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Trust Him in the Process: Michael's Faith Journey- Part 1
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Trust Him in the Process: Michael's Faith Journey- Part 1

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Hi friends!  On today’s episode of Draw Near to Me, we will begin Michael’s faith journey.  For those who prefer to read, today’s content is also posted below.  I met Michael when he was serving as a pastor at church.  Unfortunately, the pandemic soon came around and halted many things in terms of in person interactions.  However, my impression of him was that he was very thoughtful, intelligent, well spoken, and kind.  When he saw a Facebook post about Raul’s faith journey, he commented on how he also had a history with the same mission organization.  I proceeded to ask him if he would be willing to share his story, and he agreed.  I am so grateful that he did because he has wonderful insights and his willingness to go where he is called is incredible! Michael, thank you for being willing to share part of your story.  I know we have only scratched the surface of all that you have done, but it was a privilege to learn some valuable lessons from your experiences with the Lord.  Since this is a man’s testimony, my husband, Jeff, will narrate for us.  If you enjoy this post, please share it with others using the share button below and consider doing a free or paid subscription.  With that, let’s dive into Michael’s story. Enjoy!

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What I wanted to share with everyone may be a little bit different.  I am taking more of a long picture view of my life and how my wife and I have followed God in missions.  Once people start pursuing the Lord, I think many may struggle with a pressure to figure out their purpose in year one.  Often there is a sense that we need to immediately define what we are supposed to do with our life. 

The heartbeat of what I plan to share is seen from the lens of looking over the past 14 years of our lives.  Through that perspective, we have realized how much the Lord has worked over the years.  The reality is that we don’t have to have everything figured out right off the bat.  It is about recognizing that there is a bigger picture, even during the times when we have no clue what’s going on. 

I grew up in Tennessee, outside of Nashville, back before everybody in the country decided to move to that region.  My family had a respect for church and for God, but we weren’t a church going family for the most part.  We had little stints where we went for few months when I was a child, but that was about it. 

It was not until I was in high school that we started going to church more often.  Trying to get a teenager to care about church for the first time in their life is hard, especially if they did not grow up in it.  That was me.  When I was a freshman in high school, I did not have a lot of understanding or a real heart intention for why I was there.  I simply went to church because that was what we did. 

When I was in college I met my wife, Sarah.  After we got married we found a church in our area.  We attended service regularly and, of course, it began to influence our lives.  However, it was not until October 2008 that I had my first real encounter with the Lord. 

At the time, my wife and I had opposite schedules.  Sarah worked in the morning at a coffee shop until a little after lunch.  I worked as a copy editor for a newspaper while I was finishing school.  We had about a 30-minute window where our schedules overlapped, and we saw each other.  After that I went to work until 11PM or midnight depending on the deadline.  That was kind of our life.

One day, I was at home alone reading a book about Christianity.  I don’t particularly remember the title of the book, but it was about the 12 disciples.  It described their lives based on information in the Bible and what was recorded in history as well. 

Up to that point, one of my early struggles was trying to reconcile what I experienced in church versus the combination of what I read in the Bible and my initial views of Christianity.  Sometimes those things created a big disconnect for me.  As I was reading about the disciples that morning, something really jumped out.  The disciples were just messy, ordinary people.  Yet once they got it, they went full force for Jesus at that point.  It made me realize that Christianity wasn’t just about the entire church.  Rather, it was also about every individual and what they were willing to choose when they said “yes” to Jesus.

I really felt the Lord in that moment.  For the first time, it was as if He made it click in my head what it meant to follow Him.  It was different from a religious idea of going to church, or even the things that I kind of made up in my head.  Although I didn’t necessarily have good language to put in my prayer, I told God that I wanted to say “yes” to Him and whatever that meant.  That was the moment I truly surrendered to the Lord, and everything kickstarted from there.

I’m very much a black and white thinker.  Once things clicked and I gave my life to Jesus, I immediately thought about how it had to lead somewhere.  I had to do something with this.  The next seemingly obvious and logical thing to do was to read through the Bible.  My wife and I used one of those Bible in a year plans to accomplish that goal. 

