Hi all,
I apologize for my long absence. Between visiting home, attending a conference, my van self-destructing, and going camping with my lovely wife, children, and dog (it’s amazing what you can fit into a tiny two door Prelude), I haven’t had time for personal writing. I have been busy reflecting though. As part of entrance into a new seminary and rebooting my candidacy process for ordination in a different denomination I have had to write a general overview of my life – family of origin, faith experience, sense of call, etc. Eventually, I’ll get to be interviewed by several groups of total strangers who’ll ask me to dump my innards on the table so they can poke through them in greater detail. No worries though, I’ve had a zipper surgically grafted to my stomach.
Since I've got nothing else and in the interests of posting something, rather than nothing, here it is.
MY LIFE IN A MUSTARD SEED:
Three generations of my middle class family faithfully attended a large 3000 member Methodist church in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Church was just something we did, we never discussed it or God outside of “it’s time to get in the car” on Sunday. I was nine when I had my first powerful sense of God’s presence, while hiking alone on my great-grandparents farm in the other-worldly mountains of southeastern Kentucky. I was suddenly overwhelmed with beauty and an intimate sense of God’s loving presence. That moment was my first awareness of God’s still quiet voice calling me into relationship, with a God both infinitely beyond and infinitely present in all of life.
My father had a daughter from a previous marriage, who lived with her grandmother, so I saw her only every other weekend. She was ten years my elder and the first to introduce me to the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus. It had simply not occurred to me before. She didn’t push me for a decision; she just shared the joy and excitement she was experiencing. I liked what she described, but didn’t think much of it when she wasn’t around.
Eventually these two experiences came together at a Christian camp. One night after our cabin leader had spoken passionately about God wanting to be our friend I made the conscious decision to “let Jesus into my heart”.
In Junior high I began to take faith more seriously. We had roughly 100 youth split between Jr & Sr high and each group had a youth council elected by the students. Our youth minister asked me to run for the Jr high president position, but I felt insecure and inadequate so I fervently declined. Come election day I was shocked and annoyed to find my name on the ballot and even more surprised when I was elected. Accepting the position out of a sense of obligation, there was little sense of call from God, but I did recognize a call from the community and worked hard to live up to their confidence. I continued to serve on the youth council until I went to college.
Several years later, the youth minister who pushed me into leadership left for another church and a new pastor came. It was then that I was surprised to hear some of the other youth talk about how much better they liked the new minister because he didn’t play favorites. I didn’t know our old minister favored some over others, probably because I was one of the favored ones. It bothered me that people were being left out and that I was completely unaware of it. How easy it is to be blind when you’re on the “inside”. Our new youth minister showed me that opening our eyes and pushing our boundaries always requires effort and can often be unpleasant, but it’s essential if we as a community are to be the Body of Christ.
I vaguely recall the idea of pursuing ordination coming up in middle school, but I didn’t take it seriously until high school. With the encouragement of my closest friends, I began meeting our youth minister for breakfast once a week for several months to go through a study on considering the ministry. I came out of this experience with mixed feelings. Although I began to sense a call to ordination, I had a fear of preaching and leading worship. But there were other ministry opportunities, so I forged ahead.
Telling my parents about pursing the ministry initiated an unexpected reaction. My mother declared in no uncertain terms that ministry was for emotional parasites and that if I went that route I’d receive no help whatsoever towards college. I was stunned. There was no discussing it with her, so I dropped the subject and went to college to study psychology. Slowly, I was able to get an idea of where her vehement feelings towards ministry came from. She had been raised in a fundamentalist church, where she came to feel that to take religion seriously was to become judgmental, inflexible, and inherently hypocritical. At first I tried to change her mind. Unsurprisingly, that went poorly. I finally realized that her feelings where her own and that it wasn’t my responsibility to change her. Still, I knew I was only prolonging the inevitable confrontation.
All thoughts of seminary however, where soon to be obscured by a very bad year. In the first six months all three of my remaining grandparents died. Over the course of the rest of the year my extended family fractured over old hurts, my fiancé and I broke it off, I flunked out of school, gained forty pounds, and my cat of sixteen years died. It may seem silly, but the death of my cat was the last straw; it was then that I shook my fist at God screaming my anger and disappointment.
