Pressurizing times and God´s peace

Thought I would jot down some of my thoughts..... Bayless Conley came to visit. Apparently he comes about once a year to Germany and I heard him speak last year too. Its so amazing, cos we attended the afternoon service and the topic was "dealing with pressure" - which was exactly one of the core issue that was bugging me before.

His 3 main pts of how to deal with pressure:-
1) Do not trust in yourself (2 Cor. 1:8)
2) Be content where you are and what you have (Phil 4:11)
3) Commit your requests to God in prayer (Phil 4:6)

I went through a phase of asking God if the church where I´m attending now, where God wants me to be. Even though I have been attending it for 1 year, but its so different from SJSM (Sg) where I came from and I really struggled through vast differences. There´s nothing wrong with the doctrine of the preaching, but I was really finding it difficult to feel " at home" in the church.

I´ve been facing quite a lot of pressure lately too, being back from Singapore for 3 weeks now. Firstly the language barrier bugged me like crazy. Our weekly youth cell group changed back to german when my german class ended. I found it pretty tough over the past 2 times to understand what was going on. Plus as a cell leader, there´s endless meetings, additional obligations and my leaders are so busy! At the moment, I´m attending 2 german courses - a course similar to "christianity 101", which is the pre-requisite to be a member of the church and a leadership course. Both of which are compulsory and conducted in german of course.

I was faced with double stress cos while I know I need to take it slowly and adapt to the language and culture, but circumstances are pretty unforgiving for that. The culture in Germany is such that people have a tendency to "advice" people. I meet someone for the first time and more often than not, I get this "new" person advising me about life in germany etc. Nothing wrong with that, but it gets to the point that I´m so adverse about hearing about "advice" that more often than not, I shut out before I listen.

i.e. Pressure from culture + pressure from church + expectations on myself = recipe for disaster.

Yah. That´s in short of what´s been happening over the past week. We finally met up with our cluster leader and had a heart-to-heart discussion with him. I was at a deciding point of either I look for another church or I really needed to hear from God if I´m going to continue to stay in the current one. My mindset was: If I was gonna live in a pressurizing culture, at least I want to be a church that was less pressurizing.

It was such a breakthrough to talk to this leader of ours, cos he was so honest, sincere and for once, not offering me any advice, but even acknowledging that what I was feeling about the church is TRUE and there is currently no solution for it. But he did ask that I give the church more time, for problems and issues to be sorted out and also for myself to find more of a rooting in the church. WOW.

I really found the answer and the peace of God that I so desperately needed. Before that, Stephan and I were so divided about this issue. Cos I kept wondering if it was supposed to be an issue of wife submitting to husband or a issue that can be discussed? I even posed this qn to my leader and he said honestly that he had no answer for that.

This was really a period where I struggled with God about a huge issue on my heart. He answered and gave me the peace about it through our cluster leader. I´m really thankful for the light for the next season, that I know that BGG is where I will stay and see what God has in store for me in this church. I pray that I will call this church "my church" one day and not simply "Stephan´s church where I happen to attend".