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Why I Help you Live LIGHT
Hi. My name is Trevor Lund and my plan is to Live LIGHT and help you to Live LIGHT too. You need to know a bit of my story to know why I’m so passionate about it. So thank you for listening as I share a short version of my journey.
The Story in Video
Walking Oxymoron
I used to call myself “a walking oxymoron”. I was a senior pastor and head of the Elder board when I was 25. It was good that I only knew that I didn’t know much. In the 7 years I was senior pastor I was continually blown away by God’s grace. In any way most people in churches count success – budgets, baptisms or butts- things were very, very good.
But we felt God’s calling us to lay our family, friends, finances and future on the altar. I resigned from the church we loved in July 2004 and told them we would be available for them until the end of December, when we’d move to New Zealand without a call or a plan or any reason beyond obedience.
About a month later my dad was diagnosed with Bulbar ALS and was told he’d have only 18 months to live.
It was a tough, tough thing to leave our family and friends. But we had to obey what we felt God was telling us to do.
Our time in New Zealand
I went to New Zealand with the wrong attitude. I figured God owed me and if I had willingly given up so much, the least He could do was give me an open heaven.
We arrived in Aukland New Zealand at 6:00 AM January 1, 2005. It was a city of 1 million people… and everyone was at the beach.
We had friends tell their son to let us in their house since they were at the beach. We went down an empty four-lane freeway to their house, and didn’t see anyone on the side streets. We did join them at the beach in a few days.
I don’t know what “open heaven” means to you. I’m not sure what it means to me. All I know is an empty city of a million people is more post-apocalyptic than it is open heaven.
We learned a lot in New Zealand and we met so many amazing people, and had incredible experiences with God. But in August of that same year, after friends from all over the world agreed, we realized it was time for us to return home and be with family.
Three things I learned the hard way
We returned home in time to help my dad publish his book before he died. In the process I decided there had to be a better way to publish books and I started a publishing company. Over time, I learned 3 very important things.
1. I can’t live offended at God.
2. I shouldn’t make a major life decision like starting a company while I’m grieving and living offended at God.
3. No one should ever start a company on credit cards, especially when they are grieving and living offended at God.
The church I had pastored also held my ministerial credentials and the new pastor decided to withdraw their support of me because I wasn’t currently being paid as a pastor. We never did that when I was in his position. We’d walk alongside the hurting. It was days before my dad died. I felt completely rejected by people I loved just days before we all mourned my dad’s death.
Life on the hustle
The back engine for the website I wanted developed for publishing got delayed and I started publishing books painfully slow. Authors needed websites, and I needed income, so I started doing websites. People saw my web copy and wanted help with theirs, so I started writing web copy and ad copy and short copy and sales copy. I didn’t like scrounging clients so, I started ghostwriting books.
All of it was to keep ahead of the credit cards. I’d hustle to make the next payment. I thought I was protecting my wife if I kept our financial situation from her.
You can imagine how that affected our marriage.
My blog was getting 100,000 visitors a day. I had 5300+ subscriptions to my podcast and over 10,000 email subscribers. I had two Twitter accounts with over 250,000 followers on each. I created a fast from negativity that outrank Oprah’s call for people to do a negativity fast.
I was doing all I could to keep all the balls up in the air. I was pretending everything was amazing. From the outside a lot of people thought so. I was getting invites from around the world to come and share my message.
When it all fell apart
But my wife was mad at me, she was rightfully hurt and betrayed with my admission with how much we were in debt. I felt worthless and ashamed and incapable of supporting my family. I emotionally withdrew from her and the family.
With all the web traffic, my site kept crashing. I couldn’t afford the downloads for my podcast and the fees for my email subscribers kept skyrocketing. With no way to make money with all those platforms, I had to kill them all.
All this time I was leading Bible studies and prayer times and teaching on different topics in several different churches. I was still staying close to God. I wasn’t giving him credit for the works of the one who comes to steal, kill and destroy. I had learned to live unoffended at him and I wasn’t blaming him for me not keeping in step with His Spirit.