Less than a few months into the process, I came across passages in Matthew that talked about the harvest.  Specifically, in Matthew 9:37-38 it speaks about how the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.  The rest of the verse says to pray to the Lord of the harvest that He’ll send out workers into His harvest.

After reading that passage, it made sense to me to pray for God to send people out.  I took the time to be alone with Him and pray.  I essentially started by saying, “Alright God, you know the people that need to be the ones who get sent out and tell people about you.” 

As I prayed I felt the Lord begin to speak to me.  It was not in an audible way, but rather simply in a way I understood.  God clearly asked me, “Instead of praying for other people to do this, would you just be willing to do it?” It was the first time I ever thought that perhaps I was supposed to be sent to do this work.

After talking with my wife, we both agreed that we were being called to missions and decided to go.  In fact, part of her story was that she felt called to be a missionary when she was 18.  However, she had been advised by many people to go to college first.  For her, the seed of being sent had been planted several years before we even met. 

In some ways, the idea of missions was not completely foreign.  We already knew several full-time missionaries.   Youth With a Mission, also known as YWAM, had a Nashville location.  Many of their missionaries attended our church.  That was the main paradigm that we were familiar with in terms of becoming long term missionaries.  Once we recognized God’s calling to mission work, we felt that going through YWAM was the route we were supposed to take. 

Sarah and I met with our pastor and explained to him what we felt God was asking us to do.  In our first conversation with him, he really wanted to make sure we were specifically being called into missions and not some other way of serving.  After that was established, our pastor then began to walk us through the different ways in which mission work could be done. 

Although we were familiar with people that worked for YWAM, our pastor wanted to make sure we knew what it entailed.  When making our decision, he wanted us to take into account the different aspects of various organizations.  At YWAM, we would be 100% support raised.  That meant fundraising not only for ourselves but also for our ministry.  Other mission organizations had different formats.  For example, the International Mission Board, IMB, was set up where it was almost a salary format.  With YWAM we would be praying and asking God where we should go, whereas with other organizations we were more likely to be assigned to specific places. 

Our pastor did a great job of parsing out all those finer details about different mission sending organizations.  He really wanted to make sure that we were not just going with YWAM because we only knew one way to do it.  After going through an exhaustive list, we still felt called specifically to missions through YWAM.  I’ll be honest though, it made zero sense for us.  At the time we did not have a lot of family and friends with a church background that would send us out and financially support us.  Although we didn’t have any of that, we felt very strongly that God was specifically calling us through that avenue. 

After we had our conversation with our pastor, we met with some of the YWAM leaders at the Nashville location.  It was a married couple that worked for the organization.  They wanted us to come in and make sure that this was what God was calling us to do. 

A lot of times when people are interested in working for an organization, there can almost be a recruitment mentality by the people that are hiring.  This is true in many places whether it is inside or outside of ministry.   Oftentimes, if someone is interested in mission work and feels called, people want to bring them in and convince them that this is the place to work.  Surprisingly, when we met with the couple from YWAM, we got the opposite.

The leaders were obviously very welcoming when we met them.  They explained what it looked like to train with and become a missionary for YWAM.  When we left the meeting, the wife of the couple wrote something out and gave it to us.  She felt we needed to read it to help us make our decision. 

Sarah and I went home and read the letter.  It essentially said, “If God is calling you to this, then even in the hard circumstances you can trust His goodness in His calling.   However, if this is a great idea that you are latching on to for whatever reason, but it’s not actually what God is calling you to do, then this life will chew you up and spit you out.  If you are not called it will be very difficult.” 

That letter was the “recruitment pitch” we received.  In the end, the leader advised us to really take the time to discern what God was saying.  We needed to not rely on our circumstances, any sense of adventure that came with being a missionary, or whatever else that may be attached to it.  Becoming long term missionaries should not be something we did because we thought it was a good idea, it needed to truly be a calling from God. 

To be continued.

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