by Michael A. Howes, pastor, West Swamp congregation
I grew up in southern Louisiana, attending church every time the doors were open. Sometimes my family were the ones who opened them.
I chose to become a follower of Jesus Christ at a young age and was baptized. My congregation had a very active youth program, and I was immersed in Bible study, worship, prayer, and mission projects all through junior high and high school. My youth group did everything from putting on musicals to visiting the state women’s prison to stage puppet shows. And I was in the thick of it all.
In eighth grade, my Sunday School teachers challenged us to read through the Bible, week by week. If you did the readings for the week, you got a gold star on a chart in our Sunday School room. For some reason, the idea of accumulating those gold stars was powerfully motivating to me; I read through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation that year.
At the same time, I was absorbing from my youth pastor a life-changing truth: being a follower of Jesus didn’t only mean attending church and being a good person. Instead, Jesus wanted me to surrender my whole self to him so he could express his life through me. The inward spiritual disciplines of Bible study, prayer. and worship, combined with the outward discipline of service, worked together to deepen and broaden my life with God and prepare me to hear God’s call.
As my senior year of high school began, I tried to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up. As I had always been instructed, I prayed about it. All that came to me was that I really liked my youth group, so I decided that I would become a youth pastor.
That fall, at my youth group’s fall retreat, we were sent out into a field to listen in quietness for the voice of God. I didn’t have any patience with this. I sat down barely long enough for the dew to moisten my jeans, and then I bounced up and sought out my youth pastor. I was certain I had exciting news for him.
“Ken, guess what!?! I’m going to be a youth pastor, just like you!”
I expected him to say something along the lines of this validating his life’s work and about how excited he was.
Instead, Ken told me something I will never forget: “Michael, until you stop telling God what you’re going to do and start listening for God to tell you what to do, you’re never going to understand God’s purpose for your life.”
Umph! Not the response I had been hoping for.
But by God’s kindness, it was a teachable—if humbling—moment for me. I began to honestly seek God’s direction for my life, with no preconceived endpoint.
Six months later, my youth group was back in the same place, on our spring retreat. One evening, while watching a video about evangelism, I had an experience of hearing God speak to me. It wasn’t an audible voice, but I heard God call me to be a minister.
When I shared what I had heard with my congregation, they affirmed that they saw these signs of God’s gifts and call in my life. That was more than 30 years ago, and that experience of call has been what the Spirit of God has used to sustain me through the ups and downs of ministry.
The opinions expressed in articles posted on Mosaic’s website are those of the author and may not reflect the official policy of Mosaic Conference. Mosaic is a large conference, crossing ethnicities, geographies, generations, theologies, and politics. Each person can only speak for themselves; no one can represent “the conference.” May God give us the grace to hear what the Spirit is speaking to us through people with whom we disagree and the humility and courage to love one another even when those disagreements can’t be bridged.