What a Wild Ride

Wow.  When I look back at my life it absolutely blows me away to think that everything up to this point has been preparing me to enter full-time ministry.  I mean everything... my academics, my home environment, my athletic career, past jobs, conversations, successes and failures alike.  These experiences fit together like a masterfully designed puzzle and they have readied me for something incredible.  As my friend David Crowder says: "I feel I'm on the brink of something large."  Large might be an understatement...

Three months ago, working for FCA was not even on my radar.  Despite my extensive involvement with it, I assumed that I would enter ministry in a church somewhere, just like my Congregational Ministries degree was preparing me to do.  But God had other plans.

This 2010-2011 season marked the end of my competitive wrestling career.  I had goals to stamp my name into Messiah College Wrestling history by becoming the school's next All-American and did everything within my power to get there.  I sacrificed time, relationships, energy (both emotional and physical).  I sweat.  I bled.  I poured out everything in me to achieve my goals.  But God had other plans.

My past work experience included an unlikely combination of jobs such as lifeguard, camp counselor, bank teller, worship intern.  Looking back on them going into this year, I just wrote these experiences off as mere ways to work up some more money to pay for school.  But God had other plans.

And His plans blew mine out of the water.  Unexpected as they were, His faithfulness in working together all things together for my good has been, bar none, the most humbling experience of my life.  He has blessed me with an opportunity as FCA's Area Representative to Central Pennsylvania to do full time work that involves my greatest passions:  an AWESOME God and athletics.  Along the way, He has provided unmistakable signs of confirmation such as affirmation from my closest friends and family, a place to live, a roommate, and opportunities to finish my FCA training in a timely manner amidst a final semester of madness.

If there is one thing that I will never forget from this wild ride, it is this:  God is faithful and He will see this thing through to completion.  I Thessalonians 5:24 says, "The one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it."  I have never believed these words more than I do now.