I was in eighth grade when God first tapped me on the shoulder and said that he wanted something more from my life: he was calling me to full-time ministry. Now, for a lot of thirteen year olds who spent their entire lives in church receiving such a calling might be one of the most exciting things in their lives up to that point. This was not the case for me.
You have to understand that there was a legacy of preaching in my family that I was fairly certain I didn't want to follow in the footsteps of. It's not like you have heard in some stories where a family patriarch neglected his family for his ministry to the point where his descendants hate anything associated with ministry. My great-grandfather was church planter during the early to mid 1900s. He began birthing pentecostal congregations in the mid-west and kept working his way across the western United States until he eventually retired in Hayward, California.
Throughout my childhood Grandaddy told me stories about his early days as a pioneering pastor. He told me all about his good and bad experiences, the times where God worked great miracles and the times of great struggle and opposition. He held nothing back. It wasn't until several years after his death that I discovered that Grandaddy had given me a rare gift through these stories that he gave to no one else, not even his own children, but at thirteen when God first called me to full-time service the knowledge gathered from these stories led me to say, "No way Lord!".
I knew about how hard a life it had been for my Grandaddy, I knew how rewarding it had been too, but I knew about how hard he had had to work just to be a poor bi-vocational pastor. And then, quite often, a large portion of the community literally hated him. That, at the time was not a road I wanted to walk down. I wanted to be rich.
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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States
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