For a couple years I had felt that God was leading me go back to Michigan, this was the first place I really felt called to return to. I put it off for about two years, mainly because I wasn't ready, and in all honesty I didn't want to go back. I had been hurt, and I wasn't eager to return to a place that had cast me out. God kept putting it on my heart, and I kept pushing it to the side, I don't even think I mentioned it to anyone for two or three years. I had been back to Michigan since leaving, there's a huge Christmas store, Bronner's, that I've taken my daughters too and to get there you drive past the exit I used to get off at to get to my old apartment and the church.
I had been back to the church I had pastored, and God kept putting it on my heart to go back to Michigan, so I mentioned it to a couple people this time, asking them to pray with me about going. I got on the church website to see if the church was even still open (I had some doubts that it would be) and when I did I found that there was a new pastor. The people who I talked to confirmed that I should go, and since this lined up with what God had been telling me for years, I began to try and get in touch with the pastor.
I sent an email, and go not response. I reached out to a couple of the young adults I knew from the church to see if they had a personal email for him, and got no response. I reached out to a couple other pastors I knew in the area asking for anyway to get in touch with the pastor, and no one seemed to have any personal contact information for him. It got to the point where I was about to just drive up there and sit in the parking lot, something I wasn't big on, but it felt like it might be my only option, and God was leading me to go. I finally called the church directly, and ended up sending him another email, letting him know more specifically what I was wanting to do, and this time, a week before I had planned to go, I got a response. We had a phone conversation, and the pastor agreed to let me come and spend some time in prayer, and even said he'd be around if I needed anything.
The morning came, I woke up early, made a note on a 3x5 card "Off to Michigan to kill a lion", and began the four hour drive to Flint. I actually filmed my day, part of me is interested in trying to get into YouTube so this was my first attempt, you can see the video at: http://proverbs1824brothers.blogspot.com/2017/08/trying-something-new-by-will.html
I got to the church and took it all in; very little had changed in the past seven years. I met the pastor, and he walked with me into the sanctuary. He told me he would be in his office if I needed anything and then gave me some words of wisdom. I don't remember exactly what he said, my mind was a little distracted, but the gist of it was that people in the church make mistakes, doing what they think is right and biblical, and that I shouldn't hold it against them (I'm not capturing what he said well at all, it made a lot of sense actually led me to the discovery I needed to make).
He left me alone, I put my bag down on the from pew where I used to sit each Sunday morning, and then I began to walk around the sanctuary; it was a lot smaller than I remembered. As I walked and began talking to God something came to my mind that I hadn't thought of in years. When I had started at the church there they put me in charge of the offering Sunday mornings. I would share a bit about what the teens had studied the previous week, relate it to tithing, and then pray. I used to pray by addressing God as "Daddy" (Romans 8.15; Galatians 4.6). It was the way I prayed and the way I connected with God, and it just came out when I prayed on Sunday mornings.
The first few weeks nothing was said, but after about a month the pastor asked me about it, said some older people in the church had said something about it, and so I said I wouldn't use that term on Sunday morning any more; to me it wasn't a hill worth dying on. The first Sunday morning where I didn't say it, one of the older board members came up to me after words and said, "Thank you for changing that." At the time I didn't think anything of it, but as I sat there, in the same spot where that man had spoken to me it hit me, that was the real wound. The wound that had been inflicted hadn't happened in a meeting, but in the sanctuary over the way I addressed God in prayer...
Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11
TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!
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