Saturday afternoon after I left Calvary Community Church, I flew from Seattle to Phoenix and drove to the area of Chambers, Arizona. I was going to do a women’s event at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship on Monday night.
Sunday and Monday were great opportunities for me to try to lock myself away in a remote hotel room and get a lot of catching up done on the next book “For Parents Only”. It’s very stressful to be way behind on deadline and to know that there’s such good information but to not feel like I have enough time to really do a good job of getting it out on paper. So, this long weekend break in between the Seattle and Phoenix events was a really good opportunity for me to get a lot of work done.
Sunday morning actually was great for me because I went to the morning service at the church that I would be speaking to the women’s group on Monday night. It turns out that it just happened that this Sunday morning was a very special Sunday in the life of this particular church. They were opening up for the first time their new launch facility. There has been a phenomenal growth that this church has experienced. Less than three years ago they were a church of 1500 people and they were building facility to be able to handle 2000 people. Today, less than three years later, they’re church a of 3500 people. By the time they move in to the new building in a few months, they’ll already be planning on building the next one. The thing that was very touching on Sunday was hearing the pastor talk about touchstones for the church from the Book of Esther. Esther was challenged to do something extraordinary, and had to decide whether she was going to answer God’s call. The pastor said, “Every once in a while- rarely in a person’s life- God will give you an extraordinary invitation to join Him and doing something. You have to decide whether you are going to answer it and those choices don’t come around very often.” Certainly my mind went back to eight years ago when I felt like God was asking me to step out in faith and start writing my first book “Fasting” and asking God to do the impossible of getting it published and it happened and I think what would my life be like if I had not answered that call. It’s such an honor to be used in this way by God and it is such an encouragement, I think, to others that if you feel like God is calling you to do something and you just try it and watch and see what God does.
Monday night, I had a fun women’s event for about 350 women over coffee and cookies to talk about men. It was a great event and just a really neat crowd as they really seemed to get it. I am looking forward to hopefully coming back to this church to do a pastoral interview in the spring as well.