I came back and I told my boss, I understand the situation we’re in, and I’m willing to work for this department if you’ll hire me. So they hired me for this position that I was not trained for. I didn’t have expertise in it, but I had peace again. But then again, that same boss pulled me into his office, and he said, “This position is not secure. We are probably going to have to let you go again.” So that time I went home and I told my wife, “Here we are at the beginning of another six months perhaps.”

This time I told my wife, “I think I’m going to get let go again.” And then we just laughed and we said, “Okay, God, obviously we can’t take care of ourselves. You’re just going to have to take care of us.” And we meant it like I meant it, God, you’ll just have to do it. I gave up on this stranglehold that I had on security and on my life. I gave up and gave it to God.

I think it was that very night I finally told my wife this secret that I’d not told anybody. I told her, “I think I was called to ministry this day back in 2011 but was too afraid to do it because I was too afraid to trust God for provision.” But now here we are, we have to trust God for provision in the secure route that I took. And so I said, “Maybe it’s time to pray about me going into ministry?”

Right then my church wanted to hire a young adult pastor, so I told my pastor, “Hey, I’d like to do it if you want me to.” So he said, “We can pay you X amount.” It was basically a third of what I would need to cover our monthly bills. So I was just going to go raise the rest through support.

So I went to my boss at the job where my job was not secure and by that time, it was actually a new boss. I told her, “I feel like I’m called to go into ministry. I don’t know what that means, but I believe that means I need to put in my two weeks’ notice and go into ministry.” Right there in the office, she cried, and she asked me, “Would you consider doing this job part-time?”

I’ll tell you, I did not pray about it for one second. I just said, “Okay, that sounds great.” I don’t know if that was obedience or disobedience, but when I think back on my story, I realize the first time I was called into ministry, I just said, “No.” The second time I was called to the ministry, I said, sort of “Yes, I’ll do it part time.”

Then we came into a really dark time. We had a miscarriage in 2017 which was hard. That’s when my wife really had a serious bottom out into dark thoughts. She went to a church in DFW, and that night, the pastors stood up and said, some of you here are seeking more of the Holy Spirit, so you’re seeking more with Him, a deeper encounter. You’re on the right track. Keep pressing in. And then they had their ministry team stand up around, the outside of the congregation, and Tina, my wife, looked at all of them, and she just thought, nothing against them, but she said, I don’t want any of them to pray for me. And then she randomly, if you will, spotted just some random lady and said, I want her to pray for me.

She didn’t tell this to anybody, just to God and then she bowed her head and started praying. Then a friend of ours came up to her and said, “I have a friend who I would like to pray for you.” And of course, it’s that woman. So she started to pray for my wife, and she said, “I just keep hearing the word new car, new car. Did you just get a new car?” And my wife’s like, “No, we’ve never had a new car.” And she asked, “Do you need a new car?” And my wife’s like, “No, we have working cars. Everything’s fine about that.”

We know that sometimes God speaks through symbols, and one of these symbols is cars, new cars symbolizing new ministry. So we felt like God was saying, “Keep your eyes open for a new ministry that I knew I was already in part-time, vocational ministry.” I suspected that I was called to more than that, and so now we have our eyes open, a new car, and a new ministry. New car new ministry, right? That’s what’s in our minds.

We realized that we had some, automatic No’s that we were bringing to God, maybe not her as much, but definitely me. I had automatic No’s. I was praying things like, “God, I’ll go anywhere. Send me anywhere you want. I’ll do anything for you. But no, I can’t leave my town. I can’t leave my friends, I can’t leave my stuff, and I think it was I can’t leave my comfort.” I wasn’t putting it in those words, but that’s what it was.

So we put our kids to bed this one night in April. It was a Friday night. We put our kids to bed, and we sat on the living room floor, and we just cried before God, and we said, “God, we’re so I’m sorry. I have been wanting more from you, but I’ve been saying no before you even give me an instruction.” We repented. “God, I will leave my town, if that’s what you say, I will leave my friends, if that’s what you say, I’ll leave this whole country. If that’s what you say, I’ll leave the comfort of this life, we will do it. We’re not saying No anymore.”

