Make Disciples

Hello world,

My name is Eddie Chamberlain. This blog is going to be a collection of thoughts, life experiences, ponderings on the Bible and who knows what else. I will start with a post introducing myself and what got me to where I am right now.

To start, I’ve been a Christian pretty much my whole life. I grew up going to church from the time that I was born. I said the “sinners prayer” when I was about six years old and have always had a desire to serve the Lord the best I knew how. I did AWANA as a kid, then progressed through Junior High and High School youth group. I got a little tired of the high school scene and quit going to church for about six months or so. I was a home school kid and could tell I was different than many of the other kids in the group. Many of them lived pretty worldly lives and had their cliques of friends that usually excluded me. I had a few friends there, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much. After taking a good chunk of my 16 year old life away from church, I started a program called Running Start through the school district I lived in. I was able to begin college classes at the community college my Junior year of high school. I began attending classes the beginning of that school year and quickly was introduced to Campus Crusade for Christ(now known as CRU). I quickly made a lot of friends there, learned how to play guitar and began helping with worship. Most of us were Running Start teens that banded together in our love of Christ and held a weekly meeting on campus, at Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Washington. One of the friends I made lived, in the neighboring town, of the small town I lived in. She invited me to her church, which was near my house, and I began attending church regularly again. A bunch of us from CRU went on a winter retreat the following year to Spokane, Wa. It was on this retreat that I really made the decision to follow Jesus. I remember, during worship one of the nights, I felt the presence of God for the first time. I don’t remember what song they were signing, but I began weeping and praying, dedicating my life to the Lord. I went on to serve there, and at the church, through worship, AV teams and sound teams. That went on for many years. All of us grew up, shared many life changes, got married, etc. My wife and I got married when I was twenty-three. Before our marriage though, I got laid off in the 2009 economy crash, when I was twenty-one years old. I spent almost two years unemployed and seeking work. I learned to trust the Lord even deeper. I would almost run out of money, but right beforehand someone would call and offer me a short bit of work for a few days. It carried me through before finally getting a job in the summer of 2011. We were still attending the church that my friend brought me to back in 2004. She and her husband were a couple of my best friends. Her husband got hired as the worship pastor at a different church. He asked me to help start a band there with him, just for the summer, until he had enough members to continue without me. I served there on my off weeks at the other church, for the summer of 2011. In just that short time we saw God moving in the little church he got hired at. It was a small church of only about thirty people and by the end of that summer it had almost doubled in size. My wife(then fiance) and I were feeling led by the Lord to leave the church we were at and become members at that small, growing church. In the fall of 2011 we got married and began attending that church full time. My friend and I led worship together at that church for ten years together. We saw God do some really cool things there. The community grew very close and it was beautiful. At some point along the way though, my walk with the Lord had grown stale. I wasn’t reading the Bible and I rarely prayed. The financial struggles we had early in our marriage were gone and I didn’t have to trust Him for provision. I had begun to become the lord of my own life. I trusted my job for the provision I needed, my pastor for my Bible study, and my wife for relationship. All things that I should have been going to God for instead. I attended church on Sunday and worship practice on a weeknight, but had begun completely neglecting the relationship I had built with Him for much of my life. I was, for the most part, just a part of the world and doing “Christian” on Sunday. I was watching shows and movies I shouldn’t have, spending most of my free time on my Xbox and ignoring God except on Sunday morning. Finally, after a few years of this, 2020 hit. The year that must not be named. However, for me 2020 was the greatest turning point in my life. My friend(the worship pastor I played with) began seeking a deeper life with God. He had come to a similar point in life and knew there had to be more to being a Christian than what we were experiencing. He went on a journey of exploration with the Lord. He found several YouTube videos of people living a Christian life much more akin to the Book of Acts in the Bible. They were seeing people get healed, demons cast out and the gospel shared with those that needed it. All things we had pretty much never experienced. His family had a vacation planned for Spain that year, but it was cancelled because of Covid. They ended up traveling to North Carolina instead and met some people that were living that kind of lifestyle there. He came back to Washington, from that trip, and was raving about it to me. He began talking to me about it and teaching me what he was learning from one of the guys he met while on their trip. We started putting it into practice after services on Sunday morning and saw God heal a few people. Some of us got prophetic words for people or words of knowledge about things in their life they were struggling with. We saw many people leave healed and encouraged and it ignited our faith. I was at work one day, after learning to pray for healing, and a co-worker had awful back pain. It was so bad he wanted to go home because he could barely walk. I felt the Lord pushing me to pray for him, but I was fighting the urge. It became such a burning knot in my chest, that I went over and prayed for him. I just said a really short prayer and the guys eyes turned to saucers. He practically began jumping and gave me a giant hug. His pain went down to almost nothing and he was able to work the whole day. This was enough to help me see that there was so much more