Through full-time volunteer ministry, Paul commits to cultivating authentic, accessible space to process the difficult questions of life, through content, conversation and community. While he is honest about his personal faith, he seeks to be available regardless of ones beliefs, knowing the value and importance of connection even when minds do not change

He has spent the last two decades serving with various ministries, like YWAM River City. He's a content-creator, through his podcast "Where did you see God", 24+ books, and an array of videos. A husband and father of three, he believes each day presents opportunities to "love God and love others", at home, locally, and globally.

Visit: wheredidyouseegod.com

Welcome to 12-Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, His creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Paul.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

I am in Virginia in the United States.

Wonderful, wonderful.

The thing that caught my attention is YWAM, yeah, and I'd love to know how your connection with that organization was able to help you continue in ministry.

YWAM is Youth With A Mission, and Youth With A Mission has existed since the 60s and actually exists in most countries in the world throughout the United States.

Its heart is to know God and to make Him known.

There's a high focus on youth and young adults and equipping them to be able to go into all the world and just represent who God is, but it also has a heart for serving in the communities where it's located.

I serve with a YWAM location here in Virginia called YWAM River City.

What's interesting is I joined YWAM in a very unexpected way.

I've been serving in ministries for over two decades, and the last ministry I served with unfortunately became quite a toxic environment.

It was very hard to exist there, but what made it particularly hard is I felt like God was inviting me to stay, and He was saying it wouldn't get easier.

There's a whole story there, but I learned a lot about what it means to be an ambassador of Christ in that space and what it means to serve even if it's costly.

I learned how to find joy in even the hardest of situations.

In the end, I ended up losing my job without any explanation given and found myself unemployed as a husband, as a father of three, a homeowner, and with tremendous pressure from others to get a job as soon as possible.

But then I felt like God very clearly was saying, Do not operate out of financial fear.

Put another way, He was saying, I don't need money.

I need Him.

He will be my provider.

Am I willing to trust that?

What that led to was about nine months of being unemployed, and yet somehow the bank account didn't run out.

My wife was serving in the same ministry, and so neither of us were making much money, as it was, but one income.

Fast forward, that was 2018, but you get to the spring of 2019, and I had a few opportunities on the table, a few jobs that I most likely was going to be offered.

Some made a good amount of money, some would have carried a good amount of reputation, and then there was this one opportunity with Youth With a Mission.

On paper, it had some amazing things going for it, including it wasn't a specific task I was being invited to do or specific role to fill.

They were inviting me to come and serve because they knew how I operated and to do whatever God was inviting me to do.

That was great.

The one caveat is nobody in YWAM gets a paycheck.

Every single person that serves with YWAM is a full-time volunteer missionary, which meant that in this job, I was stepping into no paycheck.

Many people, when I say that, are like, I don't even know how that works.

It works because God had already shown me that he was a provider.

He had already set that framework.

But to get to the core of your question, serving with YWAM has actually freed me to learn what it means to be an ambassador of Christ and to live it out in ways that I found very hard in traditional ministry roles and traditional vocational roles.

Because I do not have to operate based on getting money, I can operate based on loving God and loving others.

Because my roles aren't shaped by metrics but on faithfulness to God's invitations, I can serve as he invites, even if it looks meaningless, even if it looks like a failure.

As a result, each day is an opportunity for me to wake up and say, all right, God, how can I love you and love others with my life?

Some days, it's easier than others.

Some days, it feels rewarding.

Sometimes, it feels challenging.

But since 2018 and since 2019, serving with YWAM, I found that God has been faithful because we still haven't had our bank account empty.

We still haven't lost our home.

So it gives me an opportunity to really discover who God is.

I was just praying and asking God to help me not only recognize what should be corrected, but help me to understand how to correct the thing.

And when you talked about the metrics, I really love the concept of realigning with the question.

What do you need from me today, Lord?

What should I do?

How should I show up?

And the good news is God is so patient with us and gracious with us in that process.

There's a passage that says something to the effect of God is not slow to answer his prayers, but is patient with us.

And I love that because we have these stubborn understandings of God and life and value and purpose and what needs to happen and what shouldn't happen.

And we will cry out to God and God and his love is actually patient with us.

And so you look at the disciples and see all the ways they got it wrong, but then you see Jesus patiently walking with them, correcting them sometimes gently, sometimes bluntly, but always exuding a deep love that saw who they were created to be and believed that they were on their way there.

Well, you've definitely done work with your time.

There's the podcast, there's 24 plus books, there's videos, of course, there are other podcasts that you're going on.

You've been working.

Is that a natural aspect of who you were in terms of, hey, when I get there, I work?

Yeah, I laugh because it is not necessarily a defining factor of me.

I'm definitely not lazy, but I've never been the type A, I want to be the best, I want to do the most.

I'm very intentional about what I choose to do and what I choose not to do.

And the other reason I laugh is because so many of the things that people look at and say, wow, you've done so much, occurred at times when I felt like I had nothing left to give, no more energy, sometimes no desire.

All I had actually at most of those moments was a willingness to still say yes to God if he invited me, even if everything in me was like, but no, I want to sleep, God.

And so even last year when I self-published a book a month, that came at a time when I really was telling God I have nothing left, God.

And in fact, some of the books echo that.

One of the last ones is based on David Psalm, and it's how long, oh Lord.

And so, yeah, I think productivity is a value in many cultures, and particularly in American culture.

Accomplishment is a huge thing.

But that has not been what's driven me.

I want to be faithful to God's invitations, and I want to act with integrity when it comes to loving God and loving others.

And if that is going to be in the result of a podcast or a book, then I want to be willing to say yes.

But at any point, I'm doing it based on my own desires and efforts, then it becomes more and more prone to becoming misaligned, or becoming for some other purpose than loving God and loving others.

So I try to be attentive, but yeah, more often than not, it's God's strength and capacity, not my own.

Amazing.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's the message you'd leave for future Paul Granger?

I think I would want to ask myself the same question you just asked me, to ask myself, where did you see God in this season?

Because it's easy for us when we are in a hard season, as soon as we get out of it, to want to not think about it anymore.

And the opportunity we miss in that is God was with us in that.

And when we don't ask where God was in the midst, we may miss what he was doing in that moment.

And so I would want to challenge myself to look back and to remember how I feel now, the thoughts I'm having now, and to have five years of deeper insight to be able to say, oh, that's why God didn't let that thing happen.

That's why God allowed that thing to happen.

That's the unexpected thing that God was working on.

And to have a peace, if there is still unanswered questions, to be able to still name that God was present.

And so that's what I would want to ask myself is, Paul, where did you see God during that hard season?

Well, this has been an amazing conversation.

I appreciate you tremendously.

In closing, is there anything else you'd like to share with our amazing audience?

I always want to challenge people to know that you don't need to be the smartest or the best or the strongest or have the most desire or any manner of capacity to be able to experience God, or more importantly, to step towards him.

You can take the slightest toe-nudge forward in the smallest way, and that is still a forward movement towards God.

So I would want people to know that God loves you and desires to be in relationship with you, and that he has given you the ability to do at least that much.

Sometimes he might equip you to take a giant leap, but don't shape your life around the leaps.

Know that even the smallest faithfulness is still faithfulness.

As Jesus put it, faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.

We all have that mustard seed amount of faith if we're just willing to say yes, even if we don't understand it.

So no matter your situation, know that that is within you today, and you can do that little bit today, and it could end up being immeasurably more than you realize.

Well, this has been a pleasure.

I treasure amazing audience.

Links are in the show notes.

Thank you for being on What Is Inspired by 12 Minute Convoys.