Still at Work
I’ve been a member of Christ Church since 2018. When I think back to the first time I walked through the main doors—before the atrium was added and we gathered in the narthex—I can’t help but marvel at how much life has changed since then.
At the time, my husband Josh and I were fresh out of Covenant Seminary, looking for a place to plant roots and raise our family. I was pregnant with our second child, Calvin, eager to find my footing in ministry with a degree in Youth Ministry and Worship, and hopeful that my vocational path would look something like what I had always imagined. Today, you likely know me as a mother of three. Josh is no longer in vocational ministry, and neither am I. Our life looks very different than the one we planned.
Scripture reminds us that “the heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Looking back over just the last eight years, I can see the steady, unmistakable hand of God’s sovereignty and provision guiding ours. He provided for us in unexpected ways as we entered our first home. He provided for us when Josh placed 11th out of 10 accepted candidates for the police academy scholarship—missing the mark by the narrowest margin. And yet, in God’s perfect timing, a phone call came in the middle of the night, just hours before orientation, informing him that someone ahead of him had been dismissed and that he needed to report in the morning. An entire avenue for our family opened in a moment, one that we can clearly see was given not by merit or planning, but wholly by the Lord. In His kindness, Josh was promoted to detective within five years.
In His grace, God used my own first birth experience to awaken deeper questions in me—questions that eventually led to a calling and a career far better suited to my gifts and personality than anything I could have designed myself. He provided again when business ownership was unexpectedly placed in my hands after a difficult resignation from my partner in 2020, and He continues to sustain our family through a business I never would have chosen, but now deeply steward. And just about a year ago, God once again surprised me by orchestrating events during a birth that clarified a calling toward midwifery—another path I never imagined for my life.
In very real, practical ways, I depend on the Lord daily: for inquiries for my business like manna in the desert, for the timing of every birth (hello, on-call life), for the health and safety of the mothers I serve, and for Josh’s protection in a high-risk profession.
As I’ve been meditating on the book of Acts in recent weeks, it has felt natural—almost easy—for me to believe how clearly the Lord worked through the Spirit in the detailed lives of the disciples and the early Church. After all, I’ve seen Him at work so personally in my own small, ordinary life. Acts is often described as the acts of the Church, but perhaps more accurately, it is the continued acts of God. As Paul declares in Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.”
As I write this letter to you—my church, the Church God is still actively working in and through—I pray you find hope and peace in this truth: our God did not stop His work at the cross, or the resurrection, or the ascension. No—our Lord is still acting today. He is at work in us as individuals as well as us as a group, through the mundane, the major decisions, the disappointments, and the unexpected turns. And we can trust, as Paul reminds us, that “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Let’s stay steadfast In Him, together.