Two Phrases...

Last night at church, a guest speaker by the name of Earl Creps spoke about the recent journey and calling he and his wife have embarked on. I don't remember the exact timeline, but the long and the short are that he was serving as a professor at a seminary in Missouri, and now they are heading out to Berkely to plant a church with the purpose of reaching out to the many students who populate that city. He spoke of this journey and process leading up their decision to pursue it within the context of Acts chapter 16 where Paul and his ministry team had been traveling the Roman highway network spreading the news of Jesus Christ. Their journey was targeting all the locations one would have expected and planned on for that time period, until one night when Paul had a dream about a man from Macedonia, asking them to travel to his homeland. Long story short, Macedonia was probably not on their radar, and my understanding is that it represented a challenging/hostile place to continue their ministry of outreach.

So again, Earl was drawing some parallels between the events in his own life and what Paul's team experienced, which I thought was very cool.

As you would imagine, such a sermon/talk largely revolved around what it means to be obedient to God when he wants you to make a change or perhaps take a step outside your current circumstances/comfort zone. In the course of the talk, he rattled off a couple phrases that struck me, and I wanted to be sure to get them down in writing because I think they deserve to be kept at the forefront of my thoughts and prayers (maybe they deserve to be at the forefront of yours too.) These are not verbatim, so I apologize in advance if I misqoute or spin these incorrectly...

1 - (regarding how we tend to want things laid out, planned in advance before acting on a leap of faith) Pay more attention to what's coming after you, as opposed to paying attention to what comes after.

2 - "You know how they say when people are drowning, their life flashes before their eyes? So often when Jesus calls us to do something drastically different, our lifestyle flashes before our eyes..." (he went on to explain how at a point in their decision making, he had a moment when he started counting all the comforts he currently enjoyed and how they would most likely be put on hold.)

Just some food for thought that I'm chewing on today.

Cheers!