Soaking It In

Sometimes when we are paying the least attention we gain all kinds of knowledge and experience that will benefit us in surprise ways later in life. During the time that I quit thinking about becoming a pastor I gained so much knowledge about leading a faith community that I am still sorting out what I learned.

Moving to Dubuque changed everything about my life. The three places that my life took shape; home, school and church, all seemed to be completely reversed. Dad was now home instead of mom who was working in a department store. There was less income, a smaller house with a tiny yard and neighbors so close it felt claustrophobic. School was huge; an overcrowded limestone monolith containing more than 1600 strangers. Church was bigger too. It was more formal, less friendly and it certainly didn’t need the kind of help that I was familiar with offering.

What choice did I have but to make the best of it? That doesn’t mean that I did so happily or quietly. I remember making my family, and especially my parents, miserable at times. In those four years of high school I did my share of rebelling and of being a jerk. But I did some good things too. I got more involved in music. I explored some artistic endeavors. (Don’t ask my mom about the way I painted my bedroom. She still gets the shakes when she thinks about it.) I eventually made some good friends and learned to navigate the changes at home, the hallways and social situations at school and the very different feel of faith in the new church.

While I was preoccupied with my particular strain of teenage angst and ignoring any sense of call to ordained ministry two things became everyday events that would shape my understanding of ministry. First, my dad took a part-time job as custodian of the church we attended and he invited me to join him. I emptied wastebaskets and cleaned floors in the evenings and on Saturdays. I witnessed all the behind-the-scenes activities that keep a church going. I got to know the people on staff; the pastors, the secretaries, the youth director and some key volunteers who were frequently present. I found the people who work at a church to be ordinary people. They had lives outside of the church. They struggled with family issues, grief and stress. They showed up to work exhausted because there was so much going on in their lives. They had good days and bad days. They lost their temper when things weren’t going well and they could be very forgiving and encouraging too.

The second thing that happened is that my dad started processing what he learned at seminary as we sat at the dinner table. He told us about conversations in which he and his classmates speculated on different subjects. What if Jesus had gotten married? What if he had died a different kind of death? What if Mary wasn’t really a virgin when Jesus was born? For the first time I was becoming aware that open-minded speculation about some of the hard and fast doctrines of the church was okay. Suddenly, faith became something that I could participate in beyond memorization and regurgitation. Faith was something that could be tested and explored. God became bigger than my Sunday School lessons and catechism explanations. It was as if all the recorded scripture and theology was a leaping off point instead of a landing zone. It was there to help launch us into a life-long experience of finding God wherever we find ourselves to be physically, emotionally or spiritually.

The lessons I learned when I wasn’t paying attention have done more to shape my understanding of ministry than any class in seminary. They are the places I fight the hardest to maintain my sanity and dignity in this calling. They are the issues that cause me the most heartache and joy. Perhaps being an ordinary person willing to explore extraordinary possibilities is what we are all called to in whatever ministry we serve.

Dubuque

I really can’t talk about my call into ordained ministry without talking about my dad’s call into ordained ministry. For the first 14 years of my life my dad worked at Oldsmobile as an electrical engineer. The summer before my 8^th grade year I learned that this was going to change.

Normally during the summer our family would spend a week or two vacationing in a pop-up camper at a state park somewhere in Michigan with a nice lake and a sandy beach.  We also spent the 4th of July week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a family reunion on my mom’s side of the family. The announcement early that summer that we were going west on vacation to see the Mississippi River made me excited to see something that I had only seen in books and on TV. But it also raised some suspicions. Why now? And why were we going to Dubuque, Iowa to see the river there?

To be honest, Dubuque in the late 1970’s was not a vacation destination for anyone.  I’m sure we must have done some touristy things but I don’t remember much about the vacation. The one “highlight” was visiting Wartburg Seminary. The limestone block buildings, the classrooms, the library and the chapel were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The statue of Martin Luther holding a Bible in front of the small campus and the well-kept grounds reminded me of the university buildings I had seen during cutaways from Saturday afternoon football games on TV. We walked through married campus housing which consisted of a trailer court and a couple of old Victorian houses that had been converted into apartments.

I didn’t quite understand why we were visiting the school you attended if you wanted to be a pastor in the church, nor why it was the highlight of our vacation. Staying in a hotel room with five other people was a new experience but I missed the beaches and campfires. I fell asleep to the loud drone of the hotel air conditioning instead of the muffled sounds of other campers settling in for the night.  This didn’t really alarm me or upset me, though. It was just one more of those weird things that my parents did which my middle-school self didn’t understand.

A month or so after we returned from that vacation mom and dad gathered me and my brothers together and told us that we were going to be moving to Dubuque the following summer. They told us that dad was going to leave his job at Oldsmobile and go to school to become a pastor. They told us to keep it a secret and not tell any of our friends. I’m not usually good at keeping secrets but for some reason I didn’t want to talk about this.

Throughout the coming year we would talk about moving in quiet little snippets. My grandparents were concerned that we would be living so far away and that my dad was quitting his well-paying job. My brothers and I were concerned about being the new kids in school and about leaving friends behind. I wondered what High School would be like and how I would get along in a class of 450 instead of 30. I hate not knowing that to expect and there was no way I could know what was coming with this move.

The thing I couldn’t talk about was the way I thought my dad was taking my call away from me. I suppose there is a time in every kid’s life when the last thing they want to be is like their parents. Because I look so much like my dad I was accustomed to hearing how I was exactly like him and I was tired of it. Now my dad was laying everything on the line to become a pastor, the thing I secretly thought was my calling. Never mind that I hadn’t mentioned that dream to anyone or that I didn’t completely understand it myself. It just felt that if I became a pastor it would be one more way that I was like my dad. So I stopped thinking about being a pastor. It would be another five or six years before I admitted to myself that I was indeed sensing a call into ordained ministry.