Discontentment and Call to Missions

At that point I was thinking, Okay, I’m working a job, I’ve got my wife, a couple young kids, and I’m attending church, this does not feel like IT. This sort of expectation of the reality that I’m good with God if I go to church, I tithe, I volunteer. I disciple someone, I read my Bible, I pray. I was doing all that, and I didn’t feel right with God, and I didn’t feel like I was loving him. I felt like there were a lot of things wrong in my life.

I started to think, Okay, since my time living overseas in Turkey, I’ve always wanted to live overseas. I’ve always wanted to do missions. I remember hearing, as a young Christian, these mission calls, “Are you willing to go to the nations? Are you willing to die for Christ? Are you willing to suffer, to go to the hard places?”

You may have heard this story about how God sent us on this mission, the Great Commission 2000 years ago, and we’re not even close to completing it. I started to think maybe the reason why I’m discontent in my church life is because I’m not called here. I’m called to go do missions. If I go do missions, then, all this stuff that I’m feeling, this tension I’m feeling, will will be resolved.

And though I felt inside of myself this frustration and this deep desire to go to the nations, I knew that I needed to hear God, and I knew I needed to follow God. So when I met my wife about a month into dating, I asked her, “Are you willing to go to the Middle East with me? If God calls us into missions, are you willing to go?” She said, “I’m willing to go if God calls us to go.”

We got married in 2011 and it was in the summer of 2016 that the Lord said, it was time to get ready to do missions. We had an opportunity to travel with my job to Europe. And the Lord had said something to us as we prayed about YWAM, he had said something about Norway. We had made a connection with a friend who was a missionary with YWAM in Norway.

Fundraising and Initial Challenges in Norway

We got into a missions development group to help us learn how to be a missionary and learn how to take those steps. There were a lot of different things we worked through, but one of the key ones was fundraising. And we started to pray and seek the Lord about, okay, what are you calling us to do, and how do we fundraise for this?

In the spring of 2017, we started fundraising. I remember thinking, you know, this is make or break how are we going to do this? I ended up killing it, I loved it. I love working with people and talking to people. I love interacting with a new person every day. And what we were doing was going around and sharing vision, sharing this exciting vision of going to the nations, impacting lost people.

We felt like he told us to do media as a key part of our mission work. And so we shared this vision of using media to reach young people and train them and get them into missions, and we’re very excited. This season of meeting with people and talking about what God envisioned us to do was incredible. I mean, it was just powerful. They were excited. People are impressed when you’re saying, “I’m taking my family. At that point, we had three kids moving overseas.”

It was about five months of fundraising and we got fully funded. We had signed up for a discipleship training school, which is the first thing you do when you join YWAM, which is how you get on staff. So we had our discipleship training school starting on this base in Norway.

In the fall of 2017, we got there and we jumped in. In my mind, there were just years and years of expectations built up around missions and living overseas. Additionally, we had a whole year of build-up with fundraising and the envisioning around it. We got there, and it was, just not what I was expecting.

We found ourselves immediately struggling as parents with our three young children, struggling to live in another country with language and culture barriers. Lots of paperwork, trying to get a driver’s license, trying to do all these things. It was challenging, but in the middle of it, it felt like what we were doing was almost like going backward in the development of our faith. There wasn’t stuff that was super challenging to us in the program.

There were good things about it, and there were things that God did in it. We were so excited to share the gospel. We were so excited to be impactful in missions and to be missionaries but we found that was not the focus of the program. It’s a missions training program.

Part of that has to do with the cultural climate in Norway. People are not, as you know, open to talking to strangers there. We found that it was just, I think, a weakness of the base at that time. I remember on our DTS, we had a lady come who was one of the key leaders in the Middle East, with YWAM in the Middle East. She came and she talked about God’s move in the Middle East, in the country she was in. People were coming to Christ.