Over the years my grandparents battled cancer I had never prayed harder. As one by one they died my faith came undone. My grandfather was the last to go. I was fortunate to be very close to all my grandparents, but I particularly looked up to him. And yet, I had never told him I loved him. Those words weren’t spoken in my family. When I missed the chance with my first grandmother I vowed to tell the others. But I couldn’t speak the words before my second grandmother died. The day before my grandfather’s birthday I finally had worked myself up to tell him. His nursing home was just five minutes down the road. I was literally half out the door when the phone rang to notify us of his death. I was devastated. Intellectually I knew that faith was more than putting in spiritual “credit” and getting back what you ask for; but if my grandfather had to die, couldn’t God have held him ten minutes longer? That’s all the time I needed to say “I love you.”
At the time I focused most my anger on myself for being too afraid to say the words earlier. It wasn’t until my cat was put to sleep that the dam finally broke. Anger, betrayal, confusion, guilt, fear; all the conflicting feelings of that year poured out threatening to drown me until I willed the breach shut and tucked the them back behind a smile.
After a year I returned to collage switching schools and majors, going from psychology to philosophy. I was looking for answers, desperately needing to know what was True – with a capital T. It didn’t work, at least not the way I’d hoped. I wanted something solid, a logical, indisputable foundation to build upon. Instead, I found more questions. At one point I began to fear for my sanity. Mind racing through sleepless nights trying to force an answer. Trying to prove once and for all that there was or wasn’t a God. I had never felt so alone. One night I had a dream that I was a spacewalking astronaut. Connected to my spacecraft by a tether, I reached out and set a knife to it. I vividly remember feeling that the spacecraft was my only way home. Yet, in the dream I cut the cord and drifted away. I woke up covered in sweat, convinced I was going to hell.
To return to what had been safe or cut the ties and go into the darkness? I consciously chose the unknown. That decision was pure grace. Years later, I realized that in that moment, when God felt most distant, God was deeply present. Not that God was more present then than any other time, but that in the exhaustion from searching for answers my natural barriers were down, allowing God to act within me without any awareness or understanding on my part. This was the beginning of the stripping of my pious pretensions towards God, and the dawning realizations that not only can God handle our anger and doubt, but desires our relationship to be completely open and real.
It was during this time of searching that an old friend from high school invited me to his church’s college fellowship. It was there that I was given a safe place to rage and weep. They lived out God’s presence and gave me my first awareness of the extraordinary spaciousness of God’s grace. I cannot over emphasize the value of this group, who appropriately enough called themselves “the Koinonia”. They were one of the best models I’ve experienced of intentional Christian Community.
Finally, I made what felt like a second leap of faith, which had little in common with the first. When I was ten at camp it made sense, there was no fear and trembling, it was as easy as 1+2=3. The second time it made no sense at all. There’s nothing logical about Jesus Christ fully human, fully God. Rational argument fly’s in the face of 1+2 = One!
I was scared again, not of going to hell this time, but of giving up and checking my brain at the door. Yet, at the same time as I worried about the rational defensibility of Christianities central tenets, I was attracted by their non-sense. When I was willing to live in the tension that the beliefs we confess create, I was pushed beyond the boundaries of reason and language to a truth that could not be spoken, it could only be experienced. So in the hope that faith was more than a figment of my imagination, I took the plunge a second time, leaping with reticence into the mystery of faith. I was a little surprised to find myself safely caught.
Since then I have found that my faith journey periodically requires these leaps. Like a trapeze act, I must let go of what is sure and leap towards what is hoped for. It’s not gotten noticeably easier, although I am beginning to trust my partner more.
Eventually, I graduated with a degree in philosophy, married my best friend Heather, and with the support and encouragement of my pastor, church, and friends went to seminary. It was hard on my mom. She still would have preferred if I had done just about anything else, but surprised me by affirming my right to make my own choices. My father, thought I had gifts for ministry, but worried that I would be overly attached to the pain of others and become burned out. He was right.
Over the course of the next five years of seminary I attended classes, took Field Education positions at a nursing home, an inner city church, a small town church, and did a unit of CPE at University Hospital, while also working several part-time jobs. Although I enjoyed most of the academics and the field education, I soon found myself once again fighting depression.
Before beginning seminary I had taken the required psychological evaluation, at which the psychologist affirmed the ministry as a good choice, but warned that I may be suffering from depression. I didn’t want to hear that. I’m from a thoroughly rugged-individualist family, we help other people, we don’t ask for help. I assumed that my periods of profound lack of energy and difficulty focusing where due to laziness on my part and that the accompanying feelings of dread and immanent failure where a reasonable response to my lack of productivity. Therefore, I simply intended to work harder.
