PASSAGES BEYOND

There are journeys of faith that reach a known or given horizon. When you reach that point where what you are trusting God for becomes fulfilled you know that trip has ended. Where it ends with a happy ending or heart ache you still know when it is over.

What lingers in the mind is when you reach what you thought was the end of a journey and it turns out that instead you find a gate. Beyond it lies uncertainty, sometimes fear or other times another potential place of promise.

It is like a journey with a detour. You started out assuming you knew God’s will and how the trip should end, but when you reach the point of conclusion you find the journey is often one that just begun.

For example, such as when I went back to college. I went specifically because I assumed that I was preparing to study for a ministry of religious education. I did graduate, but didn’t end up actually pursuing that ministry for a variety of reasons. Basically the doors closed.

However my college experience exposed me to the rigors and inclinations in writing. It was the seedbed from which my own fruit of creation would eventually grow. And so now, years later, instead of working in religious education say as a minister of education in some church, I spend my time writing various forms of spiritual writing that are read by far more people than I might ever have encountered in some church.

Do I rejoice over this unexpected detour? No, not really. I do celebrate with a degree of awe the incredible power God has to bring us to that point to serve him according to his desires instead of what we assume is our calling.

The hard part is getting passed the gate. In my case it was nearly two years from the time I graduated before I actually began pursuing writing seriously as a result of a vision I had.

Those two years were long and full of doubts. I sat back on more than one occasion feeling utterly confused over why the journey had been taken in the first place.

God didn’t shine forth some ray of assurance from the heavens to explain my wandering in that period. He didn’t give me any clue that there was something yet to come.

So I waited and prayed and kept believing that there was some point of relevance that would become understandable in due time. And I must confess that moment of vision, which was my gate to the passage beyond was an experience that will always be fresh in my mind.

I share this in hopes it will encourage someone else who might have reach such a gate in their live and only have questions. Rejoice in knowing that God will open that gate in due season. In the meantime, the call is to keep trusting. I pray we always listen.