Detours

Following the path we believe God sets out for us doesn’t always take us straight where we think we are going. Sometimes we go a different way on our own and sometimes we are forced to take a detour we wouldn’t choose for ourselves.

I love physics and engineering. I am absolutely captivated by the way things work. But I’m really bad at math. I think in words instead of numbers; metaphors instead of symbols. So I naturally gravitated towards English as a major in college. Because I like to live in my head instead of the external world I added minors in philosophy and psychology. Having finally come to terms with my call to ordained ministry, this seemed like a pretty good education in preparation for seminary. What it wasn’t good for was finding a job right after college.

When my dad attended seminary I witnessed the difference between the second-career students and those who attended immediately after college. Those who had been out in the world of work and careers seemed to have a different perspective than those who had been in school their entire life. In addition to being more mature and world-wise, the second career students didn’t seem to get as caught up in the theory and theology. They seemed to be more connected to the people in the pews, so to speak; to know the side of life where church was a piece of, but not the whole, puzzle.

I decided that I wouldn’t go straight from college to seminary. I would take some time to work, to gain some “real-life” experience and to begin paying off some student loans before accruing some more. Additionally, Amy and I were getting married the summer after I graduated and she was taking classes for her Master’s Degree while working full time. My plan was to get a job in the publishing field or as a technical writer and work for a few years before going to the seminary.

The problem with the plan, I quickly found out as I began sending out resumes, is that companies don’t want technical writers with English degrees and a fascination with the way things work. They want engineers who can write well. And the publishing field wanted people with editing skills not someone who could talk about the nuances of a novel and its meaning.  This would have been great information to have prior to my graduation but I hadn’t even thought to look for it.

Two weeks prior to my wedding I was shopping for gifts for my groomsmen when I noticed a “Help Wanted” sign at a sporting goods store in the mall. I couldn’t bear the thought of getting married while being unemployed. No, that’s not completely honest. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking my father-in-law in the eye on my wedding day if I didn’t have a job. So I filled out an application, had an interview a week later, and began working as a stock boy exactly one week before I got married.

After the wedding I continued to look for a job that was worthy of a college graduate but I kept running into dead ends. The few interviews I got all ended with, “We’re really looking for someone with other qualifications.” Meanwhile, at the store, I was working 9-5 with weekends off and I could wear jeans to work and no tie. I unloaded trucks, organized the back stock and was responsible for inventory.

One day the district manager called me into the office to ask if I would be willing move out to the sales floor as an area manager. I accepted and began selling weight lifting and exercise equipment. I learned about the other departments and became a certified ski tech and a certified bowling ball technician. (That’s right. I have skills now.) Within a year I was promoted to Assistant Store Manager and transferred to a different store about an hour’s drive away. 

Working in retail management wasn’t part of my life’s plan. But it kept me out of a career where I would be working in a secluded cubicle and got me to interact with strangers on a regular basis. As a natural introvert I needed that experience. I learned management and motivational skills. I found out that people like choices but don’t want too many of them. (Next time you’re in Wal-Mart notice how they have lots of things but only a couple of choices for each item.)  I met con artists and thieves and I learned about the politics of business when the union went on strike. I learned to give people a chance to prove themselves when I hired them and I learned that some people will work harder to get out of working than if they had just done the job in the first place.

I eventually brought all these lessons with me when I started ordained ministry. And it’s a good thing because I’ve needed them all. Accepting and keeping that job in the sporting goods store was difficult and humbling for me. But in the end it proved to be exactly what I needed.

When Someone Trusts

It really is amazing what kind of growth happens when someone trusts us.

Sitting on the sparse grass and sandy soil just outside of Cedar Lodge the kickball rolled, bounced and arced its way around the circle. With each pass the name of the intended recipient was shouted.  “Brian!” “Scott!” “Darren!” “Chris!” “Scott!” “Chris!” “Mike!” “Rodney!” “Jonesy!” I keep track of who is getting the most passes and who is getting the least. I memorize the faces and try to burn the names into my memory. This is my tribe, my group, my cabin, my boys, my campers. We’ll be together for a week and the sooner we get to know each other’s names the better.

The ball keeps going back and forth across the circle faster and faster and I am suddenly aware that six sets of parents have just dropped off their pride and joy. Some were handed over with a gush of relief and the dream of getting home to a quiet house. Others reluctantly let go of their son’s hand and would loiter around the edge of the parking lot until we hiked off towards our cabin. They would come back on Saturday morning, six days from now, to eagerly embrace their child and listen to them recite everything that happened during the week.

