26 January 2006
Why are we walking away from our best ministry situation ever?
On a logical level this decision doesn’t make sense. In fact, part of why we struggled with it so long is that it isn’t quite logical. Yet, in the end, we know we are following God’s call to Orlando.
When we left Orlando in 2003, it was with a clear sense of God’s call to temporarily work in Eastern Europe and Russia to develop Internet ministry as a means of reaching people for Christ. While we weren’t exactly sure that God intended for us to return after a couple years, that was what we understood at the time.
Knowing that many other CCC staff members have left the US on short-term assignments and have seen God turn those into long-term assignments, we wanted to leave things open-ended enough so that we could respond to God if He chose to lead us that way. In fact, we talked about what a change of direction might look like. We concluded that a change of direction would look exactly like what our situation has looked like this last year!
Almost everything about our life here is really great. The pace of life is nice, the community of American missionaries (lots of them) creates familiarity, our kids have a great school, we love our house, Europe is an extremely interesting place to live, etc. There were a few difficulties of life here, but nothing so large that our desire to follow God’s call couldn’t easily overcome them. Audrey’s distaste for Budapest was the biggest negative factor, but as her parents we felt God could change her heart if need be.
Ministry-wise things were going well. We had “demonstrated the concept” that God would use the Internet to draw people to Himself, and we had a plan to grow this method into a significant strategy. Jerry loves working with Tom, and they both love the work. Cathy found an opportunity to do something she always dreamed of doing, too, in her work helping to create short film-based outreach strategies. Things could hardly be better, and they had all the appearances of what we thought God’s call to stay here long range would look like.
Yet in all this, staying on a long-range basis didn’t seem right. That was very confusing to us because we expected to be compelled by the circumstances to stay long range. That is until we finally remembered God’s original call. He called us to work in Budapest for a short time, not indefinitely.
We prayed fervently about this decision for months. We asked others to pray with us. We spent time listening to what God would say to us through prayer and through His word. We talked to as many wise counselors who knew our situation as we could find. In all of this we never had that internal knowledge that God wanted us to stay in Budapest.
So we finally concluded that, contrary to our expectations, God had not changed the directions He’d given us three years ago. He still wants us to return to Orlando. The presence of an equally compelling, interesting job which completely aligns with our God-given purpose and life desires confirms that this is where He is leading us. In fact, the short film-based outreach project that Cathy has helped with here is moving to Orlando as well, and Cathy anticipates working with it from there, too. She is very happy about this.
We are extremely sad to leave our friends and the ministry here in Budapest, but we are just as happy to return to friends and new challenges in Orlando.
We don’t pretend to understand God’s reasons, but we are certain of His direction.
