In February of 2011 I was in my 25th year of pastoring churches.  My ministries had been stable with many God moments and fruitful work for God's Kingdom along with some work and recognition within my denomination (United Methodist). Yet for several years God had made me aware there was something still lacking both in ministry and my life.  

     In 2009, as I was preparing to move to a different appointment and church, God began placing on my heart two primary emphases: 1) Be more Prayer Dependent, 2) Strive for Excellence.  As I have gone back to my sermons at that time, my description of "Striving for Excellence" was John Wesley's call for people to "strive to go onto perfection."  I had been introduced to Entire Sanctification in seminary and felt like I had an understanding of it, however I had never experienced anything I identified with Entire Sanctification and knew my understanding was quite rudimentary.  Still, striving to do the best I could for God had been what I believed was to be my goal and intention.  I felt confident this was a lofty intention and was the extent of what John Wesley meant by "going onto perfection."  I just needed to focus on doing the best I could and trust more fully on God's answering prayers and God's direction through answered prayer.  So I entered my new appointment with these two emphases for myself and the church I was serving.

     Then in February of 2011 God did something in me that I didn't know I needed, in order to fully answer my prayer and desire.  My life would change in a similar manner to when I first started my life with Christ as an 8th grader at a Lay Witness Mission.  It was at that Lay Witness Weekend, in the basement of the parsonage, my house, I asked Christ into my life in response to promptings from an adult lay witness team member.  After that I noticed changes in my desire to read the Bible and my interest in living for God.  There is no question that was the beginning of my relationship with Christ.  Since that time I had many workings of grace by God in my life.  But now, a few days before Valentines Day my life would again change in a drastic way.

     I was flipping through channels on the TV, Friday night, February 11, 2011 in the basement of our home in Marshall, MN. I came to the movie Apollo 13, the true story of the ill-fated space craft headed for the moon that has an explosion and ends up scrambling just to get the crew to earth safely without landing on the moon as was intended.  Tom Hanks plays the role of Jim Lovell, the commander of the mission.  I had seen it several times so I stopped to watch it again.

     A scene in the movie had always intrigued me but I wasn't sure why.  I watched the scene again that night without any more insight. It is the scene when Jim Lovell day dreams about landing and walking on the moon which he had dreamed about for a long time.  The other astronauts with him are oohing and aahing over the landing site and how close they were. Lovell pictures himself in full space garb on the moon scooping up moon dust while inspiring music plays in the background. But as he surveys the moon he looks over his shoulder and the earth comes into view.  It is a stark contrast to the drab moon that has little color; the earth is beautiful.  It is colored with deep blues, whites, and tans.  Lovell snaps out of his day dream and says in an authoritative voice, "Men, what are your intentions?  Mine is to go home."  They immediately snap out of their dreaming and begin to work on how to get back to earth.  The scene again felt significant but no new insight came to me.

     The next morning, I got up and opened my Bible to do my daily Bible reading.  I was reading the 3rd chapter of the book of Colossians.  It read, "If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God."  I stopped.  Immediately God brought back to my mind the scene in the movie from the night before.  I remembered clearly the stark contrast between the colorless moon dust that had been so important to touch and the exquisitely beautiful and colorful earth that was the astronauts' real home.  God impressed on me these words, "Wes, you have been focused on and chasing moon dust, the things of earth: honor, money, comfort, pleasure; but your real home is so much more beautiful than those temporary and perishable things.  Your real home and what you need to be focused on are things of heaven and the things that will last for all eternity, 'You have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, ....  Set your mind on things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.'"

     Everything changed in my life.  Significantly at first but not nearly as completely as God was going to make it.  I knew God had done something more than significant in me.  I wondered, is this the entire sanctification that I had heard about at seminary, wondered about from time to time, even preached a series of messages on just three years before yet all the while, through twenty five years of ministry still never felt sure about?  Not only had I been uncertain about experiencing it, but I even felt unsure about grasping what it fully was.  I knew what happened was significant.  I changed what I was to preach that next Sunday and talked about this experience.

