just-the-tip of the day when I took my three-year-old daughter to an outdoor pool in the center of the city. There, with the water's chill taking away some of the day's heat, they were playing a game of "find Daddy" in the shallow end of the pool. I had taken my daughter with me to a store so that she could purchase new tennis shoes. Now she stood alone in the water and began to cry. "Daddy!" she screamed. I raced to her and scooped her out of the water. She cried louder. "Daddy!" I held her in my arms and hurried to get out of the pool, then realized my daughter would have none of that. She pointed her little finger at me and began to scream, calling me the most vile of names. What had I done? I had brought her with me into a place where she was out of her element, to a place where she had neither her clothes nor a favorite teddy bear to which to cling, no place she called home. She was overwhelmed with fright. "No, Daddy! You must never do that again!" she cried, as I quickly carried her back inside the hotel room. "I know," I told her. "I'm sorry." As I sat there in the hotel room, holding my crying child in my arms, I began to wonder how I could have gotten into this predicament. Before I had left home I had prayed for God to give me wisdom as to what was right and what was wrong, and now, in the middle of New York City, I needed to decide just how to do the right thing. The Bible says that wisdom is a gift from God, not to be squandered by man. When you have received God's gift of wisdom, you are to use it for the good of others, not the harm of others. My daughter, the youngest of three, had come to me with the blessing of her daddy. How could I have been so irresponsible as to allow that to come to an end? I felt as if I had betrayed her, and the love of her family. I felt so empty I couldn't move. I could not even cry. After hours and hours of not being able to function, when my daughter fell asleep, I crept out of the hotel room and went down to the hotel bar where my pastor worked in the mornings, hoping to find solace there. The only people at the bar were a man and woman who looked like refugees from war-torn areas. Their clothes were tattered. Their lives were not what I would call "normal." It was an environment of total chaos. There were so many issues that were pressing on these two people's minds they didn't even have time to notice each other or me. As the hours went by, I felt only more empty, and still had no idea what to do about my predicament. There were so many conflicting thoughts in my head, so many issues, and so many decisions to be made. I got up one morning at the crack of dawn and decided to spend time walking the streets of this troubled city, to find answers, but I didn't go into the street. I simply stood on the balcony of my hotel room, staring at the streets below. I stood there for hours and hours, but no answers came to me. At times I would stand there all day. When night came, I went back to my room and tried to come to terms with my situation. To my utter astonishment, the words I had heard in church the night before—the words God had sent me to read just before I left home for my trip to New York—came to my mind. And what God said in His Word came to my mind as well. When we got to heaven, we are going to be fully equipped with everything we need to bring life to a dead world, so we can bring life to the dead world in order to reap a harvest for God's glory. Yes, the answer was there, right in front of me in New York. I knew what the answer was: I was supposed to be ministering in the city, and it was for me to live and work in New York as a minister, and I was supposed to raise my child with God as the center of our lives, not the world. But I didn't know how to make those decisions. I finally went back to my room, went to bed, and prayed for God to show me what to do. "I will not allow you to be so hurt and betrayed that you allow it to take your love and trust in God away," He said. It's God's Will that you be His minister; be in the city. Do not allow anyone or anything to take your trust away from Him. Do not put up with that. What is meant for your hurt is for your healing, and what is meant for your healing is to come to an end. The decisions I made will not be perfect; they will not be what I had planned, but they will be His will. By the time I had put this all down on paper, it was two in the morning. I had never written so much in my life. In the darkest hours of the night, before sleep took me, a peace came over me, a feeling that I was on the right track. The next morning, as I was about to leave the hotel to head for the airport and a flight to Tampa, Florida, for a few days, I called my father, who was in California. "I need you to pray for me," I said. My father paused, and then said, "Okay." He always listened to the things I had to say with great concentration. If he wasn't completely convinced, he wouldn't even try to say a word to me, but he listened to my words and did as I asked. "There are no words for the prayer I need from you, but, Dad, the way I see it, if this trip to New York were just the icing on the cake of my life, then this trip wouldn't have been made. But this is the cake. The icing is the way to live for God, and this trip will get me in tune to that, to my Father's will." He said, "Okay," and that was the end of our conversation. I hadn't even told him that I had a pastor with me in the hotel room, or that I was staying at the same hotel as some Christians who believed that women should not be preaching in the name of Jesus. That was not something I wanted to disclose to my father. If my father had said to me, "Oh, well, it must be God's will," then my heart would have turned to him. But I knew I didn't need my father to pray for me, because he couldn't know what was the will of God for me. I could only pray to God for what was for my good. "God, thank you for giving me my father. Thank you that you loved him, and love him still, no matter what he has done. And thank you that I can still love him. "You have allowed me to keep the peace with him all these years, in spite of what we have gone through. "And I can thank you that you allowed me to fall in love with an amazing woman. I am so thankful for everything she and God have done in our lives. "And now God, help me to let you move through my life. Help me to make the right decisions, and help me to not live in fear, but to know you are here, in every decision I make." I then sat in the hotel room and waited. I said to myself, "If God is sovereign, He can do this on His own. All I have to do is stay still. I am a vessel, and God will move through me to affect lives." As soon as I had made these important decisions about my life, the decisions that would impact others, my life began to change. I began to feel peace where I had been so empty before. It was four in the afternoon when I finally left for the airport, and as I made my way through the busy New York streets toward my departure gate, it occurred to me that all I had ever needed in this city to keep my heart and mind at peace was for God to come and visit me there. We travel for a purpose; we live in a city for a purpose. And a city isn't just an earthly place—it's a spiritual place. We can be in a city and not realize it. You can be right in the middle of a city and never know you are there. Because of the many problems that cities present, they are filled with so much evil. I lived in Detroit, but for many years I lived right in the center of the city. I was involved with the church, and I was leading worship, but I did not realize I was in the middle of the city. Then one day one of the people on our church staff said to me, "Why don't you just go to this restaurant that is right in the center of Detroit? Go there and see what God wants to do for you there." So I went, and found a restaurant that was the hub of all the activity going on in the city. The music that came out of that restaurant was so terrible; every time it played on the radio, it seemed as if it made the people