Over the years
Over the years, we tried planting a church twice. The first on was stopped by our covering leadership just days before we launched. The second didn’t even get that far because the ones who wanted us to do it, decided it was going to be too much work for them.
Over the years, I tried getting a real job. My wife and I describe a “real job” as one you earn paid vacation time when you work. When you have pastor and director of Christian ministries on your CV it’s tough to get an interview for a real job.
When I did get an interview, some Christians thought they’d be taking me from my calling to give me a job, others thought I’d be too “evangelistic”. Non Christians didn’t know how my skills could be transferable in the real world.
I had one friend tell me “You used to be someone, what happened?” I had a complete stranger who was interviewing me to take over his position say, “I heard you on the radio last night talking about your book. You were great. That’s what you should be doing, you don’t want to work here.”
That was great, but it would also be great to get a job be that was capable of doing and that would support my family.
I did get a job that I grew to really dislike. The pay was ridiculous and the owner wanted me to prove how much more money I brought in than he paid me – which was easy to do but degrading. I didn’t like trying to stand behind the process and product I knew every client was going to have issues working through. And I had to deal with backlash. Every decision that would have enabled me do the jobs I was expected to endure – was never made. I distain setting people up to fail and it was being done to me. It was the closest thing I may ever experience to a personal hell, but I needed my wife to know I’d do what I could to bring in some stable income for the family.
That part of the journey wasn’t easy. I needed to confess and repent of a lot. But I have an amazing wife. She showed me what real forgiveness looks like. I have let her down so much and she’s still the best friend I’ve ever had.
The seeds of Live LIGHT
In time, she was the one who convinced me to teach people how to really hope. I wrote the book “Hope in Transition” in 2010. It is a written expulsion of every lesson I had learned up to that point through everything we had to go through.
In 2013 I became a certified elite coach and started coaching people to help them live with their legacy in mind.
I really enjoyed coaching and kept it up for this first year I went to be the pastor at my next church. We went to a hurting church that needed to be healed. It was there the idea for Live LIGHT started to come into focus.
When we were in New Zealand my email signature was “Be a living light, living light”. I didn’t know what It meant or what it would become.
It was at that church that I started writing the Live LIGHT Manifesto.
My whole journey is one of learning to lean into failure and find contentment in pleasing God. I don’t try to impress people and I can’t and don’t need to impress God. I need to be faithful and faithfulness to God is multiplication. That’s why I do classes and courses and coaching and blog posts and books with the same original content.
In the three years we were at that church we saw seven baptisms and two people we baptized had never seen a baptism before they got wet. It was fun, but we left that church just before it closed its doors. We were able to help some people, but we weren’t able to help the church more than they were willing to help themselves.
More recent history
In a short while, the first church I was at, was looking for a pastor. I prayed about it and felt God wanted me to go back. They prayed about it and felt God wanted them to have someone else.
Shortly thereafter, on August 26, 2018, I had a heart attack.
In the year of recovery with a forced Sabbath some things became clear. I have been entrusted with the Live LIGHT message. Is is my opus. It’s the legacy God’s entrusted me to make the world a better place. It’s everything I’ve had to learn, unlearn and relearn the hard way. I want to Live LIGHT and help you Live LIGHT too.
Live LIGHT
You were created to walk with God in the garden in the cool of the day. Sin came into the world and you bore the consequences. Jesus came and reversed the curse and took your place and offered you His yoke that is easy and his burden that is light.
You are a living light….will you live LIGHT?
I want to help you live loved radically, live intentional fearlessly, live generous joyfully, live hopeful trustfully, and live today mindfully.
And you can live this way, regardless of what you’re going through in life. The darker your night, the brighter your light. It’s the miracle of the transformed mind that silences the arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the knowledge of God.
You CAN change how you feel.
You can Live LIGHT.
I’m here to help.
