2025.10.28

Reformation

This past Sunday was Reformation Sunday, and the church family I serve apparently has a history of recognizing that. We had a bagpiper greet people as they arrived in the parking lot and again after worship. I don’t recall any of the previous three congregations placing such emphasis on the day, and, to be honest, I hadn’t either. But something inside of me took me back to my own personal “reformation” some 25 years ago…

I was out for a summer walk with Andy, my pastor, and he told me about a new book he had read. After the walk, Andy gave me a copy and told me to read it and pray it. That little book was called The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life by Bruce H. Wilkinson.

I read that book and began to pray that prayer every morning. That prayer reminded me every morning that I was blessed, and it seemed like every week my worldview would enlarge before me. Not only that, but God began to expand before me. I could feel myself guided along a path that I did not know on a trajectory I could never have imagined for myself. Yet, I kept praying!

At the end of March 2001, approximately nine months into that “prayer trek”, I woke one morning to anguish of mind and spirit. I could not pray or focus. I gave up trying, poured a cup of coffee, and sat at the kitchen table with my Bible in front of me. Tears were welling up in my eyes, and I had no idea what to read. I put my Bible on its spine and let it drop open. It opened first to this:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

Genesis 12:1

I read a few more verses and grumbled, “Yeah, right.” I placed the Bible on its spine again, and it dropped open again. Here’s what it said:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak…”

Jeremiah 1.5-6

“Right.” I was not convinced. One more time up on the spine. The Bible fell open once more:

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Mark 8:34-35

This time I did not grumble nor reject what was proposed on the page I was looking at. Instead, I was filled with resoluteness and joy. I knew that the Lord would take me to new lands, teach me how to speak, and that the life I knew must be given up so that I may lift high the cross!

That was the day I discerned my call to ministry: Monday, March 26, 2001!

And it all began with some obscure little prayer from a book of the Bible that few actually read. This little prayer has taken me to:

• Dubuque, IA
• Farmington, IL
• West Newton, PA
• Sparta, NJ
• New London, NH

And yes. I have broken through to a blessed life!

“Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain!”

1 Chronicles 4:10