#75 S3 EP 37 Paul Granger's Testimony: Discovering Divine Strength in Life's Toughest Moments

Speaker 1: 0:25

Hello, hello, hello, hello. Welcome back God's diamonds in the rough. Amen, we are ready to do it again. A brand new week, honey. How are you?

Speaker 3: 0:38

I'm feeling good, you know, just getting over a sinus infection, but you know it gotta go on.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Amen, amen. Today, y'all, we have a treat, amen. We've been having a lot of interviews on our show lately, amen, and today we have a young man. His name is Paul Granger. Amen, and he is a child of God who wants to share his experiences with all of us. Amen, and if you are watching visually, y'all can see him on the screen right there. Paul, you want to say hello to everybody?

Speaker 2: 1:22

Hello everyone, Hello to all the diamonds. It's great to be here. I'm excited by the conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:28

All right, so are we. So before we go any further, we have to pray.

Speaker 3: 1:34

Let us pray. How do you get a sip of that coffee? Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, our Lord and our Savior, jesus Christ, we just come to you right now, humbly, as we know how to say thank you. We thank you for your grace and your mercy, thank you for your loving kindness and turn the mercy. We beg your forgiveness for anything you might have said, done or thought that's not pleasing your sight that your grace will forgive us and cast us back into the picture where it came from. We pray in the name of Jesus, counseling any of the enemy that will be sent back into the picture where it came from, for it has no power, no dominion, no authority. But your word says that we do. We pray in the name of Jesus that we walk in the boldness and authority and dominion and the ability that you have given us. We pray in the name of Jesus that your word will come forth in us and through us. We pray in the name of Jesus for the ones that has no desire to know who you are. We pray in the name of Jesus for the ones who wants to know you but don't know how. We pray in the name of Jesus for the ones that say pray for me. We pray in the name of Jesus, interceding on their behalf right now, in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, that you would have your way. These things and all things we ask, all in Jesus mighty and maximus name, jesus Christ, we say thank you, thank you, and we say amen, amen, amen, amen.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Hallelujah, amen. So y'all know that we are big on focusing on Jesus and what he's able to do in our lives, and it's a fact that he sees us in such a way that we oftentimes don't see ourselves. We see those diamonds. Amen. And you know, life is life, life happens to all of us, amen. And y'all know our primary goal is for us to see ourselves the way that God sees us. Amen. And even in the midst of storms and all of that, amen. And I know, I already know, that Paul is going to share with us Now. He's going to overcame some things and able to give you some insight as to just simply understanding your faith. Amen. So, paul, before you get started, michael, did you have anything else you wanted to say?

Speaker 3: 3:51

No, no, I'm intrigued to hear this. I'm intrigued.

Speaker 1: 3:56

All right. So, paul, tell us a little bit about yourself walking the door. Come on in the door and give us what God is giving you.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Yeah. So you know, when I introduce myself, when anybody introduces themselves, a lot of times they'll say they're occupation, because that's what we attach our identity to. Five years ago I didn't expect to have lost my job made it a lot harder to introduce myself in that way, because saying hi, I'm Paul and I'm unemployed doesn't ring as well. I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Right.