They were using Facebook ads to reach people. Even in a closed nation, they were seeing new believers, young believers. I remember listening and thinking, that’s what I want to do, that’s where I want to go, that’s the kind of work I want to be a part of. But I remember saying, “Okay, Lord, do you want us to go? Should we go to this, this place in the Middle East?” I felt like the Lord said, No, what I have is actually better than that. What if you send people? What if you’re a part of seeing people go to these places? And I was like, not what I wanted to hear, but, you know, yes, yes, Lord, whatever you want to do.

So it was near the end of our DTS (Discipleship Training School), and I’m thinking, Okay, you’re not calling us to go to the Middle East. You’re calling us to send people, and you’re calling to do media. So I’m going to do that. I’m going to do that as well as I can. We finished DTS and had the rest of the summer as a break, and then starting in the fall, I was going to jump in and help build a media program, a recruiting program for this base in Norway.

Recruiting, Overwork, and Burnout

Our goal was to attract young people to our discipleship training school so that they would be sent to the nations so that they could become missionaries. It was essentially what God had told us to do, send people. We got some training on how to do that well using Facebook ads, videos, and a call team. Basically, we got the names of young people who were interested in missions, called them, and then tired to help them get to the school.

We were succeeding with the ads. We were getting names of young people to call, but we were struggling to find the people to call them. I was working hard to get the logistics set up, working hard on the ads, and then I was actually doing calls. Sometimes I would call people in the middle of the night because they’re in a different time zone. Maybe you’re recruiting people from the US, and you’re in Norway, and so their four o’clock, five o’clock time would be, you know, late in your evening.

I was working around the clock trying to call people who were showing interest. I spent several months doing that and got to the point, where I was getting burnt out. I was just getting worn out. I was tired, and I wanted so hard to make this work. I got to the point where it was just like my chest was tight. I’m struggling to show up and work. I’m stressed. It was overwhelming. My family wasn’t doing well on top of that, and I realized, oh my gosh, I need something to shift inside of me.

That summer, we went home, we reached our two-year point in Norway, and we went home to visit family. We knew that we could get a visa in Norway for four years. So we knew that Norway was not going to be our long-term destination. We started to realize that we needed to figure out where we would head next. We needed to figure out what we were doing.

Transition to Kansas City

When we came back to the US, we thought, okay, let’s go visit a couple different YWAM locations and just pray, ask the Lord if we’re supposed to go there. We went to YWAM in Denver, and we went to YWAM in Tyler, Texas. And kind of on a whim, we decided last minute to drive up to Kansas City. We have some friends there and there’s a YWAM base there.

We drove up to Kansas City and visited the base. That evening was relaxing and felt the Lord say to me, “I want you to move to Kansas City.” I was just very surprised by that. And then on top of that, he said, “I want you to move there in 2020 the next year.” I was just thinking, Man, I do not want to move back to the US. I don’t want to move to the US at all. I want to stay in the mission field.

We were nine months into this two to three-year-long project, and what I did when we were in Norway, was recruit. I was recruiting people and asking them to sign up for two years to really jump on board with us and make this vision happen. And now God was saying to me, “You’re moving next year.” It was very challenging. I did not want to do it, and we prayed about it. My wife and I felt very clear from the Lord that we were supposed to move to Kansas City the next year.

Right around this time, we found out my wife was pregnant, and she was struggling quite a bit with that. It was a challenge for our family. And we knew this baby was going to be born in the early months. I think his due date was early January of 2020.

So we were all of a sudden trying to figure out, how do we tell our team, how do we tell our supporters that we’re leaving. We got back to the base, and the first school that we were recruiting for was about to start. The school had to be canceled because we only had two students, and so all of this work that we put into recruiting, we thought we were going to see all this fruit. That it was going to be the biggest school they had ever seen.

We had to cancel the school and I feel like an idiot, and I’m about to tell everybody I’m leaving. We had just grown in our team from two or three the year before to now we have eight people and I’m about to peace out and leave. It’s going to look like it’s because I failed. I’m failing internally, in my own health, I’m burning out. And the school didn’t go well. It was really hard to go to the base leader and say, “Hey, I know we committed for four years, but we feel like the Lord’s telling us to leave early.” It’s not the conversation you want to have.

