the pastor’s wife, part one.

So now it seems I’m a pastor’s wife.

The reality is still just beginning to sink in and lately several friends have asked the question, “What do you think your gifts as a pastor’s wife are?”  It’s a great question, and I plan to answer it here on the blog.

But I want to start by telling you a story of my “growing into” the role of a pastor’s wife.  I think it’s important to tell because it took a whole lot of work on God’s part—a lot of struggle and correction and love and learning—to bring me to where I am today.  It’s a story that’s still being written.  But I can honestly say, by God’s grace, I’m growing. I hope it may be of some encouragement to any of you who are still in process.

Being a pastor’s wife or a missionary wife—or really any sort of ministry wife—was never something I dreamed about before marrying David—or even, necessarily, after marrying David.  I guess at best I can say that I was cautiously open to it.

I had pretty narrow ideas of what serving in a church looked like, and they consisted of: leading worship, teaching a Bible study, youth ministry, and children’s ministry.  In all honestly, I’m not very good at or interested in those things, as vitally important as they are.

And as the years passed, as I served in some of those capacities, I saw God work despite my short-comings, but I’d never felt truly, deeply passionate about church ministry as I knew it.  I never felt like my particular gift set fit those boxes.  In fact, I really didn’t know exactly what my “gift set” was, even after years and years in the Church.

So—and I don’t know if you can relate to this—I began to translate “I’m-not-great-at-and-don’t-love______ church role” into “I’m not great at and don’t love church ministry, period.”

Imagine my predicament making this discovery as a soon-to-be-full-time ministry wife.  I can recall numerous tearful “discussions” between the two of us over the years about my role as the wife of someone in ministry.  I struggled with gaping feelings of inadequacy and fear and ambivalence.  I went into each ministry situation with hardly a shred of self-confidence and certainly nothing akin to true joy.

As time passed and we pressed ever onward to overseas missions, I thought and said horrible things to David.  Things like, “I’m not good enough.  You should have married someone else.”

Sure, I guess that could sound humble to some (and I suppose I thought it was humility).  But it wasn’t.  It was pride, raw and ugly.  And worse than that, it was a blatant mistrust in God’s power to provide when He has called.  It was unbelief that what He creates is good—and that His creation of me was good.  It was making our service for Christ all about me (about my perceived failures and short-comings) rather than about God’s kingdom and His glory.

But it shouldn’t surprise you to discover that God is infinitely patient.

He didn’t write me off for my conflicted, woe-is-me attitude and lack of enthusiasm toward being a ministry wife.  He didn’t come down hard on me with more rules, a neat list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for someone in my position.

No, He didn’t do any of that.  Instead, He showed me a different way.

He brought me to a church called New City Fellowship, a brand new church plant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  We started attending shortly after Judah was born, and I was asked if I’d be willing to help cook and serve dinner after church.

As with anything else I’ve done at church I had immediate misgivings . . . But I’m not a good cook! I don’t know any of these people!  This feels awkward!

But I rolled up my sleeves and joined in because, well, it was a church plant, and I had to.  I spent many a Sunday afternoon stirring a simmering pot of spaghetti sauce or fragrant chili or baking a pan of Duncan Hines brownies.

And as I carried my food offerings down to the musty church basement week after week, as I helped set up the buffet line and got to know the other folks I served with, as I piled food on plates with a big smile as men, women, and children passed by, I found myself thinking with surprise at some point, I love this!

Our church was in an low income area, and plenty of the people who attended genuinely needed that meal.  But even for those who didn’t need it in a financial sense, there was enormous satisfaction in providing hot food (simple though it was) for our little community, in filling people’s bellies, in looking out over a crowded basement full of people talking and laughing as they ate crammed together at long folding tables.

Yet another surprise was the snatches of conversations I had over the months with those I served with, and the love in my heart that grew for them as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder and scrubbed pans, as I heard their stories and as they heard mine.

Those ladies became my mentors.  No, we never had a formal “mentoring” relationship—everyone was too busy for that.  But we worked together.  And there was so much joy to be had chatting over our work, exchanging meal ideas and recipes, brain-storming over how to make the serving line more efficient (and how to keep the kids from snatching all the cookies), and from there seamlessly going deeper, sharing what was really going on in our lives.

I didn’t realize it, but I was forming life-long friendships with each passing week.  Those women are still my friends today.  They have taught me so much about joyful service and loving well and clinging to Jesus in the midst of heartache.

All of that forged over Sunday evening dinners.

And through it, I was learning something about the definition of “ministry.”

There were other things I got to do in that little church: tutor a junior high brother and sister after school with David, have folks over to our house for dinner, including a homeless man that we became friends with, help put on a cook-out for the neighborhood.

All of this was out of my comfort zone, but I felt my heart coming alive to the idea of serving the Church in those days.  I loved seeing the body of Christ come together as we each stepped out of our comfort zones to do something bigger than us.  I couldn’t help thinking, If this is what ministry is, then I love it!

It’s not that this particular church got ministry “right” and other forms of church service are wrong.  I’m just saying that in this setting I began to discover the types of ministry that I personally feel happy doing.  Worshiping and serving at New City broadened the definition of “church” in my heart, and I was grateful.

God taught me more on a trip we took to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  There, surrounded by such unbelievable poverty and the suffering of AIDS patients, God showed me that “ministry” was simply sitting with people.  It was crouching in a tiny windowless hut, holding a hand, saying a prayer.  It was sitting in silence when words weren’t enough.

In those moments I fell in love with missions and knew it was the life for me.

God directed our steps to South Asia and, well, you know the story from there.

He’s been showing me ever since that church “ministry” isn’t some static office to fulfill.  No, it is life itself.  It is people.  It’s listening.  It’s meeting their needs when I can.  But sometimes, as I learned those many, many months of illness in South Asia, it’s lying still and letting them meet my needs.

It’s being free to be weak.

It’s giving and it’s receiving.

That is what fills a heart to overflowing.

I’m still being surprised by what true, vibrant, authentic church life looks like, and I expect to go on being surprised.  Ministry needs only arise when there are real flesh-and-blood people, and since no two people look the same, no two churches or ministries—or ministry wives—look the same.

Day by day as I let God reveal—and widen and stretch and change—the passions of my heart, and as I seek to love people well, He shows me the work He has for me.

This story of my preparation for ministry has not been one of me becoming more “polished” at any one role in the life of a church.  It’s not been about training or promotion.

It’s a story of increasing simplicity and freedom.  Of going back to the basics.  Of learning to accept that God is the God of “different ways.”  He’s mysterious and much, much bigger than me, and my definition of a great ministry wife is not His.

It’s learning to let go of my fears and my formulas and simply trust that He is my Father and that He is good.  He created me.  He writes the story.  He calls and he provides.

I find that I’m perfectly happy with that.