By Tanya Jolliffe
I was nudged by the Spirit in the spring of 2005 to join a church planting team that my home church was creating. I attended a three-day church planting boot camp and although I didn’t know how things were going to go, I took my spot on the team. Our family spent the next several years helping to build a troop to join us and set up a community presence. We then prepared to launch a second worship location in 2007. A few years into our plant, the leadership team felt called to split from our planting church and become an independent congregation. We chartered as an autonomous church in 2013 with over 125 people signing membership.
You can imagine my surprise when the Spirit nudged the new leadership team to close that church five years later with plenty of money in the bank and an average of 60 people attending worship each Sunday morning. It didn’t make sense. The congregation spent months seeking God’s direction and desired to be obedient to what God was asking. After many agonizing meetings and many prayer gatherings, we obediently closed the church in the summer of 2018. We gave away thousands of dollars and all our building assets to other communities of faith and took on the hard process of finding a new community of faith to support our spiritual formation through grief. Did God know we likely wouldn’t withstand a pandemic? Did he have other reasons for us to disperse our community of faith? We may never know the reason this side of heaven, but we were obedient all the same.
Obedience, when things don’t make sense, is hard. I often wish God would guide me in a more direct way by saying, “go here and do this for this reason.” Unfortunately, in my life, it hasn’t worked that way. The spirit leads me according to his will but in a less descriptive manner. Re-reading the story of Noah as part of our Living in Truth Ministries leadership group bible study, I was struck by the example God supplied in his word for obedience when things don’t make sense.
In Genesis 6 we are taught that God repented that he had created man because of how wicked, evil, and violent they became. “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:5-6 NIV).
As we read on, we learn God decided he wanted a “do-over” and selected Noah and his family to spare because Noah was “a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. God said to Noah, ‘I’m going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So, make yourself an ark of cypress wood'” (Genesis 6:9,13-14 NIV).
A few things jumped out at me as I re-read this familiar passage. First, God gave Noah the ideal directions, go here, do this, because of this reason. Second, how confused Noah must have been. God told him he was going to get rid of all the people, the very people he created. That must have sounded outlandish and likely scary. What if the reaction was the total opposite because he saw how violent and wicked people were and said, “yea, it is about time.” Lastly, God also told him he was going to destroy the earth. Maybe Noah was relieved that he was going to be spared as well as overwhelmed by the unknown of what life for his family would be like after the destruction.
There are so many questions that must have run through Noah’s mind as well as his wife’s, his son’s, and their wive’s minds. There were so many feelings they had to process. Yet, in the face of all the feelings and unknowns, Genesis 6:23 NIV tells us “Noah did everything just as God commanded him.” Noah was obedient even when it didn’t make sense.
The last two years haven’t made sense for many people all around the world. Up is down. Left is right. Right is wrong. We have hope that things will improve. Part of what helps things improve is when the people of God do what he asks of them even when it doesn’t make sense, just like Noah. When you feel the nudge, process the feelings and take note of the unknowns as you answer the call, and let God use you for the plans he has, especially when it doesn’t make sense.
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