My name is Jennifer Parker. I am from Phil Campbell, Alabama. I am honored and privileged to attend and serve at Mountain View Baptist Church. As an introduction, I want to share how God led me to start this blog. He did not tell me to do this because I am knowledgeable in building websites or starting blogs, to be completely honest, I don’t have a clue as to why this is the task He has given me, all I know is that He has.

I am a morning person. I wake up most days about 3am…yes, you are reading that correctly and I begin every day in prayer and devotional time. Spending time alone with God is so important and I believe that we should give Him the best part of our day. For me, that is the morning. It was during this time, for several months, that I felt like God was telling me to write a blog. I couldn’t understand why He would say this and I really thought I was misunderstanding Him. So I tried to put Him off. In case you’re wondering, that doesn’t work with God. He is persistent. So I began to pray that He would give me some kind of confirmation, an assurance, that I was hearing Him clearly. Out of the blue, I felt led to go talk to a lady friend of mine at church, Corrie. I had no idea what I was supposed to say to her but I knew I was supposed to go talk to her. One Sunday night, after our church service, I pulled her aside and said, “I think I need you to pray with me about something,” and I explained it all to her and how I didn’t want to do anything God wasn’t telling me to do. She said, “That’s so crazy, several years ago, (15 give or take), I wrote a blog.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. See, I had no idea she had ever written a blog. At the time she was writing a blog, I was not saved and was certainly not spending my time reading Christian blogs. I knew this was the confirmation I had been praying for. Corrie talked with me and counseled me on how to pray about this. She encouraged me to let God lead, trusting that He would show the steps when it was time to take them.

Over the next couple of weeks, I began to google and research how to start a blog. The top result that showed up was something called WordPress. I didn’t know what that was but I clicked on it and started reading. The more I read, the more overwhelmed I became. I felt so inadequate for this task. It sounded as if I would be building a website and I barely even knew what a blog was! I started doubting and backing away. God knew how I was feeling. He knew I was scared. So He set to work. At my job, we use several web based applications. Many of which I access on a daily basis but there are a few that I really don’t use at all. On this particular day, for a reason I can’t even recall, it was one of those that I logged into and there across the top was a banner that said ‘Get WordPress’… God had literally put a sign on my computer screen. I would get on YouTube to listen to music or Hulu to watch a show and there would be an ad for, yep, you guessed it, WordPress. I went to get gas and there on the screen was a commercial for ‘Doing a God-sized Task’. It was like God was jumping up and down saying, “This is it! Step 1!” So, yes, I downloaded WordPress and set up an account.

The first thing I needed to do was choose a domain name. So I started praying, asking God to tell me the name He wanted. He kept telling me the name was important and I didn’t want to just choose something because I thought it sounded good. I wanted it to be what He wanted. That is when He led me to 2 Timothy 4:7 and the words ‘Finish the Race’ just grabbed ahold of me and I thought, this is the name. I felt so confident. But the thing is, when we are in the will of God and we are taking those steps of faith in obedience to Him, Satan can’t stand it. He will do everything he can to discourage and disrupt the work. He caused me to doubt that I was really hearing God at all. I started backing away again. At this time, no one other than Corrie, my friend from church and my sister, Angela, knew anything about this blog. But it was there in my doubts that God said, “Ask your Sunday School class to pray”, not just any prayer but specifically that God would give me the name and cause me to hear. I have to take a moment here to tell you I am so blessed to be part of this small group. They have encouraged, taught, loved and discipled me in ways they don’t even know and I knew without a shadow of a doubt, when I asked them to pray, they would absolutely be praying. So I asked. The very next week, during our worship service, our pastor, Brother Sammy, got up to preach his sermon. He put the main scripture text on the screen and God ’caused me to hear.’ It was 2 Timothy 4:7….. and finishtherace.blog was born.

I don’t know what God is going to do through this blog. I don’t know that anyone will ever even read it. But we learned in Sunday School a few weeks ago that in our Christian walk, our success is not dependent on other people’s response, our success is found in our obedience to Christ. This is what He has told me to do. It doesn’t make sense, it’s actually pretty scary, but my job isn’t to make sense of it all but only to submit to my God and offer myself up as a vessel through which He can speak. So here I am LORD, let the race begin….