*I was informed that my spiritual autobiography wasn’t opening on some computers, so here it is good old copy & paste style*
I can’t remember a time when God was not real to me. When asked once to identify my moment of conversion on a ministry internship application, I wrote that I had always had a relationship with God. When pressed at my interview, I answered that I must have accepted Jesus into my heart in utero; because I have always just known God is with me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my hard times with God. I remember crying through long nights of despair in my teenage years and yelling, “God, I know you’re not there!” There were also numerous times when my life choices were clearly not in line with God’s desires for me. But my biggest faith crisis came to a point because I lost my belief that I could serve God. I was 23 and the acting minister at a church in Holbrook, AZ. I had been licensed to preach and serve communion to this small, pastor-less parish in the middle of the desert. It was nearing the end of my second year as Peace Lutheran’s minister when I realized I wasn’t qualified to do this. Perhaps it should have occurred to me as a 21-year-old college student, presiding over communion for the first time, that maybe this was a bit beyond me. But it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to do. I knew the words of institution by heart, having listened, enraptured, to my father say them Sunday after Sunday growing up. I was always at church, most often going to not just one, but multiple services on a Sunday. My dad would ask me to fill in when readers, assisting ministers, or communion assistants didn’t show up. I simply loved church and only missed my congregation’s services when I visited other churches to see how they did things. I had become an amateur sociologist of religion at 16, visiting Mormon, Methodist, Jehovah Witness, Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian, Calvary Chapel, Covenant, Nazarene, and Foursquare places of worship. I enjoyed visiting these churches, but always came back to my Lutheran congregation more convinced that it was where I belonged.
So becoming a minister of a Lutheran church at the age of 21 fit my perception of my life path perfectly. Already I had worked as a confirmation teacher, helped lead Vacation Bible School, run a Sunday School program, worked at a Bible Camp, and been part of an intensive internship at a large community church. Being a Licensed Lay Minister of Word and Sacrament was simply the next step, and one that was giving me good experience for seminary and becoming an ordained minister. So natural did this all feel to me that I did not see the crisis coming on. It hit me hard one Sunday as I was driving home from church. That morning a man had cried on my shoulder as he told me of his grief over losing his father and I felt like I had no way to address his pain. A woman told me my sermon on forgiveness had offended her because I had insinuated that any sin could be forgiven with the help of God. “You can’t tell me to forgive the man who killed my daughter. You have no idea what it’s like to lose a child!” I had no words other than, “I’m sorry.” Driving home that day, something snapped. Here I was, 23 years old and trying to minister to people two and three times my age. All of the faith and depth I had thought I had seemed not only inadequate, but also illusory. I felt lost and unable to see my path toward ordained ministry anymore. Every Sunday after that, I became more and more convinced that I needed to experience life more before I could ever dream of being an effective minister. A few months later, I graduated from college and moved away from Arizona and my little congregation.
Since then, I have moved toward and away from seminary and ministry a number of times. I have applied and been accepted to seminary twice, but have not gone either time. Something in me has always said, “You have something more to learn.” I have worked at two churches, one as a youth director and one as the director of faith formation, but have also explored other career fields. I have worked in mental health as a case manager and residential counselor, spent tax season as an accountant’s assistant, worked in an Alzheimer’s care unit as a caregiver, explored peacemaking work with Christian Peacemaker Teams, became a trained mediator and facilitator, taken science classes to explore careers in health care, helped babies come into the world as a birth doula, volunteered weekly at a homeless shelter, and spent months at the Arizona/Mexico border working with a non-profit called No More Deaths. Five years later, I have realized that no amount of life experience will ever make me feel ready to be a minister, and that through God’s grace, I have been doing ministry all along. I am finally ready to pursue a seminary education and ordained ministry.
