Today marks the start of a brand new and exciting chapter of my life. For many years now (approx 10 years) I have been serving God.
Not long after meeting God for the first time and deciding to serve Him, I dedicated myself to His service wholeheartedly. I determined that everything that I did from that moment on would be in service to Him.
Not long after that I felt that God was calling me into full time ministry in some shape or form. How or what, I wasn’t sure, but I felt a definite call to do this.
A number of years went by with me serving God as vigorously as I could, waiting for the opportunity to make the move into full time ministry, but for a long time, it didn’t come. I didn’t let go of the plan to go into full time ministry, but I cannot deny that the thought left my mind a number of times and my ferver wained at times.
I started working “normal” jobs and planning my future - where I was going to go and what I was going to do as my career progressed. I didn’t have the most firm of plans - I sort of figured it out as I went along - but I kept moving forwards.
At the beginning of this year (2015) I prayed, asking God how I could make a way to go on a mission trip to Greece that the church had planned. My concern was that I didn’t have enough leave for the trip. I prayed and asked God, and I felt Him say to me: “resign”.
At the time I wasn’t certain if that was God or me, and so I didn’t act on it. But as time went on, I felt more and more compelled to investigate if this was my thought, or God’s instruction. I spent about 9 months of the year wrestling with this idea trying to figure out whether it was God talking or not. I eventually sort help from my senior pastor, Andy, and on his recommendation I spoke to a number of my friends and asked them to pray for me.
I started to have things clear up in my mind and I decided to take the step of faith and go into full time ministry, working for my local church, Renown Church . The step of faith was not so much the working for the church part, but more the fact that the church had no funds available to pay me while I worked there. And so I had to trust God to provide for me in some way.
The story of how God provided is still busy being written, and I will not pre-empt what God will do with what He has done so far - that will be the story of a later blog post. I will, however, say that I haven’t yet seen God’s full provision, but I am at complete peace about the fact that He will provide!
So what does any of this have to do with today in particular? Well, it’s simple: today is day 1 at my new job. Today is day 1 of my internship at Renown Church . I am thoroughly looking forward to what today, this week and the next year holds. It’s going to be an incredible new chapter of this adventure that we call life!