Totally and Completely Amazed (Guest Post)

Guest Blogger: Joshua Goodman

So, any story worth being told must start at the beginning or as close to the beginning as possible. I can remember 30 years ago moving to Haiti and beginning a whirlwind of ministry life that is only told about in storybooks:

Standing side by side with my dad, facing hundreds of voodoo worshipers and preaching the Gospel.

Cutting sacred cords around a voodoo tree at a sacred shrine of those that worship Satan, causing literally, a city-wide uproar.

Ministering to thousands, seeing hundreds saved and healed.

This list could go on and on, blind eyes, deaf ears, the lame and broken, all healed. Then 25 years ago we moved back state side to take over a little storefront church in a military town that I had never heard of.

The whirlwind continued… Growing one of the most effective and city impacting churches in Fayetteville. Being one of the first teams to legally bring Bibles into the former Soviet Union, meeting men that had spent the majority of their lives in prison for the sake of the Gospel. Planting churches and preaching to unreached people in the jungles of Thailand. Training leaders in the attics of China. And once again this story could go on and on. City impacting youth ministry, all night prayer meeting and church planting… WOW!!!

And here we are living in the Kairos (supreme and epic moment, the God ordained time). Spring has just sprung and the Bradford pear trees are in bloom. This is how the story concludes, continues and begins. This Sunday after being the senior pastor of Cliffdale Christian Center for 25 years my father will lay his hands on me and bestow on me one of the greatest honors of my life: legacy, heritage, and inheritance. We enter this time with great excitement as it only happens once in a generation.

This story is concluded, but the story will continue and the story of my life as pastor of Cliffdale Christian Center is just beginning. In the year of our Lord two thousand and thirteen, on the twenty-fourth day of the month of March I will be set in. On the twenty-fifth I will be married to the love of my life for eighteen years… And on Easter Sunday the thirty-first I will preach my first sermon… Spring has sprung and I stand totally and completely amazed.