In episode 6 of Lessons from the Field we talk with Todd Gerst, a church planter and Bible translator who worked in Papua New Guinea (See the video His Gift to Gie). He and his wife Karen spent 15 years working in PNG and seeing several churches established, elders appointed, and the fruit of new birth apparent in countless lives. Todd is now Lead Pastor at Warsaw Community Church in Indiana, USA. We asked the question:

If you were 25 years old again would you still choose the same path for your life?

Speaker

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Resource. For more information, visit accesstruth.com.

Simon:              Hi everyone. Welcome back to the

Lessons From The Field Podcast. I’ve got Brad with me, as always.

Brad:                Simon, how are you, mate?

Simon:              Good thanks, Brad. And, it’s a

beautiful day here in Western Sydney, 33 degrees Centigrade, Celsius, Kelvin,

whatever you want to use. Whatever it is, it’s not Fahrenheit, because I’m

pretty sure… What’s 33 in Fahrenheit, Brad?

Brad:                Move on.

Simon:              Okay. You’re the one who lived in

Colorado three years or whatever it was.

Brad:                I can’t do that. I can’t do

that.

Simon:              Okay.

Brad:                There is a formula, I forget it.

Simon:              Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Brad:                Let me go just grab a phone.

Simon:              Yeah. All right. Today we’re here

talking with Todd Gerst again. You might remember him from the last two

episodes. Today we’ve got a bit of an interesting question. It’s one that comes

up a lot, I think, Brad. It’s the sort of thing that we talk about just in our

culture in general, in Western culture, we often talk about this, don’t we? We

talk about reliving our lives from a certain point. People say, if only I was

21 again.

Brad:                Right, go back and do it again.

Simon:              Yeah. And in a mission context, a

church planting context, especially because it’s such a learning process, isn’t

it? There’s so many things you learn along the way. God sanctifies us, he

teaches us things, and we look back and we go man, if only I’d listened to God

earlier, if I’d done that sooner. There’s a lot of if onlys.

Brad:                Yeah, yeah, either way. So even

when you do something that you think is wholeheartedly the right thing to do,

you can still doubt itself, right?

Simon:              Yeah, yeah.

Brad:                You can still look at other

options you could have taken and still maybe even have regrets.

Simon:              I think sometimes we can do that

kind of pridefully