Ignoring a psychologist is easy. Ignoring yourself is not. Although there were professors, supervisors, and fellow students who were also struggling with depression or who had dealt with it in the past, I had great difficulty asking for their help. It wasn’t until I realized that my marriage was suffering that I finally acknowledge that I had a serious problem that couldn’t be “fixed” on my own. With no health insurance, I went to a free clinic, which was less helpful than I’d hoped. I saw a clinical sociologist, but without a shared spiritual language I felt a fundamental disconnect in our conversations. I eventually gave in to taking medication, which also proved frustrating. I never saw the same intern twice. The medications side-effects were often unpleasant; the lack of tangible progress was maddening. Eventually, I once again flunked out of school. Now I was very confused, if God wanted me to be ordained, then why didn’t God help me “beat” the depression? I seemed to be going in the wrong direction. The sense of failure was overwhelming.
Still hoping I was called to ministry, we moved back to my wife’s home town of Cincinnati where I took a position as a Director of Education and began seeing a doctor for depression. I began my new job feeling like “damaged goods” and feeling very grateful that they were giving me a chance.
Unfortunately, the congregation was largely divided and bitter. Adults were often tying to triangle me into taking sides against the co-pastors and/or other factions, and many of the staff members gave off an aura of frustration and negativity. After two years, I was approached by another DCE whom I’d worked with on occasion, about interviewing for the youth director position at her church. At the time I’d been putting in 60 to 70 hours a week and feeling very frustrated with the over work and culture of blame, but there were also many good reasons to stay. After prayerful struggle I decided to interview. I was completely honest with the staff about my depression, but they recommended I not mention it when I interviewed with the lay committee. That should have made me think twice.
The new position had much that was good about it, but I was surprised by the cynicism of the youth. I soon learned that I was the 5th youth director they’d had in six years, and they weren’t confident I’d stick around. I assured them that I would and I meant it, but within a year the DCE, who had invited me to apply, decided that I wasn’t cut out for youth ministry after all and suggested I leave. I resisted half-heartedly, but in inside I was already defeated. I cannot begin to explain how devastating this was. In the irrationalism of depression this was a confirmation of my worst fears. I felt I had let everyone down, the youth who were just beginning to open up, the adult advisors who were willing to fight for me, my family who needed me to provide for them, and even the staff who were “suggesting” I leave. I felt worthless and hopeless.
Friends from seminary suggested churches to apply at, parents at the church I’d worked for previously asked me to come back, but I was done with ministry. For twenty years I’d thought I’d be serving in the church and now I was at a loss for what to do. I went through the stages of grieving, especially anger. I had casually studied other religions for years, but after leaving the church I began to seriously look into them, particularly Buddhism. I think a part of me was unconsciously giving God an ultimatum, “fix my life God or I’m switching teams” – not particularly mature or noble, but there it was.
I began applying for every non-profit social justice job I could find. I tried very hard to create another dream to throw myself into, but I couldn’t get an interview. One day my wife suggested I read Jonah (a not so subtle hint). By that time several other things had changed. My wife and I had begun going to therapy together, I had found a new doctor who aggressively worked with my therapist to find a medication that seemed to help, and we decided to begin church hunting. When in Louisville I’d had a field ed. position at a Lutheran church, and my wife and I had discovered that we found the more liturgical and sacramental worship deeply meaningful. So we began visiting Lutheran and Episcopalian churches. Serendipitously, our therapist turned out to also be a Lutheran pastor, who when asked recommended the church of a friend of his that he thought we’d like. He was right. Trinity Lutheran was across town, but going there was like coming home. During worship, to my surprise and embarrassment, I cried more in the first few months than I had in years.
It was the life of the community of faith that tangibly expressed God’s loving presence that provided the opportunity for deep healing for my wife and me. In time I was able to stop blaming both others and myself, realistically accept my own complicity, reevaluate how I imagined ministry, and begin to trust my instincts again. Ever since I accepted that I had depression I had looked forward to the day when I’d “beat it”, put it behind me, and minister out of my new found “strength”. Now I’ve come to realize that my greatest strength can also be my greatest weakness. But thankfully God works in and through weakness. To some degree I may always be a perfectionistic, self-doubting, mess. But that’s ok, it’s a constant reminder that I must throw myself wholly on the grace of God if I’m to live well and bear fruit.
