A couple years ago I listened to this sermon delivered by John Shirley at The Gathering, and it’s stuck with me since. In it he talks about a lot of truth, and a bit of it that has come up in my life time and time again… including lately… had to do with the metaphor of pruning and abiding. Now, if you can hang in there for about 1,000 more words, I’ll get back to that…. 🙂
Ever since I can remember, I’ve enjoyed being in charge of things and honestly ever since I can remember those positions came pretty easily to me. This is especially true when I think back to before I was in a relationship with God. During middle school, and probably before that too, whenever we had group projects I liked being the leader for them. When I did dance, my favorite years were the ones when I got to be a dance assistant and help teach the younger girls classes. In high school I did theater; I was the stage manager and student director by my sophomore year… not because of some exceptional love for the theater, but I think simply because I liked “running the show”. By my junior year I switched to journalism instead of theater and became design editor of the yearbook, and that’s where I stayed through my senior year. I liked leading because ultimately I liked control. I was a very bossy, bold, in your face kind of person those years.
When Jesus finally caught my attention in a good way and I entered into a relationship with the Lord through Him, I was in my freshman year of college and probably for the first time in a long time in no sort of leadership position. I was just trying to figure out life outside of high school and “on my own”. To put it in a cliché’ kind of way: It was a beautiful time of just sitting at the feet Jesus. Cliché aside though, it really was. I don’t even remember thinking about or desiring to be in a leadership position once that year. I had even been fortunate enough to have been blessed through my parents and saved up enough money, that I didn’t even have a job that year. I was with out any sort of position, other than that of getting to know Jesus, following Him, and fellowshipping with other believers.
It was such a good place.
The summer following my freshman year I went out to San Diego on summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ, and it was the perfect continuation of that time. The first 5 weeks of the 10-week trip I was given a mentor and served on a ministry team. Literally my life along with my heart, mind, and desires could not have looked more different then compared to the state they had been in just 9ish months before that when I had just started to walk with the Lord. Everything had been completely flip-turned upside down by Him. I’m still learning more and more how good He is at doing that.
At that point in summer project, the 5 week mark, all the staff and student staff leaders leave, and in doing that they hand over the last 5 weeks of the summer project to the students. In the process of that they nominate students to step into the leadership positions they leave behind, and I so happened to be one of those students and goodness did it take me off guard. I say that with all honesty. Ha I was so clueless as to what was happening. I literally thought the student staff leader, AnnieRose, who asked me if I would be the leader of my ministry team, was asking to meet up with me just because she wanted to hang out, and I was genuinely excited to do that… then I realized what the meeting was actually for, and then I was still excited but also nervous. Truthfully, in the moment I was afraid of that leadership position. It was the first time that I had felt that way about a leadership position ever in my life; I believe that’s because during that time of getting to know Jesus and his Father, I began to realize how big they were and how small I was in comparison. More than that I realized how worthy they are of control and how much better they are at “running the show” than I am. I knew who I had been before I came to know the Lord, I knew how I took leadership and control for myself then and I didn’t want to be that person anymore. So, in the moment I didn’t want to be in a position that reminded me of that. I think I also saw my being in leadership positions as removed from my life, like so many other things I saw as being removed while I was changing over that year through God.
That’s when the Lord spoke some truth about those things I believed to be being removed. That truth was, that in my naivety I was seeing Him changing me and believing that, that meant a complete and utter removal of who I had been my whole life, yet that wasn’t the case. In that moment He revealed to me that He wasn’t necessarily removing everything so much as He was restoring it to the way it was supposed to be. There was a massive reset going on, but it wasn’t to completely wipe out who I was, it was to make who I was right so that I could function and live in my fullest potential. And so, I accepted the position of leading my ministry team and let the Lord start to teach me through it what it meant and looked like to be a leader through and because of Him.
Since then… I’ve basically been in a constant position of leadership in some way or another in the ministries I’ve been involved with, and boy oh boy have I learned so much through all of them. Each of them has been humbling, and each of them has been a gift from God, which in and of myself I felt pretty inadequate for, yet through Him confident with in.
