Hey, Merry Christmas, Everybody.  

I hope you are all as far along in your Christmas preparations as you would like to be.  I think we are.  In fact, this year might be the most Christmas prepared that I have ever been in my adult life.  That's a strange feeling.  

But it's been an unsettling year, so why should Christmas be any different?  

At the beginning of this year, we were living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Annika was in fifth grade, playing basketball, playing in band and singing in choir, going to GEMS with some of her classmates, and being her quirky artistic self.  Seth was beginning his last semester at Calvin Theological Seminary, and getting ready to be a pastor.  I was teaching part time at Lake Michigan Academy and getting ready to be a pastor's wife.  

There were a few notable things at the beginning of the year.  

• The biggest ice storm in 30 year hit Grand Rapids that February, closing school for a week and a half. 
•  Annika turned 11.
•  Seth graduated from seminary.  

Then came summer.  We commenced fixing up the house, packing up the stuff, and getting ready to move.  

• A cousin from California offered to buy our house.  He is now attending seminary. 
• I taught a short summer school course.
• Seth completed a CPE (clinical pastoral experience -- sort of like an intern for chaplains) at Pine Rest Mental Health Center. 
• We sorted all of our belongings and began disposing of the superfluous ones (why do we have so much stuff?)
• Annika spent lots of time trying to get cat Volpix to walk on a leash in anticipation of moving.  That didn't happen.  

Once Seth was done with his internship in mid-August, we loaded up a moving van with the help of our church friends, and then we camped our way west across the country.  The cat made a break for it at the first rest stop and didn't come back.  She was discovered a month later and brought to a local vet until a neighbor could claim her.  

  We stopped for a week at the Wisconsin Dells, which I had never seen, and we spent a week in Iowa with Seth's grandfather and my sister.  We spent an afternoon in Chandler, Minnesota, meeting the town that we now call home.  We stopped in with my Uncle Jack and Aunt Ev in western Montana.  And we did a lot of driving.  This was our second cross-country trip in two years.  I'll be honest: Northern Michigan is lovely, but it doesn't compare to the Olympic coast.  South Dakota and Wyoming are beautiful, but they are long. Mountains are always a welcome sight, but they make for long days of driving.  And that's just a lot of driving.  

We spent about a month going back and forth between my parents' house in Washington and Seth's family in Oregon.  We moved a lot of boxes in and out of storage. (Why do we have so much stuff?) And in that time   

• We accepted a call from Chandler Reformed Church.
• We traveled to Canada for the first time to visit my sister and brother-in-law and their kids.
• We gave the tent trailer back to my in-laws, and I don't miss it a bit.  

October found us moving cross country yet again.  We loaded up all the belongings once more and set out in some of the worst October weather we've ever seen.  It was a tense week.  I don't want to do that again.  But we got here, moved in, settled all the paperwork, and now, just before Christmas

• Seth is an ordained, installed minister of the Word and Sacrement.
• Annika is in sixth grade, playing basketball, playing in the band and singing in the choir, and being her quirky, artistic self. 
• I am doing a little substitute teaching, but mostly I am focusing on getting to know the community and being a pastor's wife.  Also, you will notice, I blog a lot more.  

That's our year in a nutshell.  

Some thoughts on Will-Finding pt. 1

 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” ~Ephesians 3:20-21

It occurs to me that after encouraging people to test themselves by seeking God’s will, I should really say something about finding God’s will.  This is a little tricky.  Most of what I have to say on the subject has been said before.  God is reliable.  If you ask, He will answer.  If you are looking and listening, God will tell you.  Even if you are being incredibly obtuse about seeing His signs, if you are honestly looking, He will make sure you find them. 

I will post more on seeking God’s will next time, but for now, let me throw out this question:  have you sought God's will and waited for God's will and then passed on God's will because it didn't seem possible? If you have, you would not be alone.   

