Beginnings and Endings

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6).

As I took the steps onto the stage to deliver the Word for the last time as the Women’s Ministries Director of my district, the Holy Spirit stopped me and said clearly, “Well done. You have been faithful. Now go and do what I have for you next.” As much as I long to hear those words at the end of my life, in the moment they stung. I knew those words meant it was over. Serving the leaders and ministering to women of my district had been a joy, a passion, a dream fulfilled. I loved every minute of it and in my flesh I did not want to give it up; but that would be disobedience. We were mobilizing to the foreign field in three months. I had been called to the ends of earth at a youth camp altar when I was thirteen. I had been praying for and dreaming of this for decades and now the Lord was leading our family there. Yet in order to embark on this new beginning, what I was doing for the Lord had to come to an end. It seemed as though both passions could not flourish at once. I was so expectant for this new chapter but simultaneously mourning the closing of the last. It was not the first time we had transitioned to a new ministry, and likely not the last...continue reading

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Elizabeth Wolfe is an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God, and serves with her husband Curt and two children, Penelope and Ezekiel, in the Arab world. Prior to field work, Elizabeth served as the Women’s Ministries Director for the Michigan District, where they also pastored for nine years. She has a passion to see women of all ages and nationalities challenged and changed through the Word of God.