It’s late May and sometimes the early mornings are still cool here in Texas. Today is one of those glorious days. Wayne and I thought that it would be especially poignant on this beautiful spring morning to return to our roots. 

We took a walk around the prayer center connected to the Grand Prairie campus of Gateway Church. It was built years ago by the visionaries of Shady Grove Church for the eternal purposes of prayer and intercession. 

Years ago, we prayed there often. As we walked the beautiful property, we  asked God to release us into the nations as ambassadors of the Good News. We implored Him to prepare us for reaching the Jewish people for His glory.  Having received a number of promises and prophecies through the years, we knew that God had a plan for us outside of the front doors of the church. I had cherished the same promises since my youth with a deep longing to touch the world for Jesus. 

In the early 1990s we felt a stirring and had received fresh prophetic words to the end that God was about to release us. Around and around this prayer center we walked for months and months, crying out to God for full release, for connections, for opportunities, for an anointing that breaks the yolk of sin, for the ability to discern the Lord’s perfect will for our lives. 

It was prophesied over us that we would become healing leaves to the nations.  In our natural minds, this seemed inconceivable! But God was still leading.

“Then the angel showed me the rivert of the water of life,u as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2).

I can’t tell you just how many requests we uttered or steps we trekked circling that sacred and beautiful, wooded, green outdoor sanctuary. And now, to make it even better, there exists the Pastor Jim and Barbara Morrison Prayer Garden which is also a reminder of our history and the foundations that God laid in our lives here as a young married couple and as a church with a special calling. All along God had been preparing us for our destiny and connecting us to the right people! Even then, God saw this day through the dreams fulfilled and the shattered hopes as well. There has been no shifting of purpose in Him through all of our sifting and changing. He is faithful.

Eventually in 1996, God did release us and Shady Grove Church sent us to Odessa, Ukraine. We lived in various places for nine years, and we continued to travel the nations for the next 22. Then we connected with Gateway Church (which sprung from the seedbed of faith thriving in Shady Grove Church) and Wayne became pastor over Jewish ministry. 

Years later, leaders have come and gone, and names and titles have changed. A lot of things have changed–what remains are the eternal things–the glorious and wonderful that only heaven will  reveal in eternity along with the souls that have been touched and changed. And it has been a joy and an honor to be sent from Gateway church. 

The last year has been the most painful of our lives losing our senior pastor from a moral failure. He was more than a pastor but a brother and friend from the Shady Grove days. It has been humbling and the only way forward has been not to blame and point fingers but rather to allow the light of the Holy Spirit to illuminate the dark places of our own hearts and repent–to plead for mercy, to forgive. 

God has done a lot of healing in the last few months and in our hearts and many hearts. He has cleansed and given us a clean slate with new hope. 

It’s a new day now for Gateway Church. A new pastor is due to arrive the end of the summer. Today, Dr Daniel Floyd, will deliver his first message to Gateway church as the new shepherd. We are eager to hear his thoughts and heart for a fresh assignment as a body. We long to press into influencing the kingdom of God as never before in these glorious last days before Jesus’s return.

That is exactly why we thought it would be so special today to return to our roots. It is so very important as we age to remember our beginnings and to give God thanks for the way He has dealt with us, forgiven us, and prepared us for new vistas. 

Today we honor those that have gone before us and laud a beautiful foundation of expressing Jesus to the world–and for us particularly to reveal the Jewish Messiah as Jesus. And so here we are thanking God for our original pastors, Olen and Syble Griffing, and all those that we labored with for sending us out and bringing us home, for connecting us with Gateway church. Thank you for all the opportunities that we’ve had that have been a blessing and God ordained.

So I want to say in this beautiful prayer garden of yesterday year and about the significance of today that I believe the best is yet to come. On the cusp of a new beginning today, with a new pastor, we honor the Lord Jesus Christ and our early beginnings and those who put into us who we are and helped mold and shape us for whatever God has called us too. I still feel the same zeal and passion for whatever comes in the days ahead. I am so thankful for a new shepherd and how he will lead us.

My prayers are connecting with Wayne’s today as we pray for Ps Daniel Floyd that he will be wise and anointed and will lead us, not into more numbers but that more people will be sent into the world to touch and change it. We fix our eyes on Jesus alone and on no man. Lord, send laborers. Our prayer is that we will just be two of those people.