The Eye of the Storm

"Make my calm your storm."  -Caedmon’s Call

"There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God."  – Traditional Hymn

As you might have noticed if you read my reworked front page, things have changed somewhat for me lately.

I’m not exactly sure how this is going to come out yet, so please bear with me.  My thoughts for the last three months or so have been very stilted, and I don’t know how to make them make sense.  I’ve come to some conclusions, but of course the place for those is at the end of the entry.  Until then, let me catch you up.

Sometime in the middle of last semester, I noticed had a rather uncomfortable feeling.  It was a feeling I couldn’t quite place, and I dismissed it. In retrospect, I had been feeling it almost the entire semester, but it had never received a hearing from me.  The feeling was that I am really not cut out to be a pastor.  The feeling came as a product of two sides of the same coin.  Nothing has become more clear to me since I started Seminary two years ago than the actual callings upon the life of those special servants called to pastoral ministry.  I have learned much of their duties, their lives, and their hearts.  I have heard many of my fellow classmates, from a variety of ethnic, socio-economic backgrounds, share their common love for Jesus Christ and His church.  Their candid willingness to express these desires immediately humbled me, and caused me to evaluate my own motivations for ministry.  The first side of the coin, then, is my own learning about the knowledge of what being a pastor is all about, and comparing my calling to that of the fellow servants around me.  The second side of the coin is the work God has done in revealing my passions to me.  For many years, what I truly loved to do was a somewhat inane issue to me.  I believed that I was called, and so further consideration about what I wanted to do or what I desired to do was superfluous.

It comes to this.  As I sit at this computer, am I not certain whether I have the heart to be a pastor of a church, nor am I sure I have any desire to do so.  Nor am I certain that I am being asked to do those duties anymore.

The pieces have been falling together for me to arrive here since I started school two years ago.  I see it so clearly now.  I arrived here cocky and arrogant, sure of myself and the calling.  I believed I would walk effortlessly through Seminary as I had my entire previous academic career.  I walked into Seminary believing I was leaps and bounds ahead of my classmates in terms of my knowledge of theology and philosophy.  I believed I would wow my professors and cause them to praise both my diligent study and the people who raised me.  I was very interested in making everyone proud.  Too interested.  But God went to work, even on that first day.  I realized quickly that I was not leaps and bounds ahead of my classmates.  I realized I was but a wee child in comparison to many of them, and a mental midget to many others.  And the first pieces of my bulletproof self-concept fell to the earth.

Those were only the first pieces. Since I started Seminary, there is not an area of my life where God has not laid me bare and scoured old wounds.  In places where there were no wounds, some were administered.  Every thing I have ever trusted besides God has been taken from me in this place.  I have no help.  I have very little support.  I have no unbiased voices.   I trust myself, but much more quietly than before.  Though the world I have known has fallen around me, still I trust in my refuge, Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts.  May He never find me failing.  I have learned that I am neither as smart or as dumb as I imagined.  I learned that I am not exempt from the command to love.  I learned that to some, beyond my wildest comprehension, I am lovable.

I also learned that I am desperate to please people in so many ways.  That I have pursued this life to prove all those people wrong who posited that a person with my background and history could never amount to anything.  I have lived my life as an affront to those who doubted me, living the life of a paragon so as to shame those who did not believe in my calling.  And in that way, my calling was a integral part of my self-concept.  I got the calling to ministry at 17.  Who am I if I am not Pastor Nick?  I have shyed away from that title, but secretly that shying was only postponing my coronation, the day I proved all my detractors over the years wrong.

Os Guinness says that calling has two parts:  general and specific.  He is careful to note that calling, contrary to modern myth, is not the same as vocation.  I read The Call, the book where he exposits this idea, last spring, in the midst of the first round of sandblasting to my soul.  Though he is right when he says these things, for me calling has always been specific, it has always been about vocation.  It has always been about fighting the front lines and complaining about the stabs in the back from the troops under my leadership.  Churches are cruel places for those in the ministry.  The things Christians do to their leaders in the name of God are more abominable than anything they have done to other groups in history.  There is a reason that leaders are canonized now in the Catholic church in the same way the martyrs of old were–the scars and wounds are not altogether different. 

