Some
of the more amazing stories of God's hand at work at DHM are contained in a
category we call hospitality and
discipleship. For several years now,
we've talked about Desired Haven as an actual place, but who could guess He
would use friends to provide a Narnia-like home where hands-on ministry fit
neatly alongside the perfect place for Randy to write. Here's how Randy wrote about it in the November, 2012 Our Daily Bread:
"After 10 years of renting in a charming location, we discovered that our landlord suddenly needed to sell the house. I asked God to change the circumstances and make it possible for my wife and me to stay in this place we??d made home, where we??d watched our children grow up. But God said no.
When it comes to my needs, I worry that I??m asking for the wrong thing or that I??m not worthy of the request I??m making. But God??s no doesn??t need to shake our faith when we??re grounded??surrounded I like to say??in His love. In Ephesians 3, Paul understood that those who know the love of Christ intimately (vv.16-17) can trust God to have a loving reason for saying no.
Shortly after hearing "no? from God about my request, friends from church offered to rent us a home they were vacating. Our new location??with new appliances, new plumbing, new electrical wiring, and an extra bedroom??sits on the ocean, an idyllic scene of ships, sails, and sounds that daily remind us that God is bigger than any issue we face. Our loving Father used loving friends to give more than we asked.
Whether God gives us more than we imagined or far less than we desired, we can trust that His plans are much better than ours."
And, in one of God's delightful twists, the
home brought with it its own small group ?a group that gives as much love and affection and service as it receives. The family who owns the home---and who invited us to live there long term---had already started a life community group (small group) as part of our common church home. As members of that group, Cheryl attended leadership training and we inherited leadership of the group from our friends and fellow church members. The group, which now numbers well over 20, includes mostly twenty and thirty-somethings to go with four or five of us older than that. Food and fellowship built the bonds of affection that soon gave way to acts of service as generous as packing/moving help, celebrations of births and marriages, being present and serving during times of loss, as well as ministering to families in the group facing serious surgeries for newborns. Determined to be more than social led us to serve each other, and serving each other led us to wanting to know how God would have us do these things, which led us to study books like Tim Keller's The Prodigal God, and the life/group-changing book A Life Together by pastor and Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Even before Bonhoeffer's study, the group was reaching out beyond its' ministry to each other, involved in ministries as diverse as reaching out to women working in "men's clubs" and working with those seeking to address slavery's insidious inroads into this area. In short, we were not only loving and teaching these group members, but being loved and served by them---while learning as much from them and their hunger to matter as they were learning from us. What a gift God gave us as we pressed ahead with his other calls on our life and ministry.
