Continuing Call

In seminary, we were asked again and again to tell our call stories as if the retelling would prove our worthiness. Here’s something I wrote in 2017.

My “yes” to ministry constitutes, in traditional ways of thinking, my fourth career. I have been a singing actress, an early childhood teacher, program director, and consultant, and most recently a professional writer. My path or trajectory into “yes” began with a divine encounter experienced while listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in G Major at age seventeen. This chapter of my story, well worthy of exploration, does not belong in this telling.

My current chapter began on a warm, sunny, beautiful day in August when I suddenly lost my husband Tony to a river. One which should have been closed to waders and swimmers that day. But instead swarmed with people and boaters and no safety precautions allowing the river to have its say, taking two lives, and seriously endangering three others–mine and my two sons.

Not part of our plan. Not God’s either.

In the first hours and days grief froze in a truth with no warning. I couldn’t understand how to organize our life: our journey home, Tony’s funeral, and our future. At Tony’s visitation a friend handed me a copy of our current Bishop’s blog post honoring Tony. My husband had served at the ELCA churchwide assembly but was more well known in ELCA circles for his healing work with staff, ushers, and bereaved family members after the Wichita, Kansas shooting of a medical doctor in the narthex of his Lutheran Christian church. The post’s sentiments were nice enough but what woke me up, irked me, and sent me reeling was a mere sentence, written by a man who had never met me, questioning my call’s future.

The question in my head was not if I still felt called to become a pastor but how I could accomplish the coming years of schooling and internship with three of us in grief and trauma recovery and with one of us just beginning his healing journey from Lyme disease. This question, along with the sighs and sobs of grief, were lifted into God, the universe, and the stars in the pain of night or to the air at dawn on our deck overlooking a world which felt full of external objections.

As the days passed, I heard similar rumblings from others. Weeks later my candidacy committee, meeting me for the first time, questioned my call while parading their misplaced pastoral care skills.

I did not question my call.

Ongoing confirmation flowed from other people. My aunt, a survivor of sudden traumatic grief and an ordained pastor herself, acknowledged my pastoral future as we created Tony’s complicated funeral. A former bishop after hearing me eulogize my husband acknowledged my call at the funeral luncheon. My friend who preached at Tony’s funeral shared his congregation’s willingness to help fund my seminary studies. My own pastor, who I temporarily fired in the days after Tony’s death, said “yes” when my candidacy committee said, “hold.” My women’s ministry group assured me of my call during my most pain-filled moments. Friends all over the country did not question but instead declared “of course you are going to seminary.”  Long time editors at 1517 Media asked me back to work five weeks after I began grieving. Brought me up to Minneapolis for a two-day meeting. When Dawn, the project developer, met me at the elevators on the first day of meetings I said, “Why did you bring me here? I am so broken.” Dawn merely steered me into the elevator toward the work at hand.

In December of that year, I met my Bishop. During our meeting I shared how I sat in the pew each Sunday and itched, itched to be an active part of conducting worship. Something shifted in his eyes and in his posture and in the room as he also recognized my call although his words could not fully say it yet.

In February my congregation blessed me as I officially began seminary. A sanctuary full of people either with their hands on me or hands stretched toward me meeting me with teary eyes. Weeks later in this same community, a three-year-old child turned to her mother during worship and asked “Where’s Pastor Jennifer? I don’t see her.”

Amazing, ever-present, omnipotent, patient God keeps calling me. And I keep saying “yes” with perseverance despite the obstacles set before my race. I am ever thankful I did not minimize or compartmentalize God during this time in my life. Trusting, as never before, in my journey with God. More tenacious, having walked through the valley of death, knowing there is no evil I need accept. Only abundant love to first receive and then share. My voice, prophetic as I embrace continuing call. Call which does not bypass me in my pain and healing. Knows instead to use me as I publicly proclaim this human experience called grief and trauma recovery.