Missions Mag 1-4

Sunday and slip out the back door, there is little expectation. If someone asks you to do something they may not even expect
you to say yes. But when you join a team, or become part of a ministry, or publicly profess you are going to serve in a certain
way, people will start asking you how it is going. There is a level of accountability there.
My decision came down to one thing, what did God really want me to do? I didn’t decide to serve just because I was
asked. I decided to serve because I felt like God wanted me to serve in a way I hadn’t done before. That is the way things work
with following God. We start off on this journey not knowing what lies ahead in our lives, and as we continue on, God may
give us another assignment.
Life kept continuing to change for me as my level of commitment continued to increase. I found myself on youth
trips and helping at various events. I took my first mission trip away from Mayfield after Hurricane Katrina. We went with
our youth to help with the relief effort and hold a kids camp. I started to see their were other areas in the country that could
use help sharing the good news of Jesus. A few years later I was attending a youth summer camp and felt an overwhelming
sense that God was calling me to leave my secular career and pursue being in full-time ministry. Later that year Chrissy and I
surrendered our lives to following what God desired for us to do. We didn’t fully realize what that would entail, but we wanted
to keep trusting God more in our decision making.
It was about a year later when I got the opportunity to go to Poland over
New Years with our youth Pastor Jeff Keith and his seminary friend Phil Rice. We
traveled with Mel to a few of the different ministry spots and met Pawel Kugler.
It was on that trip that I realized God might be asking us to rethink how comfortable
we were in our current location and doing what we thought everyone
expected of us. It was a few years later that my new friend Phil, moved his entire
family to Romania (on Right) to be on the international mission field full-time.
At this point I didn’t really know what was next, but I was being prepared to not
try to define my future for myself anymore, and let God lead me.
I ended up being on staff at First Mayfield in a couple of different positions, starting as part-time interim youth pastor,
and then a position as the missions pastor. During those times we took multiple mission trips. We returned to Poland several
times and kept working with our friend
Pawel. My desire would be to continue
working in Poland for as long as I can.
It has always been a special place to me.
But God was moving me to something different during this time.
One place in particular stood out in the United states. When I arrived in Arizona to work with Eric and Brittany Gibbs in
the summer of 2014, I started to sense something was coming in our lives. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, or should
I say I didn’t want to admit it, but God was showing me how much need there was in Arizona. It really wasn’t a question of
there not being a need in Mayfield, that was obvious. And I am well aware that I can find people that are not following Jesus
as Lord and Savior everywhere I go. We need to share the gospel everywhere, and we need to start where we live. But there
was something different about Arizona. People were not lining up to leave the comfort of their current ministry positions, or
even the comfort of having family close by, to relocate and share Jesus. So in 2016 we decided to move to Arizona and help
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