I have been so exhausted.
I have been so exhausted that when I see posts from friends who talk about how tough this second year of seminary was but how we all made it through anyway, I just laugh at them. I laugh at them the way I laugh at the self-evaluation question that asks whether I feel prepared for the realistic demands of ministry. Sure. Whatever. I feel prepared. It can't be worse than this.
I mean, it can. I'm sure that being a full-time pastor will bring with it more stress than I feel right now, and more despair, and more complications. I'm sure that I'll feel pulled in ten thousand different directions and that it will sometimes be unmanageable and that I'll have to make decisions that seem unfair to everyone involved (because they are) and that there will be days I will never want to revisit again. I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that working three jobs while taking a full load of classes and an internship while trying to maintain a new relationship, after having gone through the all the rigamarole of becoming a certified candidate, has in no way truly prepared me for the trials and travails of ministry. Ministry, I'm sure, will be overwhelming in ways I could never have imagined. If this past semester has felt like treading water in an ocean with the tide perpetually coming in, I'm sure that ministry will feel like a never-ending series of tsunamis. There's just no way I can be ready.
God, it makes me want to scream.
Contrary to the assumption built into the question of whether I feel prepared for the "realistic demands of ministry," I am not some sweet summer child who has never dealt with anything of import. I am not naïve, I am not unaware, and I am not self-absorbed. I am not a stranger to hard work, to complicated work, to delicate work. I have weathered this storm and I will weather others. Like most of the women I know, I learned how to endure long ago. I learned how to endure the world and I learned how to endure your inaccurate expectations of me, so you know what? You can step off.
But you know what drives me nuts? You know what sends me over the edge? It's not these suggestions that I can't handle what will be put in front of me. No, I can endure and I will endure and I will put up with all the challenges thrown my way and you can bet that I will be here shifting the world towards better as long as there is breath in my lungs, but the thing that knocks the breath out of me is when the people who should be standing strong by my side are the ones who I have to turn my efforts against.
More than one of my friends has said that they were warned about going to seminary because in seminary, "they take away your Jesus." Which is fine, I guess. I get it. We all misunderstand who God is, who Jesus really is. We forget that if Jesus showed up in America today, he'd for sure get stopped for a "random security screening" at the airport. The Son of the Heavenly Father came down to Earth and lived and died and rose again for us and for our salvation and a whole bunch of the people who claim to follow him likely wouldn't give him the time of day if they saw him on the street because Jesus, you see, was brown.
See, seminary didn't take my Jesus away from me. I am set on following this Arab Jewish carpenter rabbi from the backroads of Palestine. I'm just glad that the salvation he won extends to me. No, seminary didn't take my Jesus from me. It took my church.
Because the church I knew would never have doubted my ability to lead. The church I knew would not have questioned someone's call because of who they love. The church I knew didn't struggle with integration. The church I knew would have lived into its polity and its principles in the prophetic way. The church I knew could have sang In Christ There Is No East or West and They'll Know We Are Christians without a shred of cognitive dissonance. The church I knew was guided by the Holy Spirit who is Love.
And it exhausts me to have lost my church. It exhausts me to have lost my songs and my worship and my surest connection to God. There is death and new life in abundance in the world and the everlasting purgatory of the inbetween that this past year has been was electrified with it, but I have no idea how to ground it. All the electricity of new events has shocked me and then dissipated into the air. I have offered more hugs of condolences and congratulations than I care to count, sought out more hugs of comfort while in stasis than I care to admit. And all the while I have sought out every empty piano in every quiet room with a hymnal that I could find because God has been difficult to locate here in the inbetween and my spirit has noticed the absence.
It is tiring to not know where you belong.
It is enraging to realize that your home was taken over by someone else.
But I have found that the quietness of tomorrow offers you the chance to try again, to sweep clear the room and invite a new spirit in. I don't know how to fix our problems. I don't understand why faithfulness looks so different in so many different hands. But I can pray that the God of love will fill me and you with an everlasting Spirit so that we can dream dreams that are unheard of in this age, and I can pray for the Spirit of strength and patience to dwell deep in our hearts so that we endure until the day when the kingdom comes and the will of a good God is done on this earth as it is in heaven.
Until then, though, we have work to do.
