admin
From Adversity to Destiny
Sometimes I don’t want to hear the truths the Lord speaks to me. I want my life to be easy and simple. That is not the path He chooses for us. If we lived without adversity, we would have little desire to learn, grow and become the person He has destine us to be. The Lord will not give us more than we can handle. 1 Cor 10:13 ‘No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.’
In order to grow, we must be stretched. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” I have found that to be an absolute truth. Our program has grown in leaps and bounds over the last year. The biggest single change was moving from standard definition to high definition. That was huge and expanded our program significantly. I could not imagine ever going back to where we were.
Independence That Leads to Sin
The prodigal son is the one parable I most identified with when I returned to the Father’s house on March 3rd, 2001. I grew up during a time when there was little talk of God’s grace and mercy from any place inside organized religion. The biggest thing I remember is the 10 commandments where preached hot and heavy and if you choose not to obey, well, you would pay the price.
At one point during my senior year in high school, I made a conscience decision to walk away from the Lord. It seemed everything in my life was falling apart, so instead of running into our Father, I ran away. I would spend the next 28 years doing a bang up job of messing up my life.
Cast Your Cares on Him
Walking with the Lord does not relieve us of the burdens of this world. Walking with the Lord gives us a place to lay our troubles. When I’m feeling pressed in from all sides, I know in my heart Poppa has all of this, it’s my job to do the work at hand and leave the big picture stuff to Him.
I find myself far from home today. It’s nearly 3000 miles from Ft St John British Columbia to Warner Robins Georgia. Even though I flew all over the world during my military career, I feel like I’m farther from home than I’ve ever been. Perhaps because I don’t have the infra structure of the US government supporting me or maybe it’s because of the remote location of this racing facility, regardless it’s an odd feeling for me.
Walking in the Anointing
There has only been one time that I’ve gone against the Lord’s will for my life and the ministry since returning to the Father’s house. When we started JAMA, the one thing He told me to do was to give everything away for free (books, bibles, sermons, music, food, etc) and He would always provide for the ministry. Some how we convinced ourselves we could sell t-shirts and that would not violate what He had asked us to do. So we went ahead and had them made up and attempted to sell them.
Attempted is probably the best way to put it, because they did not sell even though folks had told us they would buy them. I think we only sold 2 or 3 before the conviction of what we had done set in. We gave the rest of them away and attempted to find the person who had bought them so we could give them back their money…unfortunately we could not find them.
Allowing God to Promote
When we first started Dragstory.com, we thought the Lord would use that program to provide a source of revenue for our company. Everything we did to promote that program failed. We went to trade shows, sent hundreds of proposals to possible advertisers and did everything in our power to promote the business with zero results. Yes, Z E R O results.
We were a little more than perplexed. The response from drag racing enthusiasts for our version of event coverage was well received, yet no one was interested in advertising with us. We knew the Lord was in our efforts, just uncertain why we could not find financial support for our program.
Our Work Versus Our Value
Most men base their value in what they can do with their knowledge, abilities, hands or a combination of the two. I was no different. If the job I was tasked to accomplished failed or did not meet the standards, I considered it a personal affront to me as an individual. That all changed on March 3rd, 2001. I went from being a man of the world to a child of the living God. On that day the transformation of understanding who I am in Him and the value He places on my life began.
Death Works in You
I have driven nice cars and I have driven junk. I now drive my wife’s car, a classic 1984 Firebird…that’s right, I don’t have a car of my own. That may seem odd to some folks, but since we gave my GMC Suburban to another ministry back in 2003, there really has not been a need. I was driving our 15 passenger ‘church van’ we used to tow our race/ministry trailer. Once I retired and we started our own business, there really was no need for more than 1 car in our household. It’s simply amazing what you can learn to live with when you no longer have something you thought you had to have.
My car was my pride. It was always clean, vacuumed and serviced. When the Lord asked me to give my truck to another ministry, I simply ignored Him. I had heard stories of people giving away cars and other worldly possessions and always thought that was really nice, but when it came time for me to do the same it was different. Yea, seems silly, it was just an old Suburban, but it was MY Suburban! After a few weeks of the Holy Spirit urging me to do as the Lord had asked, I finally did. I made the call, signed the title and set up a time to drop the truck off.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
