I was sat in my room and I was a bit desperate. Incidentally, my desperation will become a common theme in this blog. I am not deliberately self-deprecating just to look humble. I have genuinely found over the last four years that when I am desperate, God tends to step in.

I was desperate because we had agreed that we would go with some friends of ours to help them in a church that they were going to lead. I wanted to do something, and I wanted to do something soon. I was so keen to do something that I said yes to the first offer I got.

We loved the people that we were going with, they had helped us loads and we wanted to help them for a change. However, I knew that it was the wrong thing. All I could think about was Manchester but we weren’t going there. So I prayed. I can remember the prayer to this day. “God we are going here, but all I can think about is Manchester. Are we meant to go? If so could you put me in contact with someone in Manchester that I can work with?”

I struggle with the idea of being “called” or waiting for God to write you a personalised letter that explains everything you should do, but the fact is I felt called. God had woken me with dreams in the night and set my brain whirring in a way that I just couldn’t ignore.

As I have discussed before, I was a bit stuck. Stuck in my church, in my job and in my head. When you’re a bit stuck, you can’t see that you need to do the obvious thing in front of you. The obvious thing was to try to do something and ask God to send me in the right direction. If God’s sovereign then he can deal with me being a bit stroppy.

So I prayed and then I went to work.

At lunch time I got a phone call.

To cut a long story short, my pastor met a guy in Manchester who wanted to plant a church that would reach the exact same group of people I wanted to reach. All this guy wanted was somebody to lead this plant.

Bingo.