Every summer during college I worked at a Bible camp in northeast Iowa. 500 acres of rocky, hilly, forested terrain in the middle of corn and hay fields provided a natural playground to hike, run, explore, swim and get out of a normal routine. We would read from the Bible, tell stories, sing songs around campfires, play flashlight tag after dark, make crafts, swim in the giant pool of freezing water and talk about God and creation. Other groups, with older kids, would go canoeing or backpacking away from the main camp. We would cook over an open fire, eat trail lunches and stop at the Canteen for an afternoon ice cream cone. For six days I was responsible for keeping this group of boys alive, healthy and having fun.

Sensing that a couple of the boys were getting tired of the game we stood up and started out for the cabins at the south end of the camp. Some, who had been to the camp in previous years, wanted to know if we were going to things they had done before. One wanted to know when we were going swimming. One wanted to know when he could start a fire. I make a mental note to keep that one busy and make sure the matches are always in my pocket.

When I was a kid I was dropped off at Bible camp myself so it seemed natural for a parent to leave their kid at camp for a week. As a 19-year-old counselor, now responsible for six young lives that were not my own, I wondered how they could do that. Why would a parent leave their kid with me, a complete stranger, for an entire week?  Why would someone trust me like that?

I remember being awestruck by that realization. As someone who has taken their own kids to camp I know how hard it is to drive away and trust them to a college-aged young adult who has never met them before. But I also know how much a child can grow in one short week and how it begins to prepare them to be independent one day.

Having people entrust me with the lives of their children helped prepare me for ordained ministry. In addition to the practice I get leading worship around a campfire or preparing a Bible study or listening as a lonely child lamented the fact they were with you and not at home I also learned what it was like to have someone trust me with one of their most precious possessions. Later, in ordained ministry, I was floored by the way people would trust me with the memory of a loved one’s life at a funeral. I was honored to be brought into families at holy and sacred moments like a birth or death, a baptism, a confirmation, a wedding or anniversary. I am still surprised that people entrust me to speak their fears and longings, their joys and sorrows in public prayers and worship.

When someone trusts me like that I never want to let them down. I know that sometimes I do and at other times I live up to the responsibility.

What completely amazes me, though, is the way that God trusts me with all of creation and with the life that has been given to me. When I forget that trust is a gift and only see it as a burden, well, that’s when I tend to fail. But when I recognize that something precious has been put in my hands and that I can help nurture and encourage it towards its’ intended purpose it humbles me and fills me with the joy I need to do a good job.

For those who have trusted me over the years, Thank You. 

An Ill-Equipped Leader

As I wrote in my last post, God used a cute blond co-ed to get me to walk through the doors of the Lutheran Campus ministry at Central Michigan University. After that I started attending on my own. I’m not sure why, other than the fact that I felt comfortable and at home in a church. The people who met on Wednesday night welcomed me into their group right away. I learned that the they traveled to lead worship in churches around the state one weekend every six or eight weeks. Those trips. like the Wednesday evening rehearsals, were completely organized and run by the students.

When I returned for my sophomore year I brought a used guitar I had picked up at a garage sale. I started learning the half dozen chords needed to play the songs that we sang and stood up front at rehearsals with the other guitar players. My playing wasn’t great but it was passable. At the end of that year the people who had been leading the group graduated and everyone gathered to elect new leaders. When I was chosen to lead the group I felt honored and a bit surprised.

Returning to school my junior year I found myself leading not only the student folk group but also the tuba section of the marching band. That gig had been handed to me by the previous section leader. I was excited about leading these groups because I loved being a part of them and I wanted to give back and support them. But I also felt ill-equipped to lead them.

Both groups were centered around music and both groups had members who were stronger musicians that me. I worried that someone would make an issue of that fact and point out that I wasn’t fit to lead.

The other reason I felt ill-equipped was because of my natural introversion. Leaders have to be in front of groups. They have to motivate and energize people to move in a desired direction. Leaders need to have really good social skills. As an introvert I prefer quiet reflection and developing strong relationships with a few people. While my passion for the groups that I lead naturally showed in what I did, sometimes my lack of social skills got in the way and caused all sorts of frustration for myself and for others.

It was also about this time that I started thinking again about being a pastor. That sense of call crept back into my mind as my peers began putting me into positions of leadership. Finding myself with the responsibilities of leadership, while at the same time feeling ill-equipped for the task, created a strange mixture of confidence and fear that continues to be with me to this day.

