Let Me Kick You...You'll Thank Me For It Later...Trust Me

Well, I didn't go to church tonight. I was going to and then I had a little conversation in my head.

Well which one do I want to go to?

Ummm...neither...okay, let's try a new one.

But which one?

How 'bout this one?

Why do I want to go there?

I don't know. Okay, what about this one.

But why?

The name gives me no clue "what kind" of church it is.

So what am I going to do...go evaluate it?

Yeah, then maybe I can type a review of it, let people know what it's like from a positive visitor's view.

Nooooooooo...I don't want to do that.

Sigh...I just want to pick the one I'm supposed to be at...Lord? Which one?

God, how can this be right? Don't you want me to go to one out of the three?

Put it in my heart to go to one of them, because right now my heart and mind are set on going, they're just waiting on further instructions.

Do you want me to stay home?

Which ever one you pick is really fine with me, but pick one pretty quick they'll be starting soon.

After doing this for 2 hours, I still didn't get an answer until I sat down at 7 o'clock with my husband and talked about an employer that we had both worked for and both got fired from years ago. He had gotten the job selling advertising 3 months before I did. After he got the job I started creating ads for him to take to a potential customer to sell. His success and my ads, eventually got me a job there. For about 6 months everything was great. The money was good, the job was easy and our sales were good enough. When you start spending a lot of time around the same people, you start thinking like them...and that's what happened to "our group." In the 9 months before we eventually got fired, not once did any of us even think about looking for another job. When they fired us, our job performance had not changed, but our attitude had. No, we didn't get fired for a bad attitude, we got fired because we got caught up in an upper management scandal.

Anyway, it was after that I started my publishing business and my husband started working at a job in commercial financing that he loved. I'd been thankful for a long time now that I got "kicked" out of that job, but I'd never realized it was 9 months that I worked there miserable. I thought it was worth pretending like I was content with my job to be happy. Not once did I think about doing something else until about a month before I got fired. Not once did I ask God what He wanted me to do. All I cared about was what I wanted. I think he got tired of waiting for me to move on to what I was supposed to do and He kicked me.

It took me a while, but I get it. When I finally decided that my situation would be God's will, regardless of how bad it was...and it wasn't near as bad as it is now...that was when my publishing business first got started. Of course, years later I'd long forgotten about letting His will be done and was more concerned with what I wanted. So, I'm in a similar situation now, but now I get it, let His will be done and His will, will be done.

It's just kind of scary. I've been reading stuff on the "out of church movement" and something called emergent churches. That's not what I'm about. I do think church is important and they are a vital part, but how can I encourage people to go to church when I can't decide to go to one myself? Most pastors I'm sure would say that I'm on a mission to find the perfect church and that's not what it is either, but I don't want to be confused with somebody like that. I feel more like someone that is supposed to be an evangelist, but don't even evangelists have a "home church?" Too, who am I to compare myself to the evangelists that I know of?

So I guess I'm somewhere between what's called the "come to church" and the "come to Jesus" evangelism. Why is it that people are so quick to tell me what's wrong with one or the other and insist that having both can't be right? Am I the only one like this?