A Note From God

by Pastor Tri Robinson

Memoirs of Faith

In the early spring of 1987, Michael Anderson was 12 years old. He stood on the front lawn of his church in Ontario, Ore., holding a yellow, helium-filled balloon prepared earlier that morning in his Sunday School class. Inside the balloon he had inserted a scrap of notebook paper with the handwritten words "Let us love one another - 1 John 4:7&8." He released his balloon along with the others from his Sunday school class. It slowly rose in the cold morning air drifting eastward with the prevailing wind toward the Idaho border.

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A little over a year later, in the summer of 1988, the last thing on my mind was planting a church in Boise. Nancy and I were happily situated in a growing Vineyard church in Southern California. We felt secure and fulfilled in our ministry as the associate pastors of the Lancaster Vineyard.

Nancy and I had met and fell in love 20 years earlier as students at the College of Idaho (now Albertson College) in Caldwell. We married in 1970 and remained in Caldwell for two more years as newlyweds. We then moved to the mountains of California to raise our children on the family ranch. I worked as a school teacher many years before joining the staff at the Vineyard in Lancaster.

In 1988, out of the blue, we received a phone call from an old friend. Pat Armstrong had remained close with Nancy and I since our college days. Pat made his living building backcountry trails with a team of mules.

We had often spent our summer breaks working for Pat while I was still teaching school. We would pack our whole family back into his remote camps for long stretches of time. At the time of the phone call, I hadn't worked for Pat for several years due to our full-time schedule at the church. He was now asking us to help him reconstruct a damaged air strip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I had a couple weeks of vacation, so we jumped at the opportunity and packed our car in preparation for the 800-mile journey north to Idaho.

Our kids had heard many stories of our early days in Caldwell, but they had never visited Idaho themselves. Kate and Brook were in their early teens that summer and were very content with their life on the family ranch. None of us had even given a thought to leaving our comfortable life in California until we passed through Boise on our way to meet Pat.

I can't tell you what happened that day, but I have to believe that it was supernatural - we all fell in love with a city. God was definitely doing something in all of our hearts, but I was the last to admit it. Privately Nancy asked me if I would ever consider giving up our life in California to plant a new Vineyard church in Boise. The question stirred up fear in me because I had seen so many new church plants fail. My defiant answer of "NO" came out with much irritation and intensity. I quickly let her know that I didn't want to talk about it again.

Two days later, we flew out of Stanley into Pat's camp on Mahoney Creek. Everyone was having a great time but me. Frankly, I was miserable. I had waited nearly 20 years to get back into the mountains of Idaho, and now I wasn't enjoying it. The thought of leaving the security of my established life was really bothering me. Leaving the ranch, risking everything, transplanting our family to an unknown place with no friends seemed crazy, totally impractical.

Nancy observed my dilemma as I struggled with these feelings. Early one morning, she suggested that I take a long walk and get alone with God. Actually, what I heard her say was "Why don't you take a hike?"

I decided to climb a tall mountain adjacent to Mahoney Creek. I climbed most of the morning only stopping to catch my breath and pray. I remember crying out to God for an answer.

"Lord," I said, "I desperately need a word from you." But every time I stopped I didn't hear his voice. Finally I made the summit. I thought for sure God would speak to me on the top of the mountain, like Moses on Mt. Sinai. But His voice was absolutely quiet. At that point I decided to stop striving about the future and just enjoy the time I had in the backcountry with my family and friends.

As I walked down an aspen covered ridge, something caught my eye on the opposite side of the ravine. It was bright yellow and looked out of place for the colors in the area. Intrigued, I knew I had to find out what it was.

I descended the ravine and scrambled up the opposite side. I climbed under a thorny berry bush and pulled out a deflated yellow balloon with an illustration of Noah's Ark printed on it. For some reason I knew that this particular balloon had been sent to me from the Lord and that it contained a message in it from Him. (Three times before I had found balloons with notes in them, so I was a bit of an authority on them. But that's a story for another time!)

I felt the balloon and, sure enough, there was a small note inside. At first I was almost afraid to remove it. I climbed back up the side of the ravine to a bright, sunny spot and sat down. I ripped a small hole on the side of the balloon to remove the paper.

Here I was, sitting on a mountain in the very center of the largest wilderness area in the entire continental United States. I had prayed all day for a word from God. As you can guess the note read, "Let us love one another - 1 John 4:7&8." The funny thing was, I distinctly remember saying to the Lord that I needed a real word, an answer to my very real question.

It was then that the Lord spoke to me by His Spirit more clearly than I had ever heard Him before. He said, "Tri, I don't care where you do it. All I want you to do is build a church that loves people." Then, in the form of a question, He asked, "Do you want to do it in Boise, Idaho?" It was at that moment that I discovered what He had already put in my heart and I replied, "Yes, Lord, I do."

Later that morning I wandered back into our camp on Mahoney Creek and found Nancy by the fire. She asked me if I had heard anything from the Lord, and I pulled the balloon and small strip of notebook paper from my pocket. Yes, I had, I told her - and, in fact, I had a written note from God.

It was almost one year to the day that we found ourselves back in Boise with 13 other families from Lancaster. They, too, felt God's call to go plant a church in Boise that would love people, and that is how Vineyard Boise began.