Peter

The Rock. On whom the church has been built. One of the "Big Three" (sorry 'Bron, Wade and Bosh). Peter was such an instrumental person in the history of the Church. I can't say for sure, but my guess is that my buddy Peter was named after him (at least he is one of the namesakes).

Peter was one of my best friends growing up here in Arizona. He was one of the three friends I chose to join me as "ninja turtles" for a birthday party, and he was also a basketball teammate on a few teams growing up. He came out to visit my family in the first year or two that we lived out there. But after that, to my knowledge, I hadn't spoken to him in over a decade.

Flash forward: the wife of the leader of my internship here in Arizona is in nursing school and made the connection with her instructor that I used to be best friends with her son. Yep- you guessed it: Peter's mom! So we made the connection and scheduled to hang out a week ago. We spent the evening eating pizza and watching a football game and while we chatted about life, I recognized that he kept making reference to a desire to check out church sometime with me.

Over these past few months, I've been learning a lot about listening for God in prayer and doing things in faith. I felt the Lord put it on my heart to share about a new obedience-based way to study the Bible that I've been learning in my internship, unsure if he would be interested. We started studying in Luke 16 together, and by the end of the passage we got to the part about writing an "I will..." statement to commit to obeying the passage. I challenged him to pray and ask the Lord to speak to him, and while we were both bowed in prayer, I was praying like crazy, "God, PLEASE speak!" And speak he did.

Peter wrote and shared one of the most beautiful I will statements I have heard! It was super heart-felt and, when asked where that came from, he said, "I don't know where it came from, but it felt really good." We then closed in prayer and by the end of our prayer time, he was in tears. I left him with more passages to study and, because he's truly in the Father's hands, he is equipped to learn straight from the Word and the Spirit on his own!

God is amazing. He really does speak! Hallelujah!