Fighting the First Step

The word of the Lord came to me, saying,

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
    before you were born I set you apart;
    I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

“Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”

But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.

Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Ever had something just running through your mind over and over. You try to run from it, you try to shrug it off, you may even say that you will do it but are not sure if you ever will. But the moment you are still, the moment you close your eyes at night, there it is. Lately I have been giving every excuse in the book as to why I am not the one that God should have chosen. It usually goes like this:

“Why me”

“Before I formed you, I knew you and I set you apart”

“But there are so many better educated and qualified people that could do this”

“You must go to everywhere I send you to and say what I have commanded you to say. I will put my words in your mouth”

“But who am I”

“I have appointed you to speak, teach and proclaim the truth”

Now usually these conversations go on for a few hours and then I still try to convince the God of the universe that He has chosen the wrong person. More and more, He has started using my wife to speak and cut through all of my issues to get to my heart. I will begin to speak, “preach”, about the topic of the day. In these moments my wife sits there and smiles. Anyone who has a spouse, you know the smile, it is the one where they see you doing the very thing you don’t want to do. When I call her on it, she just looks at me and asks, ” soooo, when are you going to start”. The answer is always the same, “I know.”

Where does this leave me? To be honest, it leaves me with a decision. I sit here late one night in prayer understanding the words of Paul so well when he said “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15). I know the right decision, I have lived the right decision and guess what, that road, it is never easy. I have spent the last two years using every excuse to keep from having to go down that road. I thank the Lord for His patience with me.

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48b). Or in other words, to whom much is given, much is required. With great power…you know the rest. In the past couple weeks I have had these words engraved on my heart. A few months ago I said to my wife during one of my many rants, “Whatever knowledge God gives you, you must freely give.” The very moment those words left my lips I felt a conviction that the time to begin is now. I will never be ready but God doesn’t ask you to be ready, only willing.

The New Journey

I began this journey a year ago with, where every breakthrough starts, worship. One video became two and then three per week. I began to minister in a way that brought me back to the beginning of this journey where I was standing next to a projector doing my best to help others worship. The projector has been replaced with a computer and the home town congregation with strangers all around the world.

For the holidays I went back to my hometown and spent a couple weeks with my family. When I was there I spoke with my father about the videos I was making. He began to look at them and said something that I had not noticed about my videos. Every week I was creating a worship service. Taking that revelation I came back home and created “Sunday Morning Worship” to bring the weekly videos together into a coherent worship service for anyone to use. After seeing those videos thrive I was excited to start on the next phase and updated the Vectored website to be better equipped for the future. Things were going great and then…

The attacks began. Attacks from places I never expected have hit myself and my family. Deep pain, true forgiveness and clinging onto Romans 8:28 for dear life are my daily routine. Along with the emotional and spiritual pain, my disabilities flared up and debilitating migraines sent me spiralling. A few days ago, while experiencing physical, mental, spiritual and emotional pain, I was crying out to God to make it all stop and asking why I needed to walk through this painful nightmare. While laying in a dark room with nothing but a TV on I heard a few words that spoke to the very depths of my soul:

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

“Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”

My story is not over, my calling has not concluded, if you’re reading this, neither has yours. Every day we have to wake up and write the next page. No matter how good or bad the day is, it is part of the story that is our lives and that journey will one day end, the last page will one day be written. On that day, the calling inside my heart has but one hope to stand before the Lord and to hear, “Now that was a great story”.