“We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.” Proverbs 16:9
I have lived the reality of Proverbs 16:9 in multiple seasons. Growing up in the church and serving Jesus as a volunteer, I had my own ideas of what this journey of faith would be.
I went to Cal State Los Angeles University and I graduated with a B.A. in English. During those years as a college student, I was the volunteer youth pastor at a church in east Los Angeles.
I had imagined the following… I’d be a high school English teacher, I’d volunteer in the local church, I’d be a faithful tither, and I’d gladly cover the pulpit for my pastor whenever he went on vacation or had an emergency (I always had a sermon ready to go). Talk about being the dream church member!
After working as a teacher in Los Angeles for seven years, I started to feel this sense of deep dissatisfaction in my profession.
It was around this time that my husband, Joshua, woke me up in the middle of the night and said, “God is calling us to plant a church, and we will pastor people nobody wants to pastor.”
That was scary! Why would God do that to us? Ha!
This church girl knew what it looked like to cover the basic expectations of being a Christian in my current church culture. The idea of stepping outside my comfortable, safe Christian bubble was not something I wanted to entertain. I had a plan, I had paved my own road, and it did not include leading people who are difficult or not “ALL IN” with Jesus.
Little did I know that God had been forging a path for my life and a large detour sign was about to show up.
For two more years I worked as a teacher feeling more and more the conviction that the Holy Spirit was inviting me to something different. I just didn’t know how that was going to look for me.
Keep in mind I am the youngest in my family of four, and the only one to graduate from a university. How could I explain to my family that I felt called to ministry? How would I financially contribute to our own little family? We already had two boys – a toddler and a preschooler – when we used the two bad words for the first time, CHURCH PLANTING. (I say “bad words” when speaking of church planting facetiously in case you are wondering.)
As we took steps toward this new life, God began to deal with the various layers of legalism, Pharisee-like tendencies, pride, fears, and the list goes on and on of all the work God did and is still doing in my soul. It was undoubtedly the most exciting, scary, daunting, faith-filled, humbling, and joy-filled season of our lives.
For more than 14 years leading up to planting, I had served as a volunteer in the local church, all the while working outside of the church, faithfully giving of my time, treasure, and talent. Those were some incredible years that shaped my disciplines, my devotion, and my conviction for the work of the Holy Spirit and the local church. It felt good to be able to financially provide for myself and get to do the work of ministry without having to trust God for that part. Yup! I said it. Somewhere in my mind I had concluded that my job was to be my own provider. How silly of me. In Christ we live and breathe and have our being. He is the sustainer of all things. Even the breath I have access to in my asthmatic lungs comes from him.
A year into our church plant, when my husband’s salary could afford our rent and our humble family budget, I walked away from teaching. (Now, Josh having this salary is a whole story wrapped in miracles and faith, but that would be another article.)
I became a full-time volunteer in our church plant. It was such a relief to be exactly where God wanted me to be and I was happy to get to do it for free. Can you believe it? It would be years before I became a full-time employee in our church. So many lessons in this process, so many things to unlearn and new things to put into practice.
Holy detours usually show up as an invitation. That initial invitation came into our lives when we decided to respond to Jesus’, “Follow me.” The invitations do not cease after our first, “Yes.” Some invitations can be as undemanding as, “Can you pray with us weekly at this particular hour?” All of a sudden, your weekly calendar has a holy detour in its already fully-stacked activities.
The invitation can be, “Can you step up to lead in the ministry you are serving in?” Or, “Would you like to be a part of our church planting team?” Holy detours sometimes show up as solutions in your mind.
It may very well be that you see a need and you have the answers that can move the mission forward. In the Kingdom, we are not simply invited to provide ideas, we are invited to do the work. The solution is an invitation to a holy detour that will require your time, talent, and, more often than not, your treasure.
For many of us, the holy detours have come through the invitation the Holy Spirit gives us when we observe the heartbreak of a community, a neighborhood, or a pueblo needing the hope of Jesus.
For many of us, the holy detours have come through the invitation the Holy Spirit gives us when we observe the heartbreak of a community, a neighborhood, or a pueblo needing the hope of Jesus, and we said, “Yes, Lord, I will follow you and plant a church with you.”
I guess the question here is whether it is worth it.
After 30 plus years of combined full-time and volunteer detours, I can say that the paths Jesus has carved out for me have been filled with buckets of tears and so much joy and deep fulfillment. In every holy detour, I can imagine Jesus stretching out his hand and saying, “Join me.”
I want to be where Jesus is… even if it is hard and inconvenient. Ultimately the win is to look back at the various seasons or even decades of life and mark the holy detours that told the story of the Savior through our yeses.