We repented in tears, and that night, we slept like babies, and the next day, I won a $30,000 new car. The night that we say, “God if you say go, we will go.” The day after that we won a $30,000 new car. What does that even mean? Surely, that’s a hoax, right? Surely, there’s a catch, right? I donated $4 to some ministry, and they entered my name in a raffle, and out of the entire country, I won the car.

So we’re driving now in our old car to the dealership to pick out whatever car we want. And on the way there, we could tell God was saying, “Yes, you will leave your town. You will leave your friends. You will leave your stuff. You’ll leave your comforts. You did not know that this car was coming, but here it is. Trust me, follow me, and I will take care of you.”

I actually felt sad when I would listen to missionary testimonies of people who left everything to go do what God was saying. I felt sad because I knew that I could not do that until that day. Then I knew. A switch had been flipped. Then I knew I could do anything. I could go anywhere. So God was very clear that we needed to leave our town, but he didn’t tell us where we needed to go, and we really just wanted to be led by God in everything.

As we were praying, the only thing we kept getting was Proverbs 16:9 “Man makes his plans, but the Lord establishes his steps.” So we made a very logical plan. We moved to a very near city, and I got hired at a church to be the part-time church planting resident, where they would train me and equip me, and then send me out with several people to start a new church, and then the other part of my full-time job would be to start their youth group.

So we go and we’re there at that church. It’s great. I learned so much at that church, and I started to challenge myself. I would set for myself these 30-day challenges, 30 days where I share the gospel with at least one person every single day. I cannot go to bed until I do it. And yes, I had to get up out of bed a couple times and rush to Walmart because I had forgotten.

But one of those times I went to Walmart, and on the cereal aisle, I came across a guy, and I just felt, God said, “Buy his groceries.” Now I’ve shared the gospel by now with lots and lots and lots of people. I’ve never thought to buy a guy’s groceries so I just told him, “Just so you know, no matter what happens in this conversation, I want to buy your groceries tonight.” And he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost, but I told him, “I want to pray for healing tonight. Do you need healing?”

He said he’d been in the hospital, actually for 100 days because he had been in a terrible car accident, and his foot was still in really bad shape, and he was actually in a lot of pain. So that’s when I assured him, no matter what happens, “I’m buying your groceries, so I’m gonna pray for your foot, but just be honest with me, don’t pretend like it’s healed. So I’ll buy your groceries. I’m buying groceries no matter what happens.”

So I got down on the ground and I prayed for his foot, and then I stood up, and he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost again. And he starts stomping his foot and backing away from me, saying, “How did you do that? How did you do that?” And I’m, going toward him like we’re following each other around. I’m like, “How did I do what? What happened? I don’t know what happened.” He’s like, “I feel tingles. My my, there’s no pain.” He starts, like, stomping his foot on the ground and twisting it around. And he’s like, “This is amazing.”

So I got to share with him about the love of Jesus, the power of Jesus. He was a believer already, but he said he’s a single grandpa, which means he was raising his two teenage granddaughters by himself. I said, “Man, let’s, let’s just go all out.” I was beside myself. I was like, “Get whatever you want.” And we’re just talking and exhorting each other in the Lord and encouraging each other. It was awesome!

We get up to the register at the end, and we’re just kind of standing there, just a little still in shock and just really just over the moon about what’s happening. And he says, “I just can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. He said I was so scared to ask somebody to buy my groceries tonight because I thought that they would think, well, he can’t take care of his granddaughters. And they’re going to call CPS and they’re going to come take them away. So I was terrified to come here and ask somebody to buy my groceries.”

