One of my biggest fears has been that all this joy I’ve felt over the past year will only be limited to Hope. That the happiness and peace I’ve discovered at Hope, the intense connection I’ve felt with God will not travel well.
I worry about being able to find God outside the property lines of Hope.
It’s created a great deal of anxiety for me now that I’m beginning to think about seminary. In order to follow this call, I will have to spend a great amount of time over the next three, five or eight years in a classroom, learning the Bible, learning how to be a pastor.
And I’ve been distressed worrying that the classroom setting would somehow relegate God to pages in a book and make Him antiquated and dusty. I worried that in the classroom I would lose sight of the living God.
I love that even when I’m worrying needlessly about something that God doesn’t brush aside my fears and wait for me to figure it out on my own. Instead, He sends a friend to me to take me on a tour of the seminary I will probably attend, Asbury in Orlando.
Before I continue I want to preface this next part by saying I have no idea what my future holds and whether or not I will wind up at Asbury, but the four hours I spent there last Tuesday convinced me that at the very least, Asbury can be home to me like Hope is a home.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that God’s presence was as strong at Asbury as it has been for me at Hope. I could see God in the people there just like I see Him in the people of Hope. And when we met for Chapel and began to sing, I felt the same raw, spiritual emotions welling up inside my heart, just like I feel at Hope every Sunday.
But God is not just at Hope or just at Asbury. That is what I learned in my visit. Because when the emotions surfaced during Chapel, I realized that I had felt those emotions before at other churches long before I found Hope.
Even in churches that I could not join because I disagreed with where they stood on issues, I still felt a soul-stirring whenever we sang the hymns. I was still moved to tears.
God is everywhere. He is always reaching out to us, trying to make that connection.
Hope is a special church. It will always be special. I was lost and there I was found.
But God would be a very tiny God indeed if He allowed Himself to be hemmed in by four walls.
My new joy is discovering all the other places that I can find Him.
