Looking Back

Things in life are crazy right now, and I know that I need to give an update.

This here is a flashback, to the summer before I met Donna. I had a write a testimony for my Spiritual Formation class, so here is the rough draft. I so much enjoyed writing it that I decided before I went back and focused so much on the grammar, which would get annoying, to just post this right now. Let it encourage you, like recounting it encouraged me.

An Example Of God’s Provision

It was In England that I met my wife and God really began to give me direction to where He wanted me to go with my life. However, I almost wasn’t able to go there, and had it not been for the grace of God I would not have been able to meet my wonderful wife Donna.
See, I was living in Germany at the time, with my family near a military base, it was the summer before my last semester of bible college, and I was really counting down the days until I could go back to England to graduate. That summer was hard on me, being in a military community, all my Christian friends that I had the summer before had moved away, and the church that my family was going to lacked any kind of depth in it’s sermon content. So needless to say, I was very excited to back to good old York England for my last semester.
About a month before I was to head over there, I received an e-mail that essentially said that due to various new visa restrictions, I had to go to an English Embassy and get a student visa, or I would not be able to go to the school that semester. So with my plane ticket already paid for, and my heart longing to be back in the UK, my Dad and I started the process of making an appointment to going to the nearest English Embassy, which was about 200 miles away from where I was living.
Now the appointments booked fast, but I was blessed enough to find one that was a week and a half before I had to leave, so we got all my information together, and we headed to Muchengladbach, to get a visa stamped into my passport. After driving about 3.5 hours we finally arrived at the embassy, so my Dad and I got in line and waited. Right before it was my turn I was told to get my passport ready, so I look in the folder, and to my horror, it wasn’t in there. I quickly ran back to the van, and it was not to be found. Without my passport, there was nothing that I could do so I sadly, and fearfully, (knowing that my Mom was going to have a cow) went back to the house, and found the passport on the ground there, it had apparently fallen out of the folder when we were walking to the van.
At this point, I was crushed, I could have sworn that the Lord wanted me in England, I felt the call, and I knew. Yet at this point, I had no idea how I was going to get in. My Mom came up with a bunch of plans, saying how I could go to the Bible college in Germany for the last semester and things like that, but my heart longed for England.
So at this point my Mom said, “Aaron look at it this way, you already bought your plane ticket, just get on the plane and if God wants you to go to York, you’ll get in no problem, and if He does not want you in York, well you shouldn’t be there anyway.”
She had a good point, I mean what could I lose, except possibly an opportunity to see God completely circumvent a legal system in order to get His will done in my life. So, that week my parents drove me to the airport, and after praying for the Lord’s will to be done, I departed from them and got on the plane.
On the way there I was nervous, what if I had to get sent back, would I have to pay for that myself? Would they interrogate me? Strip search me? The possibilities were endless, and so was my imagination. But about half way there, I started to feel peace with my decision. Somehow I knew that I was doing what He wanted of me, and so that caused me to relax, because I knew that if I was in His will, He was the one who would take care of it.
So I sat back, and talked to the man next to me, who was apparently a language expert, and after telling him I was going to the Bible College in York, he started grilling me on my knowledge of the beauty of the Hebrew language, (a topic I still honestly know little or nothing about sadly) but needless to say, that conversation was probably a bit one-sided.
Now upon arriving in England my heart started beating fast, my brow became sweaty, this was the moment of truth. A part of my half expected a security team to meet me at the door of the plane, and by force lead me away. But there was no security, only a surprisingly genuinely nice flight attendant who had displayed much patience during the flight.
After getting off the plane, I went to customs, and upon looking at my passport, the man asked me with furrowed eyebrows “Why are you here in England?” I briefly explained to him how I was going to be going to the Bible College in York, and with that he stamped my passport and let me through. At that point overwhelming joy overtook my heart, while I was not technically allowed to set foot in the UK, God had somehow allowed me in.
I was light as a feather, as I sang praises to God all the way to baggage claim! It is that semester that the Lord taught me much about leadership, and also allowed me to meet the woman that I had been waiting for all my life. But it all came back to God through His divine power, providing for me a way to get into England.