But my dual-sided coin has proven to be my own nemesis.  I have no desire to be the head pastor of a church at this time.  None whatsoever.  I am still convinced that I belong in the ministry of the church.  But I am no leader.  At least, not right now.  A leader must be selfless.  A pastor must be a shepherd.  I am neither.  In addition, I am dangerously close to burning out on ministry before I ever reach it, if I have not done so already.  I am lame duck in my studies, a ship floating in the doldrums without hope of a breeze to take me to port, and no sails to gather the wind even if there were one.  I find little to no motivation to continue my studies with the diligence they require except the financial burdens contingent upon me if I quit.  I don’t want to do this anymore.  I just want to feel like a normal person.  I can’t remember the last time I felt that way.  When I was the one no one expected anything of, I was not normal.  When I got the call to ministry and sandblasted my life free of almost every trace of the old person I knew, I was not normal.  I am not normal now, dubbed (with a select few others) as "the future of the conference."  I never asked for that label, and I collapse now under its weight.

This is not a plea for sympathy, it is only a statement of my reality.

I want to teach.  I want to stand in front of a small group of people and dive into material.  I was the happiest I have ever been while I was teaching every day.  It motivated me to get out of bed in the morning in a way nothing has ever motivated me, even ministry work.  And the opportunity for me to teach, or at least to try to get a teaching position, has presented itself.  And I plan to mine that opportunity for all it is worth.  It’s not that I want to do that instead of ministry work, it’s that it has become clear to me, in these last tumultous, horrific months, that this is the ministry I was created for.

I have a

desire to serve as a teacher in a local church, to work on mentorship programs and Sabbath school curricula.  I want to sit down with people and get them to think hard about the realities of our faith.  I want to prepare them to go into a world that has taught them that faith has no place in the public sphere.  I want to arm them the tools and weapons they need to live strong, public lives for Jesus Christ.  And though that is certainly part of the pastoral duties, it is the only part of those duties that interest me.  I used to long to preach, to stand in the pulpit and lecture.  But with my pride and anger vanishing and being replaced by peace in and with God and mourning for our cultures, I am left with none of the vitriol that motivated me before.  I only want to build good relationship in a normal, everyday life so as to bring people to understanding of my faith, even should they choose not to accept it.  I have no great talent for compassionate counseling, nor do I have a great gift for comforting those who mourn.  I am a teacher, I am analytic to a fault, and quite frankly those parts of the job which I see now as my great deficiencies I have no desire to perform.   They are the duties of the pastor.  Anyone can be a teacher, but it takes someone special to be a pastor.  I’m not that kind of special.

And so there you have it.  I’m stuck.  The place I have longed to escape to since I was 15, the great state of Colorado, has become for me a prison of the persona I created to appease people in my own ignorance.  My desires lie elsewhere, and I am here until May 13th, attempting to put up the charade of being a good student so as not to totally waste this opportunity before me.  This world is not my home, this I know.  But this life I live is the life of a man I do not recognize.  His dreams are not my dreams, his goals are not my goals, his calling is not my calling.  I am not opposed to ministry work, but the ministry work that the other man desired is not for me.

I stand in the eye of a great storm of activity, unable to do anything, feeble to affect any change for the next 9 weeks or so.  I am powerless to change it.  This the punishment I brought upon myself for taking other people more seriously than myself and my own relationship with God and His callings on me.  That said, I am strangely peaceful.  But that peace is right now mixed with shiftlessness, and I punish myself through education for the temerity it took me to believe that others were more important than God.

This is not a plea for sympathy, it is only a statement of my reality.