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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Angeline D. Brauer

Song of My Pilgrimage

Well, you know, I honestly feel like I really don't need to share with you this morning because it seems like everything has already been said through the songs and through the prayers and through everything, really.

But I suppose I should follow through with my commitment and share with you.

It's amazing how the Lord really prepares the services at Advent Hope.

I've seen this over and over again for years now, and I truly, truly believe that the Lord is leading here at Advent Hope, and it has been a real blessing and privilege to be part of the leadership team.

But I know that the Lord has even greater things in store for the ministry here, and I look forward to hearing about it in the future.

I'm very happy to have my family here with me this morning.

And so many of them have made the trip here.

And it's really very meaningful to me that they are here at Advent Hope to experience my family that I've had for the past 5 years.

So I'm really glad that both my families are together this morning.

And I just want to share with you that Some of my favorite memories from my childhood were when my family gathered together Friday evenings to open up the Sabbath, singing around the piano.

And music has always been a very powerful force in my life, and I've been really blessed by the music this morning.

And I think that there's so much that we can learn from music that really speaks to us and expresses things that maybe we can't quite verbally express in other ways or there's just something very powerful and driving about music.

And of course we know that in the Bible, music plays a very important role.

And this morning, what I want to talk to you about is not necessarily about music itself, but about a song.

So take your Bibles and turn with me to Revelation chapter 15.

And We'll pray before we read this, but go ahead and turn to Revelation 15.

This is a song that we don't know yet, but I hope that we are all looking forward to learning this song.

Father in heaven, Lord, we come to your throne pleading for bread of life.

Lord, you know my words are feeble, but your words are strong and powerful, and they quicken us.

So I pray, Lord, that the words that are heard this morning are your words.

Bless us with your Holy Spirit at this time, I pray.

So, Revelation 15, and let's read verses starting at verse 2.

And I saw, as it were, a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.

And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty!

Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints!

Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name?

For thou only art holy, for all nations shall come and worship before thee, for thy judgments are made manifest.

And this morning what I want to share with you how the Lord brought me here and sustained me.

Well unlike many others who come to Loma Linda who have great dreams of being a doctor or a dentist or a nurse or some very prestigious profession like that, I had no desire for advanced education.

However, after finishing up my bachelor's degree, I realized that if I wanted to do anything outside of research in the lab, doing bench work, which I did for a while, and I really didn't enjoy.

I'm not a lab rat, but I needed something different than the degree that I had.

And so I found my way in public health and I worked on my master's degree in public health, but I found that after doing that I ended up in research.

However, this time it was not in the lab, it was public health research, and I could resonate with that a little bit better.

But honestly, it wasn't—it went very well for 6 months.

And then the job situation changed, and there were a lot of challenges, but I stuck through because I knew the Lord had given me that job.

And after 4 years of struggling in that position And wondering, is there any room to grow here?

Can I actually learn more than I've already learned?

And finding that it really wasn't going to happen at that place, I started wondering and asking, okay, Lord, what's next?

It's losing its interest, and I'm really starting to feel very stuck.

Well, at the time, there were a lot of things going on in my life.

I was also serving quite frantically, maybe, at church in a number of ministry positions and enjoying every moment of it, Absolutely loving the time I spent at church, and planning and preparing for all those activities.

And yet I knew that there comes a time when all the activity is not enough, and you have to progress in your spiritual walk.

And I knew that in my life, I had come to a point where I needed to go to the next level.

And so I was asking the Lord, okay, I'm ready, I think.

Take me somewhere where I can grow and where my spiritual muscles, most importantly, will grow.

I had just learned about it a few months earlier, and through a series of misfortunes, I actually ended up going to GYC.

I wasn't planning on it, but the Lord changed my plans.

And there at GYC, As wonderful as the messages are when you sit there and listen to someone speak and break open the Word of God to you, what's more important, I found, is the time that you spend individually with the Lord.

And on Sabbath afternoon at GYC, I was alone in my hotel room, quite broken, and asking the Lord, what are you doing with my life?

Am I going anywhere, or is it just going to be the same thing over and over and over again?

Well, I took my Bible because I didn't know what else to do, and I thumbed through a few pages and wasn't really finding anything that was speaking to me until the Lord led me to open up to Isaiah 54.

And I'm not going to read the whole chapter to you, although it's a powerful chapter.

But as I went through those verses, and the Lord said to me, I have called you.

I have a plan for you." And it was 1 of those moments where I heard the voice of the Lord clearly speaking to me, I have a plan for you.

It was freeing in many ways because I felt like, okay, now things are going to change.

Everything will be so much better, different.

And Lord, I'm going to go forward, go out into the world, and serve you in full-time ministry.

That's my plan." Well, I spent the next year trying to work my plan out.

But GYC 2006 came around and nothing had changed.

And so I was really struggling with this idea that the Lord hadn't really followed through with that promise, with the word that he had spoken to me.

Well, after some time of wrestling and praying, A friend of mine actually suggested to me, why don't you check out the nutrition program at Loma Linda?

You're interested in nutrition, you know, it's something you've been wanting to study, why don't you try it out?

So I went to the website, looked at it, didn't really find a lot of information on there, except for a couple things that jumped out at me.

1 was the focus on vegetarian nutrition, and the other was the Adventist health study.

And I thought, Well, those are very unique to Loma Linda.

Maybe this is where the Lord is leading me.

So I decided to just, you know, put in the application and see what happens.

If they accept me, then that must be the sign that the Lord is taking me to Loma Linda.

I really honestly had very little hope of getting into Loma Linda, but just a few weeks after putting in my application, I received an email saying, congratulations, you've been accepted, and you know, so on and so forth.

And so I don't think I was ecstatic at the time, because to be honest, I didn't really want to come to Loma Linda.

However, I had never been to Loma Linda before.

I just knew I'd never wanted to go there.

I guess rumors, or I don't know what it was, It just didn't seem like the right place for me.

But it's amazing how the Lord will take you just where you don't want to go so that He can teach you there.

And I'm not going to go into all the details of how the Lord provided for that transition here.

I had about 3 or 4 months to prepare for the move, and in many, many ways the Lord just opened up doors.

And so at each turn, I was understanding more and more that this was the Lord's will for me to come to Loma Linda.

And I was starting to think, okay, Lord, you know, I think you really want me to do this, and I'm going to do it in faith.

I don't have a lot of arrangements already settled there in Loma Linda, but I'm just going to go out there and see what you do." And as confident as I was that the Lord was bringing me to Loma Linda, I was equally confident that he would only keep me here for 3 months.

That come December, after the first semester of classes, I would be back home in Maryland.

Well, The Lord didn't reveal the whole history to me at that time, which is probably a good thing.

But you know, at that time, as I was preparing for the move, there was a verse, it was actually a scripture song that kept going through my mind over and over again, and I want to turn to it.

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Song of My Pilgrimage

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