“There’s got to be more than this.” These are the words I uttered to the grandfatherly British minister whom I had met the day before. As the new pastor of a church in Massachusetts, I was getting to know him in a little breakfast café nearby. Norman had just asked me, “How are things going Mike?” Having just moved my family of five across the country–and still living out of suitcases–my heart was aching because I wanted my family to be settled in to our new community. I’d been out of seminary for seven years and I was already feeling a bit disillusioned about full-time ministry. In the deepest places of my heart I yearned to see and experience what I had experienced fifteen years before: I was born again during the tail-end of the Jesus Movement, and I thought that’s how church was supposed to be!
I told him, “There’s got to be more than this.” Norman looked over at me and with a gleam in his eye he said, “Oh yes, there’s more.” And that’s all he said. I was waiting for him to tell me what more I could expect, what more I could learn, what more I could do. More of what? And with Norman’s words hanging in the air, he said he needed to get back to the house where he was staying as a guest. That was it, I wasn’t going to find out what kind of more Norman was talking about. We paid our check and headed for my station wagon. (Yep, back in the day families with kids used to drive station wagons.)
I remember that as soon as we got into my car it was like the heavens opened up and the rain just dumped down onto us. It was really loud and really heavy. I reached for my keys and Norman asked, “Can I pray for you, Mike?” “Sure,” I said. What happened next will forever be a part of my testimony and our story as a family. We both bowed our heads and I thought we’d have a nice little prayer and be on our way.
Norman reached over and placed his hand on my right shoulder. As soon as he made that point of contact Norman prayed, “Lord, would you fill Mike with your Spirit and show him how much you love him.” That’s all he prayed, just that one sentence. The thing that surprised me was that as soon as Norman touched my shoulder and began praying, I felt electricity go from my shoulder all the way through my body. I had no idea what was going on. I remember thinking, “What is this? What is going on?” At the same time I remember thinking, “This is amazing.” As I felt power surging through me, I began to feel that this is the Lord.
I was amazed and undone. I just sat there and began to soak in the presence of the Lord. Honestly, I didn’t have the experience or the language for what was happening to me at that moment. I just knew that I was somehow encountering the Lord in a way I never had before. As the presence of the Lord continued to grow in and around me I felt like I was being enveloped in His love. I knew it wasn’t the case but I felt like if I had opened my eyes, I might see some kind of cloud around me. I never saw one but that is certainly how I felt. As the presence of the Lord came over me, my heart was filled with great peace.
After some time–I honestly don’t remember how many minutes–Norman broke the silence and said to me, “Okay, Mike, now you pray.” I was so amazed by the presence of the Lord that all I could pray was, “Thank you, Lord, for this day and thank you for Norman.” I prayed the easiest thing I could think of because I was trying to process what the Lord was doing at that moment in my heart. I was then able to get a few more words out and I said with a stutter, “Norman, I’m, I’m, I’m taking you home.” There it was again–that grandfatherly smile. He said in his British accent, “Very well then.” I noticed that the downpour had moved on and the sun was breaking through the clouds. I started the car and drove Norman back to the home of a young couple in our church. I don’t think I said anything but “thank you” and “goodbye” when I dropped him off. He just kept smiling like he knew something I didn’t know.
What I did know was that I needed to get by myself and pray. I needed to talk to the Lord and find out what was happening to me. I drove past our church where I had my office and headed for the home where Lynn and I and our three boys had been guests for the past five months. When I walked in the front door Lynn was at the dining room table with the boys. She was homeschooling them and everyone was busy with their assignments. Lynn looked at me with a bit of surprise and asked, “What are you doing here?” She knew that I was always in my office or doing something for the church late in the mornings. I looked at her with wide eyes and stuttered, “I, I, I’ve got to pray.” With a perplexed look on her face she replied, “You’re a pastor and have your own office. Why can’t you pray there?” I walked up the stairs, looked back down at her and said again, “I’ve got to pray.” When I entered our guest room I looked around and thought, “I know, I’ll go into the walk-in closet and I can pray in there.” I closed the door behind me and got down on my knees.
With the presence of the Lord that I felt in the car still lingering, I closed my eyes and began to pray. The only thing that came to my heart and mind while I was praying was, “You are so HOLY Lord, You are so HOLY. You are so other than what I have known about You all these years.” I knew the Lord was dealing with me on a deeper level than I even knew was possible. I remember thinking, “Lord, your presence is so tangible, so real, you have blown apart my box.” The Lord was indeed blowing my box apart—the box I had put Him in. I remember while I was praying I felt the Lord giving me a great desire to spend more time with Him.
