Assessment

The next few weeks flew by. I was walking on cloud nine. Over the next two months, I met with many different church planters. I went through three different individual assessments. It is a crazy thing being assessed for something that you know that you have been called to. It lands somewhere in between annoyance and excitement. There is so much pressure but at the same time, all you can do is to have faith. Kacee and I landed in a place where we were excited to walk down this path, even though it seemed redundant because we knew that the end of this assessment process would give us a clear picture of God’s calling in our life. 

Here is a little back story to help everyone know about the craziness of our summer. We start our summer with about 5 different graduations and 10 different grad parties. Then, the first week of June our church hosts Pine Cove’s Camp in the City. It is great and Kacee and I have hosted counselors every single year. We did not this year because we were going to be hosting a friend from England, but the week is still very busy and LOUD. The following week is one of our GUM (Galveston Urban Ministries) mission trips. It is always a great time of ministry and fun. God always shows up in a different way each and every trip, and He did not disappoint. BUT the week is exhausting. I ran a team that grew from 6 to 30 and was hanging sheetrock in a house. Oh, the skills that you pick up after Harvey. You always get back home spiritually full but physically empty. The day that I got back we helped out with a foster placement for some friends of ours. We did not have to bring in any more kids, technically, but there were a lot of hoops that we jumped through to help get these kids into a great home. The weekend is capped off with Father’s Day, which is always a whirlwind of emotions for me. I love being a dad, but cannot really ever fully enjoy Father's Day because it brings back the reality of my dad not being here anymore, and the circumstances surrounding his death.

Here is a picture from GUM during lunch, we were tired:

The next two weeks were supposed to be down weeks for the summer before we went to youth camp for the first week of July, but that was not the case. The 3rd week of June was a four-day assessment that we needed to go to in order to determine which residency I would enter into. We had no idea what we were walking in to. I thought it was going to be like summer camp for church planters, but it was more like Navy SEALS boot camp. We worked our tails off living in a world that was very foreign to us. We had the desire to plant a church but soon realized that we did not know as much about planting as we thought we did. During the assessment, every second was scheduled for us, kind of like preteen camp. Everything we did was being watched, from the projects, we did to the way we interacted with others in line for lunch. It was like living in a fishbowl for a week. If I am going to be completely honest, it was VERY HARD. Not hard like we no longer want to plant, but hard like a marathon is hard. We found ourselves limping across the finish line if the finish line was their recommendation. But at the end of it all, they gave us their stamp of approval saying that we were the kind of people who should plant a church. Hurray!!! 

The funny thing was that we were so emotionally and spiritually exhausted that, when they told us, we looked defeated. A friend of mine called me up and asked me if we realized that we got recommended. I told him "yes", we just wanted to get out of there before they tortured us any further. I made some really good friends that week that I am excited to walk alongside for the next several years. It was really cool to be in a room with that many people who had the same dream as we did. 

The things that I learned during the assessment I am still trying to process though, but it was a stone on the path to us planting a church.