From Couch to Field, Part 2: The Valley of Decision

El bloguero invitado Neil Broere continúa de su post anterior sobre cómo Dios lo aconsejó a él y a su familia desde el sofá de la oficina de un pastor hasta el campo misionero.

It was a Monday morning. I remember every detail: the humid North Carolina air, the emptiness of the house which mirrored the uncertainty in my recent decision to go to Bible school, the random number on my caller ID that was most certainly another debt collector.

But mostly, I remember Anxiety—Anxiety so real it felt like a force literally standing in the room with me, pushing me to the floor. Dropping to my knees under its weight, I met Anxiety’s cousin, Confusion, whose goal was to end my seemingly short trip down the road of full-time ministry.

This was the Valley of Decision. Unbeknownst to me, I was soon to be lifted up by a power I had never experienced before.

We had told Jesus that our lives were no longer our own.

A couple years earlier, my wife and I had turned from a life of excess and worldliness to a complete surrender to Jesus. We had told Jesus that our lives were no longer our own and He could have us completely, whatever that looked like and wherever that took us. All we wanted was Jesus, and we meant it.

Over the next two years, we served faithfully in our local church, joined a church planting team in a neighboring city, and chased hard after God. We led Bible studies, attended conferences, and evangelized in our community. We were confident of God’s leading in the decisions we were making.

Then, the church plant ended in a painful split. The Bible studies grew stale. Our financial security degraded as the daily debt collection calls increased.

But the weeks leading up to this particular humid Monday were marked by an insatiable desire in me to be led by the Lord and not by my own understanding. Psalm 127:1 had challenged me: “Unless the Lord builds, the builders labor over it in vain.”

I was very familiar with what laboring in vain felt like, and I knew that wasn’t the way of the Kingdom. I had noticed in Scripture that one of the defining characteristics of the world changers of our faith was that they heard from God and obeyed His leading.

• Abraham obeyed God when He said, “Go from your country… to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).
• Moses spoke with God face to face and obeyed when He sent him to Pharaoh (Exodus 3).
• Gideon heard and obeyed the Lord’s command, “Go in the strength you have and deliver Israel from the power of Midian” (Judges 6:14).
• Paul obeyed the night vision from the Lord and “set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called (him) to evangelize them” (Acts 16:9-10).

I was confident that if I could hear from God the way Abraham, Moses, Gideon, and Paul did, then I could do the same bold things that shifted the course of history forever.

Where I found myself on that desperate Monday morning was a serious test that would define the course of our family forever.