June 7th 2022
It’s week TWO!
A week ago this morning I woke up in my RV, ate breakfast with my amazing family, and unplugged our house from our host family’s driveway (thank you to the incredible Peterson family for a phenomenal kickoff to our mission in your living room at our first HOUSE WORSHIP NIGHT!!!!), beginning my first day of work no longer as a campus minister at the University of Miami, but truly as a music minister for the first time in my life.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?!
I’ve been serving the Church in a variety of ways since I personally encountered the love of Jesus at a Steubenville Youth Conference in West Palm Beach, FL in June of 2010 (Millenial reminder: we were still in the single digits of iphone counting at that point). Every time I have come before the Lord in prayer and asked how I can best serve Him, I have always - and many times accidentally - end up singing. The flow of ministry has seemed to go something like this:
SING -> CONVERSE -> CONVERSION
Back then, I never thought that people, young or old, were experiencing conversion through worship. I figured it was the conversations I had afterwards that were leading to greater interior freedom for the youth groups and small groups I’d sing for. And besides - who really gets to do what they love for a living? Definitely not me, I thought.
This is a long winded way of saying that this past week I lived off of what - and who - I love for the first time in my life in the most radical way yet. After saying so long to our host family of our first HOUSE WORSHIP NIGHT, I made the simple, but important announcement: my family and I would step back from our campus ministry position at our home base parish to live off of sharing the Gospel through music.
I believe that creating places and spaces of true worship of Jesus Christ is the fastest, most efficient way to share the Gospel in the modern world. By singing boldly the truth of God’s love for us, the believer and unbeliever alike are offered an encounter with the Holy Spirit, a brush with the worship of Heaven itself, so distinct, and so clearly supernatural, that it must be shared.
DROPS OF REIGN
In the most expectedly unexpected way, THE LORD HAS RADICALLY PROVIDED. The calls I’ve been on this week, the places I’ve already led worship in, are places I have never and could have never imagined. We have families reaching out to us day after day after day offering their houses to us to bring authentic, orthodox worship into their homes, to share with their friends and families (we’ll be sending out those dates to our email list, make sure you’re on it!) On the heels of finishing my first concert at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, we were offered a whole new venue with a whole new mission to share at MorningStar Renewal Center, to bring the Church together for a moment of witness to what happens when we retreat into the presence of God, and to worship the Lord for what He has next.
Most importantly, my life as FATHER and HUSBAND has flourished. I’m writing this at a cafe looking across from my best friend, and co-adventurer - my wife Alexa, who’s busily working away at another flyer to put a Gospel moment in the hands of the people around her. My children are not just around my work, but spent the day of house worship helping set up, and conversing with the families who were showing up to partake in prayer. They aren’t aware of what I do, they are in what I do. This might sound funny to those of you who have had the blessing of ministering this way. In my story thus far, most of my events have been late at night, and hard to bring toddlers to, while my office work has always been done within brick and mortar. Now, I rise with my children, eat three meals a day with them, and incorporate them into my prayer life.
Today my oldest son and I were listening to worship music in the car, and he had a new comment to add: “Daddy, I think you should add this song to your set.” TOO CUTE!
JUST SAY YES
“I have never experienced anything like that before in my life. You could feel God come into the room.”
“During that moment in prayer though it just kind of clicked that if Jesus loves me, and I know he does, he is going to take care of me through it all…God loves me enough to let me poor my heart out he listens to me and not only that , I can see him act and move in my life I just hadn’t been noticing it until now.”
Reflections like that would have been IMPOSSIBLE without a simple yes to a crazy proposition: quit your job, sell your stuff, and go ONLY where I send you.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on Matthew 10, where Jesus says He is sending out His disciples…it’s probably worth it’s own blog post because of just how specific Christ is with where and who He sends the Apostles to.
For now though, I’m realizing that for the first time in two years, the story of the rich young man who left Jesus sad “for He had many possessions” wasn’t echoing on repeat in my head. I don’t feel like I’m off the hook, I still feel Jesus is daring me to step into that call to radically follow Him evermore deeply in each moment. I’m still the rich young man, and I’m still struggling to find out how to sell everything I own and follow Him. The only difference is, I said “YES Jesus, show me how”. He never expected us to do it without Him, right now, I just want to say yes to doing this in Him. I’ll be His worship leader, I’ll give it all, I don’t need to wait for anyone else to say yes to me, I can just say yes to Him. “‘Cause you know when you love someone, you’ve got to sing it out.”