Leading Lines
You know that deja-vu feeling when your immediate circumstance seems like a movie you’ve already watched? Many people experience this. In fact, almost everyone does–as much as 97% of the population according to the National Institutes of Health. I’ve have deja-vu from time to time. It’s like my brain fabricates a memory based on where I am and who I’m talking to and, for a brief moment, I swear I’ve been here and seen this exact thing before. Maybe you can relate.
Move-In Day
In August of 2010, I moved into my freshman year dorm room at Bethel University. I knew I wanted to become a pastor one day and was starting on a degree in Bible and Theology. Turns out, my roommate that year was a pastor’s kid. When we met in the dorm room that day, we discussed what each of us was majoring in. I learned he was an engineering student and, when I shared my major, he told me his dad was a pastor. I turned to his dad and we exchanged names and initial hellos. That was about it. Over the school year, I can’t say that my roommate and I were best friends but we certainly got along fine. I was on the hockey team for the first semester and we just ran with different groups of people. Bethel isn’t a big school (about 3K students) so we stayed familiar with each other over our time at the school. I remember eventually ending up at his house in the summer for a party one time.
The Panama Planter’s Kid
Sometime during my freshman year I met another kid at lunch with a group of friends. He heard that I was majoring in Bible and that I wanted to be a pastor one day. He also turned out to be a pastor’s kid and that his parents had moved to Panama to plant a church there. It turned out that this was actually the second church his parents had started, the first one being in Wisconsin. This seemed crazy to me. But I was intrigued.
The God of Leading Lines
Fast forward a few years, okay fourteen years to be exact. A lot changes in fourteen years, especially when those years span your twenties and early thirties. I married my wife, Bri, and we moved to Colorado where she worked to put me through seminary. I was on-staff at a big church in a south-Denver suburb and we had two kids in Denver. In 2021 we moved back to Minnesota and I joined the staff at a church in Minnetonka. We had our third kid when we moved back to Minnesota.
My wife and I started sensing God was moving us in a new direction in ministry. I can’t explain why exactly, but we knew he was up to something. We started to wonder if starting a new church was what He wanted for us. We had been around church plants in the past, and loved the idea of venturing into a new frontier. It seemed exciting, and a little scary. We’re not thrill-seekers by nature, so it took some time to clarify that planting a church was what God wanted us to do. This is where everything seemed to oddly come full-circle.
Remember the pastor’s kid who was my roommate my freshman year? His dad had become the Director of Church Planting for the Minnesota district of our denomination (Converge). He and I had lunch and he shared how church planting through Converge works. I had a lot of questions and the time talking with him was instrumental in our decision-making process. We have connected several times over the last year and he’s continued to be a great source of support, knowledge and encouragement. One time he mentioned another church planter who would be good to connect with. Guess who he turned out to be–the Panama Planter whose son I met at lunch fourteen years ago.
These two guys have become major encouragers and influential in the journey of planting Harvest City Church. God had placed them in my life fourteen years earlier for a purpose I could never have imagined at that time. (I would have called you crazy if you told me then I was going to be planting a church)
He Will Make Your Paths Straight
God is an epic author of our lives. He is writing a grand narrative in our lives with so many intricate storylines only He can keep them straight. The bible says in Proverbs 3:5-6 that we should trust in the Lord with all our heart, not relying on our own understanding, but acknowledging Him in all we do. Then there’s a major promise: He will make your paths straight. This has proven true in my life at every turn and twist. God has written the leading lines in my life in ways only he can bring together. When you let God call the shots in your life and surrender yourself to Him, He will lead on. You won’t know all the different ways He is leading in real time, but eventually you’ll see a bigger picture where all the lines lead to where He has you and where He is bringing you. Trust God to lead and embrace the journey.