Let me give you an example:  

When Seth first got his call to ministry, we began earnestly seeking God’s will in several ways:

1. We had asked godly friends who had been through seminary if Seth should continue to work full time and study full time as well. 
2. We had fasted and prayed and asked others to pray for us while we tried to figure out what kind of ministry Seth should go into. (He’ll tell you himself that he did not want to be a preacher in a church. More on that later.) 
3. We spent time listening and reading Scripture and recalling Scripture. 
4. And we interpreted the signs God gave us in circumstances. 

The leading that we received was clear: full time seminary and full time work were not conducive to a healthy family or faith life, especially not when one works in the electronic industry, which can suddenly demand  60 to 80 hours a week without warning.  So based on what we understood, we decided that Seth would quit his job as soon as I found full time teaching work. Obedient, right? Yes.  Sacrificial too? I thought so. And God led us to that point, right?  Yes.  That’s what we asked for.     

Note the words “based on what we understood.”  A lot of times in our efforts to follow God, we are well meaning, but we are not understanding because our scope is not big enough.  Human beings, like it or not, are limited by time and space and limited experiences.  Seth and I had been raised to believe that God does supply, but we had not experienced the many ways He could supply.  We anticipated that He would provide work for me.  I had been maintaining my teaching certificate.  I had been developing a reputation as an excellent substitute.  Naturally the next thing that should happen is that I should get a full time teaching job so that Seth could devote himself to pursuing God’s calling.      

Long story short: I did not get a full time teaching job.  And Seth got fired.  

    To sum up, at this point we were willing, we were listening, and we were anticipating, and we were confused.  We plunged ourselves more deeply into the job market. Was this our fault?  Not really.  Our life experience up to this point had taught us that God provides work, and thus he provides everything else we need. Moving forward with no job felt insane. However, God had lessons that he wanted to teach us.  Specifically, He wanted to teach us that everything we need comes from Him, and we do not need to depend on human institutions.  We needed to be weaned off the idea that security meant a full time job and health insurance.   And because we were willing, listening, and anticipating, we were ready for those lessons to begin.  For the next two years, we worked as substitute teachers and never failed to pay a bill.  Those two years were plenty anxious, especially at first, but God came through one day at a time.

Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink or what you will wear. The nations run after such things, but your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 

How many of us, being faced with the will of God, reject it (at least at first) because it doesn’t match with what we believe about other things.  You’re not going to perceive God’s will if you aren’t willing to let go of a lot of preconceptions, such as your notions of security.  When the Apostle Paul says, “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,” he means that literally.  We have no idea what God can do with the circumstances that He lays in front of us.  When we say and mean, “Thy will be done,” we are opening a whole new horizon in front of ourselves.  Look at Jacob; look at Mary; look at Jeremiah; look at Paul.  Could any of them have anticipated what “Thy will be done” would do to their lives?  

I think more often than not that this is the part where faithful Christians stumble.  We urgently seek God’s will, but when it’s revealed, we can’t cope with it.  So often, God’s will isn’t just for our obedience; it’s also for our expansion to move further into our destiny as Sons and Daughters of God.  In our case, God’s will was not only to pursue ordination; it was also to learn to rest completely on God for the provision of our daily needs.  

Now, it would be nice to say that these two years really pounded this lesson home, and we never doubted God’s provision again.  (because that’s just like human nature.  <Snort>)  When I said obtuse earlier, I was speaking strictly from a been there/done that perspective.   I can’t count the number of times that Seth and I said to each other, “I just want an itinerary. I just want to know the next couple of steps or the way over this obstacle” or that we reacted with fear and frustration until God made His answer very plain.    If you read the Bible, you know that this is one of those primary points where humanity really struggles,  and we really struggled too.  