     I noticed my attitudes and even desires changing.  I began wanting to listen to Christian Worship music which I had seldom sought out since my college years.  My conscious desire to experience more of the Holy Spirit's power drastically increased.  My desire to resist habits that were not spiritually enhancing were noticeably stronger than before.  My consistency in trying to keep a daily Bible reading and journaling time shot significantly up.  That fall, during a personal retreat for sermon planning and spiritual growth, God brought my thoughts back to this experience in February.  I felt a strong confirmation and assurance that it indeed was God's work of sanctification in my heart and life.  I remember feeling such amazing joy and broke down crying and worshipping God that God had so greatly blessed me.  But God had so many bigger things for me to come. 

     As I lived in this changed and deeper relationship with God I still found myself struggling with some of the same old "baggage", or habits and temptations.  I felt clearly closer to the Lord yet I never sought to understand more fully what God had done in my life that February.  No one in my current relationships spoke of Entire Sanctification or even about a deeper walk with Christ.  Pastors as well as denominational leaders were most concerned about bearing fruit in the congregation. Often fruit was more clearly talked about as numbers of people in worship, in small groups, in mission projects, etc...  With no one to help me unpack what I had experienced I moved on from the experience and threw myself into the job of pastor, preacher, and congregational leader.  

     God got my attention in March, 2012.  My youngest son, Than, short for Nathaniel, was a junior at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul.  On a Wednesday night after returning from a full evening at the church during Lent, my wife, Pam and I listened to a message on our answering machine.  It was from Than's roomate telling us they had taken Than by ambulance to the hospital because he had become terribly sick and they couldn't get him into the car to get him to the emergency room.  He said Than's RA was with him at the hospital and would call us when they got more information.  It wasn't long when the RA called us back.  After several calls back and forth the RA told us they think it is pancreatitis and will probably keep him at the hospital overnight.

     When Pam and I arrived at the hospital the next morning we found they had him in ICU.  Over the next several days his conditioned kept getting worse.  The doctors and nurses were having a hard time understanding why they were losing control over his condition.  They diagnosed him with severe acute pancreatitis but could find no primary cause for his condition and for an otherwise healthy 21 year old having his organs begin to shut down.  We could hear and see the panic in the doctors and nurses.  I began to pray to God with a more desperate petition.  I claimed God's healing power and called on the Holy Spirit to grant full, complete, miraculous healing on Than.  I stepped out in faith and rejoiced that God would heal Than fully.

     Early the next morning God woke me up.  I began to pray again to the Lord for Than's healing but this time I sensed God speaking back to me.  God asked me, "Wes, what if I don't heal Than?  What if Than dies?  Will you still praise me, trust me, and serve me?"  Then God brought to my mind the story of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice Isaac his son.  I felt God was calling me to make a similar acknowledgement of faith as Abraham had.  I felt that God wanted me to be willing to surrender my son, and even my whole family, into God's hands.  My faith and relationship with God could not be based upon what God called me to do and/or surrender on earth.  Did I trust God completely, and live completely for God's purposes or not?  My responses through tears was, "Yes Lord, I will praise you and trust you even if Than doesn't live."

     There were many more ups and downs in Than's condition but after 3 months in two different hospitals and an extremely risky and exhausting surgery God's miracle of healing came about in Than's life.  The doctors waited as long as they possibly could before performing surgery to take out dead and infected tissue in Than's abdomen because of their fear of spreading the infection inside of him requiring more surgeries.  But God healed Than through that one, long, exhausting surgery never needing another.  Than would be diabetic, the only question was whether it would be considered type 1 or 2.  Than left the hospital and has never had to take insulin again.  He has no signs of diabetes.  He has to remain on a low fat diet.  When he doesn't the pancreatic pain returns but otherwise has been completely healed.  God used Than's experience not only to deepen his faith and dependence on God but mine as well.  God showed me that sanctification means surrendering all to the Lord's will and giving testimony to God's goodness.

