Hello folks! How are you? We are Neil & Janet Young. We live with our amazing teenage son, in Coleraine, on the beautiful North Coast of Northern Ireland. We feel that writing this blog is part of an obedience journey to the Lord that we are trying to adventure in! Really what we’re writing is a diary account of what we feel is a new way that God is inviting us to live with Him. Our prayer is that as you read the entries and come along on this journey with us, that you too will meet with God in new ways that blow your hearts and minds open to His possibilities and dreams over your lives! And that The Holy Spirit would grow in you a deep desire to see the Kingdom of God come in the areas where you live 🙌

In October 2023 we stepped down as Senior Pastors from the church that had been our home for 20 plus years, and that we had been leading for the last 6 1/2 years. For the first time in our married lives we were jobless and churchless, but thankfully not hopeless! 2022-2023 had been a difficult season and as we headed towards 2024 we knew that God wasn’t done with us yet, but we were in need of a rest and some healing. Thankfully God agreed, and so in our 40’s we took our first ever GAP year even though there was no way we could afford it! That year we had the opportunity to do so many things and we experienced God’s provision in so many miraculous ways throughout the year.

Here’s the photo dump!

The beginning of something

As we moved into the Autumn of 2024 we began to pray with a little more urgency about what was next for us. We knew the desires and passions God had put in us but we weren’t sure which ‘vehicle’ God wanted us to use in order to pursue them. In October 2024, one year after we stepped down from our previous role He began to speak more clearly to us. We had already received a clear word that we were to look to the old promises God had given us when we were leading church. He had called us clearly to that role and whilst we saw so many incredible things over those years, there was so much that we hadn’t seen fulfilled yet.

I guess if I could summarise those callings into 4 things they were;

• A passion to see our community transform into something that resembles the Kingdom of God. We know that this side of heaven we can’t see that in it’s fullness, but Jesus taught us to pray that His Kingdom would come on earth as it is in Heaven, and it was clear that our community didn’t look a lot like heaven, yet!
• A desire to see those who aren’t yet in a relationship with Jesus find their home in Him. God has radically transformed our lives in such an incredible way and we want to see others experience that relationship.
• We want to see the supernatural ways of God become natural to His people. Too often we have reduced following Jesus to good attendance and modified behaviour. God has so much more in store for us than that.
• A desire to live beyond our own generation. God always works outside of our time, His story is bigger than our lifetime, but too often we live as if everything needs to work in our timeframe. We desire to see what would happen if we made decisions with onehundredyears in mind.

On the morning of the 21st October 2024, God spoke to us through the prophet Isaiah in the Bible;

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:18-19

We felt it was an invitation to step into the new and move on from rest. He also lead us to Hebrews 11, a chapter that I (Neil) have always loved. It opens with this statement;

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1

The passage goes on to detail the incredible faith that so many people we read about in the Scriptures displayed in their lifetime. Each one of them faced an uncertain future but stepped into it because of the faith they had that God would do what He had promised. The incredible thing is that these people were operating generationally, the promises that God gave them weren’t exclusively for them. They were stepping into something bigger than them.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Hebrews 11:13-16

God was catching our attention again.

I (Neil) headed out for a run. God had been speaking to me throughout the year as I ran, so I chose a random talk from a church I often listen to and began my run. Guess what the talk was on (this wasn’t in the title when I chose it!)

❤️HEBREWS 11❤️

The speaker spoke about how we are not running our race (ironic) for ourselves but for the generations that came before us and the generations that will come after us. He even talks about a dream he had where God took Him one hundred years into the future. God was definitely speaking to us!

When I came back home, while I was stretching, I felt a real sense that we were being called into continuing to live the one hundred year dream that we had begun through church a few years ago. I felt the invitation to begin a ministry that did just that. It felt so clear and so obvious. Even though I didn’t really know what that would mean I felt a peace with it.

Next Steps

So, we wrote to some friends who pray to ask for their discernment. We didn’t tell them what was going on but they all knew we were praying about our futures. Through them and through other prophetic words we received we knew that what we were hearing was not wishful thinking, or the result of eating too much cheese. It was the Lord.

The one thing we felt that would characterise the next season would be obedience to God’s voice. We always feel we’ve tried to be obedient to His voice but we received 3 or 4 very specific words in that season which reminded us that God would tell us what to do and when to do it – we weren’t to rely on what we thought was a good idea or things that worked in the past. This was God’s plan and our job was to carry it out.

This felt both exciting and terrifying if I (Neil) am being honest. We came into the new year with a sense of what the next 3 generations might look like, but with no idea what we would do on Tuesday.

We hope you enjoy the journey that we are taking and we invite you to come along too.

We have full faith that God will do what He has promised and we just hope we can keep up. The people of faith mentioned in Hebrews 11 didn’t have it easy and so we invite you to pray for strength and endurance for us as we embark on what is ahead

Blessings

Neil & Janet