Map Changes - Calling Doesn’t

It has been quite a while since my last public post. The most recent one was published on July 30, and it concluded a four-part series about how God opened doors for me to Israel and Pakistan. Since then, things have been quieter here, but there has been plenty going on both in the site’s “engine room” and in my own life...

In fact, so much has happened over the past few weeks – and especially during the past week – that at times even I have found it difficult to keep up with which direction the road is turning next.

When I wrote that four-part series, I already knew that Pakistan would not remain a one-time trip. The next trip has been planned for December, and it has now been confirmed as far as things like this can humanly be confirmed and prepared in advance. If everything goes as planned, I will therefore return to Pakistan toward the end of the year.

But during the past week, something happened that I had not planned at all.

Suddenly, an opportunity opened up for me to go to Northern Ireland in October on a Vision Trip with Operation Mobilisation.

The purpose of the Vision Trip is to get to know OM’s work and people on the ground, and to explore what kinds of opportunities there might be there in the future. So I am not going to Northern Ireland with a ready-made assignment or a precisely defined plan, but above all to look, listen and ask: could God be opening up some next step there?

Sometimes the next step only becomes visible when it is time to take it. Sometimes you only sense it once you have already stepped onto it.

What I can say is that, once again, within the past seven days such remarkable things have happened – dreams, signs, and words of knowledge even from friends who otherwise knew nothing about this (when I didn’t know myself either!) – that I have no doubt that God Himself is leading me on this Vision Trip.

Northern Ireland was not in my plans. Not on my list. Not “next on the map.”

And that is exactly why this has somehow felt so familiar...

Over the past year, I have repeatedly seen that while I am looking in one direction, God is preparing something somewhere completely different. For more than 22 years, I thought He had intended me for Sub-Saharan Africa. Not even in my wildest imagination could I have guessed that the direction was nowhere near there!

Last autumn, Israel opened the way to Pakistan. From Pakistan, something much broader began to take shape. And now, right in the middle of all this, Northern Ireland appeared on the map. I do not yet know what all of it means. And I do not need to know everything in advance.

Living Faith – Moving and Ready to Change from the Start

At the same time as a lot has been happening in my own life and ministry, Living Faith has also changed. That in itself would not be so unusual – except that this website only opened in March!

In fact, the order has been exactly this: first, what is happening around me has changed, along with the direction my ministry seems to be taking. The website has then had to change and be slightly reshaped along with it, even at this very early stage. Living Faith has not been given a new structure simply because I wanted to redesign a website, but because I needed a new way of sharing things when the nature of the work began to change.

When this website was created, I thought of it above all as a place where I could write about faith, the Bible, God’s work and the things I encounter along the way. It is still that. But little by little, I have realised that not everything belongs in exactly the same way on a completely public platform.

There are things I want to write about openly for anyone to read: teachings, thoughts about faith and life, true stories of what God is doing, and those parts of the journey that can be shared publicly here. Then there is this other level.

There are things that are still unfolding, prayer needs, preparations, doors that are only just beginning to open, and situations where it is neither wise nor always possible to share everything publicly.

That is why Ystäväkirje (a letter for my prayer partners) and the private Lähempää area have been created alongside Living Faith. They are intended for people who want to follow the ministry more closely and specifically support it in prayer.

At the moment, however, Ystäväkirje and Lähempää are available only in Finnish. This is because they are designed specifically for my Finnish-speaking prayer partners and contain more detailed ministry updates, prayer requests, videos and stages of the journey that I do not publish openly online.

The public side of Living Faith is not becoming Finnish-only or private. Quite the opposite. I will continue publishing public posts, and all public blog posts will continue to appear in both Finnish and English, just as before.

This change also explains something you may already have noticed in the blog archive. The original four-part series about how God opened doors to Israel and Pakistan no longer appears there in full. The two middle posts – the ones specifically about Israel and Pakistan – were moved from the public blog into the private Finnish-language Lähempää area. That is why also the English blog now appears to have two posts missing from the middle of that series. (The same is with the Finnish public blog: these two posts are missing.)

The public blog itself will continue. There will still be content here about faith, the Bible, life and God’s work – and certainly some updates from future journeys as well.

I Still Don’t Know the Whole Route

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how easily we would like to see the whole plan laid out in advance. Where am I going? Why there? What will come of it? What will happen six months from now?

I too would sometimes like to see much farther ahead on the map. But lately, God seems to have been teaching me a very different way of walking: the next step is enough. And sometimes even that step is not completely visible when the call to take it already comes.

A year ago, I would not have known how to draw this route on paper.

Israel. Pakistan. Northern Ireland. And Pakistan again.

I did not plan this whole route. I can only prepare for what I can see right now, keep my heart and my hands open – and walk through the door God opens next.

And perhaps that is one of the most practical sides of faith.

You do not have to see everything in order to start moving.

If you have been following Living Faith through the public posts, don’t go anywhere.

There will be more. ❤️ I will certainly write about Northern Ireland too, either while I am there or after the trip.

Thank you for being part of the journey! ❤️