You’re telling people, “Hey, we’re following God.” But you know that it doesn’t look like that. It looks like you’re just doing what you need to do. As if you just don’t feel like being there anymore. It’s gotten challenging so you decided to leave. That’s what it felt like I was saying.

We got to January 2, 2020, and our son was born with a condition. And without surgeries, multiple surgeries, he was not going to be able to live at all. And so we did the first surgery the day after he was born and that went well. We met with the surgeon and he said, “What are you guys doing? Where are you guys at?” We told him, “We’re moving back to the US. The Lord told us to move back.”

He said, “You should figure out where you’re going to go, in the US. You need to find a surgeon that can do this. You want to be around that surgeon for the first 10 years of that kid’s life. You will need follow-up. You need multiple surgeries that are coming. If you’re not going to be here in Norway, you need to go there. We don’t want to schedule the next surgery. We want you to go there and figure that out.”

So we were overwhelmed and feeling like, we were in a crisis. Suddenly moving back to the US actually made a lot of sense. We started looking it up and realized that there’s a hospital in Kansas City that has a specialist for his condition 15 minutes from where the YWAM base is. All of a sudden it made a lot of sense to move to Kansas City. We felt, oh, man, maybe this is why you told us to move and why the timing was not what we expected. And so we ended up moving back to the US in February 2020.

We landed in Texas for a couple of weeks, and then we headed up to Kansas City. I remember leaving and starting our trek up to Kansas City and hearing then-President Trump say you can’t travel. We’re restricting travel. We are an hour on the road. We’re like, “Hey, we’re we are already headed there.” We already had a place to live. We landed in Kansas City in mid-March 2020, and the day that we got there, the lockdown started.

We actually felt like, you know what? This is challenging. My son needing surgery is challenging. COVID is challenging. Moving countries is challenging, but we felt in the middle of that maybe the most challenging thing we’d ever done a sense of this is where God wants us to be. He told us to come. In the most difficult season of my life, I felt like the Lord was there with us.

Learning to Receive God’s Love

In that season, I found myself sitting at home with my kids, who are a mess. They were a mess before we moved countries, and moving countries didn’t make it better. Made it worse. My marriage was in a difficult place. We were committed to each other, but struggling to figure out how to operate well together. For six months, I sat at home and talked to the Lord, and I started to realize that I was not living like I was a son. I was not living like I was loved.

It was deeply frustrating to me to not look like a missionary, to be living in the US felt to me like what we were doing was not missions. The reason I did so well fundraising is that I love the vision of being a missionary. I loved the idea of living overseas and doing hard things. Having been over there, I realized you can live a boring life as a missionary. Living overseas doesn’t make your life that much more interesting.

The same struggle that I felt in church in the US, I felt as a missionary in Norway. It started to highlight in me this realization that I cared what I looked like, to myself, and to others. That’s what I thought, God looked at when he looked at me, that what he saw was how much of a missionary I looked like. But here he’s telling me to do these things that don’t look that good from my vantage point, or other people’s.

I had a dear friend at that time tell me, “I think the assignment of God on your life right now is to learn how to receive His love.” I was thinking, yeah, that’s the last thing I want to work on. I want to go do something. I want to make something happen. And I remember him telling me that probably every six months, and I think the first four or five times he told me, and I was just like, “No, that’s not what I’m interested in. That’s not what I want to do.”

Obeying The Father’s Voice

About two years ago now, in the spring of 2023, the Lord told me, “Hey, I want you to look at last year, and go through your notes.” I would listen to God every day, and I would ask him, “What do you want me to do? What do you want to say to me, what’s what’s on your heart?” I’d hear quite a few things daily, and I’d make notes.

