The wind blows where it wishes…

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
John 3:8

This verse from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus should be my life verse, at least for a little while. At least over the last few months, it has certainly felt like I’m being carried only by the Spirit of grace, not really knowing from where things are coming or where they are going.

You may know that we’d been living in Spokane for the last four years and I’d been working at Redeemer Lutheran Church. This spring we ran into some immigration issues, and had to leave the country while we sorted them out. So since March, we’ve been somewhat nomadic, living in various places in Western Canada with gracious family and friends. We were waiting for an answer from the US government about whether or not we could get a new visa to continue living and working in Spokane.

This past week, we still didn’t get an answer. But what we did get was clarity about one thing: we are not going to be able to continue our life and ministry in Spokane.

How did we get clarity about that? We were going to need to have an answer by August 15 of this year, and it became clear this week that it is just not going to happen. Though we could still wait until Aug. 15 to see what happens, we believe that would be foolish to do so; it’s all but guaranteed that we won’t have an answer by then, and it longer makes sense to keep waiting.

That’s all worded rather generically, and obviously there are a lot of details missing. The whole story is just so complicated that it would require a good supper and good beverages to tell, so I’ll not attempt to tell the whole thing in these pages.

But the bottom line now is that Suzanne and I have decided that it would be best to seek a new direction for our life and ministry. Since the door to working in the US is now shut, that new direction will lead us back to Canada. As with the wind of John 3, we’re not yet sure where that will be, but God is gracious – we are exploring some opportunities already, and He’s taking care of us in the midst of it.

It’s been a rough week, discovering that we cannot continue to live and work among people we love dearly. We are feeling pain, loss, and grief. For me personally, a big part of the pain is that God clearly called us to Redeemer four years ago, and I believed that He wanted us to stay. I believed there was so much work I had yet to do there. And if I’m honest with myself and with you, I still believe that.

Yet it seems that God is now calling us away. Right now I’m really struggling to come to grips with that. Yet His sovereignty is often a mystery, and He calls people according to His purposes, not ours. And when we can’t see His purposes clearly, it’s often hard to take. But I take comfort in two things: 1. if my feeble human mind could fully understand God all the time, I sure wouldn’t respect Him very much, much less worship Him (Romans 11:33-36), and 2. the Biblical example of Joseph, whose earthly circumstances seemed hopeless, yet God used all of those events not only for Joseph’s good, but for the good of an entire people (Genesis 37-50).

So we’re preparing to move back to Canada, hurting and wounded right now, but confident that God is leading us, even when we don’t have a pillar of fire, or (as a good friend recently put it), a great big neon sign, to follow.

Thank you to everyone who’s been praying for us and encouraging us. We will continue to covet your prayers as God leads us by His Spirit to a place we don’t yet know, in a timeframe we don’t yet know, but with the absolute assurance that He is with us in the midst of it.