I was at a conference a little over two years ago and Chelsea and I went into a ministry room. As soon as we sat down and prayed with the ministry team, a gentleman who had never met me before began to laugh and began singing these words:

“Slow down, you move too fast, you’ve got to make the morning last…”

He immediately looked at me and told me that I was going to have to slow down if I was going to get all that the Lord had for me right now. Talk about a word from God himself. I sat down with some professional mentors, some spiritual mentors, and every one of them was telling me that I was going to have to slow down. I wanted so much, and I wanted it right that moment. I was absolutely miserable at work, I was extremely unfulfilled by the ministry I was working with (it amounted to putting the specials together each weekend).

Chel and I were having dinner tonight and that song came on in the background, and I began replaying the events of the past two years. There’s so much I have to learn, but I can say that I’ve learned a lot more about slowing down. I’m afraid there’s more the Lord wants to teach me, but in the past year especially, I’ve learned that I can’t find my identity in my work…once I finally learned that, I got a 55% raise. I was tired of doing nothing in ministry, but once I turned it over to the Lord, we got to be worship pastors, and work to build the small group ministry of a church launch.

Today, I’m not so much in a rush. I’d rather it slow down for a bit. I’ve had offers from churches/plants, we’ve even had local folks ask us to launch a church - but the point is, I’m trying to take it slow. We have ABSOLUTELY no desire to launch a church - nor do we believe we have the calling for it. We haven’t felt the confirmation from God about the plants or existing churches - so we refuse to move. There are moments in the middle of this that I feel like a complete failure. I feel like I’m letting down all of the people who’ve invested in us, I feel like we’re wasting what’s been invested - but that’s all my flesh and I’m trying to hand all of those emotions over to the Lord for Him to process through. At work, I’m making more money than most 40 years olds I know and I “get” to travel all of the time. Chel’s working and our income is great. We have so much to be thankful for - and we are - but that doesn’t drive us. I don’t have the need to be on staff at a church or to be some super executive within the company I work for.

There’s something so relieving about not having it all planned - about enjoying this part of the journey. We have no idea where we’ll work, where we’ll live, or what we’ll be doing in a year - all we know is that now is the time for chasing after the Lord like never before. More than ever before, I’m just trying to make the morning last…

mjd

For more on this journey, check my blog out at http://forthejourney.wordpress.com