🙌It’s the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

I begin my “40’s” today. I remember thinking life had peaked at 17 when I was my high school’s head cheerleader. Then again, at 21, when I was one signature away from a dream job after graduating university at the top of my class... And then I heard God speak.

He spoke from the ashes of my childhood home, surrounded by the charred remains of every physical marker of life to that point. His words were the beginning of climbing down the ladder of success as the world might see it. I declined my job offer and took out my very first student loan. I drove a moving truck across the country on my 22nd birthday and enrolled in seminary to study Marriage and Family Therapy.

I completely out of my comfort zone, but somehow found my footing in the absence of a home base. This was my first glimpse at my Father as my home. Once again, I stepped down life’s proverbial ladder. Freshly licensed and thriving in my new career, I turned in all my keys and canceled my cell phone plan on the way to the airport. God had spoken again. This time I moved across the world.

I have moved, let go, and gone “backward” for the last twenty years. In my 30’s, external injustices made it impossible to visit the people and places that shaped my first 20 years. On this first day of 40, I count it all as joy. My story has shaped an awareness in me of my deep thirst for living water. Both my stumbles and dizzying decisions have led me home, to my source and supply. His name is Jesus.

As I look ahead into the next 20 years, I pray for more of God’s voice, more losing my life and finding it. More home in Him and only Him. Today, my prayer for you is that you find something... one thing...you can count as joy because it turns you to Jesus.

Listen to “Abandoned” by Benjamin William Hastings