The Lord changed my whole paradigm that morning. My whole identity up to that moment was that I was a husband, a father, a pastor. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to be known. I wanted to lead a big church. And yes, so that people could know Jesus and grow as disciples, but, honestly, there was self-centered ambition in my heart as well. While I was on the floor before the Lord He did surgery on my heart. His manifest presence ruined me for all that I had known as the “normal” Christian life. He placed within me a hunger to follow Him like I had never known before. I spent a little over two hours with the Lord that morning. Lynn actually came upstairs some time later to check and see what was going on. I had a hard time putting into words what the Lord had begun to do in my life.
Lynn and I had been married for eleven years when the Lord ambushed me that morning. Honestly, our marriage had been on shaky ground. I paid more attention to my ministry than I did to my wife and children. I had a terrible problem communicating with Lynn. I brought a lot of baggage from my upbringing to our marriage. By the time I was fourteen, my parents were hardly ever around the house because of their work at Disney World, and they were planning to divorce. I remember forging my mom’s signature on my report cards around the same time. My two younger brothers did the same thing as they got older. We pretty much did whatever we wanted to do and didn’t answer to anyone. Coming from that kind of background, I was basically telling Lynn whatever she wanted to hear and then doing whatever I wanted to do. So, when I shared with Lynn that the Lord was doing something very powerful in my heart, she would later tell people, “I took a wait and see attitude.”
Over the next two weeks I wouldn’t approach prayer as something I HAD to try and make time for because I was desiring to pray. I was desiring to sit before the Lord with His Word open before me. I was expecting Him to show up and I would enjoy my time with my Heavenly Father. As I was growing in my prayer life and intimacy with the Lord, I was sensing that the Lord wanted to do something very different with our lives. I literally had NO IDEA what that could be or how it would be fleshed out, but I knew that if I kept meeting with the Lord, He would guide our steps.
One morning, about two weeks after meeting with Norman, I felt a great burden for our family. I decided I would show the Lord how serious I was by getting down on the carpet in my office. I began to pray, and out of my heart came these words, “What am I going to do Lord? What are we supposed to do? We’ve been here for six months and we still don’t have a home. Before we came here we told the leadership that we would never sacrifice our family for any ministry and I feel like that is exactly what’s going on. Lord, what do you want me to do?”
As soon as I had paused in my concern, I heard the voice of the Lord speak in the strongest way I had heard up to that point in my life. I didn’t hear the audible voice of the Lord but I KNEW He was speaking to me loud and clear: “You will resign from this church and you will move to Atlanta, Georgia.” I was dumbfounded. I was not surprised by the first part, but I was shocked by the second part. Atlanta, Georgia? In my great surprise I blurted out, “And do what?” I had no idea what we would do in Atlanta. Why would we go there? The Lord shot back with this answer, “I’ll let you know when you get there.”
And that’s where the conversation ended. Of course, I wanted details, I wanted more information. But I knew He had spoken and I had to share it with Lynn. This was something new for us. The Lord was directing not just me, not just my wife and me, but my family of five to move to a new city despite having no idea how we would make a living. We called our friends and shared that the Lord was directing us to move to Atlanta. Our only connection there was a friend who was a youth pastor in a nearby suburb. We resigned from our church at the end of October and two weeks later we loaded up our two cars in preparation for our drive down. We left all of our belongings in the storage room (there in Massachusetts) where I had unloaded them six months before.
Lynn and I have never been quitters. We have never walked away from a challenge because it was too hard. We were saddened by the fact that things didn’t work out for us to stay in Massachusetts. All these years later we are convinced the Lord took us to Massachusetts for the divine encounter I had with Norman that morning. That meeting with him, and more importantly, with the Lord, changed the direction of our lives forever.
We both love New England, and frankly, it was hard for Lynn to hear the Lord direct us to go back to the Deep South. Her heart has always been to be in ministry outside the Bible Belt. But it was very clear to both of us that the Lord was leading us to Atlanta. Years later we can look at Acts 20:22 and see what Paul meant when he said, “And now, look, bound by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem–not knowing what will happen to me there.”
Eight years after we left Massachusetts we returned to visit the family that housed us for those six months. We picked up right where we left off. They invited us to come with them to their church, the church we had resigned from to go to Atlanta. It felt a bit awkward, but we felt we should go with them, back to that place where there was once pain. Much to our surprise, a number of people came up to us and told us how sorry they were for the way we were treated. Some told us that the church had gone through a very hard patch for a number of years and that they were now in a much better place.
So, during the second week of November 1993, we loaded up some suitcases, three little boys, and Chester and Pepper, our Cocker Spaniel and Shih Tzu. Were we nervous? Sure we were. But the Lord was calling us to step out in a measure of faith we had never practiced before. Little did we know that He was setting up things in Atlanta and beyond to show us a measure of HIS faithfulness.
We gave our wonderful hosts big hugs and headed for Interstate 95, the highway that would take us south and on to…The Next Step.
In our next post we’ll share how the Lord provided for us in Atlanta and invited us to follow Him to lead a church in, of all places, Ukraine. What an amazing God we serve!