Speaker 2: 4:32

I'm a lawyer, if I've worked in jobs that weren't your traditional, like high value jobs in the eyes of the world. I've been in ministry for the past couple of decades and but unemployment added this whole other level to it. But the whole time, something that God had been pushing me to understand is that my actual identity was his child, was one made in his image, was one who was invited to be an ambassador of Christ, and I wanted to be that ambassador of Christ. But it took some time to really learn what that meant. And in fact, becoming unemployed is what really pushed me into that place of realizing it doesn't matter what functional job I have. That job of ambassador of Christ is of one who represents Christ in whatever space I'm in, with whomever I'm engaging with, like that always existed, and so for the last five years I've been really living into that and serving in full-time ministry. But I haven't gotten a paycheck in the last five years. Two of those years my wife actually felt like I was inviting her to leave her job, so there were two years that we didn't have any money coming in, and so I share all that. To say where I am and understanding the power of God now is way different than how I understood it five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, 30 years ago. But 30 years ago I still believed in God, I still believed he was powerful. I would have, on Sunday, claimed it, you know, say God can work, god can do amazing things, but what I realized is, over the years, over the decades, what changed was not that core knowledge, but really a loosening, a releasing, sometimes a destroying of some of my human knowledge. That was putting barriers on what God could and couldn't do, who God could and couldn't be. And so one of my favorite passages is Ephesians 3.20. To him who is able to do abundantly more than anything we could ask or imagine, because of the power work within us. Even more prevalent in my life has been Proverbs 3, 5 and 6. Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and do not lean on your un-understanding, and all your ways submit to him and he will set your path straight. So what are these two things saying? They're saying that, at the core, we're gonna have our own understanding, that we're gonna have things that we're asking for and imagining, and God's not mad at us for that. He created us. He created us with the capacity to think, to dream, to imagine, to have critical thinking. He made us that way. He knows that. But what he's saying is yes, you have what you're asking for and imagining. Yes, you have your own understanding. Don't lean on it, don't settle for it. And so, over the course of my life, there have been these moments where I have had my own understanding, where I've been asking for things, where I've imagined things, and then God didn't do it the way that I wanted. In the hardest moments, I would get a little upset with God. I would try to still honor him, but I'm like God, don't? You see? It would be a lot better if you just did it this way? And on this end of it, of course, I can look back and realize, oh, god knew a lot better than I did, but this has been part of the journey, and so one of the first moments that became core and central to really shifting how I understood God was 12 years ago, 2011. So when I was five, my father passed away, and so I never really got to know my biological father, but I knew he was a good man, I knew he loved me, and so there is this deep longing within me to be able to be that for my kid one day, to be able to go past age five and pour into my child's life. And so I had this longing to be a father for a long time and eventually it got married. A certain amount of time passed. You know what I think. We're ready to have kids. My wife got pregnant. We get to our nine week appointment and there's no heartbeat, oh no. And I'm immediately shocked and crushed because it's like you don't expect that, you don't want that. We don't really talk about miscarriage all that much. It's more common than we realize, right? But just as quick as I had that moment of shock I had, I felt like I was putting my mind all the times in scripture where the dead were raised, all the times in scripture where it talks about the power of prayer. And I suddenly had this crazy thought, crazier than any spiritual thought I had ever had, of what if I prayed for life? I mean, that's crazy because our baby's dead. Like I know, my human logic, my human understanding knows how this story goes. But the sense that we were being invited to pray was so strong that we asked the doctor, like is there anything we have to do now. It like could we take some time to pray? And the doctor said we could take a couple of weeks, and that started this period where my wife and I, and some close friends prayed in ways that we never had prayed before. Because I mean I may be prayed for somebody to get healed, someone sick, or so they sat in the other. Yeah, I prayed for that before. But, like this type of prayer, I had to go way into it, more than I ever had, because the stakes were pretty high, because I knew that one of two things would happen Our baby would come back to life or our baby wouldn't. If our baby did, then we can't pray the same anymore Because, like, we've seen an actual miracle and so we'd have to be praying for everybody. If that same power, that same forever, if our baby didn't live, well, then I'm gonna have to get to a crossroads here where I decide what that means about God, because didn't His words say this and didn't His words say that? And I went all in for God and where was he for me? So I've got that in the back of my mind and I'm praying hard and I'm going in and I'm wrestling and I'm like, oh my gosh, what if I mess up? What if I pray the right way all the way up to the end? I'm like I'm going through all these questions and we get to the two weeks and there's still no heartbeat. But then I'm thinking, oh, no, no, this is the moment Because before it could have been just an error, but now there's two appointments saying maybe this is it. We keep on praying, we keep on praying and we go to the third moment where the doctors would have to do what they needed to do, and nothing, no change. Our baby never came back to life. And so now I'm at that crossroads, in addition to being crushed that we officially, officially, lost our baby, now I'm realizing that I prayed with everything I had for this thing. Pray anything in my name, it'll be given to you. I'm