Journey of Shawn Peoples' Walk in Grace!

As I sit here tonight next to my mom while she preps Thanksgiving dinner for tomorrow, I am very thankful for the hardest 3 years of my life. It has been a joy to walk these three years under duress, stress, uncertainty, being crushed and being healed. One of my best friends and I sat today talking about the journey God has placed us both on. All I could do was be thankful that God still uses me and loves me. I have come to experience the incredible Grace of God while God moved us to Hawaii 3 years ago and then crushed me 2 years ago. The man that God destroyed was a prideful, hurtful, critical pastor who thought he knew everything. I remember thinking that most pastors didn't have  vision or were just wimps that had given up the fight of the Gospel. How wrong I was and how it took My Daddy to change that. I grew up in 2013 and hope that I continue to grow up this next year. Last year at this time, I was hurting incredibly. Michelle was really the only one that knew it. I didn...

This world is hard! Yes, I said it and so have you, "this world is hard". There is so much pulling at us and so much to do. We are overwhelmed with responsibilities and tangible things that pull at us constantly, hoping for our affection and time. As a Father; my family, my house responsibilities and my position within the church can become overwhelming. Where do I find the time to do everything I am responsible for and still find time to follow Christ's call? I think the problem is really the last question! I see a ton of people that live very segmented lives; they have their Christian life (missions, church and bible reading), they have their family life and their work life. Sometimes they even find enough time to have a hobby or 5. I see people so busy with life that they are running non-stop, only to give me that "I don't have time for another church thing" look. You know that look, its the roll of the eyes when someone announces an opportunity to serv...

Last week I had a blast challenging our church to know their primary calling and concentrate on being intimate with God. In God preaching His Word through me, I built a wall on stage to show some of the things Satan uses to keep us from intimacy with God. What I forgot to do was be ready for the attack that came this last week. As some of you know, we are in the midst of getting our house on the market to sell so we can move to the McMurray, PA area soon. There is so much to do to get the house ready to sell, one of them is painting (oh how I hate painting). I am not a patient person when it comes to painting or remodeling. I tend to bite off more than I have time for and then whine through the process as I go. Usually I end up trying to do the job too quick and do a really poor job of remodeling. I am a slow learner when it comes to remodeling or painting. In the beginning of our painting process, I thought I was tackling a ton of it, only to find I had only hit a small portion of t...

If you haven't heard by now, we are moving to PA. Yesterday was my official first day of being the pastor of Faith Community Church Lakeside. How awesome is our God! It felt so good to be back preaching God's Word to people who want to hear it. This church has treated us so well that I had to pinch myself last night as I thought "this might be too good to be true". I know that we will have trouble, but God has given us a great start. Yesterday, 2 or more people stepped from death to life at the end of our service. One, a mother, came up to me after the service telling me she has never been to our church. She told me how she felt pulled to be here this morning and how she couldn't believe how much God loved her. She cried with joy that Christ lived in her and that she could talk to Him at anytime. I met a family right before our service that hadn't been to our gathering in over a year. At the end of the service, their daughter said yes to Jesus. The dad was...