How does someone follow God? - part 1

Sorry for taking so long for my next post.


So, what does it mean to follow God? This can mean many things to many people, and it’s really difficult to explain what an evangelical Christian means when they say things like “God spoke to me” or “I’m following God” or “As the Spirit moves me” etc. I know for people outside of the evangelical Christian community, this can unfortunately conjure up images that resemble Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. For me, there isn’t an actual voice. I’d describe it as an inexplicable strong feeling that there isn’t a logical reason for why it got there. Perhaps many non-believers have this and chalk it up to the universe, intuition, etc.

I think a lot of people have this “voice” inside of them. Having the courage to ask for this voice to speak to you, listen for this voice (not let it get drowned out by everything else going on), and then actually follow it is how you can have God lead your life. The two things the I pray for more than anything else for me is: 1) For God’s light to shine through me so that others can see it and 2) For God to lead me to where I’m supposed to be. From my experience, these two prayers, if you have the courage to follow, will lead you to places that you’d never expect. I certainly never expected to be lead to the Czech Republic in the summer of 2011. Let me explain.

I was a fairly new Christian attending Christ Community Church in St. Charles IL. In April 2010, I was flying to Austin to go to Dell headquarters on a company business trip. Leading up to the trip, I had God talking to me (aka an inexplicable strong feeling) that I should talk to the people who sit by me on the plane. I had this pretty strongly for the week or so leading up to the trip. So, as I’m on the plane, about 30 minutes into the flight, I start talking to the man sitting in my area. He was flying to Austin TX, from Romania, and this was his last leg of the trip. He’s an entrepreneur, in his late 20’s. We spoke about life in America, and I was very interested to hear his perspective about life under communism, even though it crumbled before he came of age. Here’s something mind blowing to those of us in the west. Under communism in Romania, youths would be preparing for a test they took (I think when they were 15 or so). This test would essentially determine the course of their entire life – where the government placed them to live, work, etc. Absolutely mind blowing that a test when you are 15 would set the course of your entire life like this (and it makes the SAT/ACT tests look completely unimportant by comparison).Thank God that the experiment into communism failed and that the people of Eastern Europe now have liberty.

The conversation then turned to faith/religion. The man’s name was, ironically enough, Christian. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian. Religion as a whole didn’t have a good name in Romania. After communism crumbled, all large institutions got a bad name because of the fear/concern of centralized power and large scale institutions. Also amazing to me was that Christian shared with me that he believed that believe in God had actually gone down since communism lifted. When communism was in place, the people needed religion, even with fear of imprisonment, etc. to keep them sane in such a society. However, as communism lifted, the reasons for belief seemed to have lifted as well.

All on this trip (I believe it was about 4 days), God was speaking to me again. I needed to go to Eastern Europe and spread the gospel. It was a bit mind blowing to be coming to this realization, when I had only been a believer myself for a year. In reality, who better to understand where a non-believer is coming from than someone who recently didn’t believe?

Part II in a future update.