I was like, “Wait a minute. You didn’t ask me to buy your groceries. I just told you I was going to.” Then he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost again, just like at the beginning, he said, “I know I’ve been in the hospital 100 days. I haven’t worked in 100 days. My granddaughters have been living with the neighbors for 100 days. I came here tonight with no money, and I just thought, maybe if I just get the basics, maybe somebody at the cash register will maybe they’ll let me take it. Maybe if I just get the basics somebody will let me go, and I’m just praying to God, is there any way I could get these groceries tonight? And now we’re standing there with a mound of groceries in the basket.”

I just heard God saying, “He didn’t even have to ask. He just asked me.” I felt like God was telling me, “I sent you because you were out here looking for somebody to minister to, and one of my children was out here needing somebody to minister to him. So I sent you.” God knows, I’ve always wondered. I’ve heard these stories about somebody who’s coming down to the line and they need provision. I’ve always feared that God wouldn’t come through for me, but, even more than that, I always thought, could I be the person who hears God say, write that check, or hears God say, go to that person and bring them this food? And I always thought, God, I wanted, I just want to be there when you’re doing something.

I felt like the Lord was saying, “I’m here, and you’re here because you’re ready and you’re listening. And if I will do this for him, how much more will I do it for you? Are you any different than him? He’s one of my children, and he needed me, so I sent you, and when you need me, I will send somebody for you. Just trust me. Just go and keep listening, and I’ll send somebody when you need him.”

I told somebody about that night, and that the groceries cost $250 and when I was telling the story, I was still beside myself. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been able to tell this story without crying just like this. And I told it to somebody, and they, you know, made a joke like oof, $250. I thought, what I would have paid, you cannot buy being there with God. I would spend anything for that. When I thought that in my heart, I was like, wait a minute, what am I saying? I’m saying I would spend any amount of money to be there when God’s moving.

So the Lord’s doing all this in my life. I’m working at this church, and God’s doing just deep work of preparation in me. And then we got really, really bad news in September of 2020, I was diagnosed with cancer. I was coming out of sedation for a procedure that they were doing, and as I was coming out of it, I was getting my mind back together. There, my wife is in the room, and the doctor’s in the room, and they don’t look like they’ve got good news for me. My wife had already been told, and then the doctor told me that I had cancer and that it was the second biggest killer, actually, of all the cancers. It was in my large intestine and so they pulled no punches. They wanted to make sure that I did not have too rosy of a view of what was going on. So they told me this news and made sure that I understood this was a serious deal. While she was talking, I heard the Holy Spirit speaking inside me, and He said, “Dustin, you have one opportunity for a first response to this news, and I want you to praise me.”

I just felt the tenderness of God that didn’t feel insane. It felt amazing. I felt like He was telling me, “You’ve always wondered what kind of Christian you were. I’ve done work in your life. I have changed many things in you, and now you’re going to get to see everything that I’ve done in you.” I just felt when I heard the voice of God, I had the grace to do it. So as soon as they left the room, I turned to my wife, and said, “I heard from God we need to worship God right now.”

I grabbed my Bible. I wish I could remember the psalm that we were in. It might have been 54 but we read the Psalm, and then we just praised God, and we meant it, and we didn’t thank God for cancer. We weren’t trying to, like, manipulate this bad thing into a good thing. It was, here’s a bad thing and you have a chance now to worship and praise Me amid a bad thing. In the eternal state, after all, sickness and all disease is done away with. You’ll never get a chance to praise Me amid something really difficult.

So we praised Him and we worshiped Him, and that set the tone for the rest of the cancer journey. It was eight months between the surgeries, surgery, recovery, and then a long, miserable chemo regimen. So the cancer experience was a testing ground where God tested me so that I could see and rejoice in something that He had done in me. I got to see that even in the face of that, I was not afraid.

