The Influence Of Passion & The Promise Of Ministry

The Influence of Passion & The Promise of Ministry

Have a look at this: "Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need." - Frederick Buechner. We’ll come back to it.

When I was a very young Christian, just beginning to sort out myself and developing a realistic sense of both my weaknesses, but also developing a very strong desire to serve God with my whole heart,

I was at this worship event at a friends home, and I heard God speak very very clearly, in that time of corporate prayer and worship, that my life was to be spent in missions.

I did not understand what that meant, and there hadn’t been anything about me at that point that would’ve suggested that that this was to be true of me. I was in college studying music, planning to have a career as a Christian musician.

It was so much the case tghat this was all very unlikely, that the friend who hosted that event that I was at, was pretty sure that I had misheard God, or that I was misunderstanding something that God might have been saying to me.

But, not being entirely cynical, and having recently heard about the Yonge Street Mission, in particular Evergreen, he had learned that there was a summer missionary program at Evergreen. This was in 1985.

So he said, “why do you just try out Evergreen, why don’t you get your feet wet, and get a sense of what Mission life is like.

“Evergreen and the Mission as a whole are just as good a place as any to try to get a more refined sense of what God might be calling you to”.

So I interviewed with Rick Tobias, and I got a position as a Summer Missionary, doing outreach in the park, music and drama in front of Evergreen, back when it was on Yonge Street, and spending time mostly in the evening drop in.

My church at the time, Faith Temple, supported me for the entire summer and while I was there, again just beginning to scratch the surface of what it might be like to serve people,

still thinking that I was called to missions overseas, I sat in the drop in at Evergreen and had coffee with someone who I had just met.

That person was a transvestite prostitute, they were an addict, and they had a lot of life challenges and mental health challenges.

We sat across the table from each other, drinking coffee, and we talked. We talked for some time, and the conversation got fairly serious.

And at one point, as they were speaking about their life and their struggle and their addiction,

I looked directly in that person’s eyes and, very unexpectedly, I had this tremendous feeling that I was looking at myself.

It wasn’t really so much “there but for the Grace of God go I“, but it was a pretty deep sense of connection and understanding and, that might’ve been the first moment in my life,

five years into being a Christian, that I had a sense of what we might call Agape love toward this individual.

Now that was not a pleasant experience, really. It was very disorienting for me.

It was not what I expected to experience. I thought my call to missions was a call to go to Africa, to Liberia and the Ivory Coast.

But in that moment, talking with that person, and then in the months afterwards spent reflecting, God refined my sense of call to simply be at the Yonge Street Mission.

Why? I didn’t know at the time. Years earlier, when I was just starting to play the saxophone, I had heard very clearly from God that I was to be faithful in music, and that he would be faithful to me.

I had done that and found that my musical growth accelerated exponentially.

So, having that experience behind me, I learned to trust God when he spoke or made a very strong impression in my spirit, and when others backed that impression up with encouragement to keep going.

Little did I know that I would be here in 38 years talking about this formative event in my life.

But it was a beginning, it was a scratching of the surface. It was, for me, a putting my actions where my mouth was.

It was a small step of obedience, filled with many questions, frankly a great deal of self-doubt at the time, but also this powerful sense of love for God who had redeemed me

Today is the last message on the series we’ve been looking at for all of October.

The whole month we’ve been looking at some of the ideas that are contained in the Network Course that we will be running on Mondays beginning on November 6 at 6 PM.