I had also given a great deal of thought to my vocation and finally realized that I would find all of the things I disliked about the church wherever I went, they’re just part of the human condition. Making some peace with my own brokenness helped me begin to make peace with others. I also realized that all of the things that I find most valuable and meaningful are expressed best or only in and through the Body of Christ. As I began to get involved at our new church and several people asked if I’d considered ministry I had to laugh. When Seth, our intern from Trinity Seminary, invited me up to visit the campus I felt that it was where I needed to be.
My strengths are in pastoral care, interpersonal relationships and communication. I have a deep concern for worship, the sacraments, spiritual formation, and community outreach. It’s ironic that worship, which scared me most about ministry, has become the area I feel is most important. I have a love for church history and theology that I want to be able to celebrate while translating into the present and future. Which leads me to a host of questions about just what is “the Church” and how are we to be relevant, life-giving, and transformative in a world very much in need?
I particularly need work in the areas of time management, organization, and administration. Unfortunately, I also bring a nagging perfectionism and a general frustration with being a mere mortal. However, I have written a resignation from Godhood, and although I still find myself wandering back to the office, I have become somewhat more realistic in my personal expectations.
As for after seminary, I now see myself probably pursuing a solo pastorate, possibly in a small town. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s to be open to surprises.
I apologize for my long absence. Between visiting home, attending a conference, my van self-destructing, and going camping with my lovely wife, children, and dog (it’s amazing what you can fit into a tiny two door Prelude), I haven’t had time for personal writing. I have been busy reflecting though. As part of entrance into a new seminary and rebooting my candidacy process for ordination in a different denomination I have had to write a general overview of my life – family of origin, faith experience, sense of call, etc. Eventually, I’ll get to be interviewed by several groups of total strangers who’ll ask me to dump my innards on the table so they can poke through them in greater detail. No worries though, I’ve had a zipper surgically grafted to my stomach.
Since I've got nothing else and in the interests of posting something, rather than nothing, here it is.
MY LIFE IN A MUSTARD SEED:
Three generations of my middle class family faithfully attended a large 3000 member Methodist church in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Church was just something we did, we never discussed it or God outside of “it’s time to get in the car” on Sunday. I was nine when I had my first powerful sense of God’s presence, while hiking alone on my great-grandparents farm in the other-worldly mountains of southeastern Kentucky. I was suddenly overwhelmed with beauty and an intimate sense of God’s loving presence. That moment was my first awareness of God’s still quiet voice calling me into relationship, with a God both infinitely beyond and infinitely present in all of life.
My father had a daughter from a previous marriage, who lived with her grandmother, so I saw her only every other weekend. She was ten years my elder and the first to introduce me to the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus. It had simply not occurred to me before. She didn’t push me for a decision; she just shared the joy and excitement she was experiencing. I liked what she described, but didn’t think much of it when she wasn’t around.
Eventually these two experiences came together at a Christian camp. One night after our cabin leader had spoken passionately about God wanting to be our friend I made the conscious decision to “let Jesus into my heart”.
In Junior high I began to take faith more seriously. We had roughly 100 youth split between Jr & Sr high and each group had a youth council elected by the students. Our youth minister asked me to run for the Jr high president position, but I felt insecure and inadequate so I fervently declined. Come election day I was shocked and annoyed to find my name on the ballot and even more surprised when I was elected. Accepting the position out of a sense of obligation, there was little sense of call from God, but I did recognize a call from the community and worked hard to live up to their confidence. I continued to serve on the youth council until I went to college.
Several years later, the youth minister who pushed me into leadership left for another church and a new pastor came. It was then that I was surprised to hear some of the other youth talk about how much better they liked the new minister because he didn’t play favorites. I didn’t know our old minister favored some over others, probably because I was one of the favored ones. It bothered me that people were being left out and that I was completely unaware of it. How easy it is to be blind when you’re on the “inside”. Our new youth minister showed me that opening our eyes and pushing our boundaries always requires effort and can often be unpleasant, but it’s essential if we as a community are to be the Body of Christ.
I vaguely recall the idea of pursuing ordination coming up in middle school, but I didn’t take it seriously until high school. With the encouragement of my closest friends, I began meeting our youth minister for breakfast once a week for several months to go through a study on considering the ministry. I came out of this experience with mixed feelings. Although I began to sense a call to ordination, I had a fear of preaching and leading worship. But there were other ministry opportunities, so I forged ahead.
