Have you ever responded to God's Will with a really hesitant or difficult "Yes"? I certainly have - and if you have, too, please feel free to share your experience here, stating what you felt He wanted you to do, and what the outcome/end result was.
I'll kick things off by sharing my own story:
One of the
hardest decisions of my life was God's command to sell all my possessions,
leave all my friends (I had no family), and move from Seymour, Missouri (near
Springfield) to Colorado Springs – a place I NEVER wanted to see again due to
some severe childhood traumas involving endless sexual abuse by my adoptive
father, beginning at age 10, before he retired from the Army at Fort Carson.
Anyway, it was 1996 and I was 45 when I first "heard" those words
droning on in my mind on a daily basis for at least six months: “Move to Colorado Springs!” I was still a "baby Christian,"
just a year into my walk with “Jesus” - and when I heard those words, all I
could think of was: "This CANNOT be from God, because He KNOWS what
happened in Colorado Springs! Why would
He do this to me?”
I fought Him for at least six months before surrendering; and the ONLY reason I gave in was because during that time, I just “happened” to be studying the workbook, Experiencing God, which included this mind-blowing thought: “Whenever God leads you to a God-sized task, it always leads you to a crisis of belief – and what you do about it, reveals how you really feel about God.”
Long story short, I LOVED GOD, and so (being young in my walk at the time), I made a deal with Him, which was that I would move to Colorado Springs for a year, and if nothing good happened for me there, I fully intended to return to Springfield Missouri.
So, I sold all my furniture and most possessions, and put my house on the market; packed my dog and some personal possessions into a U-Haul trailer, and moved to Colorado Springs, not knowing what to expect.
It was a hard year, in part, because I couldn’t find a decent job, and nobody wanted to be friends with a middle-aged single woman, as most people my age were married. (I was a retired Army journalist, and thankfully I had a military pension to help me survive!) Even the Baptist church I attended left me feeling “excluded.” Not only that, but I kept feeling like “something was missing” in Christians churches – but I, being new to the Bible, I really couldn’t figure out what it was that I was missing...
Be that as it may, the only good thing that happened during that time was that I had finished the year-long Bible study my pastor had given me before I left Missouri, which certainly gave me a better understanding of exactly WHO I was serving…
One Sunday morning, after church in May 1997, feeling lonely, empty and disheartened, I found myself sitting in my car, crying, because my life was seemingly at a standstill. I had reached the proverbial “end of my rope” in that unfriendly city, and I couldn’t stop myself from yelling at God, demanding to know WHY He had done this to me; after all, I had done everything He wanted me to, and NOTHING was happening.
I was lonely, basically broke and very unhappy; and so I told Him I must have misheard him back in Missouri, and that I was DONE with this nonsense, and planned to move back to Missouri as soon as my rental contract was up, because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Well, as you know, God sometimes makes us wait until we get to that point of brokenness – but He obviously heard me because the very next morning, I received a surprise call from the Colorado Springs Business Journal (which also produced the Pueblo, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin Business Journals), informing me that they wanted to hire me as the new Associate Editor!
My first thought was: “But I wanna go back to Missouri” … however, I quickly remembered that God had obviously told me to move here for a reason, although I couldn’t figure out for the life of me WHAT that reason could be, and so I ultimately decided I’d better stay put.
Anyway, from that day on, events began to move more rapidly, and the bottom line is, MANY great things occurred BECAUSE I had obeyed HIS Will, and not gone my own way!
First - although my pastor in Missouri had warned me to make sure I remained a faithful Baptist - in the spring of 1997, I started attending an Assemblies of God Church where, two years in a row, I ended up becoming a summer camp counselor for abused and neglected children.
While acting in the capacity of counselor, I honestly don’t know who was healed the most during that week-long camp; me or the kids, as the experience served to heal my own childhood wounds from the inside-out!
Through that same church, in 2008, God saw fit to allow me to become a mentor in a prison ministry called “Friends in Transition,” where, once a month, I went into the Women’s Prison in Canon City, Colorado, to mentor two women I was paired with over the course of five years.
I felt at the time, that perhaps these two worthy causes must have been why God sent me to Colorado; but no – there was a WHOLE lot more to come!
Please read on.
In 1998, although journalism has always been my first love, due to some strange circumstances (led by ADONAI), I stayed with the Business Journal for only a year, and ended up working as a contractor to US Air Force Space Command doing administrative work in their Classified Documents Library.
It was there I met a man who told me he was a “Messianic Jew” who invited me to the Wednesday evening Torah studies presented by a Messianic Rabbi from Denver. Well, praise ADONAI - those studies answered ALL of my questions as to why I felt “something was missing in Christian circles!
As a German-born Jewish girl, my transformation to Messianic Judaism was immediate; it “felt right”; it was HOME – I didn’t have to (and wasn’t about to!) give up Jesus, whose given, Hebrew Name I learned was Yeshua. I was convinced that THIS was the REAL REASON, God caused me to move to Colorado, and it may have been - but as it turned out, there was more to come… (BTW, this all happened around Passover of 1998.)
Backing up a bit, I had given up dating after left Missouri, because I could never pick “good men.” Recognizing that God was giving me a “second chance” in life, I had wholeheartedly given my heart to Jesus, and I told him that if he wanted me to find another husband, HE would have to drop him in my lap.
Well, he did exactly that around Sukkot, the following year in 1999. Still at Space Command in September 1999, I met my future husband, US Air Force (Retired) Lt. Col. William (Bill) Welker, who was working as a Computer, GPS and Satellite Security Engineer.
I led Bill to Torah, and we were married seven months later, in 2000 (under a “chupa” in the Messianic synagogue to which we ultimately belonged for 8 years), pledging our lives to YHWH/Yeshua/Torah!
In 2001, due to severe neck issues that required surgery (plus, my ever-growing perfume allergies which left me feeling every day like I had the flu), Bill urged me to quit work and stay home. Having never NOT worked, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and began to pray for guidance.
And that is when God FINALLY showed me what His ultimate goal for me was: I was to create a website revealing Torah to Christians; Yeshua to Jews; and God to all the world’s atheists. He had me call my ministry The Refiner’s Fire (therefinersfire.org), which has never had any “donate” buttons, because I wasn’t interested in using it for profit.
Since those early days, The Holy One of Israel kept “growing” Bill and me – and together, as a team constantly studying Scripture (and with Bill’s expertise in astronomy and calendar issues), God caused The Refiner’s Fire to flourish as a Messianic Apologetics Ministry.
In 2007, Yahweh dropped into my lap the privilege of working on the Aramaic English New Testament; and caused me to write several books of my own, including my best seller, Should Christians be Torah Observant.
And more recently, God has allowed me the privilege of becoming an Associate Professor at the Messianic Jewish Rabbinate, the online yeshiva from which I graduated in 2017. To this very day, I continue to do my daily work for God by reaching the world for YHWH/Yeshua/Torah via the Internet!
I thought my life was over when Bill passed away in 2021; but Yahweh gave me a new Torah-observant husband named Thomas Leannah a year and a half later, via some really unusual circumstances (which is a whole ‘nuther story!), and together, we are continuing to run The Refiner’s Fire. (Please read our About Us page: https://therefinersfire.org/who_we_are.htm )
All those things happened because of my willingness to obey God, nearly three decades ago, back in 1996. They serve as PROOF that He is faithful to those who are His. Sometimes, it takes a while to find out exactly what He wants us to do, but as long as we ask Him to keep us on His Path, we will eventually get there.
