On the face of it this is a very ordinary picture of a very ordinary scene.
A tree, some shadows, some grass and a path.
Yet for me this short path has almost as much significance as any place or person in my life.
It is, looked at one way, a very expensive piece of path. At the time of the incident I am writing about I was working in the City of London in finance. It is never possible to predict how life might have turned out in other scenarios but by an estimate I worked out a few years ago what happened on this path had already cost me over £500,000.
Looked at another way it was a place that, for all it cost me, money couldn't buy. For it was on this path - at or near the spot on this photograph - that God spoke to me so clearly that I left my work in finance and used such money as I had already saved to start paying for a Bible College Course to train to work full-time in Christian work. Many people have longed for such a calling and never heard it.
Why, though, did I add up the financial cost of the path those years ago? Because I was fed up with news of someone buying a second or third house when we haven't a first? Or another new car slotting into the car park next to my ageing homage to the Ford dealer's service record? No.
The reason I did my sums was to check out a belief I hold that God only speaks unequivocally (in clear visions or audibly) when He has something hugely life-changing to say. For me that path was the place that utterly reshaped my life by cost and call and adding up the cost helped me to see that. The call was not in the particular of a calling to a town, pastoral ministry, a country or whatever. Instead it reflected the most fundamental calling of all - just as the Saviour called his first disciples to leave their nets (in my case net profits) and follow wherever He leads.
Want unmistakable guidance? Pause a moment before you ask for the most expensive encounter you may ever have in this world!
Why, though, did I add up the financial cost of the path those years ago? Because I was fed up with news of someone buying a second or third house when we haven't a first? Or another new car slotting into the car park next to my ageing homage to the Ford dealer's service record? No.
The reason I did my sums was to check out a belief I hold that God only speaks unequivocally (in clear visions or audibly) when He has something hugely life-changing to say. For me that path was the place that utterly reshaped my life by cost and call and adding up the cost helped me to see that. The call was not in the particular of a calling to a town, pastoral ministry, a country or whatever. Instead it reflected the most fundamental calling of all - just as the Saviour called his first disciples to leave their nets (in my case net profits) and follow wherever He leads.
Want unmistakable guidance? Pause a moment before you ask for the most expensive encounter you may ever have in this world!
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