Learning to lead (and live) with this paranoid confidence has been the real work behind everything I have done as a pastor.  I’ve tried bluffing and bullying my way through certain issues. I’ve tried meditating and reminding myself constantly that God loves me the way that I am, telling myself to “do my best and God will do the rest.” I’ve tried delegating to others. I’ve read leadership books and journals. I’ve attended leadership conferences. So far, nothing has changed that swirling mass of mixed emotions that resides within me.

In the Bible there are many stories about people called to leadership who feel ill-equipped for the job, or at least they claim to be. The best, by far, is when Moses is called to lead the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt. Moses excuses himself by claiming that he’s not a good public speaker. The funny thing is, he tells this to God in one of the most eloquent and cleverly crafted speeches in the Bible. Then, throughout his time of leadership, Moses constantly struggles with his belief that he is ill-equipped for the job.

I wonder sometimes what the world and what the church would be like if every leader had this paranoid confidence and shared it openly. Would people still follow? Would it make for better leaders?

Returning to my sense of call meant entering into a place of discomfort and rarely feeling at ease with myself or what I needed to do. It meant that I would be discovering and rediscovering that the joy of being chosen is quickly overshadowed by the immensity of the task. And, as it turns out, it meant entering into a daily struggle between the awesomeness of being called to something bigger than myself and the dreadful realization that I will never quite be up to the challenge.

Reeled In

Even when I tried to ignore my call to ordained ministry and find another path I didn’t get very far before I found myself in church again. Fortunately, it didn’t take something as violent as a storm and spending a few days in the belly of a whale to get my attention. In my case God used something I was already focused on to lead me where I needed to go.

When I left home to attend college at Central Michigan University I made one feeble attempt at connecting to a church community. I called the local Lutheran church and asked if anyone could give me ride to worship on Sunday. I didn’t have a car and there was no bus service for the local community. The pastor told me that the congregation wasn’t set up to serve college students (I’m sure he phrased it a bit less bluntly) and that I should stick with a campus ministry organization. That was all the incentive I needed to explore what life apart from the church might be like.

I found that I didn't miss the church as much as I thought I would. If to this point in my life home was where I lived, school was where I went, and church was where I belonged, college now owned all three parts of my life. There was plenty to do simply adjusting to my new independence and responsibilities without adding the social obligations of belonging to a church. With no mandatory worship to attend each week I discovered lazy Sunday mornings and the joy of reading slowly through an entire Sunday newspaper before returning to school work. (I have a serious suspicion that this is what is meant by Sabbath and I still covet the once or twice a year when I get the chance to dwell in that kind of time.)

Sitting in my English writing class one afternoon during the winter/spring semester of my freshman year I found myself ignoring the professor’s lecture in order to gaze at the profile of the cute blond sitting one row up an over from me. She leans forward with both arms resting on her notebook. Her legs fold back under her chair. She is the model student, fully engaged, ready to participate. As I secretly admire her I feel the ball of nervousness grow inside of me. This was the day I had resolved to ask her on a date.

As class ends we stand up to gather our books and bags. She turns to face me as she slides her arms into the powder blue and cream white ski jacket and begins to zip it up. She smiles and her pale blue eyes shine in the white fluorescent light of the classroom. At the beginning of the semester we discovered that our next classes were in the same building part-way across campus. We had gotten in the habit of walking together and talking about whatever happened to be on our minds. It was my plan to ask her out as we walked together.

Evidently I was unable to bear the nervous anxiety until I could slip it into our conversation casually and I blurted out, “Hey, I heard there was this thing going on next Friday. Would you like to go with me?”

This wasn’t how I had rehearsed this in my mind. Gone was the suave, casual and in-charge persona that I had secretly hoped would emerge in moments like these. In its place was a sputtering rush of words vomited out in a semi-coherent splash on the floor by my feet. Did I really say, “this thing?”

“What thing?” she asks, tilting her head the tiniest little bit.

“Umm,” I stumble, not sure whether I am being given a second chance or just being set up for a bigger drop. “It’s a party. Like a dance. But I don’t know if there will be dancing. A social kind of thing at the Student Union. You know.”

I stand there trying to look confident and certain which, in this case, would have won me an Academy Award had I been able to convince her that I was.

Then, out of some magical place where grace and goodness come forth, she says, “Sure, I’d like that.” Her eyes radiate warmth and her smile washes away the anxiety. But before I have even the slightest moment to savor this little victory, before the tiniest swell of pride begins to bloom she continues, “But I have one condition. You have to go to church with me next Wednesday night.”