to Christian living than I currently was doing. During these few months, we began learning more about repentance. The churches I grew up in were always really good at teaching the cross, salvation and God’s grace, but none of them really taught repentance. Repentance was just what you did when you said the sinner’s prayer, but there never seemed to be freedom. We were all still stuck living in sins we dealt with our whole lives. Praying that one day we’d be free from them, when we reached heaven. Through our journey in learning real repentance though, we realized there was freedom to be had now, before we died. It meant diving in deep, to the dark parts of our soul, and bringing those things into the light. My wife had been struggling for years with health issues and we had seen people get healed after going through repentance on different things. She wanted to do it one night at our house, so my worship pastor friend and his wife(the girl I knew since college) came to our house to help her work through past traumas and sins. I felt this awful knot in my chest and didn’t want to be there. I sat quietly at the table, arms crossed, as they began talking to her and helping her process things. Not long after that we began to pray. Instead of praying for her though, my buddy puts his hand on my shoulder and begins praying over me. I can’t explain what happened next other than saying the Holy Spirit began speaking to me, directly through my friend. I had never heard him pray that way before or since. It was pointed directly at me and my wayward, stale, prodigal son-esque life. It pierced my heart and I began confessing sins I had never admitted to anyone before, especially my wife and two best friends. I was confessing sexual sins from my past and present, the heart behind it, that lead me to it. Confessing impure thoughts toward someone from a past relationships. Breaking soul ties with her(something I knew almost nothing about at the time). Confessing generational sexual sins that had been in my family. Confessing my stale, dead heart and why I felt that way. Repenting for seeking for life and joy from dead things, instead of from Him. This went on, for what seemed to me, an hour or more. I was a blubbering, weeping, snotty mess at the table. The next day though, I felt free. The desires toward my sin had vanished. The thoughts of the woman from my past relationship disappeared from my mind. I began to desire to read my Bible and pray. I drove forty-five minutes, one way, everyday for work. That time began to be prayer time. I sought the Lord on a level I had not done before. I began hearing Him speak to me with a clarity I’d never experienced before. He continued to take me through repentance on things in that time alone with Him. My drive to work quickly became one of my favorite times of the day. During that time I felt the Lord telling me to be baptized. I had never done it before. I was always taught it was an outward sign of an inward decision and never felt the need to do it. I knew I was a believer, I didn’t need to stand in front of a church and let them “see” it. Through further study I learned it’s much more than just a symbol. It’s a burial and a resurrection. When we go into the water, our old man of sin gets buried and we rise with Christ upon coming out. We take on a new nature. I talked to my worship pastor friend and we decided, since it was still during Covid and the church was only meeting online, to do it at my house. We filled my bath tub with water and him and another friend of mine came over and baptized me. I came up out of the water and they prayed for me to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I didn’t really feel a difference in that moment. I began praying for spiritual gifts though and shortly after, I began experiencing words of knowledge and prophetic words, with greater and greater accuracy. Not long after this, he and his wife felt led to move to North Carolina and join that group they had met on their vacation. The people there were beginning to plant house churches and my friend and his wife felt called to join them. I was excited for them to go do what they felt God was leading their family to do and he asked if I had thought about maybe doing it as well. I told him no and planned to just take over as the worship leader at the church we were at. Not long after this though, my wife began having dreams about us moving to NC and planting churches with our two families. After several weeks of her telling me these dreams, I told her I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. I had a really good job, my whole family lived near me, and I planned to just continue life the way I had been. This new found love for God was amazing, but I still had hard parts in my heart. Jesus had a remedy for that. North Carolina began coming up everywhere. I was hearing about it from random places. It was coming up in conversation with people that knew nothing about the possibility of a move there. My wife continued to have dreams about us being there. It was everywhere and I was sick of it. One day on my drive with the Lord, I got so tired of hearing about it that I got straight with Him. I told Him how I felt about it and asked Him, rather indignantly, if He really wanted me to move our family there. I was fully expecting Him to say no. The answer was very much the opposite. He told me yes, that He had many plans for my family there. He told me that the harvest was ripe there and He needed workers to join in. I got a loving rebuke for trying to do things my own way. He pointed me to Isaiah 55:8-9. How His thoughts and ways are far beyond mine. Over the next several days of work drives, He began showing me the idols in my life. Work, family, money, all of the things I had place higher value in than His calling on my life. As I began to repent for putting those things before Him, He began giving me peace about leaving everything I had ever known and starting a new life in North Carolina. He pointed me to Isaiah 41:9-10, 13. Telling me about Him choosing me, calling me from the farthest points of the earth. Saying that He would be with me and not to fear, because He holds all things in his hands. I then went to my wife and told her that her dreams were right. That the Lord was speaking to her. He had called our family to move and to serve Him in a new way. I then went and told my friend that we would be joining he and his wife on this new adventure with Jesus. Over the next few