• Seth got offered another job, and we fretted over whether he should accept it. After we decided to decline (see above), the company informed us that they had cut the position anyway.
•  
• Our unemployment insurance kept getting hung up and delayed, until finally Seth decided to just focus on school and let God provide as He would. Then the insurance, the G.I. benefits, and the possibility of Seth working as a substitute teacher as well fell into place in the space of a week. 
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• I was overlooked for full time jobs. Well, it turned out we were moving. 
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• We watched the Grand Rapids housing market from a distance fruitlessly for six months. The weekend that we got to Grand Rapids, the perfect house went on the market, two blocks away from an excellent church, ten minutes from the seminary, five minutes from my work. Because houses sell for a lot more in Oregon, we could pay cash. 
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• Seth missed out on a necessary internship our first summer there, so he was available to take a pastoral internship which turned his calling toward preaching and parish ministry and paid a much-needed stipend.

None of these were what we were anticipating, and it was only slowly that we learned to stop reacting in frustration and to see these “disappointments” as redirections and expansion and the shaping of God’s will.  By the time we were actually seeking Seth’s first full time position, worry had gotten a lot weaker and trust had gotten a lot stronger. We were more open to the possibilities of wherever God might take us. We still had moments of panic and frustration, sometimes on a daily basis, but there was a certainty underneath them that hadn't been there before.

    Now, I’d like you to notice two things here:

1. These all took time. All of our fretting took place in the waiting. Two weeks to hear back from a job interview. A semester before we could begin to relocate. Three years before we could seek a call. I think a lot of our disappointment in hearing God’s will comes from our expectation that something miraculous (and convenient) is going to be revealed immediately, and we can hop right into doing. God develops us in stages, and only He knows what kind of development we need. Walking forward step by tiny step and adjusting to the new view at each step takes time.   
2. If you are serious about doing God’s will, then you never really get a respite from the attitude of looking and listening. There is no point where it just falls into place, and He reveals the whole plan in front of you, and you can relax and take it from there. There were times when Paul didn’t even know which port to sail for next. We get the plan piece by piece, but He always gives us enough to let us know that we are still in His hands.

Are You Ready? Probably more than you know.

But the passing life that we have here in our fleshliness does not know what our self is, except through our Faith.  And when we know and see truly and clearly what our self is, then shall we truly and clearly see and know our Lord God in fullness of joy.  And therefore, it is inevitable that the nearer we are to our bliss, the more we shall yearn -- and that both by nature and by grace.

~Revelations, Julian of Norwich, 46

We are installed!  Or rather, Seth is installed.  Praise the Lord.  The "Becoming a real pastor" process is finished.  He has studied, he has been examined, he has been ordained, and he is installed.  Now we can just settle back and grow into the role that God has given us.  One hundred and fifty people with all their worries and concerns, outreach to the community, expounding the Word of God faithfully and dynamically, administering the sacraments, church discipline, being model citizens of the kingdom below and the kingdom above.  You know, no pressure.

A lot of people have been asking me, "Are you ready to be a pastor's wife?".  And my standard response has been, "What does that even mean?". The days of a pastor's wife as a social institution, as a one-woman behind-the-scenes tirelessly working holiness machine are gone.  The jufrau is no longer a job title. I know pastor's wives who are teachers, nurses, social workers, crisis mediators, and pastors in their own right, and they all told me not to get pressured into any one role.  

However, Seth and I always dreamed of doing ministry together, and this is a great place to get involved.  Worship planning, special music, prayer and language ministries, and community involvement are all on my radar, in addition to the basketball schedules, volunteering for hot lunch, decorating for Christmas, and getting those gosh darn Christmas cards out that come with regular life.  Seth asks me to edit his sermons, and I am deep in the midst of three different books on prayer and devotion (in little pieces).  Does that sound like a pastor’s wife?    I feel a certain amount of anxiety because I have high hopes, and where hopes are high, failures are steep.  Am I ready to be a pastor’s wife?  Am I being what I ought to be? 