“Sure. I’d like that,” I say without thinking to ask, “What church?” I know church. I can go to one Wednesday night service without getting all caught up in it. Church is easy. A simple tradeoff in exchange for a date.

I’m too excited to understand what is happening to me. I’m too involved in the moment to recognize that God has baited my path with a cute blond woman and a pair of pale blue eyes.  It would be fifteen more years before I would recognize how I was lured back into the church after my brief hiatus.

It seems like most people who are involved in a church community have experienced a time of leaving before returning once again. The impulse to return is sometimes a spouse, sometimes it’s for the sake of their children, or sometimes a tragic or life-changing event that sent them in search of meaning and community. Strangely enough, these are some of the exact same reasons that people leave the church.

I think I’ve always assumed that belonging to a church was the goal. But what if that’s not the case? What if God led me out of the church that first year of college for a reason? What if God didn’t lure me back to the church but called me forward into the church only after I had experienced a time away? And what if God is leading people out of the church now for a reason that we can’t yet see?

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.

Stranger in a Strange Land

At some point the charms of suburban living began wearing thin on my parents and they started talking about moving again. I was too caught up in riding bikes, building forts and joining my friends in tormenting neighborhood girls to pay attention to what my parents were going through. Even if I had paid attention I imagine it was one of those “grown up” things that I wouldn't be able to understand for years to come..

When it was all said and done my parents bought an old farmhouse and forty acres of land about 25 miles from the subdivision. Neatly landscaped lawns and paved streets were replaced by cornfields and a dusty, gravel road. Instead of being surrounded by similar looking homes the farmhouse was encircled by barns and sheds. The closest neighbor lived over a quarter mile away. The nearest town, and the place I would attend school, was five miles away but the bus ride to get there was over an hour long.

The farm held all kinds of new experiences for me: There were trees on the property that were actually big enough to climb. There were barns to explore. There were fields to play in. The old house still had a coal-fired furnace. Every morning in the winter my dad or mom would go down to the damp and dirty basement to shovel coal onto the fire so the house would warm up for the day. My parents began remodeling almost immediately. Walls were knocked down, a stone fireplace was installed and we started living in what would become and endless construction zone.

Moving from a suburban culture to a rural lifestyle and having to make new friends was difficult enough without having to adapt to a second cultural change. Our new community was predominantly populated by the spiritual nemesis of Lutherans around the world: Catholics.

Evidently 480 years hadn’t been enough time to forgive each other for insults spoken during the Protestant Reformation. There was (and still is to some extent) a fear among parents that conversion was a real possibility and would result in eternal damnation if not eternal parental shame. For five centuries the animosity has run so deep that even today I still get surprised looks when I acknowledge that my Catholic friends are indeed Christians. Nobody was hostile towards us but there was always a sense of awkward wariness.

 The most surprising part was just how Catholic the new community was. I was one of only four kids in my grade who were not released to participate in religious education and attend weekly Mass (and whenever there was a feast day if I remember correctly). In fact, the public school system arranged for the middle school classes to be held in the school building owned by the Catholic parish that stood adjacent to the elementary school. I can’t imagine such an arrangement in today’s climate of church/state separation but it worked out well enough for the community back then.

I learned a lot from my new friends. I learned that they got bored during church services just like I did. I learned that they also wondered why church doctrine seemed so important to adults. I learned that, like me, they weren’t supposed to talk about these things but were to obediently attend worship and learn the rules. What I really learned is that we are more alike than I had been led to believe.

In the Bible, as people move to new places there is a dynamic tension between being integrated into the culture and maintaining a strict separation for purity reasons. (Since each group had its own god/s it’s hard to separate the racial and spiritual reasons for maintaining this separation.) It seems that no matter how strong the urge is within us to meet new people and learn from them there is always someone (sometimes ourselves) telling us that it is dangerous and that we should stay apart.

What I am learning is that I enjoy life a lot more when I can find the similarities between other people and myself. It’s easy to spot the differences and to be captivated by them making us wary and afraid. Seeing the way we are similar is harder. It often requires looking deeper into ourselves as well as the other. And when we see similarities it often reveals things about ourselves that we would rather not admit.

Moving to a new place always puts us in the position where we need to decide if we are going to stick with the habits and ways to which we have become accustomed or if we will expand what we know about the world and ourselves. The fact that God so frequently calls and leads people to new places makes me think that perhaps there are more blessings to be found for everyone as we learn from those who are different from ourselves.