How we got started in the ministry.

I love to tell our story. It is a story about how the Lord grew our faith, but I have been reluctant to write about it....why....because sometimes it is hard for me to convey tone in written word. So let me start off by saying this....EVERYTHING that resembles faith in our lives is from the Lord.....this is not a story about how awesome Eric and Michele Helms are...on the contrary....it is a story about the Lords faithfulness. I also want to say that there are so many who have sacrificed SOOOO much. Many have literally given their lives for Christ and many many missionaries have given up all their "worldly" goods to go and serve the Lord in countries of great poverty or persecution....in comparison.....we have NO sacrifice!

I started thinking that the Lord was calling Eric into ministry about 6 years ago....I didn't say anything because you have to be God called and not mama or wife called! 5 years ago Eric started expressing, much to his disbelief, he thought the Lord was calling him to some type of ministry. Now don't misunderstand.....he wanted to serve he just couldn't believe that the Lord would use him...he felt very unworthy....at the time he had been saved for 16 years out of a life of being a "thug"....as he describes himself....It took almost 9 months before Eric surrendered to the call to serve full time.

Oddly enough I thought that he would surrender and then suddenly all these doors would open....that is not the way that it happened....I will blog on that another time....needless to say my type A personality was put to the test!!!

While we were not sure exactly what the Lord wanted us to do...we knew what we were not supposed to do.....we did begin to pray that the Lord would make our path clear. While Eric continued to work his full time job in the corporate world we started getting everything ready....we decided on a name...Driven to Encourage Ministries...and we started getting all the legal stuff in order. It was a HUGE amount of research and work...but all along the way the Lord brought just what we needed to get the task accomplished!

We then started praying about how we were going to pay the bills......again my plans were very different than the Lords....His way required much more faith and dependence on Him???? Funny how He is about that??? Eric has such an awesome captivating testimony...I thought that churches would start calling wanting him to come and share with their people and we would get paid for that....but that was not the plan for us....God started opening doors slowly for Eric to mentor young men..which he loves...and also he started having the opportunity to share his testimony to some really small youth groups and Bible studies.....there was NO money coming in and Eric was still working his full time job. We both knew that he was supposed to quit....our only debt is our house and it has quite a bit of equity but it is small...with a small payment...we couldn't rent cheaper...so we didn't feel that we were supposed to sell it but we did entertain that thought.

After much much prayer...we decided to move all our retirement money over to an account that we could use.....it was not very large but after taxes and penalties we knew we could live on it for 18 months or longer if other money came in....so Eric put in his notice...............more tomorrow!