Reflections - Fearless

I am a woman.  I was wired, as all women are, to worry.  I worry about our finances, no matter what our financial situation looks like at the time.  I worry about our kids, that something bad might happen to them and I won't be able to protect them from it.  I worry about the kids who will someday make fun of my kids, and dread the day that someone says something mean to them.  Today I even worried about what would happen when the world runs out of clean water.  What???  Yes, it's ridiculous, which is why this topic is so appealing to me.

What if, for once, we could shed this worry and go after something that scares the daylights out of us?  I have a magnet on my fridge that says"what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"... what if we truly approached things that way?  We read and read and read that we should put our trust in God and depend fully on Him, and yet, we fall back on this worry that He won't be there for us when we need Him.

Josh told me that he wanted to plant a church long before we ever did.  It was about 5 months before our wedding the first time he shared his dream and his vision.  I totally didn't get it.  I literally thought it sounded like starting a cult, which is funny now since cult rumors often get started when a church is planted.  Needless to say, I shut down the idea.  Then we had our opportunity to move to Small Town, Illinois and plant a satellite campus of a larger church.  Now this I could get in line with.  We often refer to that time as "church planting with training wheels" because even though we did the work to build a launch team, cast vision, and grow and implement leaders and teams, we had the larger church to fall back on in case of failure.  When the church planting conversation came up during this time, I would tell Josh that we were not going to even think about it until we had set our current church up to a sustainable place.  If we were to ever leave on our own, I wanted to be sure that everything we worked so hard to help build would continue to grow and flourish.  It was unfair to them to think about the next step.  And the next time it came up, I told him that we should just pray about the timing, which we did.  I don't think Josh ever expected the day to come that I would say "go" but it did.  It was about a year and a half into our life there and he mentioned that maybe in a year or so we should finally do it.  The desire was burning strong and I could tell.  He lit up like a Christmas tree any time we would even tiptoe around the idea.  About a day later I told him that a year was too long... it was time to get started.  There are a million things that happened between that conversation and the launch of our church last February, but that moment was honestly like setting loose a caged lion.  I just had to hang on tight and hope I could keep up, and I did, surprising even myself.  And now that the launch is behind us, I want to just slow down for awhile...

But God always has different plans, doesn't He?  I came up with this topic this week to hear how you would be fearless in your life.  The funny thing is, even after thinking about it for a week, I am not sure what it means for me.  What I do know is that God keeps putting this word in my path.  Every passage I read in the Bible is about putting your fear aside and putting your trust in God.  And while everything in me wants to just be a bump on a log for a season, I find myself instead saying, "ok God, now what?"  I am still waiting to hear from Him.  Now that I have seen the fruit of the work we're doing through our church plant, I know that He can do great works through little ol' me, and that humbles me to my core.  But it also makes me realize that I'm not done.  He still has work for me to do... and He has a plan that is slowly unraveling.  For me, being fearless is not about starting something new or making a big change in my life.  At this point in my journey, being fearless simply means listening for the next call, because I know it's coming.  And then being open to whatever that may be, even if it scares me.  Being open to what He is calling you to do can be terrifying, and there were moments over this past year that I really thought we had lost our minds.  But now looking back, there was never a moment that I felt like God abandoned us.  He was in it the whole time, so He won't abandon me for whatever comes next.  So God, if you're reading this, I'm ready when you are... just let me know!

If you participated this week, we'd love for you to link up below and you can read Brittany's post here.   Then read on for next week's topic.

Brittany picked a good one this week, and it's a perfect "get to know you" post, too.  She writes:

"With Easter approaching, I thought it would be very special to reflect back on our own journey with Jesus... and share a "blurb"- maybe it's your testimony or it could also be what God is doing in your life right now... there is true power in reflecting back on where we were WITHOUT Jesus and what He has done in each of our lives since then!  We can't wait to hear back from you!"

Until next Thursday...