Telling my parents about pursing the ministry initiated an unexpected reaction. My mother declared in no uncertain terms that ministry was for emotional parasites and that if I went that route I’d receive no help whatsoever towards college. I was stunned. There was no discussing it with her, so I dropped the subject and went to college to study psychology. Slowly, I was able to get an idea of where her vehement feelings towards ministry came from. She had been raised in a fundamentalist church, where she came to feel that to take religion seriously was to become judgmental, inflexible, and inherently hypocritical. At first I tried to change her mind. Unsurprisingly, that went poorly. I finally realized that her feelings where her own and that it wasn’t my responsibility to change her. Still, I knew I was only prolonging the inevitable confrontation.
All thoughts of seminary however, where soon to be obscured by a very bad year. In the first six months all three of my remaining grandparents died. Over the course of the rest of the year my extended family fractured over old hurts, my fiancé and I broke it off, I flunked out of school, gained forty pounds, and my cat of sixteen years died. It may seem silly, but the death of my cat was the last straw; it was then that I shook my fist at God screaming my anger and disappointment.
Over the years my grandparents battled cancer I had never prayed harder. As one by one they died my faith came undone. My grandfather was the last to go. I was fortunate to be very close to all my grandparents, but I particularly looked up to him. And yet, I had never told him I loved him. Those words weren’t spoken in my family. When I missed the chance with my first grandmother I vowed to tell the others. But I couldn’t speak the words before my second grandmother died. The day before my grandfather’s birthday I finally had worked myself up to tell him. His nursing home was just five minutes down the road. I was literally half out the door when the phone rang to notify us of his death. I was devastated. Intellectually I knew that faith was more than putting in spiritual “credit” and getting back what you ask for; but if my grandfather had to die, couldn’t God have held him ten minutes longer? That’s all the time I needed to say “I love you.”
At the time I focused most my anger on myself for being too afraid to say the words earlier. It wasn’t until my cat was put to sleep that the dam finally broke. Anger, betrayal, confusion, guilt, fear; all the conflicting feelings of that year poured out threatening to drown me until I willed the breach shut and tucked the them back behind a smile.
After a year I returned to collage switching schools and majors, going from psychology to philosophy. I was looking for answers, desperately needing to know what was True – with a capital T. It didn’t work, at least not the way I’d hoped. I wanted something solid, a logical, indisputable foundation to build upon. Instead, I found more questions. At one point I began to fear for my sanity. Mind racing through sleepless nights trying to force an answer. Trying to prove once and for all that there was or wasn’t a God. I had never felt so alone. One night I had a dream that I was a spacewalking astronaut. Connected to my spacecraft by a tether, I reached out and set a knife to it. I vividly remember feeling that the spacecraft was my only way home. Yet, in the dream I cut the cord and drifted away. I woke up covered in sweat, convinced I was going to hell.
To return to what had been safe or cut the ties and go into the darkness? I consciously chose the unknown. That decision was pure grace. Years later, I realized that in that moment, when God felt most distant, God was deeply present. Not that God was more present then than any other time, but that in the exhaustion from searching for answers my natural barriers were down, allowing God to act within me without any awareness or understanding on my part. This was the beginning of the stripping of my pious pretensions towards God, and the dawning realizations that not only can God handle our anger and doubt, but desires our relationship to be completely open and real.
It was during this time of searching that an old friend from high school invited me to his church’s college fellowship. It was there that I was given a safe place to rage and weep. They lived out God’s presence and gave me my first awareness of the extraordinary spaciousness of God’s grace. I cannot over emphasize the value of this group, who appropriately enough called themselves “the Koinonia”. They were one of the best models I’ve experienced of intentional Christian Community.
Finally, I made what felt like a second leap of faith, which had little in common with the first. When I was ten at camp it made sense, there was no fear and trembling, it was as easy as 1+2=3. The second time it made no sense at all. There’s nothing logical about Jesus Christ fully human, fully God. Rational argument fly’s in the face of 1+2 = One!
I was scared again, not of going to hell this time, but of giving up and checking my brain at the door. Yet, at the same time as I worried about the rational defensibility of Christianities central tenets, I was attracted by their non-sense. When I was willing to live in the tension that the beliefs we confess create, I was pushed beyond the boundaries of reason and language to a truth that could not be spoken, it could only be experienced. So in the hope that faith was more than a figment of my imagination, I took the plunge a second time, leaping with reticence into the mystery of faith. I was a little surprised to find myself safely caught.
