In the Margins

 I love books. No matter how hard I try I cannot read as many as I want to. At any given time, it's not unusual for me to read more than one book at a time. Currently I'm in the middle of three. When something I read impacts me, I jot down notes in the margins. There is no book more meaningful to me than the Bible. 

I am working my way reading it again from start to finish. I'm in the book of Luke, more specifically in the fifth chapter, when I came across a couple of notes I jotted down in the margin back in 2011. I recall the context of my written notes. 

For months I kept sensing Jesus was calling our family to follow Him. I did not know what it meant. He pounded that message into my head like a jackhammer. At that time, we lived in Seminole, TX. We had recently come off the 23 days of consecutive revival meetings. The church had grown. Attendance doubled in the two years we served there. I had the largest salary of my entire ministry. I worked on a dream team of other ministers each gifted in unique ways, and we all complimented each other in our gifting. People loved us. It made no sense to even consider leaving there. Yet the message to follow Jesus persisted. 

One morning on April 21, 2011, I read Luke 5:11. "Then they brought their boats to land, left everything and followed Him." CSB There the message was again. A call to follow Jesus. It was during this same time period I was reading a book by Greg Laurie Upside Down Church. That is when the call to follow Jesus began to come clear. It was a call to start a church. 

In the margins of that same passage, I wrote something else six months later. Here is what I wrote. "This is exactly what we did. We left FBC Seminole, our home, and salary to start Faith Community Church on July 22, 2011. Here we are. The church has grown to 100 in six months." 2-21-12

I remember that July 22, 2011, date. That was the day I officially drove out of Seminole, TX headed to Paradise, TX to begin the work of starting a church. I took Taylor with me. I left Brenda and the three youngest sons to try and sell the house before school started. It was the longest period Brenda and I were apart from one another in our marriage. I did not see her again until just before school started so we could register our sons. 

That first Sunday July 31, 2011, we gathered in a day care for our first official service. We had no music. More people showed up than we anticipated. We ran out of chairs and people stood against the wall in that small room. The smell is deeply engrained in my memory. A mixture of urine, dirty diaper residual odors, and cleaning agents all combined to produce an unpleasant stench. None of that mattered. We were riding high on the euphoric call to start a church. 

We only met in that day care for one Sunday morning. A member of the school board who attended that first service secured our meeting in the junior high school cafeteria for the next Sunday. Within two weeks, God added a man to lead our worship and his wife headed up the children's ministry. We would eventually move our services to the high school cafeteria and ultimately to an old warehouse we remodeled for our purposes. 

Our teenagers met in the stands of the football stadium in the beginning. They sat in the stands and I taught the Bible to them. It is kind of comical when I think back to all those walking on the track and getting a Bible study involuntarily. Our adults met mid-week in the day care for several months before we moved to the warehouse starting out. God saved people. We baptized in a swimming pool in the summers and a hot tub in the winter months. I lost count of how many were baptized in that first year. 

There were sacrifices. When I left Seminole that day in July, I had no set salary. I followed Jesus in blind faith. I drove east thinking that I would get a job to pay the bills and plant the church bi-vocationally. I received a phone call from the lady who served as the treasurer informing me that the core group met and came up with a figure they thought they could pay as my salary. It was $28,000 less than what I made in Seminole. That did not matter. I had the call to follow Jesus. 

Somehow God made it work. I lived in an RV of some of the people who helped us get the church off the ground. They owned the daycare we met in those first few months. They did not charge me to live in that RV for three months. Somehow God made it work. He honored our faith. We never asked anyone for money. We never communicated our financial needs. Over the next six years, those wonderful generous people from FBC Seminole sent our family over $120,000. Not the church. We never asked the church to support us financially. Private individuals sent us money. One time a family traveling through the area stopped to see us. They brought us $8,000 from several families. We were overwhelmed. God sent the right money at the right time all along the way. One person felt led to send us a monthly gift of $1,400. This gift came for years as we worked at that church. In large part that is how we paid our mortgage when we were able to purchase a home. 

Six years to the day we started that church, once again I felt God's call to move on to the next adventure. That is how we ultimately ended up in Weatherford at Spring Creek. 

I'm thankful for those little notes in the margin. I come across them from time to time. Want to know something interesting? I did not even read from the Bible I normally use this morning. This is a spare one I keep on my home desk. Kind of feels like it was providential for me to pick it up and read this morning not only the words of Jesus but the words in the margin. 

I have all kinds of notes in Bibles and books. People who borrow books from me say they find the notes in the margins just as interesting as the books. I seldom read without a pen in my hand. I have argued with some authors in the margins. I've penned prayers in the margins of Bibles and books. 

When I turned the page of Luke 5 this morning, I found another note in the margin. This time the note was written 11-1-23. The note was written next to Luke 5:27-28 which is very similar to Luke 5:11. "After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the office, and He said to him, 'Follow Me.' So, leaving everything behind he got up and began to follow Him."

Here is that note in the margin, " You know I will leave everything and follow You wherever you call me to go." 

That should be the prayerful desire of every single follower of Jesus. To follow His lead wherever He calls. This has been a theme in my personal Bible reading and writing lately. That phrase "Follow Me" is repeated multiple times. I read it twice just this morning. It is a way of life. A mentality. A mindset of availability. 

If you would have asked me three years ago if I would be coaching professionally, I would not have believed it. If you would have also asked me if I would teach the Bible in a substance abuse rehab facility weekly neither, would I have believed that. To be honest as a wet behind the ears teenager this time of the year back in 1985, I had no idea that I would be a preacher or that I would be writing things that go out all over the world. My whole life was in the margins. I was not popular. I was not a gifted student. I was not the greatest football player to come from my high school. I lived in the margins. Not part of the real story. 

That is until Jesus reached me in 1983. I asked for His salvation. He asked me to follow Him. That would lead to His invitation to preach. I know I was born to preach, shepherd, to lead, and to write. If the 18-year-old me could have seen the 57-year-old me, I don't know that I would have believed all God has done. 

I was willing to follow Jesus at 18. Am I still willing to follow Him to new adventures at 57, or 67, or maybe 77. That is what He demands. He demands that for all of us. Chuck Swindoll is still doing that in his 80's. So is Jack Graham in his seventies as well as David Jeremiah. George Mueller followed Jesus into his 90's. Hudson Taylor served Jesus in China into his twilight years. 

There is no retirement age for following Jesus. Abraham was 75 when God called him to his great adventure. Noah was well past the century mark when God called him to build an ark. John was an old man when he received the vision of God that became the book of Revelation. 

I am thankful for God's reminder from the margin today. It serves as fresh fuel to keep following. I hope it might do the same for you as well.