Throughout my story, God had been letting me take these baby steps of trusting Him, and I was at a point at the cancer spot, where I was really trusting Him. After that, there came a testing of my trust in His provision. I ended up having to leave the church where I had been hired full-time. I had a meeting set with the pastor of a church called Wellspring. I told him, I promise when I set this meeting with you, I had a plan. But as of yesterday, I found out that I can’t plant the church with my previous church, so I actually have no plan now.

On the spot, he offered me a part-time church planting residency. Just offered me the job, and I thought that was pretty cool, but I wanted to pray about it. At the same time, another friend who pastored a church in South Fort Worth essentially offered me the full-time lead pastor position at that church. So here I have a part-time church planter position. That means I don’t get all the money per month that I need to pay the bills and the plan is to somehow start a church from scratch, and that will pay the bills. So that option didn’t look great. The other one was, to go right now and become a lead pastor.

I was going to go with the lead pastor option, but I had a friend, my best friend, who’s the worship pastor of Wellspring. He encouraged me to seek prophetic counsel, really, to just seek the Lord about it. Just take the options to the Lord, and just let Him speak. So I did. I felt great about the idea. I called a fellow that I knew to be very prophetic, who I knew would not pull any punches with me, and I just told him what was going on. He said, “Dustin, you cannot take another man’s sheep, pastor the people where you are and that will become your church.” And I said to him on the phone that day, “I think that this is the voice of God right now, I’m going to do this. I do not want my story to be and Dustin always did the easiest thing.”

So this word I took as prophetic for myself, that is not saying a single thing about whether it’s right or wrong for somebody else to go take over another person’s church. But I knew at that moment, for me, God was saying you cannot take another man’s sheep, pastor the people where you are and they will become your church. So I took that to mean take this pastor position, this part-time, pastor position at Wellspring, and just pastor the people there, some of them will voluntarily leave with the blessing of the elders of the church, and that will become my church. So I went back to Wellspring, and I said, “Yes, I’ll be a part-time pastor here, and I’ll be a church planter.”

During the cancer journey, we had a lot of amazing people around us, and they were just donating to us to pay all these bills. We had good insurance…I guess it was good. We had bills to pay, but it wasn’t hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were paying insurance bills, and people were donating. This was during 2020, so the government gave a lot of people a lot of help money, and they did that for us. I guess because I don’t know how it happened, but I guess because of all the money we paid in medical bills, we got this enormous tax refund that year, and this was the most money that we’ve ever had at any time in my life, by, like a lot, you know, now that’s relative, but it was the most money that we’d ever had.

I was taking a part-time job that was not given us nearly enough to pay the monthly bills. And so I found myself praying one day, “God, would you bring another part-time job so that we can spend this money on the kingdom rather than living off of it?” And the Lord, I believe the Lord, said, “I want you to spend that money on the kingdom, and then I’ll provide for you.” And so I went to my wife, and I said, “I think God is saying we’re supposed to give away all of this money, and then He will provide for us.”

My wife, who has much greater faith than I do when it comes to finances, said, “That absolutely sounds like the Lord, let’s do it.” And that’s a complete paradigm shift for me. Instead of walking by a person and hoping they don’t ask me for money, I’m looking around saying, who’s it going to be? Who needs this? Who am I going to give this to?

I do feel like sharing one amount for this one time. It was right at the very beginning, so I can’t remember what we gave to but in one week, we gave away $2,500 and the next week we got a check in the mail for $2,700 and I just…I couldn’t believe it. I took a picture of the check. I could not believe that this had happened. It was some it was some corporation. I don’t know what it was, but it was real money, and it was for us. And I told my wife, “We’re not gonna run out at this rate. We’re gonna have to be more aggressive with how we give.”

The exact same thing happened with a lesser amount, the next month, we gave an amount, and then we got a check for more than what we had given. And I just thought, What? What are you doing? God? Here’s what I knew, this had to be top secret, nobody knew what we were doing, and I didn’t know what was going to happen.

