Shepherds Ministries: A World of Potential

We would like to welcome Amy DeBurgh, Director of Volunteers and Guest Services, to the Shepherds family. Along with being a pastor's wife and the mother of three children, Amy is a gifted writer who, as time allows, will be sharing her love of God and the people of Shepherds through this blog.

It is impossible! There is really no way to explain God and how He works. The book He gave us can’t be fathomed by us.  We are too stuck on the surface for that kind of plumbing. But we send the line out anyway, and every time it comes back we know Him a little bit better.  This happens every time we study God’s word even with passages we thought we already knew.  It’s the craziest kind of satisfied hunger.  Every attempt to know God fills us up and makes us want more. That is the nature of the pursuit of the Eternal One by the earthbound.

    Life offers experiences that are especially conducive to this kind of feeling toward God.  A story of His grace, a sermon, a song or witnessing the miracle of salvation can peel back the terrestrial veil just a small amount and what we see, draws us into worship.  Sometimes its a place and an important work.  Visiting Shepherds Ministries for the first time was that for me, an inducement to worship. It was paradoxical in its understated pronouncement of God’s glory.  I saw the image of God across a new landscape. It was the same God, His same image in new personalities and faces.  

    What had I been missing in my knowledge of God that was revealed to me in this experience?  I think it was potential. 

God was before and still is the God of Omnipotential.  He was never lacking. He never changed.  It was seeing that people can be challenged to reach a greater potential than everyone around them ever expected, that was wholly unexpected to me.  I was surprised by God’s image, uncontained and untamable, smashing expectations and setting the record straight.  

He let me see, in the lives here at Shepherds, that for all my knowing, I don’t know much. It made me wonder at what He would do next.  I came to a deeper understanding that there is a world of potential inside every human image-bearer that, at the hands of the Creator, removes all doubt that with God all things are possible.