God seems to love irony and seems to work his peculiar plan of redemption in my life through a helluva lot of irony. I am at a point where it is healthy to start to try and figure out a general direction of where you are going in life. Marriage and family counseling, bam, right? basically i realized, since i am graduating so young, i am going to need to take a little time off inbetween masters and college, since by the time i got my masters i would be 23 and who wants to see a marriage and family counselor who is 23? not me. I started praying a few months back that God would start guiding me in what i needed to do and where to go. basically, the only place in my heart i was not willing to go was explicit ministry. I couldn't bring myself to, since of my past, growing up in a pastors home who was abusive, growing up in a church that you were shunned for honesty and excommunicated when you came for help, i couldn't. i have always stayed in the church and tried to change myself so the church would change and figured that would always be my place, since that was all my heart was willing to be, i thought that was all i could be.

Well, God answered a lot of prayer and kept on hammering me with, " yo, you gonna be in the ministry. you also going to be working in the church, foo!" aside from being weirded out that Mr.T was talking, i kept praying wondering if this is actually where god wanted me. well, hell, it is. i never wanted to possibly put my family, my kids, in a situation even remotely similar to mine. I worried for my family, since i do believe if you are working in a visible branch of the kingdom, you are putting yourself out there for a stronger spiritual attack. But, as a guy pointed out, that is a selfish reason and not trusting god's sovereignty. if God is going to put me in something, he is going to provide for me as well. money, i couldn't careless about, i have always been poor, but the idea of possibly putting my family in harms way spiritually horrifies me. however, God is in control, and if this is where he wants me, he will provide just like he always has and always will, since that is what he does.

redemption comes in so many weird ways, for me, the one place i said i would never go, explicit ministry by name, is where god is wanting to continue my story of redemption apparently. my RUF minister pointed out, basically, ministry is the process of shepherding and loving people, essentially building community. I have been praying for almost those exact things to be given to me, for god to use me in those ways, and i think this is part of God answering those prayers, since being in the ministry, i would basically be doing the exact thing i am doing now, but on a larger scale. loving people with a love i have been given and shown. redemption is a weird story for us all, for me, it is basically being given the heart to pursue what i swore i would never pursue. At this point in my life, where he has taken me, nothing else really makes sense for me to pursue, nothing else fits my desires for life at all. i want to glorify God, enjoy what he has given me, i want so badly to redeem the name of the church and the name of jesus. i dunno how else to really do that than to literally wear the names on my life. God uses so much irony to show his redemption.