months, I continued praying about when we should move, but God went silent on the matter. I couldn’t seem to get an answer on that. He spoke many other things to me. Showing me my identity in Him. That he desired a closeness and friendship I hadn’t had with Him to this point in my life. I spent the next several months just growing that friendship with Him. Learning more and more about spiritual gifts and what walking with the Spirit really looked like. I had previously never had that in my life and it was very new to me. I read every book I could get my hands on that had to do with spiritual gifts, the Holy Spirit and intimacy with God. I continued praying for people after church and seeing healings, prophecy and deliverance(another very new thing for me). Our friends put their house up for sale and began their process of moving to North Carolina. Before they moved, one of the guys he had originally stumbled upon on YouTube, was coming to our area for a weekend revival. Our families decided to go check it out for fun and see what God would do there. We drove several hours to a church in the middle of nowhere, on the Olympic Peninsula, and we got to see God do some awesome things. We saw a bunch of people get baptized, several people get free from demons and a number of people speak in tongues for the first time. After all of that, we went inside and the revival leader gave a teaching on the four soils from Matthew. Near the end he touched on the great commission and was saying that when God calls you to something, you don’t need to wait for Him to say go. He said two thousand years ago to “go” and make disciples of all nations. When He calls you to something, just go, the man said. This stood out to me as I was sitting there in my seat and I asked the Lord if He was finally answering my prayers about when to move to NC. The speaker introduced a woman who came up to do a worship song. Her song had basically the same message and now my “spidey senses” were tingling. I asked the Lord again if this was Him confirming that we should move. As I ended my second prayer, a woman stood up a few rows behind me and screams something out in tongues. The room was silent for only a moment or two and a woman stands up on the other side of the room and said she had the interpretation. She proceeded to speak the answers to every single prayer I had asked the Lord about, over the previous 4-5 months, concerning our move. It was affirmations that He had everything under control, that He already had friends and family gathered and prepared for us, that His provision was already in place and not to fear because He would be with us. I began weeping in my seat, knowing these were the answers I had been waiting for. Two months later we had a vacation to South Carolina already planned, to visit some of my wife’s family. We rented a car the last couple of days of our trip and drove to North Carolina to scout the areas we had been looking at moving to. We found a couple areas we really liked and immediately upon arriving home in Washington state, began the process of putting our house up for sale. I began applying to jobs, but wasn’t hearing back from anyone. About two months went by, our house was up for sale already, when I finally received a call back from one of the companies I applied to. I ended up doing a phone interview with them a couple days later and they were pleased with my resume. They told me on the phone I’d hear back from them in a couple days. Several weeks went by and I heard nothing. Our house sold and we began the closing process. A couple of weeks into closing, I put in my two weeks notice at work and planned to continue applying for jobs after arriving in NC. The final day of work at my job, the day before moving, the place I interviewed at called me back. They said they loved my previous interview and would like to do an in person interview when I made it to NC. I told them I was leaving the next day and would be down there the end of the following week. They set an interview time and the next day my wife, our two young kids and our dog, loaded into our car and began the journey to NC. It was a long process of God working on both of our hearts to prepare us for that moment. We had so much peace by that point that my wife joked, saying we were homeless and unemployed, driving our family across the entire country to follow God on an adventure we never expected the previous year. We spent the next week driving across the US, making a fun road trip out of it. Seeing the beauty of God’s creation the whole way. Stopping at landmarks along the way that we always wanted to see. Every day trusting God would provide a hotel room, because we didn’t know exactly what town we would end up in each night. He gave us a place to lay our heads every single night. After 8 days of travel, we made it to our final destination. An extended stay hotel. A small studio apartment basically. We arrived on a Friday afternoon. I interviewed with that company four days later and they hired me on the spot. We began searching for a house that same week. Our friends we had begun this journey with, had moved down a few months prior to us and recommended their realtor. She helped us find a home within a week and a half and we began closing on our home. In less than two weeks God provided a job and a home. One month later, near the end of 2021, we moved out of the hotel and into that house. It was a huge day for all of us after living in hotel rooms for the previous six weeks. We praised God for all of the things He had done over the last year to get us to that moment. We saw Him answer so many prayers, provide in so many different ways, and care for our family in ways we never expected. The next two and a half years would be an amazing journey of continued growth, deeper surrender to God, more levels of freedom and deepening relationship with Him. I’ll continue that journey in another post. The last four years has been an incredible time with Jesus. I’ve grown more in that time than I have my entire life. I hope this was an encouraging story and that you will continue to follow along with the adventure that God is taking me on. I will share things here that I’m learning. From time to time I will ponder different Bible passages and things I’ve gained from them. Talk about experiences I’ve had, things I’ve seen God do and will continue to see Him do. Join the adventure and follow my path of learning to Make Disciples.

• Written by Eddie Chamberlain