You know what the news is -- in a minute, you're going to know the rest of the story...

Growing up, one of my favorite things to hear on the radio when I was riding around with my parents was Paul Harvey's, "The Rest of The Story".  I was always loved hearing the back story to famous events or how some common household item was actually invented by mistake.  I was always fascinated to learn the "why" behind the "what".  This post is going to attempt to start to tell our "Rest of the Story".

For more about the "Rest of the Story" including some audio of Paul Harvey's more famous segments, click here.

Over the last few days Lauren & I have used this blog to tell you about what has been going on in our lives recently, both the joys and some of the struggles.  We decided to do so in order to first and foremost, show God's faithfulness and provision, but also to hopefully provide some strength for others that are going through some of the same things we did and maybe tackle a couple topics that for some reason seem to be taboo in today's society. 

There's no way that I can tell the entire story today, so I'm going to try to start at what I believe to be the beginning, the real reason "why" 2015 has proven to be, in many ways, our toughest year of yet. 

When Lauren and I moved to Houston, one of our first priorities was to find a new church home. After visiting several great churches, we really felt called to join Houston's First Baptist Church.  We were a little worried at first about joining a church of that size, but we very quickly got involved in a Life Bible Study (it will always be "Sunday School" to me) and small group which helped make us feel at home.  We feel absolutely blessed to be apart of such an amazing church body, one that is incredibly externally focused (more than 60% of its' budget goes outside the walls of the church) and dedicated to living out the Gospel.  I could go own for days about how God is moving in that church, but let me move on to how it affects this part of our story. 

We were approached in late 2014 by the directors of our Life Bible Study and asked if we would be willing to step into a leadership positions and fill in for them while they were out after the birth of their first child.  Lauren and I excitedly agreed and began preparing to take on the new responsibilities. (Well, maybe I was a little more gung ho about it because part of the job required me to get in front of the entire class each week to speak and everyone knows how much I just HATE to be in front of a crowd!) 

We felt that God was calling us to serve and so we wanted to be faithful in answering that call.  Little did we know that this decision was going to have a much greater impact on our lives than we ever could have dreamed. Many may disagree, and that's OK, but I am a firm believer that when you make a decision to step out and lead, you are going to face challenges and attacks because of it.  This applies in every facet of life, but no more so than when you choose to lead others spiritually.  I believe with all of my heart that if you are working to see the advance of the Kingdom, Satan will actively work against you to prevent you from being successful.  This is not a blanket statement that covers the entirety of "bad things" that happen to people in an effort to relieve ourselves of blame or responsibility for our sin, but simply an observation made over time and one that I believe is Biblical. I can't say that everything that has happened to Lauren and I over the last two years is directly related to this decision, because in truth it is probably not, but I do believe that it had an impact.  

More on this and the other crazy events that we went through tomorrow...

In Him,

Chad