Hi friends! On today’s episode of Draw Near to Me, we will begin the final part of Michael’s faith journey. For those who prefer to read, today’s content is also posted below. As a recap, part 3 ended with Michael and Sarah realizing that they needed to take a break from missions. By that point, they had been in the field for around ten years without a break. They felt God call them back to Florida for Michael to take on the role as an unpaid intern at a church they had previously attended. Since this is a man’s testimony, my husband, Jeff, will narrate Michael’s story. 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 the final part of Michael’s story. Enjoy!
The internship program at Beach church and the people in it were fantastic. Of course, there were times where the transition from being a full-time missionary to becoming an intern were met with mixed emotions. It could be difficult to go from being in the mission field teaching theology to other missionaries, to now sitting in a class and discussing it. Many of the interns were young adults, but I was married with kids. In general, that placed me in a very different phase of life.
Yet, in the moments where it was hard, I grasped on to the fact that Sarah and I felt strongly that this was what the Lord wanted us to do. I told myself, “You can have your pride if you want, but if this is what God asked you to do, then this is what it entails.” It was a very big change from our former life, but we recognized that God was doing something in the midst of it.
Behind the scenes, we were also going through a crazy time. For a lot of different reasons, our donor support started to dwindle. It didn’t matter what we did or how we communicated it, a lot of it started disappearing. We realized within the first month of being in Jacksonville that we only had enough money to live there until the beginning of December. I was committed to an 11-month unpaid internship, yet we had no idea how we were going to figure it out financially.
Two weeks after that realization, God moved in an unexpected way. Sean, the serve pastor, announced that he planned on leaving the church. He was one of the best people I had ever met and worked with. After breaking the news, Sean talked to me about taking over his role. We saw everything eye to eye on what the job needed to be. Our philosophies lined up exactly.
In the end, I was selected to take on the serve pastor role at Beach church. I started in November, right before our income would have run out in December. We did not foresee any of this when I initially stepped into the internship. God really took care of us. Soon, my one-year commitment turned into three years.
It was a real privilege to work at Beach. The Lord used that experience to give me a greater heart for the local church. I gained a deeper appreciation for how God flourished His Kingdom in a new setting. Up to that point, I had skills required to do things in the mission’s world, which was drastically different. Instead of finding ways to accomplish things in countries where our presence was not welcomed, I was learning other valuable lessons such as how to coordinate logistics for large events. God used that time to equip me to do things in different ways while refining my perspectives on Kingdom work.
By the fall of 2021, we were just kind of cruising along. Things had been good. The kids were doing well and had more of a normal lifestyle. When we were in the mission setting, they went on trips with us and were even present in the background at our meetings. The format was different in the local church, and they were not as involved in the day to day. Now, instead of being wherever we were, they had more of a set routine of being at home or with friends after school.
One evening, we were having dinner with our family. Our boys were around 11 years old at the time. I was talking to my wife and the boys randomly asked, “Is this it?” Sarah and I didn’t really have any context for what they were questioning, so she asked them what they meant. They said, “We get up, go to school, come home, play a little bit with friends outside, eat dinner, and go to bed. Is this what we do every day?” We told them that yes, that was kind of what normal life looked like. In response they said, “We really miss being missionaries.”
That was an impactful moment for Sarah and me. We were always concerned about how our ministry, especially in missions, affected our kids. We wondered if they felt like they were being dragged around the world without any choice in the matter. When our boys announced that they missed being missionaries, it was a relief to know that life on mission was not a detrimental experience for them.
The boys’ comment was also a reminder to us that we needed to pray to see if we were where we needed to be. We were about to start our third year in Jacksonville, with a year long commitment ahead of us. So, over the next six months, we asked God whether we should go or stay. As we prayed, we felt like there was a change coming up, but we had absolutely no clarity as to what that meant.
While in Florida, both Sarah and I had gone back to school to get degrees. I was finishing my Master of Theology program and she was finishing her bachelor’s in psychology. Both of us were graduating that upcoming summer. Additionally, our daughter was moving into elementary school and our sons were moving into middle school the next year. Everyone had a transition coming up.
We prayed about every option. After several months, we felt God directing us to step back into vocational missions, specifically through YWAM. However, we had no clue what type of mission work He wanted us in, or what location He wanted us to go to.
One of my favorite YWAM leaders had once told me that if you knew that God had spoken something, but you don’t have clarity on what it is, then don’t move until you get that clarity. Don’t assume the timing. Don’t fill in the gaps yourself. Despite all our prayers, we did not have a definition for what God meant by transition. Later, we realized the reason we weren’t getting anything was because we were asking the wrong question.
