about trusting God when moving into to new time zones. We have been blessed with an address book full of family and friends who have walked parts of this journey with us, prayed with us and for us. God has been so faithful and we will trust Him again as we move to The Villages, Florida in just one week.
Maybe you think I just “churched up” our situation a bit. After all, we are moving away from the frigid upper midwest and moving to a place with 550 holes of golf accessible by the golf cart in my garage. I wanted full disclosure on this move! For the record we moved north last winter to Minneapolis and we are staying in central Florida 12 months of the year. I hear the summer is HOT AND HUMID. We will compare that to our last assignment in Nanning, China in 2010 – couldn’t be more tropical than that!!
All that said, we are following the Lord’s call to the best of our ability. One step at a time. Believing that He has prepared us to launch a new style church in a 55+ community of 82,000 people. We say that we desire to start a church that is “spot-on” for Boomers, yet we don’t know what that exactly looks like. One step at a time. We don’t have a building but we have a name - Live Oaks Community Church. One step at a time. We actually have grown from 2 to 4 to 21 people, or maybe more in the last 6 months. One step at a time.
I thought the picture entered with this blog was appropriate. It is perhaps the oldest and most beautiful planting of live oak trees in America, growing on a plantation outside of Charleston, SC. The photo portrays a path to be followed but the end goal is not visible – we take it one step at a time, by faith. And we trust that the One who has led us thus far, will be faithful to lead us once again. We follow Him – literally!
Radical obedience has radical rewards. Go, Chris and Kathy! I look forward to visiting you in FL some time. But not August.