Journey to Follow

“Follow Me.”  This is the simple invitation that Jesus gave over and over in the Gospels. It was similar to the invitation God gave to Abram in Genesis, 

Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family And from your father’s house,To a land that I will show you. Genesis 12:1

It is an invitation to go with God to where He is going, an invitation to be a part of His Story and His Family, an invitation to trust Him, an invitation to get to know Him personally.

My Story  

I am so blessed to have grown up in a Christian home with a Dad and Mom who loved one another deeply (and still do after 63 years of marriage and counting!).  My mom shared the Gospel with me at a good news club she was running at our house and I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior when I was 7 years old.  We always went to church and I knew all of the Bible stories from Sunday School, but I didn’t understand very much about following Jesus.  I knew I was supposed to go to church but I didn’t understand much of the Bible.  It was shortly after that when I started getting teased for my weight and started to deal with a lot of shame.  Shortly after this I was introduced to pornography and it became the way I would cope with being bored or discouraged.  This put a big barrier between me and my parents; I didn’t feel like I could talk to them about it.  This struggle got stronger and stronger as I went through High School and I withdrew more and more from church and my parents. 

When I went to college I didn’t really go to learn anything, I went because I wanted to do whatever I felt like doing.  I did OK at first in college, not great but I was passing my classes.  I wanted to have a girlfriend, but I was really scared of being rejected.  I was happy to be out of High school and hoped that college would be different. I never went to church when I was in college and I don’t even remember having a Bible much less reading one during this time of my life.  I changed my major 3 or 4 times, but what I really majored in was entertaining myself.  I have always thought of Ecclesiastes when I remember this time in my life, it was the pursuit of so many meaningless things.  I have also seen how God protected me during these years; He never let me go and kept pursuing this lost sheep that had wandered off.  

One of the strongest desires I have ever had was for a relationship with a girl.    I still remember being in 7th grade and liking a neighbor girl that lived up the street.  I also remembered being teased about how I looked and the message screamed in my head was “no one will ever want you”. I never told her -or any other girl- that I liked them until I got to college.  I only went on a couple of dates the first few years in college, but later I began a relationship with a woman for 3 and a half years.  It was a very exciting time in my life. I was able to lose a lot of weight, and we were spending a lot of time together, but since I wasn’t following God we had a very worldly type of relationship.  At the beginning I really enjoyed it, but as time went on she wanted to be able to date other people, this broke my heart.  I asked her not to, but she ended up doing it eventually.  We had a very off and on relationship after that and God started to knock on the door of my heart.  My sister Kathy lived in Minnesota at the time and had found a great church, she started sending me sermons and Christian music during that time.  I was driving a truck for a newspaper and I would listen to the tapes my sister had sent me and I started thinking about God again.  

Then the day my life changed.  I was walking to my girlfriend’s house and thinking about our relationship and how frustrated I was that she wanted to date other guys.  I wanted  a commitment, I wanted what my mom and dad had,  I wanted something real.  I finally tried talking to God about it,  I cried out “This is so hard God, I want her to give me her heart!” Then something happened that I had never experienced before; I didn’t hear an audible voice but thoughts came into my mind that I knew were not from me.  The internal voice said “Bill, this was not my plan for you.”  I was thinking about our relationship and how we were not following the way God intended in the Bible for a relationship between people who are not married.  I knew that was true.  Then I heard the internal voice say this “Bill, I have one more thing I need to tell you, there is another relationship just like your relationship with this woman. It’s ours.”  I was blown away, the thing that was causing me the most pain I had ever experienced was the same thing I was doing to God, and it broke my heart.  The last thing I heard in my heart that day was “Bill, you have never given me your heart and it is the only thing I ever wanted from you.”  I gave God my heart that day and it was the beginning of my Journey to Follow Him.

I think I was kind of like Samuel in the Bible in 1 Samuel 3:7,

(Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, nor was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him.)

I knew about God but I had never heard Him speak to me.  Eli helped Samuel recognize when God was speaking. Jesus tells us this in John 10:27-28,

My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. 

Part of this Journey is learning how to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice and then follow where He leads us.

Now the boy Samuel ministered to the Lord before Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no widespread revelation.  And it came to pass at that time, while Eli was lying down in his place, and when his eyes had begun to grow so dim that he could not see,  and before the lamp of God went out in the tabernacle of the Lord where the ark of God was, and while Samuel was lying down,  that the Lord called Samuel. And he answered, “Here I am!”  So he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” And he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” And he went and lay down.  Then the Lord called yet again, “Samuel!” So Samuel arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” He answered, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.”   And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. So he arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you did call me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord had called the boy.  Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and it shall be, if He calls you, that you must say, ‘Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood and called as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!”
And Samuel answered, “Speak, for Your servant hears.”  1 Samuel 3:1-10

All Scripture is taken from the New King James Version