Ann here!
My friends, can I share today one thing in my Christian life that I hold very close as an important life rule? It burns in me, in fact.
It’s this:
God will guide our life journey and tell us where to go next, whether it’s a house move, a person, a church, a workplace, a place to serve, some money to give, a book to read .. or any other thing in fact; if we let him.
For we walk by faith, and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7, ESV)
How I love that verse!
It’s like God gives us a breadcrumb trail to follow. But it’s more tasty than that: I think of it as a jellybean trail. God puts a jellybean down a little way ahead of us. We head towards it, pick up the jellybean, stand there and savor it. ‘Is this really where you want me, Lord?’ Then after a while we look for the next jellybean.
For several years now, I’ve followed that lifestyle of watching out for the next jellybean while standing on the spot to which God has led me, eating the current one.
Here’s how it’s played out:
In 2017, I very clearly sensed God wanted me to offer my writing services to this SUM ministry. It was a scary thing to do at the time. Super-duper scary. Funny, it doesn’t feel scary at all anymore!
I wrote and wrote. It was a sweet experience. Then, in 2019 I sensed that I was to be put in leadership. Another scary-sweet jellybean.
And he said to me, ‘Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it; and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:3, NKJV)
The scroll of your life. Eat it. It can be scary but it can also be sweet.
In 2024 I sensed that my leadership was coming to an end, and this was very difficult because I did not want to let Lynn or you guys down. I resisted it for a long time, but it is actually very clear when God closes down a ministry season: You find you literally can’t do it anymore. His hand is on you to say ‘No, this thing has lifted off you now’.
Lynn sensed it too, and we duly made the shift. She moved back into leading the ministry as she felt God was calling her to it. We kept picking up the jellybeans.
Then came a bend on the jellybean trail that I hadn’t seen ahead. The bend came upon me like this:
I had a dream that I was retraining in something. In this dream I was saying to someone, ‘I’ll retrain. Then, when I graduate I’ll be 53, and I’ll have a full career ahead of me. I am not too old. There is no reason why I can’t do it.’ It was such a vivid dream that I woke feeling myself saying ‘YES!’, like it was some great epiphany.
After that, I held it for at least a year, asking ‘Am I to retrain, Lord? Am I to have a career again? But what in?’
…. Well, I got my answer on the Day of Atonement last year. I was lying on the couch and suddenly it hit me: Retrain as a psychologist! I had already done my first degree in Psychology, so it would be a two-year masters. I got up to tell Bryce this. His instant reaction was: ‘What a great idea!’ Encouraged, I then headed straight back to the couch, and there engraved on the coffee table in front of me was a symbol I had not seen before:
‘Is that not the Psychology symbol?’ I asked. It was scratched … etched … in my coffee table.
Quickly I grabbed my phone and googled ‘psychology symbol’. Indeed it was that:
I was blown away.
A few hours later Lynn wrote to me and said, ‘Girl, it’s the Day of Atonement. I think the Lord is going to reveal some things about your future. Ask him.’
Little did she know I already had.
More confirmations came; and, fast forward to today, I have just started my MSc in Coaching Psychology at the University of Leicester UK – distance learning — and am training to be a Coaching Psychologist. How about that!
Yes, I’ll indeed be in my early fifties when I finish. But in the Kingdom our spirits get younger, not older.
My friends, how about you: Have you ever been led to a new place of some sort by God?
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