(Continued from yesterday’s post)

Sixteen years have passed since that Sunday morning. My life looks radically different, and yet many of my internal struggles nowadays are similar to ones that I experienced back then. I’m thrilled to report that my current boss is a delightful individual and going to work is not a drudgery, but there’s still a sense of “What do I want to be when I grow up?” People often ask me what I “plan to do with” my doctorate, as if the choices are all mine to be made. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

I enjoy the work that I’m doing, and I can see myself staying in this path, perhaps on a broader scale in the future. I’m making deliberate efforts to present and publish my research, so that I can gain a strong footing in academia, but even that can be iffy. I’ve seen faculty members strive for years to gain tenure and fail. Moving from “staff” to “faculty” can be next to impossible. Even making the leap from “staff” to “administrator” can be difficult, since so many of those folks come from the faculty. Anyway, it’s not something that I lose sleep over; I just do the best I can and trust that God has a plan for me.

The relationship aspects of what the woman told me, though — that’s another story. My dad and I went through some rocky times during and after my parents’ divorce. We have a much better relationship now, but I can see that God was preparing me back then to face some hard days. My brother and I developed a much closer relationship in the years following my overseas experience, which was awesome, and then he died, which was completely the opposite of awesome. I can see how she may have been referring to God “being there” for me when my brother was not. And then, there’s the marriage thing. It has been challenging, to say the least, Army deployments notwithstanding. I’m still trying to figure out the reference to that relationship. As for friends, some have come and gone, but a core few have remained, and for that, I’m very grateful.

Now that my eldest and I have the opportunity to go to Brazil this coming summer, I’ve been thinking about all of these things. There are so many prophesies in the Bible that pertain to both the current setting and some unknown time in the future. That’s kind of what this feels like right now. Perhaps the woman evangelist wasn’t just referring to Asia; maybe God was looking ahead to today. God hasn’t told me in such a clear way that we are supposed to go now like he did then, but he has already begun making provisions financially, and it is fun to watch my son’s excitement grow. It’s such a neat experience to be preparing for a trip like this as a pair, rather than just myself. I don’t know what he has in store, but I have a hunch that it’s going to be amazing!

(Continued from yesterday’s post)

When I heard my name called, I snapped out of my jumbled thoughts about work and life, in general, and I looked around to see if there was someone I hadn’t met yet who had my name. A couple of people looked at me, and it quickly became apparent that I was the only “Angela” there.

The speaker followed the others’ glances and looked my way, asking if I was Angela. I nodded, and she asked if I’d come wait for her to finish praying with the person she’d been talking to before she interrupted herself. I went down and sat on the front row, wondering what was going on.

After the other person went back to their seat, the speaker waved me over to her, so I went. She put a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes and said: “Angela, God wants you to know that he will be your father; he will be your brother; he will be your husband; he will be your friend. And, he’s going to take you to a place that you’ve never been to minister to people you’ve never met, and you don’t need to be afraid to go, because he is with you.”

She said a few things after that, but I was so stunned that I don’t really remember anything except her first couple of sentences. What did it mean? I wondered. I had doubts about going overseas, but I had not shared any of them publicly. I believed that God was calling me, and yet I felt pressure from my family (indirectly or otherwise), as well as a sense of obligation not to ditch my job after just a few months. Besides, it was a volunteer position, and I had student loans to pay. How would I make ends meet?

I had spoken to the pastor and his wife about the opportunity to reapply for the overseas assignment not very long before this happened, so I just assumed that he had said something to the speaker about me. (Why he would mention little ol’ me, who wasn’t even a leader in the church, was beyond me, but it’s the only thing I could think of.) I went to him after the service and asked him what he’d told her about me. He looked dumbfounded and said that he had not said anything to her, about anyone in the church. I realized then that I’d been a part of something really spectacular.

I also knew that somehow, someway, God was going to make it possible for me to go overseas. I wondered about the different relationships that the woman mentioned in her comments to me. I got along ok with my dad, and my brother and I got along as well as siblings do. There was no animosity in either of those relationships, that I could think of at that time. As for the husband thing, well, I had started dating an old college friend long-distance, and we had begun discussing the future, but nothing was in stone, by any means. I had a couple of close friends, but I was feeling pretty isolated and lonely where I was, so I didn’t know what the reference to God being my friend meant, either.

