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I’m sorry to drop you in the middle of the story, but the post before this one will catch you up.

As it turned out, there was a local church looking for a pastor. We didn’t think we were what they needed, but Ron talked to their pulpit committee to see if he felt he honestly could help them. Did he think he could make them grow to be a large church again like they were in the 1950’s and like they wanted to be again? No. But they had so many steps they needed to take to get from where they were now to where they wanted to be and he knew he could help them take those steps, with God’s help.

There was also a generation of people who were in their 20’s and 30’s who needed discipleship. In some ways they were almost being ignored. Many of them loved the Lord and weren’t being used to the maximum. They were the treasure of the church. There was a lot we could do at that church to help them grow in their faith as well as grow as a church. The next years weren’t going to be easy, but we felt we could easily go there with a clear conscience. We weren’t going there as a stepping stone to a better career somewhere else. It really wasn’t that kind of job.

So Ron said, “Yes,” when they asked him to come be their pastor. We were there 4 1/2 years. Those “young” people are now grandparents and are serving in other churches in Miami. Eventually, we knew our time was up. We had done what we were able to do and the timing of the education of our girls (the oldest was going into her junior year of high school.) It was time for someone else to serve there. We loved that church in Miami. But it was an almost all Anglo church in Little Havana. We started looking around and were called to a church in TX where we served for 16 years. We lived there for about 20 years altogether. But that is another story for another day.

I’ll never be anything other than a Florida girl. It was a wrench to leave Miami and the international flavor there.

We loved Miami. We would have stayed there if it would have been possible. We loved how international it was. We loved speaking Spanglish. It was with great sadness we headed for TX just after Christmas 1987. We were driving 2 cars and had a cat and a rabbit, each in their respective cages. Leaving FL was hard for me, because I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale and often ran into people I knew growing up. I knew that wasn’t going to happen in TX. We were never going to live near the beach.

For the girls and the rest of us, we had no idea what to expect in TX. Ron and I had visited there once. The girls hadn’t even visited. I know it must have been scary heading into the unknown. Miami was all they had known for almost 7 years. South FL was all they had known for the 4 years before that. That was the longest they could remember living anywhere. We often ran into Jamaican friends. It wasn’t going to happen in TX. It was the end of an era.

We headed west and into central time.

So we headed west. But we took our time. We stopped a few days in Disney World and Epcot. Then trekked on eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day in one of the southern states along the way. We had never heard of that custom before, but were told it brought good luck.

God’s grace was abundant in protecting us as we traveled and in giving us a fun trip together. Meanwhile the movers were getting our things to Tyler, TX.

I think we spent about a week in an upstairs apartment of a family from our new church while we closed on our house and waited for the movers to arrive. They barely got the van unloaded when an ice storm hit. Our house was on the side of a hill, so as we got boxes unloaded, the girls used them to slide down the hill. They had a blast. They also got to know a few neighbors. The mix of snow and ice shut the town down for a few days and slowed the start of school. It also gave us a chance to catch our breath and have some fun before school started and church started up. Driving in that mess wasn’t a problem for Ron, so he was even able to get us stocked up in supplies.

That was the start of our years in TX;

But what did I learn from our years at the downtown church in Miami?

• God often calls us to do a job for a certain season in a church. It isn’t more or less important. It is simply our calling. What we came to do there will not make any headlines anywhere. It certainly won’t make headlines in any denominational magazines. It didn’t at the time. It never will. Just like so many Christian servants over the years, it was more of a plodding ministry. Ron is a good plodder. Would we have enjoyed making a splash? Of course. It would have been fun. But honestly, we just aren’t splashy people. It wouldn’t have worked. It was only in our fantasies.
• Not everything you try will work out. We tried some things there that didn’t work out. They should have. On paper they did. But in reality, they didn’t. But we learned from the things that didn’t work out. So did the presbytery. It’s a funny thing about learning. We learn almost as much by the things that don’t work as the things that do. Who knew? And God uses all of it forld His glory!
• Often, the people you work with and/or struggle to get along with are either people who are either just like you or have different gifts from you and thus a very different perspective that you could learn from. Here is an illustration. One woman on our Women’s Ministry Committee always had a place she made a motion to give money to when there was extra money to give. It irritated me that she was always giving money to that place and not giving to other places until one day someone made a motion to give to another organization as well. It didn’t bother her at all. She was happy to give to them. It was just that no one else spoke up. She had the gift of administration, she planned ahead regarding the things she knew would be covered at the meeting and she figured out that she would make a motion to give to her favorite organization. Once I caught on to this, I thought about it ahead of time (because it didn’t come naturally to my thinking) and figured out who I wanted money to go to if it came up. I was no longer left flat-footed when money was being disbursed. That is a small irritation and a small thing that I learned from. But often those small things can become very big if we don’t think them through and sometimes deal with them (if I am developing hard feelings.)
• The eventual closing of a church is not always a failure. After a couple of years with another pastor (son of the founding pastor of the church), the church was sold/given to a Spanish church of a different denomination that was ministering to Spanish-speaking people in the area. It gave them the space and facilities needed to do their ministry. To our thinking, that was a successful end. For the first time, a genuine ministry to Spanish-speaking people on a wide scale was happening here in the middle of Little Havana. We were happy.
• God blessed many churches with the people from that church after it closed. Just as God used the disbursing of His Church in the New Testament, He blessed other churches with these special people from that church as they moved out. They had a humble attitude in their leadership and many are still leading in the churches where they and their children and grandchildren are serving.
• God’s Church is much bigger than any one of our local churches. It’s easy to forget sometimes. But God is building His Church and the gates of Hell itself are not going to prevail against it. Some days we get discouraged and find it hard to believe. But then we look back and realize, it is true!