thinking of Lazarus, I'm thinking of the children that had died, that Jesus brought. I'm thinking of all these things, and I had one or two options now before me. One was the one that made sense. God didn't answer my prayer, so he either doesn't care about me, or he's not powerful, or he's not real. And all this must have been a joke that I'd put my life into and I'm just gonna go do my own thing Because God was not there for me. Or he let me down, or he doesn't exist. That's the one that made the most sense match with how it was feeling. And there's this other option, this other option that was foolish. It was to go back to the core of what I had always been taught and believed that God was God, that he was powerful and that God was good, that he was loving and that I could choose to believe that that was still true, even if it didn't make sense to me, even if I couldn't explain it, even if I wasn't feeling it, even if I didn't like it, I could choose to still believe it. That was the crossroads. By God's grace, I went to the latter side and I would wanna believe then that the clouds parted, the sun came down, I felt warmth, the angels were singing. That wasn't what happened. I feel like I experienced what must have been depression, would randomly cry at times, was feeling this deep, deep sorrow, but also I can look back and recognize that at the same time, I did not feel alone. I wouldn't have named it that way then, but it I can recognize now that God was present with me in that space. We ended up having a second miscarriage in the course of a few days, learned that we were pregnant and then Learned that we had lost the baby. At that point I was numb. I don't even remember if I cried or not I was. I was struggling in my humanity to know what to do, but all Along I was being invited to consider what does it actually mean for God to be God and God to be good? There came this point several months later when I was at the end of myself. I was feeling Burnt out, hopeless. I was working for a ministry and it was out. It was hard. There were just the work that I was working with teens, that work with teens is hard. We're gonna. Ministry is hard. And then, out of the blue, something that never had happened before happened. This ministry that just did not have any funds suddenly said hey, we want to send you to Orlando for a conference. And so, at the time where I was at like my burnout point, suddenly I get a trip to Orlando. I didn't see it coming. And it was this period of refreshing where God met me and it was very clear to me at that point that he was with me then. But he had been with me all along the way prior. My wife got pregnant a third time at that point. Statistically, things aren't looking good, but my wife said something really powerful. She said right now we know that God has given us the gift of this child and even if we never get to meet this child, we have this child for right now, so we can be grateful for that. We went into that nine week appointment and there was a heartbeat. They were like, yes, yeah, like the first time we got to hear a child's heartbeat and that child now is 10 years old and thriving. But I share that because that was a pivotal moment, right Like the story I would have chosen would have been. We prayed and our baby came back to life and everybody's lives were changed because the miracle happened. The wild thing about this is the day that we went into the hospital. Some close friends of ours went into the hospital too. She was pregnant with twins and it was way too early and they were gonna lose the baby. So we were both in the same hospital the same day, at risk of losing babies. Their twins lived. They are alive and well today, a year older than our son. And you know, I think about that sometimes in the hardest moments I was like why is it that their prayers got answered but ours didn't? But the reason I was thinking that is because I knew what I was asking for and imagining and God didn't do it right. But God is able to do far abundantly more Than I'm asking for imagining. What I'm asking for an imagining is small Compared to what God wants to do, because that moment was pivotal to my faith. I'd been a Christian all my life, but at that moment where I decided to trust that God was God and God was good, even though he didn't answer my prayer in the Ways that I wanted, even though I was crushed, even though I lost my child, that was the one of the first moments I made that type of a step towards God. That was that cost me everything. Never really cost me that much before. I was always in Christian environments, went to a Christian University, but this time it cost me. And yet I chose God over myself in a deep, robust way. Not because of my own strength, by the way, I had none, I was at the end of myself but but that Transformed my understanding of not just who God was, but also who I was invited to be. In relation to that now, here's the beautiful thing is God doesn't owe me a thing and I owe him everything. Yet, instead of just being this cruel master over me. He is a loving father and so since then because I know that that core reality is true, that God is God and God is good there have been moment after moment after moment where he has shown up in that abundantly more way. The house that we were in, that we're in we couldn't have afforded it, but God provided it I've been five years without a traditional paycheck. Every bill has been paid. My wife was out of paycheck. That has been like. He has continued to show up time and time again, not because he owes me, not because I'm the one set in the terms, but because he is a loving father who is powerful and who is loving, who is God and who is good. And the most beautiful part of all this is that I'm still continuing to learn what that means. Right, like we want to think that when we learn these truths about God, that that's the moment we arrive and then we just kind of co-stress of our lives. But this is a God who is incomprehensible, who is beyond our understanding, which means I get the gift of the rest of my life Continuing to learn more deeply these truths that I think I understand now. Continue to learn more deeply is God that I think, that I know, and so I just I'm. It was one of the hardest moments of my life, but it was one of the most transformational moments of my faith and and I'm so grateful for who God was in the midst.

Speaker 1: 19:00

Amen. That's a powerful, powerful story. I tell you what those scriptures are. Like my core as well. Um.