These are all unsettling questions because I feel like I don’t really know myself.  The older I get, the more flexibility I see in the parts of what I would ordinarily call “me.”  When I was a teenager, I could draw the outlines of “me” pretty starkly.  Life experiences have  stretched my personality so that the outlines have gotten diluted and fuzzy. I’m not as shy as I used to be. I’m also not as black and white.   I can see possibilities that I could never have entertained twenty years ago, and I am wise enough to know that possibilities are not necessarily givens. And I feel like the changes are still happening. How do I know when I'm ready?

As I’ve been pondering the question of readiness, I came across the above passage from the Lady Julian.  She wrote it when she was pondering something that puzzled her.  God had plainly shown her that He judged her in Heaven with grace and no condemnation.  And yet, here on Earth, Holy Church told her to judge herself sinful and reckon her failures.  She wasn’t sure how to reconcile the two until it occurred to her that we don’t really know ourselves in this life except by our Faith. In fact, we won’t really know who we are until we die.  

I can see that.  We know ourselves in a sort of retrospect.  We know who we have been.  I know how I developed as a Navy wife and a seminarian’s wife, but I don’t know what I’m going to become as a pastor’s wife, and I don’t know how the three of them will reveal themselves later in life.  I have been the mother of a small child, but I don’t know myself as the mother of a teenager yet.  We can’t know ourselves from the present forward because we are fluid and responsive beings.  Life shapes us, and until we get to the end, we don’t know what shape we’ll be.  The skills we've learned and will learn, the life lessons we've gone through and will go through, the gains and the losses, the triumphs and failures, physical and spiritual all get woven through the end product until we are finally ourselves. And if Julian is right, God doesn't judge us for being incomplete.

 Here is an idea echoed through all of Christian history.  The Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossians, “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory”(3:3-4). So our future selves are a mystery.  We only know a bit of what Christ is going to be like when He returns, so how can we anticipate ourselves?  We are sown perishable;  we are raised imperishable.  What does that look like? Well, it looks like dying to self and putting away all the sins and weaknesses that we've been comfortable with thus far.  

I had to wrestle with this concept for a while.  And I had to ask myself, Why is the concept of not being complete yet so frustrating? 

Well, I have a life to arrange. I feel like I can’t competently make those plans if I don’t know who I am.  One of the questions Seth asked me as we moved into this phase of life is where I wanted to go from here.  “What is your ordination, and how do you want to pursue it?” were his words.   And I didn’t have an answer.  I couldn’t get a picture of myself down the road in order to choose my next steps.  And that made me afraid of developing incorrectly and damaging what I was supposed to be.    

But how do I get to know myself? As I get older, I see that the best way to know myself is to test myself.  Or to put it another way, the best way to know myself is to look to God and say, "Okay, Lord, what next?" Because in spite of the fact that I am a responsible adult, my life is not mine to arrange. As much as I cling to the anxiety and satisfaction that comes with control, life doesn't work that way. The running joke at our house is that we don't plan anything more than six months in advance because God will change our plans. There was a point not that long ago that Seth was in the tech industry, and we were buying a house to retire in. That was five years, three moves, and a Master of Divinity (Seth's) ago.  

When we go out on a limb, God gets a chance to show us  His grace for our weaknesses and to develop our strengths.  At the same time, we learn how to lean on Him, look for His leading, and follow Him more consistently.  And then he reaches into this bank that He's developed over our lifetimes and pulls out gifts and abilities and experiences that we can use to meet the challenge that He has drawn us into right now. And the process repeats itself and builds on itself until someday we stand before God. And on that day, He judges us. We see what we have done and what He has done with it. We see God as He is, and then He shows us ourselves as we were meant to be. And then we know ourselves completely.  

The fear of failing and the fear of going in the wrong direction pale considerably when they are washed in the development of God’s grace and the constant presence of God’s Spirit (and the Spirit is present, always).  But that kind of confidence takes time and repetition and a desire to know God.  I wouldn't have been able to understand this twenty years ago, and I am only beginning to grasp it now. And now is when I need to understand this. Because I have this question to answer: Am I ready to be a pastor's wife? Well, evidently, God thinks so because we are here. So yes, I am.