What about...

I seem to be obsessed with what my ministry is going to look like. Wonder if I should be doing research on what other prayer ministries are doing, how they got started, what has worked for them and what hasn't? Then I picked up Nancy Ortberg's “Looking for God.” I found it in the reduced rack at the bookstore, and it keeps slapping me in the face that God is doing a new thing. My ministry won't look like someone else's, and that a good thing. Or maybe I should say it's a God thing, huh?

We have a woman coming to speak in chapel today who graduated from here a few years back, and I've heard her speak before at a presidents' retreat. She has a church plant and a healing ministry somewhere in Georgia, and I thought it would be good to see how she started her ministry. Then God showed me John 21, which recounts the third time Jesus appeared to the disciples. Peter decided to go fishing and some of his peeps went with him. They had caught nothing all night long until Jesus showed up and said, “Try the right side of the boat.” I'm sure that Peter had been brooding and beating himself up, living with the fact that he had denied even knowing Jesus and that he did it three times. So when he sees Jesus, he jumps into the water and swims to him. They eat and go for a walk, and Jesus reinstates Peter and clarifies his call to shepherd his people. This is all well and good until Peter sees John (the one that Jesus loves) following them, and Peter asks, “What about him?” Jesus answers him as if to say, “What about him? We're talking about you—not him!

So it’s like Jesus is saying to me, "Don't you worry about how she got started. You look at me. You listen to me. I am doing a new thing in you, and it doesn't fit in any mold, and it can't be pigeonholed." So there you go, huh?