So the beginning of 2023 he said, “Go back to last year, and I want you to look through your notes and look through what I said to you.” I went through and I looked at my notes, and I realized, oh my gosh, all the things he was telling me in January of 2022, he was telling me in February of 2022, and March of 2023. It was simple things. Read the Bible with your family and pray for your ministry. Just simple things.

I realized he was telling me every week, multiple times a week, to do these same things, and I would come back and listen daily, faithfully through the whole year, but I wasn’t doing the things that he was telling me to do. I wasn’t actually obeying. I was just listening. So a year later, in 2023 I realized if I’m hearing the exact same things a year later, then he’s going to keep telling me this until I actually do it.

I realized I had a problem. I’m not actually obeying God in the little things in my life. Yeah, I’m committed to this missions thing that he’s told me to do, but I’m not actually sticking out in the daily, in the small things, the things he’s telling me to do. I was still operating in this place of thinking, I will allow myself to feel the love of God if I feel like I’ve done enough to deserve it.

The measurement that I was using was how I looked to myself and how I looked visibly to other people as a missionary. And though what the Lord was telling me to do was clear, I wasn’t doing it, and the things that I wanted to do, he wasn’t telling me to do. So we’re kind of stuck in this moment. As I pondered on that, I realized that I was not able to walk in obedience in response to him unless I knew that he loved me, and I was waiting until I looked the way I wanted to look to receive that love.

He made it clear to me that I was actually despising the cross, that I was actually looking at the sacrifice of Jesus and thinking, I know that you love me based on the cross, based on your choice, but I want you to love me based on how good I am and how much I’ve done, how much I can accomplish.

Trusting The Father’s Leadership

I started talking to him about that, and the Lord said, “You will never receive my love based on deserving it based on earning it.” I realized that I was believing a lie, and I was despising the cross. I despised the idea of being loved without deserving it first. I realized in the middle of this that God is actually very intentionally leading me and that he knows exactly what I need to do next.

What I had been doing was allowing my assessment of my relationship with God to be handled between me and Satan. I would wake up in the morning and I’d have thoughts in my head of, I need to do better in this. I need to do better in that I’m not good enough here. I wish I was more patient with my kids. We needed to be more. It was constant. I had 50 issues that I was constantly criticizing myself on.

As I started to pay attention, I realized that the criticism wasn’t God, that that was actually the voice of the enemy in my head. By rejecting that voice and starting to hear what God said, starting to believe his assessment of my life, I realized that the replacement for that list was not really smart, really theologically sound structures. What I needed was him.

I began to reject this old way of thinking where I looked at myself and said, “What do I need to do, and what am I not doing well enough, I stopped blaming myself and blaming people in my life and criticizing and using willpower. I started to just talk to him as a friend, and I was starting to realize, and even now realizing, as I talk to him, that I still don’t believe him, and I still need his voice to come in and tell me, you’re doing good.

It’s a challenge to believe that I’m doing good because I see areas where I could be doing better. It’s the willingness to actually trust and believe that I have a father who loves me. I have a father who is leading me, who’s guiding me and teaching me. I’m on that journey now.

Philip’s Current Journey

He’s brought us now to Dallas, and in this season of living here, I’ve been more challenged than I’ve ever been to trust him. He’s asking us to do some things that are crazy, that don’t make sense, financially. That doesn’t make sense, to the stability of our home and it is putting us in this spot for him to say, “Do you actually trust me? Do you believe that when I say everything great, you’re actually in the perfect spot when you feel like everything is going south? Are you willing to believe that? Are you willing to believe me?”

That’s the daily challenge that I live in today, is waking up, going on a walk with with my dog, talking to Jesus and letting Him tell me how well I’m doing, and letting Him tell me that he loves me, letting him tell me what to do next, and believing him and learning how to walk with other people in relationship. Hold myself accountable to what he’s saying and and if I walk under his leadership, his friendship, then my life will be what he designed it to be, and it will be successful, and it will be pleasing to Him. And that’s my story.