I listen to the Lectio 365 app for my daily devotionals. Sometimes, if something stands out to me, I will write it down in my planner. On Friday, Februrary 3^rd, 2023 I jotted down, “Do not be afraid, I hold the keys” (Revelation 1).  The next day I received the key chain pictured above. God had my attention! 

First of all, the person who gave me the key chain was my daughter’s best friend’s boyfriend. Now, this young man barely knew me. We had been at the same group dinner a few times over the course of a year and a half and our conversations could best be characterized as casual chit chat.

But, I had sent a gift to him via his girlfriend—it was a pen I had found while clearing off my desk one day at church.  I thought of him because it had his name on it—Calvary. Shortly after that, Calvary went on a trip to Virginia and decided he would get something for me with my name on it—Virginia—to reciprocate. That alone would have been super thoughtful, but what he did with that key chain, adding a key and handwritten note, changed my life.

At the time, I was in my fourth year in a ministry position at my church and pretty happy. Hear me clearly: it was not perfect, but I loved the staff, I loved the families and children I worked with, and it was all very comfortable and easy. When I got the key chain, I told our ministry staff about it and asked them to pray for me.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I became more and more uncomfortable. Verses like, “Open the gates and I will go in” (Psalm 188:19) jumped out at me, or this prayer, “Holy Spirit, show me if I am too settled in this world. Shift me from my anchoring places of my own security” (Lection 365, 2/8/23). Then, on February 15^th, in a commentary on the passage of Jesus calling the disciples, I heard, 

“Christ remains the Great Disrupter, challenging me to trade what I know for the great unknown, and all that I own for a greater cause…There is a wildness about the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise” (Lectio 365, 2/15/23).

Before my husband left for work that morning, I said to him, “I feel like I need to resign from my job today or else God may cause our house to catch fire (and hopefully not be consumed) in order to get through to me.”

And that’s exactly what I did. It’s hard sometimes for people to understand that you would walk away from a perfectly good job to go to “nothing.” They like it better if you are going to something bigger and better.

I had a bit of a cushion that made it easier for the people in our congregation to accept, because by the time the church heard I was leaving, we had found out that our daughter and her husband and our first grandchild were moving from Chapel Hill to Ohio. So, in most people’s minds, I was leaving so that I could spend more time with my family.  While there was a kernel of truth in that, the real truth was that God had moved me to “leave what was nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walk into the unknown.”

I spent the next three months traveling back and forth from Chapel Hill to Ohio. I was enjoying the freedom of being able to come and go as I pleased, but in the back of my mind I was thinking about what I might do next vocationally. I have worked, sometimes more than one job at a time, since I was 15 years old, and while I am in my 60’s and close enough to retirement age, I had a sense that God wasn’t finished with me yet. I wasn’t uncomfortable; I would describe it more as curious.

And then everything became clear.

Ka’thy Gore Chappell, Executive Director of Baptist Women in Ministry of North Carolina called to tell me that BWIM NC had just received word that they had gotten a grant from the Lilly Endowment. I was aware that BWIM NC had applied for a grant and that it had something to do with preaching, but that was as much as I knew. Imagine my surprise when Ka’thy said that the grant included a part-time position for a grant director and that they would like for me to fill that role.

Surprised, but not really.

In that moment I could see clearly that God had led me to trade in what I knew for a greater cause.  And what a cause it is—to use the generous resources of the Lilly Endowment to give Baptist women in our state opportunities to become better preachers and ministers. 

“There is a wildness about the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise” (Lectio 365, 2/15/23).

My prayer is that if you are reading this, you too will live into the unlimited possibilities of God’s presence and promise. 

💙 You deserve that!

Rev. Dr. Virginia Taylor has served in a variety of ministry positions, from senior pastor to college minister to children’s minister and more. She’s mom to an adult daughter and now grandmother to a beautiful granddaughter! She and her husband Ralph live in Chapel Hill.