My own Monastery?

The next morning,a friend called, saying he had just met a man who wanted to go on the road for ministry work. This man has a house he wanted to rent, maybe a rent  to own arrangement. The house has acreage, three bedrooms, is furnished, has new fences for horses, a barn, and a pond. All for $390 a month. Very nice sounding.

I knew the difficulty would be that the place is at least an hour away, out in the country. What money I get is here near the cities. If I went there, I would have a hard time raising the money. But $390 a month? You're probably thinking Come on, how hard can that be? Trust me, here in Appalachia, it could be tough.

It reminded me of other things; my brother in law has showed us DVD's of the Duggars, they don't look to be struggling. Then there's the other Christian homeschooling family I know; they just bought 100 acres of land, it turns out that there was a glitch in the title paperwork. They ended up getting 200 hundred acres at the same price.

It's good to see them blessed, but it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. Then I remembered something a guy said to me when I first became a Christian; this was a guy that didn't like me. He said now I should join a monastery. I thought it was a strange suggestion, since I wanted to be out among people doing ministry work. I remembered what a joy it was to be doing the things I'm doing right here. It's a big white visual example of what happens when Jesus is in charge. That and I have some ideas about improving commerce in a run down part of town; I'm already acting on those ideas, along with other ministry things. So, does the adversary have a plan to move Christians out in the middle of nowhere? I don't want to be a conspiracy-under-every-rock guy; but I try to be aware of patterns.