Getting ready for the World Race I was excited for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones was because it was such a foreign thing to me. Literally foreign in the sense that we would be travelling from country to country but also foreign in the sense that it was with an organization I had never been involved with before and it involved things that I had never experienced before. I was looking forward to being a baby in a way, a complete and utter novice after being in a state of leadership for 3 years straight.
Then I went to training camp, and was asked to be a team leader. Ha, gosh the Lord is just funny sometimes. There He talked to me about my desires of just being a follower. See in a way I think I thought that by entering into a circumstance where I seemingly knew nothing about what I would be doing, that I would automatically be disqualified from leadership and therefore free of that kind of responsibility. But what He reminded me of was that it wasn’t anything of me that ever qualified me for any position of leadership I had been given… it was simply He in me that did. I’m not exceptional, He is. I’m not experienced, He is. I’m not the leader, He is. I just follow Him closer and closer to the Father. Only in being a follower, am I a kind of leader.
I wanted to run away from the responsibility of the gift He’d given me. Weird to think about, huh? That by going on a mission trip, part of my desire in it was to put myself in a place where I thought I could be free from one of things the Lord has blessed me with. I remember trying to be so inconspicuous at training camp, attempting to go through it unnoticed in any way by staff as they were trying to pick out the leaders. As you can see that worked out really well for me. (that was sarcastic) The truth will always be that as child of God you cannot get out of the blessings He desires to give you; you can never escape His goodness, no matter how you may try at times… so, I became a team leader, and I have learned so, so much through it. I have learned many a things that I could not have otherwise learned. I am and will always be grateful for this time.
Here’s where I get back to that pruning and abiding thing I talked about in the beginning. In the sermon John talks about John 15, specifically verse 2:
He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.
He focuses on second part, “while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, so that it will be even more fruitful”. Before this I’d honestly never really looked at that part of this passage. I knew about the vine and about the dead branches being cut off, but I’d never really paid attention to this part about pruning. The point he makes about it is that when we are fruitful, we can expect to be pruned and that that can be a confusing, hard time for us because it means things are going to be cut off of us. He also talks about how it is such a good thing though. The dictionary’s definition of to “prune” says that it is “to trim by cutting away dead or overgrown branches or stems, especially to increase fruitfulness and growth”. And right there is where we have the goodness… he only prunes “so that it will be even more fruitful”.
The hard, confusing part comes when we have in some way formed our identity around the fruit we’ve been producing. That’s what the Lord largely started speaking to me about this past month in Ukraine. Through a series of events I started to realize that in a lot of ways I had begun to perceive who I was and gauge how good life was through the lens of the leadership position I was in. This fruit that had been produced in my life had grown too big. It was time for some pruning to happen. The slightly hard part of that was that the Lord revealed it to me and then handed me the hedge clippers. I had to choose whether I was going to step into that pruning process and therefore more of the Lords blessings or instead remain where I was with this “oversized fruit” of sorts.
What I said earlier about being a child of God and not being able to run away from His blessings is still true though, and He convinced me through out that time, that the growth and fruitfulness that would come of this pruning was well worth any of the pain involved in the cutting off of stuff. So, I went for the pruning… and as of the beginning of this month I have stepped down from team leading.
It is quite the change. But it is, as our current contact Raul would say, a “goodie goodie”. Ha I can’t wait to tell you more about him, but to remain on topic…this change has already in the 2 days of my officially not being a team leader proven to be yet another blessing and seriously such a good thing. This is a time, that as a branch, I am getting to go back into the vine and simply abide there, soak up some goodness, and await the new fruitfulness and growth to come. Stepping away from leadership is no longer an attempt at escaping this blessing the Lord has given me, but instead is a stepping into more of Him and listening for what’s next. It’s not a running away from anything, but now a running into the more that God has for me.
It’s a beautiful thing.
With that my long time teammate Kelly Jarvis (she’s been with me on this journey since day 1) has stepped up into leading our team. You can check out a bit about her process with that here: Steppin Up!
Thanks for reading another one of my novels! Love you all so much and sending blessings your way!!
