How did we end up here? (Part 2)
Then came that Monday. I learned on Monday, January 25th that the church was going to let me go after the upcoming Sunday (the 31st) for my lack of spiritual leadership. How do you argue that? “No, I disagree. I’m the perfect spiritual leader for this worship team.” So, I agreed. Who doesn’t need to work on being a better spiritual leader? You’d lose all credibility if you say that you don’t have anything to work on. Admittedly, I let the day-to-day tasks of coordinating the worship team get in the way of spiritual leadership at times.
My official exit meeting was on Monday, February 1st. Over the course of a few days leading up to my final Sunday Vanessa and I began to talk and pray about what we would do next. We knew that long-term we were not going to stay in Iowa, and so really our biggest debate was whether to finish out our lease in Iowa (which would run through the end of July), make the move back to Nashville, or figure out if there was a mysterious 3rd option.
The mysterious 3rd option never materialized and jobs started to line up for us in Nashville. Our connections in Nashville would make landing jobs (and therefore theoretically being able to pay the bills) a much quicker process than it would be in any other part of the country. We know that scripture teaches us to be patient and wait on God. I think sometimes we frustrate God by waiting on Him to show us what to do when He’s already made what He wants us to do obvious. During the last week of January I was able to line up immediate handyman work in Nashville and Vanessa was able to line up multiple promising job interviews.
We took the jobs lining up for us as God’s way of telling us that Nashville was where we needed to be. The church elders had asked us not to tell anyone that we were leaving until after January 31st, but our Nashville jobs and interviews lined up so quickly that we would need to be in Nashville before the following Sunday (February 7th). The unfortunate byproduct of this situation was that we did not get to say goodbye to a lot of people that we wanted to. We know that in that process we did hurt some people’s feelings and would love to have the opportunity to apologize to those people. Given the situation we were in, we felt that we were doing exactly what God wanted us to do in order to take care of our family.