     But God still had much more for me to learn about living in sanctification.  Even after feeling God's assurance of experiencing God's completing work of Sanctifying Grace and experiencing the surrendering of my son to God's will I did not grasp fully what God made available to me.  It can be truthfully stated that I will never grasp God's full grace until glorification and even then I'm sure there will need to be growth in experience and understanding, yet I was not living in the power of Full Sanctifying Grace because I didn't know to seek it.  I recognized my need to depend on the power of the Holy Spirit in my life but through all my efforts of being a good pastor and a good man of God I still didn't experience God's anointing power or confirming peace to the extent I expected.  Then on August 26, 2014, while doing my morning devotions I read 1 Kings 22.  

     As I look back on my devotional journal I see that my devotions had again become quite sporadic.  I only had 6 days of devotions in the previous month, but that was about to change.  When I look at the journal entry for August 26, 2014 it is rather benign.  I wrote on 1 Kings 22:5 "First seek the counsel of the Lord".  I wrote about human counsel can lead me astray but I asked God to give me clear counsel.  That is what I wrote but what I remember was much more dramatic.  I remember deflecting what I felt in my spirit.  God challenged me to leave ministry and the church.  I sensed God telling me that God had put a deceiving spirit within our denomination just as the text indicated God put a deceiving spirit among the prophets to get King Ahab to go to battle and be killed.  I had my concerns about the direction of the denomination but the clarity of this word was concerning to me.  I needed to give it a bit of time to understand what my response needed to be.  So for several weeks I kept praying about this seemingly prophetic word and shared it with my wife, Pam.  After prayer and on going petition to the Lord for clarity it became clear to us that we needed to leave the ministry and the denomination.  We began to seek how to go about leaving and what we were to leave to.  For a time I believed God may be calling me completely out of the ministry.  I even began contemplating other occupations.  We began looking at other denominations that God might be leading us into.  It was a time of seeking, searching, and waiting on the Lord to reveal what the next corner would be.  

     Finally, near the end of October I began reading again Watchman Nee's book titled, "The Normal Christian Life".  It had been over 30 years since I first read it.  At the same time God led me to read the book of Romans for daily devotions, partly because Nee works through Romans in the book.  God started to show me the next corner in the journey God had for me and it fully took me by surprise.  Somewhere during the end of October and the first part of November God clearly impressed on me that I was to leave the local church ministry completely and that God wanted me to start a ministry on Entire Sanctification and Christian Perfection.  At first I realized how opposite to my personality this would be.  I always kept life fairly safe.  I always appreciated being in an occupation that had great job security and a sure future.  Financially we would be taken care of and I realized I would never make a good entrepreneur, trying new things on my own. To start a ministry on my own would never be a choice I would make.  I never felt secure in myself to do that.  Risk was never a desire or friend of mine.  But I became clear this was truly God's choice and not mine.  As Pam and I prayed about it together as well as separately we both felt confirmed this was the corner God was taking us around.

     As I reflect back I realize this was my consecration moment.  I had already experienced God's work in me and a beginning recognition of my need to live wholly for the Lord but now the surrender of my future into God's hands was my laying myself on the altar to the Lord.  Now I began traveling down a path that I saw very little ahead but only felt the hand of the Holy Spirit gripping mine and taking me forward.  This is what a sanctified life feels and looks like.  We are blind and totally dependent. We trust without taking control of the direction or the speed of the journey. Oh what a freedom!  Oh what a joy!  Oh how frightening and then immediately thrilling the journey with the Spirit of God becomes when God is in complete control.

     So once the joy of the Lord's work has passed what is next?  As I walked ahead into a new unknown I felt a new confidence and assurance that not only was I on the right path but I was in the right place.  Yet life wasn't riding off into the sunset.  I knew it wouldn't be so.  I was seeking to keep listening to hear and follow God's leading forward in this life of surrender.

(continuing to be written)