Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Surprised (09/06/07)
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TITLE: God is Full of Surprises | Previous Challenge Entry
By Nathan Perkins
09/07/07 -
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A friend of mine wrote about this in his master’s dissertation. It stated that there are different chemicals in a person’s body that respond to the different kinds of stress. He also wrote about how these different chemicals help to create balance or pain when they are out of balance.
I experienced how the two different kinds of chemicals work in my body one surprising day.
I worked as a youth pastor in a church that was growing. Everything that I touched in that church turned into a success.
It was so good that by the beginning of my sixth year the youth group had grown from about 6 to 100 teens.
The church had so much faith in the work I was doing that they raised the budget for my department to the highest budget in the church. I had an enormous staff of volunteers and we just started a project that would become a complex of buildings for a teen center.
I had a vision when I started working there. Every part of that vision was coming to fruition. The process had begun and there was no way that it would not happen.
The first surprise was that God was arranging roadblocks to my perceived future.
When I became aware that I would not be able to continue working at the job I had loved for six years, I was sick to my stomach. There was so much stress in my gut that I could not even express what I was feeling to my wife.
I told her I was going for a run to try to work off some of what I was feeling and she agreed and told me to be careful.
I bolted out the door angry and afraid for my future and I ran like I was crazed. I took on an all out sprint.
Surprise number two came when I carried that sprint for three miles.
I was as surprised as could be that I could hold such a hard pace for so long. I leveled out to a run at that point and continued on.
I was still hurting emotionally and I reflected on my friend’s dissertation about the physical and the emotional. I knew that I was experiencing the exact thing that he had described.
There was enough emotional fuel to take me five miles from my home.
Finally, I dropped down near a telephone pole in some tall wheat to rest under the night sky.
Alone and upset I started to pray, sing and talk out loud to God.
I asked God to explain himself. I didn’t understand how it could be possible that I should have to leave this ministry before it seemed to me to be the right time. I even asked God,
“God, how could it be that you would allow these things to get in the way of yours and my plans? How could it be that you would lead me right up to the vision that you gave me and then you would start closing the doors so that I could not stay and see your work completed? How is it that you would want me to leave this ministry now that the church youth group is bigger then it has ever been, the budget is more then sufficient to do some great things, and the staff is incomparable in size and quality?”
I mentioned to God how everything was in place for the vision to be fulfilled.
And surprise!
It seems like God spoke the very same words back to me as evidence for why he was releasing me from that very job. He shared the same list and spoke into my heart the words “well done.” Everything that needed to be established for that youth ministry to thrive without me had been put in place.
Instantly, relief and tears poured like a waterfall from my heart. I began to sing again loud with my gratitude and greatly skewed by my emotion and crying.
After some praise, I was ready to run back home. I wanted to explain to my wife what God had revealed to me about his plan. It would be hard to make that job transition but the surprise of God’s presence would get me though!
God is full of surprises.
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