How Did I Get Here?

Throughout my grade school and high school years, I thought that God was calling me into full-time Christian ministry. Missionary work, worshiop ministry, pastoral work, something like that. In my late teenage years, I was quite surprised when God told me not to go to Bible College, as I had expected and planned. So instead, I decided to go to Fanshawe College and become a computer programmer for a few years just to earn a buck. Since I had only taken one programming course during high school, it wasn't exactly a sure-fire idea. It just seemed like a satisfactory interim plan.

So I worked at AV-Base Systems for almost eight years. That was much longer than I expected and many times, I felt like I was treading water. Why wasn't I moving forward? What was the point of being a computer programmer? What was God's calling for me? I didn't let those questions stop me entirely since I continued to be involved in discipleship, church leadership, worship ministry and Big Brothers throughout that period. Even so, my plan of making some money and then moving on certainly wasn't working out.

It seems that God's plans were - and are - much bigger than my own. It's only within this past year that I have started to realize how well my professional skills can translate to my spiritual ministry. It's only within the past year that I have started to see the parallels between a company and a church. God has been preparing me all along and I'm just now starting to see part of the plans that he has for me.

Most obviously, my professional skills will be useful in terms of developing my new company as we help severely disabled people deal with denied insurance claims. I did not imagine that my professional skills would be part of my spiritual ministry and it's amazing that this opportunity was handed to me. I've always been a little jealous of people like Abe or Richard that can work as nurses or social workers and can minister to people as part of their jobs, but I didn't realize that this could be available to me in my chosen career as well.

Beyond that, my philosophies as a Project Manager and supervisor can be quite useful within a church. My abilities to logically evaluate a situation and look for the best solutions can be useful within a church. My experience with the headaches of helping a new company grow can be directly applied to helping a church grow. And I'm not just limited to functioning inside one church or just within one company, I can see other opportunities outside of those boxes as well.

It's mind blowing, I tells ya. God's an ever-lovin' genius who had all of this plotted out before I was even born. So how did I get here? It's all God. It's all because of God.

P.S. By coincidence, here is one of the passages that I was reading during my morning Bible study today: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith...For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Ephesians 2:8-10