During this time, I was in the stage of church planting, which was the fundraising stage. So I had a bunch of meetings set with other churches where I was going to go and ask for funds to start this new venture. So I had a meeting with one church, and I asked, and they said no. And then I had a meeting with another church. I asked, and they said no. And I started to get conflicted. I started to think, Well, I’m not telling anybody about this crazy, you know, generosity thing God’s got us in, and I’m definitely not supposed to ask people for money personally. And I just started to think, maybe I’m not supposed to ask for any money, even the funding for the church? I didn’t feel like that was a direct command of God, but I just started to feel convicted about it.

So the months start ticking by, and during this time, I’m going out and I’m doing evangelism. In my first week on the job at Wellspring, at least one person a day, every day, for my first week, prayed to give their life to Jesus. I’d never even seen that before. Really, I don’t think, and now here it happened every day, except for the last day, the seventh day, that was two people. And I’m doing calculations this whole time I think we’ve got about two months left, and then the month goes by, we give away a crazy amount, and it looks like we have three months left. And then another month goes by, we give away a crazy amount, and, oh, look, it still looks like we have three months left. Like what is happening right now?

I have this journal entry from that time that I thought would be good to read. “Right now I make half as much as I need per month to make ends meet. It’s been that way since June, We started out with the largest surplus we’ve ever had. It came mostly from COVID stimulus checks from the government. I felt confident that God would bring along a job or enough funding before we ran out of money. So one day, I was praying, God please send me provision now so that we can spend this money on the kingdom instead of living on it. Then I felt like God said, “Why don’t you spend that money on the kingdom first, and then I’ll provide for you.” It was a revolutionary idea for me. Since then, we’ve been looking for reasons to give away money.

We’ve given away thousands of dollars over the last few months, and now we’re down to one month’s worth of money, so God will have to come through soon. We’re praying that we will be faithful and fearless as we continue seeking first the Kingdom. I go back and forth on faith that God will actually fill in all our missing pieces, but the Scripture seems to say that He will if we run out and we overdraft or we have to go into debt or something. I’m not sure what that will mean for us. I’m not really thinking about it too much for now, we are trying to spend reasonably seek Kingdom opportunities to give and spend our best time praying for the Kingdom while doing Kingdom ministry.

I guess we’re just doing our best to seek the Kingdom. It definitely feels like I’m personally in a season of growth. If God comes through in an unmistakable way, I think it could set me on a crazy path of more faithful and powerful ministry. I wonder what I would be like if I truly believed that God would always come through financially for any Kingdom endeavor we tried.

The very next page of the journal reads, “Yesterday, the pastor of Wellspring told me that he was leaving, and he asked me if I wanted to become the lead pastor.”

He asked me in September, and the pastor search lasted three months. We had one month’s worth of money left, and we still could not tell a soul what we were doing. And for those three months, we kept giving, and we kept seeing people getting saved, and one month went and another month went. And of course, we just didn’t run out. And we finally ran out. We finally were done at the beginning of January, and that was the first month that I got a paycheck as the lead pastor of Wellspring, God took us all the way to the line.

I always wondered if I could go all the way to the line with Him. I always thought, God I can trust you for big things. But what about for those moments in between each day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, of slowly running out before I come to the line. Could I survive that? Or would I just freak out? Would I just give in and be faithless and leap at a second job or leap at some opportunity to logically make ends meet?

But we had a word from God. We had several words from God. They were confirmed by other people, and we had the grace that was on those words to just trust Him. And so in the end, He took us all the way to the line, and it wasn’t scary, or at least it wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be. It was so much more fun than I thought it was going to be. And I have it in here. “God, if you come through, does that mean you’re always going to come through?”

I can’t believe how much it has meant just to go back through the story. And see just how faithful He was. I said, “No,” the first time.

I just have been blown away at how faithful He’s been. I said no the first time, and then I took a very scared baby step the second time, and then I took a semi-scared bigger step the third time. And then when He asked me to do something that was unthinkable before, He gave me the grace to do it, I just cannot believe how good He is.