Since then I have found that my faith journey periodically requires these leaps. Like a trapeze act, I must let go of what is sure and leap towards what is hoped for. It’s not gotten noticeably easier, although I am beginning to trust my partner more.
Eventually, I graduated with a degree in philosophy, married my best friend Heather, and with the support and encouragement of my pastor, church, and friends went to seminary. It was hard on my mom. She still would have preferred if I had done just about anything else, but surprised me by affirming my right to make my own choices. My father, thought I had gifts for ministry, but worried that I would be overly attached to the pain of others and become burned out. He was right.
Over the course of the next five years of seminary I attended classes, took Field Education positions at a nursing home, an inner city church, a small town church, and did a unit of CPE at University Hospital, while also working several part-time jobs. Although I enjoyed most of the academics and the field education, I soon found myself once again fighting depression.
Before beginning seminary I had taken the required psychological evaluation, at which the psychologist affirmed the ministry as a good choice, but warned that I may be suffering from depression. I didn’t want to hear that. I’m from a thoroughly rugged-individualist family, we help other people, we don’t ask for help. I assumed that my periods of profound lack of energy and difficulty focusing where due to laziness on my part and that the accompanying feelings of dread and immanent failure where a reasonable response to my lack of productivity. Therefore, I simply intended to work harder.
Ignoring a psychologist is easy. Ignoring yourself is not. Although there were professors, supervisors, and fellow students who were also struggling with depression or who had dealt with it in the past, I had great difficulty asking for their help. It wasn’t until I realized that my marriage was suffering that I finally acknowledge that I had a serious problem that couldn’t be “fixed” on my own. With no health insurance, I went to a free clinic, which was less helpful than I’d hoped. I saw a clinical sociologist, but without a shared spiritual language I felt a fundamental disconnect in our conversations. I eventually gave in to taking medication, which also proved frustrating. I never saw the same intern twice. The medications side-effects were often unpleasant; the lack of tangible progress was maddening. Eventually, I once again flunked out of school. Now I was very confused, if God wanted me to be ordained, then why didn’t God help me “beat” the depression? I seemed to be going in the wrong direction. The sense of failure was overwhelming.
Still hoping I was called to ministry, we moved back to my wife’s home town of Cincinnati where I took a position as a Director of Education and began seeing a doctor for depression. I began my new job feeling like “damaged goods” and feeling very grateful that they were giving me a chance.
Unfortunately, the congregation was largely divided and bitter. Adults were often tying to triangle me into taking sides against the co-pastors and/or other factions, and many of the staff members gave off an aura of frustration and negativity. After two years, I was approached by another DCE whom I’d worked with on occasion, about interviewing for the youth director position at her church. At the time I’d been putting in 60 to 70 hours a week and feeling very frustrated with the over work and culture of blame, but there were also many good reasons to stay. After prayerful struggle I decided to interview. I was completely honest with the staff about my depression, but they recommended I not mention it when I interviewed with the lay committee. That should have made me think twice.
The new position had much that was good about it, but I was surprised by the cynicism of the youth. I soon learned that I was the 5th youth director they’d had in six years, and they weren’t confident I’d stick around. I assured them that I would and I meant it, but within a year the DCE, who had invited me to apply, decided that I wasn’t cut out for youth ministry after all and suggested I leave. I resisted half-heartedly, but in inside I was already defeated. I cannot begin to explain how devastating this was. In the irrationalism of depression this was a confirmation of my worst fears. I felt I had let everyone down, the youth who were just beginning to open up, the adult advisors who were willing to fight for me, my family who needed me to provide for them, and even the staff who were “suggesting” I leave. I felt worthless and hopeless.
Friends from seminary suggested churches to apply at, parents at the church I’d worked for previously asked me to come back, but I was done with ministry. For twenty years I’d thought I’d be serving in the church and now I was at a loss for what to do. I went through the stages of grieving, especially anger. I had casually studied other religions for years, but after leaving the church I began to seriously look into them, particularly Buddhism. I think a part of me was unconsciously giving God an ultimatum, “fix my life God or I’m switching teams” – not particularly mature or noble, but there it was.
