My husband and I have felt a calling, a nagging if you will, to serve and move towards the people of Greene since we moved into this area. When we first moved to the area, we looked around at the churches of Greene and felt ‘this is obviously God’s country’. While, everywhere is God’s country, the country (Greene), largely, statistically, doesn’t want anything to do with God or has fallen complacent with ‘I went to church as a kid’ or ‘my mom was all the preacher I needed’ and so on. Our friends, neighbors, co-workers, all unreached, and we (our family) were focusing all our efforts on Madison. Yes, a very worthy group of people to be reached, but not our calling.
By summer 2013, we could not shake it anymore and started really praying and by December 2013, we were led to a church plant in Greene. We stayed at the old church until March of 2014.
Our old church experienced complete upheaval near the end of 2013. We found ourselves feeling out of place with everyone who started joining different ‘camps’ within our old church. Such discourse from people we considered our family members disgusted me and made me feel like I wanted to run away.
But God meant it for good. Though this was not the reason we chose to leave our old church, I’m glad we stuck around until March of 2014 because we got to see the healing we needed to see with good people. We learned to look at ourselves during this process, leaving no stone unturned and examined ourselves for problem identification and improvement. It was a very hard season, but something God took and used for his greater good.
On an even more personal level, my season was infertility and miscarriage. Before Hannah, a miscarriage spun me into infertility and no treatments worked. Once we stopped acting out of fear and quit treatments, Hannah was born a year later to the day. Then, when trying to have Ben, we had three miscarriages in a row before he ‘stuck’ with us.
I know my attitude was rotten before kids, “I want what I want when I want it so make it happen God!” I’m more patient now. Not necessarily understanding, but I can look back and see how everything fell into place perfectly. We were different people, different parents coming out of that refining fire.
I hated it at the time, I remember crying and being angry at God saying how much I hated what he was doing, but still loved him completely. I remember being so bitter and jealous during the process and, towards the end, turned that over to God and helped me to see his timing and plan was better than I could have ever imagined. I am highly sensitive to the needs of mothers who had the opposite problem as me, finding themselves with the exact gift I yearned for but accidentally pregnant, maybe not ready (opposite of us), and ended up at a local pregnancy center. I used to be so angry that these women were so not thankful for their accident babies (not true) and it ‘wasn’t fair’.
But God did a 180 on my heart and they are who I think and pray about daily. Each baby, accident or waiting years for is equally precious in God’s eyes. And now mine. I reflect my blessings that my children need or even want for nothing. I have a wonderful husband that helps. A lot of these ladies go it alone.
So, in my season, God took a cold, angry heart and turned it on it’s head and gave me the desires of my heart in the meanwhile. God is good, all the time, and all the time, God is good! So, I am thankful for that season (even though it sucked at the time!!)