On the back of last week’s Phone-Call/Email from God, I got this brilliant response from a friend, which I wanted to share with you:

I know friends who read your emails and they are hungry for more of God. However, there is a passiveness in the ‘waiting for the phone call’. They are paralysed by the big end to the stories and they don’t know how to get there.

 You have a powerful voice and many people read your emails what would be amazing would be to hear you encourage those first baby steps. There are few people who will read your email and reply to say ‘yes take me to Burundi’ (I know that isn’t just what you are asking), but there are plenty of people who maybe would be encouraged to take a first baby step. This could be simply cooking a meal regularly for a local neighbour, prayer walking their area, stopping to talk to a homeless person, choosing to help at Foodbank, there are endless examples.

For our journey, it started with inviting a group of mothers each week to our small apartment for an afternoon of chaos (five 3-year-old boys in a small space) and eating a meal together – how lonely those mothers were and how precious that time became – to me serving as a chair of governors at our local school which was so hard, yet now I am in conversation with the council about a city-wide education initiative using a project based learning linked with schools in Brazil. My husband followed a desire to find a house for some refugees and 18 months on finds he has started and now runs a city housing festival with nationwide impact.

I look back and think I waited too long for my ‘phone call’ moment. Actually we needed to get on and do… Ed Silvoso says start with asking someone you know what their needs are…

They are little steps but they start the adventure.

I guess what I am asking is please encourage people in your emails to take the first small step. The rest is up to God! As Christians, I think we get focused on the big ending and that can be intimidating as we don’t know how to get there, but how our hearts long for it! All our testimonies start with a small step.

 

She’s so right. Thank you, Jo! I hope what she wrote above is a helpful corrective and encouragement, and I’m genuinely sorry if my email(s) elicited anything negative in you, that’s the last thing I’d want.

Indeed, I look back on the Burundi adventure, and it was filled with many small steps. The first step was the prayer: ‘I’ll do anything, go anywhere!’ Then came the language-learning, the cultural adaptation, the building of relationships and trust.

Step by step, the hard yards.

So let’s not feel condemned, inadequate or passed by. As Oswald Chambers said: “It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional thing for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes.”

One step at a time.