I began applying for every non-profit social justice job I could find. I tried very hard to create another dream to throw myself into, but I couldn’t get an interview. One day my wife suggested I read Jonah (a not so subtle hint). By that time several other things had changed. My wife and I had begun going to therapy together, I had found a new doctor who aggressively worked with my therapist to find a medication that seemed to help, and we decided to begin church hunting. When in Louisville I’d had a field ed. position at a Lutheran church, and my wife and I had discovered that we found the more liturgical and sacramental worship deeply meaningful. So we began visiting Lutheran and Episcopalian churches. Serendipitously, our therapist turned out to also be a Lutheran pastor, who when asked recommended the church of a friend of his that he thought we’d like. He was right. Trinity Lutheran was across town, but going there was like coming home. During worship, to my surprise and embarrassment, I cried more in the first few months than I had in years.
It was the life of the community of faith that tangibly expressed God’s loving presence that provided the opportunity for deep healing for my wife and me. In time I was able to stop blaming both others and myself, realistically accept my own complicity, reevaluate how I imagined ministry, and begin to trust my instincts again. Ever since I accepted that I had depression I had looked forward to the day when I’d “beat it”, put it behind me, and minister out of my new found “strength”. Now I’ve come to realize that my greatest strength can also be my greatest weakness. But thankfully God works in and through weakness. To some degree I may always be a perfectionistic, self-doubting, mess. But that’s ok, it’s a constant reminder that I must throw myself wholly on the grace of God if I’m to live well and bear fruit.
I had also given a great deal of thought to my vocation and finally realized that I would find all of the things I disliked about the church wherever I went, they’re just part of the human condition. Making some peace with my own brokenness helped me begin to make peace with others. I also realized that all of the things that I find most valuable and meaningful are expressed best or only in and through the Body of Christ. As I began to get involved at our new church and several people asked if I’d considered ministry I had to laugh. When Seth, our intern from Trinity Seminary, invited me up to visit the campus I felt that it was where I needed to be.
My strengths are in pastoral care, interpersonal relationships and communication. I have a deep concern for worship, the sacraments, spiritual formation, and community outreach. It’s ironic that worship, which scared me most about ministry, has become the area I feel is most important. I have a love for church history and theology that I want to be able to celebrate while translating into the present and future. Which leads me to a host of questions about just what is “the Church” and how are we to be relevant, life-giving, and transformative in a world very much in need?
I particularly need work in the areas of time management, organization, and administration. Unfortunately, I also bring a nagging perfectionism and a general frustration with being a mere mortal. However, I have written a resignation from Godhood, and although I still find myself wandering back to the office, I have become somewhat more realistic in my personal expectations.
As for after seminary, I now see myself probably pursuing a solo pastorate, possibly in a small town. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s to be open to surprises.
5 comments:
Ask and ye shall receive! Once again the picture totally encapsulates the writing. If everyone had your kind of introspection, dedication to truth, humility, and honesty the world would be infinitely different. I learned a lot about you Rat and I've known you going on 20 years!
Yah - what Joann said. Thank you for your perpetual committment to truth. You help everyone else to become a little more authentic and forthright when we discuss faith, instead of hiding behind eminence fronts.
Thanks for your encouraging words.
Your comments have gotten me thinking about something I haven’t thought about before, which is why I love dialogue!
More later.
Amazing, after 25 years of being friends, there is still so much about you that I don’t know. Human beings are such complex things, that only a greater intelligence/being could have created us. God is amazing.
Just to touch on a couple of your points in your/our distant past.
Youth ministers – Like you the change from the first to the second was a major event in my life. I am so thankful that the second one came into my life, 20+ years later his impact can still be felt in my life. He was a man of conviction about his faith and he a quiet strength to him that really resonated with me. He was “cool”, but in an adult way. Who else could take getting his house covered with TP as often as it was and not getting too upset about it.
I don’t remember all of the details and counts, but there is nothing like getting 150 rolls of TP from store, TPing his house, feeling that the job was incomplete, going back to the store and getting 100 more rolls and finishing the job. Man that was some adventure.
However unlike your experiences with our first youth minister, I often felt left out of the “cool” group. Not always, but often enough that if I wanted to look back on it I could feel slighted.
Depression – Our society does a really terrible job to teaching men what it means to be men. We are taught that we have to be tough and strong, never cry, never surrender, never ask for help. What a crock of bull! Depression is such an insidious and destructive disease. It is like that primordial evil ooze that unknowingly and slowly penetrates your skin and grows inside your body, slowly devouring your from the inside and turning your guts into jelly. (OK, so I read too much fantasy and sci-fi).
