God’s Calling to Our Surprise!

Away we go! This month marks the beginning of the Williams family’s tenth year in ministry at USAFA! We moved here back in 2016 to serve the cadets of the Baptist Student Union. The calling to come to Colorado and USAFA was a surprising one! God continually surprises us as He allows, and even calls us, to be a part of His redemptive story! So, ending up where we are now was an unexpected journey… let me tell you our story of how we got to where we are now and how we know it is exactly where God wants us to be.

An earlier surprise to the move to Colorado was the fact that God called us into ministry at all.  I was working for the railroad and thought it would be what I did for the rest of my life. All I ever wanted was a job that could support my family, and the railroad was just that. It had crazy hours, but it paid the bills, it had good enough benefits, and I had many friends there. So, I planned to be there until retirement, but God had other plans.

I was getting increasingly involved in our family church in Smithville, Missouri – Grace Community Church. I started by serving with the 4th/5th grade Sunday school class and then began to help with the youth, leading the High School guys small group on Sunday evenings. I could feel myself being fed by the Lord as I attempted to love on those young men. The thought crossed my mind a time or two that maybe God wanted me to do more ministry, but I quickly dismissed the thoughts. After all, I couldn’t teach God’s Word, I found it difficult to talk about “real” things at all. We played games and ate pizza at the small group as much as talking about Jesus.

But in early 2009, I went to a youth conference with GCC’s youth pastor and had a blast learning about leading young people to know Jesus. But I still pushed the thought off. It was at this conference that God surprised me! I received a call from a co-worker telling me that I was going to lose my job because I did not have enough seniority. I remember having a peace come over me, I knew in that moment that that call wasn’t about me losing my job, it was about God making it clear that I was called to serve Him in ministry. Part of what gave me comfort was knowing that when I got home and told Angie about this feeling, she would pull me off the edge, but she said, “Sounds right to me.” I was shocked!

I spent the next few years going to Bible college getting a bachelor’s in biblical studies then stepping onto staff at GCC. These were wonderful years that I experienced and learned so much about loving, pastoring, and engaging with people but I knew it wasn’t where God was going to keep us. I was right… but it was still a surprising call that He gave me.

We were sitting in an ice cream shop in December of 2015 with several friends who we were doing a small group with and we began joking about moving to Colorado to start a church plant. They all love Colorado and joked that it would be awesome to live there and do life together. They joked, and we joined them that night; but a couple of weeks later, the joke turned into a prompting from God.

I remember talking to Angie and telling her, I think God might be calling us to Colorado. Here response was much like the previous calling… “that might be right.” So, we sat our kids down and asked them to join us in prayer and by February we were visiting Colorado to see what God might have for us. On that trip, we visited with many church planters thinking God might want us to be a part of something like that. But on the last day, our friend Bill (he officiated our wedding) took us up to the Academy and shared his vision for the BSU ministry as we stood by the chapel and looked over the terrazzo at the quarter mile by quarter mile square that would become our ministry field. We were sold. This is what God was calling us to.

Questions immediately entered my thinking: I was never in the military, and I did not do college straight after high school so “Why would you call me to this field Lord?” It took a few months for me to gain clarity in this – the Lord said, “Aaron, I brought you to myself during this part of your life (I came to faith when I was 21) and I have built you to disciple and walk with these young people who are walking that same investigative walk you were when you found me.

He has confirmed this calling for both Angie and I, over and over again. We know that we are exactly where God would have us. At least we are for now – until He chooses to surprise us again!

Please pray for us as we enter into this new year. There is always so much excitement, and this year is no exception, but it also brings so many emotions, stresses, temptations, and tiredness. We believe God is doing something big at the Academy! Pray for us to have the eyes to see Him working, for the sensitivity to see the Holy Spirit on the move, and the renewed passion for Christ’s gospel so that we will move when God says, “move” and not move when He asks us to not.