Over dinner we started talking about the ministry I’d been
working with that I had recently left. I had been working with them for three
years, in every part of the ministry outreach, as the director of their after
school program, and a coordinator for donations for the soup kitchen and other
ministries. I was writing grants and organizing and coordinating things, bringing
in funding and volunteers. I was involved in so much of the ministry and I was
in church almost every day of the week. The Lord had been opening up the
windows of Heaven and pouring out blessings and opening doors. And then all of a
sudden, one day He told me that I had to leave. My first response was, “But
what about the children? What about the doors you’ve opened? What about the
work that I have been doing? Who is going to take care of the children? Who is
going to be there for them? What are you doing? Why did you send me there only
to take me away?” And His response was, “You’re not leaving the children, I’m just
expanding your territory.” At the time I couldn’t understand how that could be.
As I saw it, leaving the ministry meant leaving the children. But He was so firm that
I had to go, and He gave me a word at that time that I’ll never forget. As I
rode the bus one last time to the after school program to meet with the Pastors and hand in my keys, He said, “Unless
a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.
But if it dies it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24) When Jesus says this, He
is talking about His going to the Cross, but when He said it to me, He
wanted me to know that the work that I had been doing needed to die in my life
so that I could move into the next place where He was taking me. If I had
stayed where I was, the work that I was doing would not grow into the work that
He had planned for me to do.
As I sat over dinner with the Priest and told him about how
difficult it had been for me to leave the children, and how difficult it still
was for me because it had only happened a few months before and I had not yet moved into that new place that the Lord had
planned for me, he said, “La Pastora,” which is Spanish for a woman Pastor. The
moment he said it, I saw a picture in my mind of a book of Mother Goose Nursery
Rhymes that my Nana had given me for my first birthday. The picture for Little
Bo Peep was my favorite picture always, from the moment I first started to
recognize images, before I ever even learned how to read or understand what the
words meant. “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find
them.” The picture was of the shepherdess with her staff, looking off into the
distance, trying to find her lost sheep. The Priest I was talking to is Irish
Catholic, and so was my Nana. They have similar features, and I could see in
his blue eyes, her eyes from years long past. She is no longer alive, but she
is the one who used to take me to church sometimes, long before I ever
understood what or why people went to church for. She had become Episcopalian,
and was very devout, and since I was born again I always feel like she’s
smiling every time I take communion. When I was a child and I’d go to church
with her, she always took me up to the altar, but she told me that I couldn’t
take communion because I wasn’t baptized. I never understood what it was all
about, but I always felt as if she were somehow so sad that I couldn’t take
communion. Now I feel like she is smiling, beaming, over every part of my life
because God is there everywhere and she is right there with Him, seeing the
ways that I am growing in Him.
When the Priest said, La Pastora, the tears came so suddenly
to my eyes that I gasped. The Holy Spirit comes to me sometimes like that – all
of a sudden, in a place or time when I'm least expecting Him. I told the
Priest about the picture and my book and my Nana, but I couldn’t speak much
more except to say that there was something very deep in me that was being
healed right then and there. I felt as if the Lord was speaking to me that the calling He'd placed over my life had been there always, and that He was confirming that calling.
In the work I do now, the Lord has brought back the
children. I’m back in their neighborhood and I see them and sometimes work at
sites where they and their parents are. And there are more children and more
adults, more lost sheep every day that He has me reach out to with His love. I
was telling a friend of mine that he is the one sheep that the Shepherd left
His flock of 99 to go find (Luke 15:3-5), and there are so many of them that He
goes looking for because “He is not willing that any should perish (2 Peter
3:9). In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, Jesus talks about the way that the Shepherd rejoices when that one lost sheep is found again, and I have had those moments of
rejoicing with Him. There are also times when I am waiting for His salvation and His deliverance in someone’s life. There are times when I am
praying and praying and doing all that I can do, but what I can do just doesn’t
seem enough. Those are the times when I know that I have to trust Him that He
will do what He has promised, that the word He has spoken over that person’s
life will not return void but will accomplish what He desires and achieve the
purpose for which He sent it. (Isaiah 55:11). There are times when He has had
me speak that word and other times when He has had me confirm it to someone
when it has been spoken already. There are also times when He has me repeat a
word when someone He has spoken over has forgotten it.
We are in a battle, for life or death, sometimes people
forget about that. We can go to church and praise the Lord, but we can be the
walking dead if we have somehow gone astray. We can love God and want to walk
with Him but be too weak to do it in the face of temptation or addictions. We
can be so caught up in the lies of the enemy that we don’t hear the word of God
over our lives, or if we hear it we don’t believe it. A shepherd carries only a
staff, but there is power in that staff if it belongs to the True Shepherd. The
staff helps to keep us walking, it helps to steady us on rough and rocky ground,
it is a reminder of who we belong to and that His great love for us is the most
powerful weapon there is.
If you are thinking that God has forgotten you, think
again. He will go wherever He needs to go to find you and bring you home again.
Sometimes He’ll come in the form of a woman who feels a tug in her heart for a
group of children, sometimes He’ll come to find us in the least likely of
places. Wherever you are, He’ll find you, and all you have to do is climb into
His arms and come home.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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