What will the future hold?

This entry was originally published at philhull.com

It’s late and I can’t seem to get to sleep. I’ve got a very long day tomorrow and I should have been in bed a long time ago. I find myself wondering where we will be a year from now, two years, five years, ten years. God has begun to do some serious work in my heart and in my head this week and I’m glad for it, but my questions about what His will is for our future still go unanswered. As I said in my little writeup about the retreat, I’m at peace with God on this issue but it doesn’t stop my natural curiosity.

There are desires of my heart that I honestly believe that God wants to give me, and I believe He will someday. I wish to be a person who makes an impact on the world. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and say to myself, “I never made a difference.” I want to expand God’s Kingdom here on earth, I want to share His grace and peace with people, I want to fulfill the calling God has on my life. I believe that these desires are pleasing to God, and I believe that they come from Him. If it were up to me, I would desire a fat bank account, a job as a sports radio talk show host and all of the trappings that would come with.

I guess the question I am wrestling with is, “Am I ready to pay the cost?” I believe that God has placed that question in my heart this evening and it is what is keeping me awake. I have always struggled with submitting my will to God’s Will. I like to make plans, I like to control what is going to happen, I want to decide what my future holds. But in order to achieve what God has planned, I must give up control and live only by faith. Living only on faith is hard to do, and sometimes it can stretch us until it hurts.

Am I ready to go where God wants, even if it’s not where I want to go? I’ve thought about Jonah all day today, I don’t really know why. I’m wondering if it’s God’s way of warning me against making plans of my own.  Ever since we came home from the retreat, I’ve been trying to guess what God has planned for us based on the prophecy Shane & Kathryn shared with us.  Are we going to Florida where we seem to be a good fit for the job there?  Is God renewing our calling to Mission Manitou from two years ago?  Is God calling us to something new?  If God is calling us to something new, when are we going to get the vision for what that is?  I have questions and I’m trying to guess the answers.  I just need to wait.

Another thing that I’m dealing with is God is really calling me out of my comfort zone in several areas.  I am comfortable in the background, all by myself.  I don’t like being up front, I don’t like attention.  I know most of you who read this won’t believe it, but it’s true.   Over the past few years I have gone from always up front to hiding in the shadows.  I no longer feel comfortable speaking in front of a crowd and I am terrified of playing my guitar and singing in front of a group bigger than 5 or 6.  But God is making it clear to me that this is exactly what He desires me to do, and to do it in a greater way than I ever have before.  Honestly, that scares me a lot because it’s not how I’m wired.

I believe that God has put a special calling on my life and I know that He desires to do amazing things through me.  (I’m not boasting, I’m just accepting what He has spoken to my heart directly and through others.)  My biggest fault is that I feel inadequate to fulfill the tasks set before me.  I don’t feel I have done well with the small things God has entrusted to me, so I am nervous about the time that is coming when I will be required to do much more.  I must not fear failure because that is a prison.  God will not let me be overwhelmed.

I need to go to bed, tomorrow is going to be a long day.  It’s a good thing God is my strength because I’m going to need Him tomorrow.

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Unshackled

This entry was originally published at philhull.com

(Please forgive if this post isn’t as well thought out and coherent as it should be. I’m still processing everything that happened over the past few days.)

This past weekend was our 2007 Reality retreat which we titled “Unshackled.” It was an amazing time of refreshing and renewal for me personally. I have been really struggling for a while now, maybe the past year or so, where God has seemed very silent. Looking back at that time, I realize that God’s silence had more to do with me slacking on my duties as His child. He wasn’t silent, He was just waiting for me to listen. This retreat was just what I needed and it seemed like God reached down from Heaven and wrapped His arms around me and He still hasn’t let go.

The weekend did not start out very well for us. Cassie had a very bad day on Friday and she wasn’t in the best of moods when she got home from work. After we dropped off Lily with our friend Nikki, ate dinner, worried about the failing brakes on my car, and then we got stuck in traffic we ended up getting there about an hour later than we hoped to. We came in during the middle of worship time, and this was worship I’m not used to at Tri-City. Shane and Kathryn Marquis, the guests for the retreat, are very free in their worship and it just flows from singing to prayer to scripture without the polish and structure we’re used to at our church. Worship with Shane and Kathryn is more of a conversation than singing of songs. It took me a few minutes to shake off the stress of the day and to open up to what the Holy Spirit was doing.

Before we left for the retreat, we prayed and I kindly requested that God give us some answers to questions about our future over the weekend. We’ve been weighing several different options for our future, but God was making us wait for an answer. Well God answered me very clearly when Kathryn was singing the words of the 139th Psalm.

“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.” Psalm 139:16b-18a

As soon as those words came out of Kathryn’s mouth, I was overcome by emotion.  God spoke so powerfully to me in that moment letting me know that He knows exactly what His purpose is for me and that He will reveal it to me in time.  I felt freed from months of doubt and questions.  I was alive and filled with the Holy Spirit.  It was awesome.  (I haven’t come down from the high yet.  I hope it never goes.)

I could go in to depth about everything that happened over the weekend, but this post is going on long enough as it is.  I will just share a little more about our one on one time with Shane and Kathryn.

First let me say that I hope everyone who will read this has a chance to meet Shane & Kathryn and be ministered to by them because they have an amazing prophetic gift.  They took the time to meet with everyone at the retreat who wanted to talk to them.  It was late on Saturday night before Cassie and I were able to be ministered to by them.  (To be honest, Cassie double-dipped and spoke with them by herself on Friday night while I was busy with some of my leadership responsibilities.)   Now I am a natural born skeptic and I have been in the Church long enough to know that there are the real deal prophets (my boy John Burton, for example) and there are lots of impostors (watch late night televangelists).  Right away I knew that Shane & Kathryn were the real deal because within 2 minutes they had confirmed prophecies that we had received 2 years ago in Manitou and even something one of my college professors told me almost 5 years ago.  I am not comfortable sharing everything they said in this public a forum, but it was incredibly affirming and uplifting.  Let’s just say that God has big things planned for Cassie and I and I’m amazed by it.

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