Throughout all of my life explorations, I have been gifted with the love and support of a large, dynamic, faith-filled family. I consider it the greatest blessing of my life; along with the deep sense of love I feel from God, that I am part of such a wonderful group of people. My parents, Mark and Donna, have always shared God with me through faith practices and through the example of how they live. Growing up, my mornings began with family devotions and my nights ended with prayers. My meals were full of conversations that were heavily influenced by the living faith of my parents and their desire to help my siblings and me put our questions, thoughts, and opinions through the strainer of our beliefs about God. My parents engage the world around them with a strong sense of call to spread Jesus’ gospel message of love wherever they can. Every day of my life, I have watched my parents act as Jesus’ disciples in the world in both public and private ways. Public examples include my father serving the church as a pastor and our family adopting three war orphans from West Africa. Privately, my mother sees the needs of the impoverished kids she works with in her special education classroom and somehow manages to help their families get what they need. My father continually engages in life-style adjustments that address his growing concern over the environmental degradation of God’s creation.
Growing up in a family that centered itself in God, having a father, grandfather, aunt, uncle, and great-uncle that are all pastors, and being active in church life from the time I was a small child, it has naturally followed that people encouraged me to look at serving the church as a vocation. My grandfather, a retired Lutheran pastor, has been a major source of encouragement in this regard. He has repeatedly affirmed my gifts of pastoring and has offered his support during my discernment and exploration process. I have also had the privilege of working with several gifted pastors who helped me explore my call to ministry and seminary, and have had many people in the congregations I’ve served point me in the direction of seminary.
A discussion of my call to ordained ministry and seminary would not be complete without saying that I was born into seminary. Literally. I was born in my parents’ apartment in the student housing of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. My mom went into labor so quickly that there was barely time to call for help, much less get to the hospital before I came into the world. Obviously I was in a hurry to get to seminary. Twenty-eight years later, I’m going through the process a bit more formally!
At this point in my life, I have no geographical or personal limiting factors to pursuing a seminary education and ordained ministry. I am single, without health problems, and I have no outstanding debt other than undergraduate student loans. I am hoping to receive significant financial aid for seminary, so as not to graduate with a debt load that dictates what types of ministries are possible for me to pursue. I can see myself doing rural ministry, chaplaincy, ministry on a reservation, and many other things. I would like to be able to serve in a particular ministry situation based on a genuine sense of call, as discerned by church leadership, the ministry participants, and myself, without financial factors being a main concern. I am willing to live simply and I am willing to go to where the going is tough. As our church is navigating through a time of change, I would like to be able to serve where I am needed. That means that I must make responsible financial decisions when it comes to seminary education.
In what is supposed to be a spiritual autobiography, I feel that there is so much more I wish to include. I don’t have time to talk about the youth pastor who shared his vision of God’s love for me by simply hanging out and being there during thick and thin. Nor do I have time to discuss the defining moment, sitting in the car with my dad at the age of eight, when my father told me about the Nazis and the Holocaust. I vowed to study this history to figure out how human beings could treat each other that way, and to work to stop something like that from ever happening again by spreading the message of God’s love to everyone. I wish I could discuss how being raised by a Bonhoeffer Scholar and ethics professor who specializes in responsibility ethics forced me at a young age to grapple with my own power to work for good and evil in the world. I don’t have time to talk about how excited I am about leading a church that can be a place where people come to learn how to love themselves, God, and others; a place that fosters healthy community and teaches people to build that community outside the church building; a place where people come to find Jesus, put Jesus in the center, and then turn around and go out to the world with the love and power of Jesus behind them; a church that can be the web that holds the world together in unity. I don’t have time to talk about any of this now, but I am excited about engaging these topics as a seminary student and as an ordained minster in the ELCA.
In some ways I am in awe of the task ahead. Despite my extra years of life experience and the education and support I will receive in seminary, I know that when I go out to be a minister of God in the church again, I will sometimes feel like I did when I was 23 – inadequate and unsure. However, I have the fervent hope that God can work through my life experiences, education, blessings, trials, and dreams to use me to bring God’s transformative love and the good news of Jesus to a world that is both wonderfully good and terribly broken. I have faith that God’s grace is sufficient for my weakness, and that together with the communion of saints and the church that I love, I can engage in the work of God in the world.
