One more step . . . Flights are booked and the appointment at the American Embassy sorted.

When I started planning for this next year, I really did not think that I would have to go through so much learning and changing! This last month or two God has been speaking to me and challenging me about my mind set, my faith, my attitude, my life! This is definitely a journey I wont forget!

Ive really had to battle against issues of where my faith lies. I love the church that I am at, and have some amazing friends and awesome leaders - God has blessed me so much through being apart of this, and I will miss everything about it. But I realised that for about the last 3 years of my time in Derby, I have been putting my faith in the Church, in the people it exists of, in the doctrin and theology that makes it what it is. Everything I have been doing was for the church and I had been putting God and Church in the same box!

Church was my god!

“It was not until the age of nineteen, while reading Romans in my college dorm room, that God the Holy Spirit regenerated me, giving me faith to trust in Jesus alone for my salvation. This happened apart from any church.

Both the teaching of Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit to regenerate me through the power of the gospel made me a member of the invisible church despite the fact I had already lived my life as a member of the visible church.

My point is that you can be baptized in the church, raised in the church, confirmed in the church, serve in the church, marry in the church, die in the church, and have your funeral in the church, and still wake up in hell if you are merely in the church and not in Christ.”

–Mark Driscoll and Gary Breshears, Vintage Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 43.

I got so caught up in doing church and being church that I forgot why we exist as church! It is so important to have faith in God and who He is. God is God! in Genesis God says to Moses "I AM the I Am" A good friend of mine - Tim Hardman - preached on the supremacy of Christ. He went on to expand on this - I am who I am - God holds all things in place. "I am" is to be - a verb, I am is to exist. God is existence!

So who are you putting your faith in? is it Church? maybe in friends? or does Money drive you? Family? your Job? If your faith is not in God, than eventually what ever it is in will let you down, eventually you will no longer get fulfillment, you will no longer be happy.

God needs to be first! He needs to be the reason for your decisions, your choices and your actions!