My Testimony (part 1)

I have spent years and years telling God what I was and was not going to do with my life. I can remember graduating Bible college and declaring that I would do youth ministry for a while, but I would never work in a church my whole life. I remember telling people that I enjoyed working with teens, but working with adults and leading a church was something I would NEVER do. I have laid plans and plotted my course. I have educated myself and prepared for a whole new direction in my life after the ministry gig was up.

Then I made a big mistake!

As I was preparing myself to leave ministry behind for a career where I could earn a good deal more money and security for my family, I could not help myself. I felt a nagging sense that God needed my full attention and He was not going to let me leave full-time ministry until I actually stopped to listen to Him first. So I did. And something happened that I did not expect.

Allow me to confess a few things about my personal relationship with God up until about a year ago:

1) I have grown up being very involved in church. I attended church for my first 18 years and have worked in one for my second 18 years. However, in all of this time, I never really grasped the concept that the church is not an institution or an organization. It is the bride of Jesus Christ and I am a part of her. I never really grasped the intimacy and passion Christ feels for His bride. I did not love the church, I just thought of it as a human-led organization.

2) I have grown up with a good deal of Bible knowledge and training. I can engage you in just about any theological topic and probably convince you that I know what I'm talking about! I know the Bible like a student knows a text book. I can pass a test. I can quote the answers. However, I never really understood the real power of God's Word when someone begins to really make it the basis of their entire life. I never really understood what it meant when the Bible was described as "living and breathing".

3) I have always been a good "talker". I love to be the center of attention and in a group setting I somehow end up getting that attention without even realizing what I am doing. I figured out, at a very young age, that my personality caused people to trust me in positions of leadership, deserved or not. The problem is that I could get attention and leadership positions on my own ability. There was never any thought to depending on the Holy Spirit's leadership. There was never any need for me to wait on God to open doors for me. I just opened them myself.

4) Trusting God is something I have always been really bad at doing. I'm not sure why, but I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that I have never really needed to trust in God. I come from a great family life. I have never really faced brokenness in my family life. I have only experienced death in a close and personal way on a couple of occasions. I have never been in need or truly desperate. I have always been able to fight my own way out of trouble or tough times.

These confessions could go on for a while, but what I have written so far addresses some of the keys to what God has done with me over the past 12 months that has really shaken me to my core and fundamentally changed who I am as a person.

In part 2 of this testimony, I want to tell you about how God has taken the first 36 years of my life and experience and turned it upside down. I am on a path now that I never planned for or expected. I have been running from this my entire life and now I finally am embracing it. Because of this, I am certain that 2011 is going to be THE landmark year of my life. Maybe not the "best" or the "most important" year, but one that I will look back in the future and note that this was the year everything changed...

(to be continued)