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

Paul , you want to say hello to everybody ?

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 .

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 ?

I'm a doctor , I'm a lawyer .

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 .