Thursday, October 29, 2015

The Beginning of the End

I title this post the beginning of the end because I am hoping and praying to God that this is the how I begin the ending of my journey to find the right church and exactly where I belong.  My road has been long and hard and the path was not always straight or clear and yes I sometimes gave up but I found my strength through God to continue even at my lowest points.

Recently, I was at one of the very lowest points of my life, a place of darkness that I had never found myself in.  A place that was scary and made me afraid, I even thought of self harm that included suicide.  I thought I was a failure to myself and to my family and felt that they would be so much better off without me. 

I had just taken an assessment at work that would dictate if I got to keep my job or not and I knew that I had not fared so well.  I picked up a magazine, something I don't think I had ever picked up before.  I flipped through and went to put the magazine down but something stopped me, I flipped through it again and found an article called Church 2.0  (here is the link if you are interested http://www.encorekalamazoo.com/building-church-20).  Something about the authors writings hit home with me.  It was everything that I had never knew in a church and everything I was not comfortable with but I was drawn to it.  Throughout the day (yes I failed the test) I continued to think about the "new" church.  I thought about it so much that I went home and found it on Facebook.  I wanted to know more and more about this new church.  I even read their website over and over.  I was fascinated and I wanted to know more and more.

Common Ground Church is the name of the church that became my obsession.  I wanted to meet the people, go to the worship and I wanted to hear the teachings.  On their Facebook page, they were inviting people to attend the movie The Captive (I must say, this is highly recommended!!).  I wanted to see this movie but I wanted to meet the people even more.  I was afraid though, would they meet my expectations, would they want me to drink the kool-aid, would they want me at all?  I got tickets from the people at the church and I came prepared, I brought a friend who is married to a pastor.  Yes, I will admit I brought a pastor to protect me from them.  Quite silly now that I think back on it.

I attended the movie and they were amazing people.  They didn't swarm me with welcomes but there were smiles and friendly hellos.  Just enough to keep my curiosity peaked but not too much to scare me away.  The movie was amazing and has to do with the book "The Purpose Driven Life"  by Rick Warren.  I was so touched and so embraced by God that the next morning I asked my husband to go to the Christian store with me so I could get the book.  I read it all the time and my pages clearly show it.   I think the most important thing that I found along the way so far is that I am not here to fulfill my purpose.  I am here to fulfill God's purpose and at that time I didn't even know what that was.

To be continued...


No comments:

Post a Comment