The pieces fell into place, and I moved across the big ocean a few months later. I had my parents sell my car to help pay for my student loans while I was away, and although it was a struggle, I scraped together enough to make ends meet. It was an amazing experience, even though I only stayed a semester. Then, in the year after I returned to the states, life got topsy-turvy in some very good and very rotten ways: my parents divorced, my brother fractured his neck in a roll-over automobile accident, and I married that long-distance boyfriend. Still, I wondered what God was trying to say.

Life has a way of making time seem like it is flying by, and one day you look back and wonder: What did it all mean?

(To be continued in Part 3, tomorrow)

I have been thinking about an experience that happened many years ago at a vastly different time in my life (or so it seemed), so I’m writing it out. It’s a long story, though, so I’ll split it into two or three posts. Here goes …

—

I grew up in a mix of United Methodist, Southern Baptist and, later, independent Christian churches. Each of these denominations/groups have their strong points, and I still attend an independent church with Baptist roots. My point in sharing all of this is that none of my upbringing prepared me for a prophetic experience that happened on an otherwise average Sunday: the ones you read about in the Bible, and they sound like cool stories, but you wonder if they ever happen in real life. I certainly never expected it to happen to me!

My first job after college was as a newspaper reporter in a rest-stop-sized town in southeast Texas, sandwiched between a corn field, a rice paddy and the Interstate highway. The highlights of the town were a phenomenal Mexican food restaurant and a popular bar (and I didn’t even drink back then, so phooey). When I moved there and was trying to get settled in my new rent house, I was on a stubborn streak and dead-set against attending any church with the word “First” in its name, which left a small non-denominational congregation as my other option.

At first, I was a little nervous because my impression of non-denominational churches involved people swooning in the pews, dancing in the aisles, shouting out and speaking nonsensically. This congregation was very small; the pastor’s family comprised four of the 25 or so members, and the church met in a building next door to their house. I quickly became involved and helped out with organizing things for Sunday mornings (we used one of those school-type flat projectors and printed transparencies; this was before the days of PowerPoint and overhead projectors!)

They did have occasional speaking in tongues, but it was never disruptive or creepy. This was the first church that I can remember where people raised their hands in worship, which seemed odd to me initially, but it became more normal as I quit wondering what other people thought of me (quite frankly, no one cares). One Sunday, we had a guest speaker. First of all, the speaker was a SHE. I was impressed that she was offered the pulpit, because even though this was a progressive church (compared to all others I’d ever attended), the highest religious duty I’d ever seen a woman have was as the youth minister.

Before I tell you what happened that morning, I should give some background. The year prior to my relocation, I had interned with a local radio station near my college town. During one of my shifts, I heard an advertisement for a non-profit education organization that was recruiting volunteer teachers for semester and yearly appointments to teach English as a Second Language in Asia. I really felt compelled to do it, and I even began the application process, but for numerous reasons that don’t matter to the story right now, I declined to go and canceled my application.

In the few weeks leading up to this particular Sunday morning with the woman evangelist, I had received a phone call out of the blue from the education organization, asking if I would consider reapplying for the upcoming year. Besides being shocked that they managed to reach me at my new number in my new town, I was flabbergasted by God’s timing.

My job wasn’t anything like I’d anticipated; I was miserable. My boss was the owner’s son and immune to discipline. He was not a pleasant person to work with, much less for. I was ready to get the heck out of Dodge, despite the fact that I’d only been there a few months. I’d had all I could take of learning about boll weevils and the local taxidermy museum, and I was tired of sleeping with my police scanner so that I could jump out of bed and cover a wreck in the middle of the night.

And so, on the morning that God spoke, I was somewhat distracted from the sermon. It happened toward the end of the service, and they were having quiet time where you could walk down front and have someone pray with you. I was just sitting alone in my usual spot, thinking.

The speaker stopped in the middle of praying with someone, looked around the small crowd in the sanctuary and asked, “Is anyone here named Angela?”

(To be continued in Part 2, tomorrow)