Over a decade before that point, in 2010, my wife and I went to Michigan to visit family. We had just begun our journey to become missionaries and were still in our YWAM training phase of life. Sarah had family all over the state, from Detroit, to Flint, to the west side. While visiting, we went to a church service. It was there that she felt God speak to her about the possibility of being in Detroit.
For us, the idea of being in the inner cities in North America was a struggle. Those places simply functioned in a different way. As a result, many ministries have not tapped into those regions. Even though we felt this strange call to Detroit way back then, year after year we felt God was sending us everywhere else.
In 2014, some of our friends moved to Detroit to start something. We did not understand why we were sent elsewhere because we felt a heart for that place. We missed out on being part of the initial team that pioneered a ministry there. As a result, Sarah and I wrote off the calling and chalked it up to being young and ambitious.
Years later, as we prayed and asked God about everything but Detroit, nothing was sticking. When Christmas came around, we visited family in Michigan. While we were there, we also met with friends who were with the Detroit YWAM team. They knew that we were praying about what to do next, but we did not talk about the possibilities of being up there. We certainly were not thinking about it, we had given up on that calling long ago.
A month or so later, our friends contacted us. They said, “We are going to be honest and upfront with you. We really feel the Lord asking us to make a formal invite to you guys to pray about coming here. This is not a recruiting ploy to get you here, we really felt strongly that He said we should make that invite.”
At YWAM we were taught not to say “yes” or “no” to people right off the bat. We at least give them the courtesy to pray it through. At first, we were like, “OK, we’ll pray about it.” In reality, we thought we would pray and then tell them “No” the next day.
As Sarah and I began praying about the invite, God began to immediately reveal things to us. Up to that point, we had asked about everywhere else except Detroit. It was the one thing we weren’t asking, but that was the only thing God was ready to speak about.
It took us six months to start asking the right question, but that was the difference. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I think that sometimes God would love to answer us, but we are not asking the right thing. If He gave us a “yes” or “no” to the wrong question, then we are still going to come up with a wrong answer. Until we make the adjustment to what we are actually supposed to be thinking and praying about, it can be a barrier to discerning the right direction.
Once we asked God about Detroit, He gave us answers to the puzzle piece that had been missing for over a decade. God brought up everything from the past 12 years and why we were sent to what felt like random places. All the times of not knowing was preparing us for the bigger picture. Every bit of it was one step in a long process of equipping us to be able to handle being in Detroit.
For the first time since we began our missionary journey, we could put language as to why we were in each location. For example, we were in Latvia fighting human trafficking because we were going to come across that in Detroit. We conducted in-depth Bible training in Madison because we needed to share those skills with others. The leadership experiences we gained on mission and in the local church at Beach were all steppingstones. They were blocks that built a foundation to allow us to legitimately say “yes” to being in Detroit.
We accepted the opportunity to get back into missions in Detroit and moved in the summer of 2022. Over the last year and a half, every aspect of what I learned from the different places God sent us has already come into play. I’ve drawn on all the experiences we’ve had to help build what we are doing here in partnership with other churches and ministries.
Overall, I think the encouragement is that sometimes we have to be okay that we don’t have all the answers about what is going on. We can trust God is seeing the big picture and that in the long run He is doing something with it. As long as our heartbeat is to be obedient, then God is going to write something with our story. We have to be patient, wait for the picture to form, and not always rush to get to the destination as quick as we can.
I’ll be honest, if we went to Detroit back in 2010 when it was initially placed on our hearts, I almost 100 percent believe that we would have done more damage than good. The state of who we were then and aspects of our discipleship still needed to be worked out. My thoughts on the church, ministry, and how to serve others had to be refined to compliment what He is doing in this place. God had to work out the rough spots in who I was.
Sometimes we’re too quick to sacrifice the process for results. I believe that is partly because our culture pushes us to see immediate outcomes if you are going to do anything meaningful. I think we’ve got to align ourselves with God’s purposes for our lives. Yes, there could be immediate success, but when there’s not, it does not necessarily mean that it’s a disappointment or a failure. As long as you’re walking in obedience, there will be something that comes out on the other end. It just has to be according to how God’s working it, not necessarily how we are trying to push it forward.
I have learned to trust God even when things don’t quite make sense. It is not about how to make progress happen according to everybody else’s definition around me, but rather making my daily obedience to God my measure for success. At the end of the day, it is all in His hands. All we can do is walk as faithfully as we can and trust that when we look back, we will see what God has been doing all along in the process.
Michael, thank you once again for sharing your story. It has been a real privilege to be able to learn from your wisdom and insights! If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with others by hitting the share button. If you are not already a subscriber, consider doing a free or paid subscription so you don’t miss any content and to support my work. Thank you!
Introductory music credits: Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/revo/shine
License code: KEON3HWMQBSBP2Q9
Share this post