In my case it really caught me off-guard. It started as couple of bad days, then the next thing I knew I was feeling frustrated by my boring job, then grew into continual cycle of getting up, going to work, coming home, putting the kids to bed, then falling asleep, over and over. But I thought that I could just break out of the cycle all by myself. All I ever wanted to do was sit on the couch or go to bed.
After finally coming to realization that this was dramatically affecting not just myself but my family and my marriage, I recent got help. What a difference the past 4-5 months have been. I still have a bad day every now and again, but life is so much easier. I apologize all the time to my wife for what I was like before the medication.
We have to teach men how to deal with these issues and that depression is not something to hide. I’m particularly concerned about the serious trauma that our returning service men and women have to deal with in a military that tragically unprepared for the mental health issues.
Church Denominations – Like you I’ve come to find great fulfillment in the Lutheran church. I really find the sacramental aspect of our worship service to really be the anchor for my week. At our church we have both the traditional (liturgical) worship service and a contemporary service. We have been going to the contemporary service ever since we joined (almost 15 years ago). While they celebrate communion every other week at the traditional service, we celebrate it every week at the contemporary service. What is so surprising coming from the Methodist background is that I really miss not having communion when I visit other churches, for me it completes the service. (Although I must admit that the Methodist have much better traditional hymns!)
A funny story about our senior pastor. Our contemporary services are very casual, in fact during the summer we hold them outside on the lawn next to the church. We all wear shorts and t-shirts, sit in lawn chairs and the kids color while sitting on blankets in the grass. The pastor always joked about people being comfortable while they were stuck in their clerical shirts.
So a couple of years ago, one of the ladies in the church, made the pastors a set of hawaiian clerical shirts (complete with the little white tabs), and they loved them. Jump forward a couple of months to the annual synod assembly. One of our lay people was speaking with a young pastor from another congregation when our other pastor walked by. The young pastor commented (disparagingly) about the hawaiian clerical, and when our lay person admitted that was one of pastors he quickly some noises and walked off.
The next day after hearing this story our senior pastor (who is quite the David Letterman type) walked up to this young pastor and fingered his traditional black clerical and with an utterly straight faced asked him “where did you find a black one?”
Well, this was much longer than I anticipated, but in any case, I’m glad to hear that you are once again pursuing becoming a pastor. You will make a fantastic pastor some day.
--ken
Rev. John was awesome. And what a night that was, his house looked like a giant blob of toilet paper. Looking back, I feel really sorry for him!
Our ideas of manhood are pretty screwed up. I can see where aspects of them can be good at certain times, but when they’re applied exclusively across the board – they suck! What does it mean to be a “man”, or a “woman” for that matter? There are so many points of view these days and I can’t say I agree entirely with any of them. I’ve taken more of an interest in gender identity recently, but I haven’t made much sense of it.
I am exceedingly convinced that breaking out of the cycle by yourself will rarely, if ever, work in the long run. For me, community is what it’s all about. Even though a screwed up part of me thinks that’s being weak.
I’ve also been concerned about our returning veterans and the issues they and their families will have to deal with.
I liked your “primordial evil ooze” analogy. It’s a good image, creepy & funny, and God knows you’ve got to find a way to laugh about depression!
Mine was usually experienced like a great weight pressing down or moving through a sea of molasses. Then there were times when I felt like I was in darkness, treading water over an abyss, with thick chains attached to heavy chests locked around my ankles, while the waves leave me gasping for air and shadowing forms soar all around whispering poisonous words of worthlessness and despair.
On the flip side though, there were (and are) times when a “darkness” comes over me, but it’s not soul-devouring. Actually, it can be soul-liberating. I call her “the Dark Lady” and imagine her as a stately woman in a black Victorian mourning gown complete with a veil that obscures her face. She never speaks; she simply enters bringing a cloud of shadow with her. Again, she’s not evil, just extremely unsettling. Both Fight & Flight are pointless. Instead, if I just sit and wait with her, I’ll eventually discover something that needs to be done away with, mourned, and let go.
Before you call my shrink – no I don’t see her literally!
I miss communion too if I don’t get it at other churches. It’s a powerful symbol that speaks deeply to me.
Hawaiian clerical? How cool is that! The lady in your church should consider marketing them! Seriously!!!
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