Bloom Where You're Planted
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
“There is no ideal place for us to serve God except the place He sets us down.” – C.H. Spurgeon
It was February 1983, and I had been out of work for three months since leaving my position at Liberty Travel in Philadelphia. With a car payment to make and no other job prospects on the horizon, I accepted a part-time position as an activities assistant at a Christian retirement community in our area.
“This is just temporary,” I remember telling my sister at the time. Well, “temporary” turned out to be 10 years and 10 months during which time God taught me everything I needed to know to start and lead America’s first-ever athletic prison ministry.
Within five weeks of being hired, I was promoted to a full-time department head, a position in which I learned how to supervise staff and volunteers, manage budgets, plan and coordinate day trips and overnight excursions, organize and conduct special events, and oversee direct mail fundraising campaigns. By the time I left the Wiley Christian Retirement Community on December 31, 1993, I was as prepared as humanly possible to fulfill my life’s calling.
Today, as president of Risk Takers for Christ, I still use many of those same skills that I learned at Wiley more than 40 years ago… and honed during my 24 years as executive director of The Saints Prison Ministry. I still supervise staff and volunteers, organize and conduct special events, and oversee direct mail fundraising campaigns. And whereas I don’t schedule day trips to prisons any longer, I have taken RTC sports teams to minister behind bars as far away as Kenya.
Even better, I have been privileged to plant a small church in an RV and manufactured home community, to launch a weekly basketball ministry to at-risk youth, to preach to a homeless group on a rotating basis, and to write a weekday devotional message and a faith-based political blog… both of which have a growing readership.
I am just trying to bloom where God has planted me until He transplants me somewhere else… or calls me home. How about you?
“But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased.” I Corinthians 12:18 (NKJV)
- Rev. Dale M. Glading, President
