At the beginning of this month, I sat in a green suede chair with a scratchy back and listened to Roger* explain the different ministries our teams would be doing. It was the beginning of all-squad month, where all 38 members of W Squad jammed into one house and did ministry in the same town. While Roger spoke at the front of the sanctuary, I mentally checked off the jobs I would like and wouldn’t like. Home visits, okay. Construction, yes. Children’s ministry, only if I have to. Office work? Well, only if the alternative is children’s ministry.
My team was assigned to either the after-school program, working with kids who needed help with their homework, or to office work. One of us needed to be in the office all month, working as Roger’s executive assistant. I signed right up.
When I started ministry this month, I was prepared for the stress. Roger is the head pastor of a church with dozens of satellite ministries and social projects, and he knows what is happening in all of them. He has big visions for Romania and the Balkans. I was prepared for lots of emails and some confusing, broken conversations with Romanians.
I was not prepared for the anger. But staring at the screen of my laptop every day, typing emails to parents or Skyping Roger while he traveled through the U.S., frustration and rage burned like a low-grade wildfire, somewhere underneath all the tasks scrolling through my brain.
Part of it was feelings of uselessness- people are dying on the beaches in Greece, and I sat in a comfy office with good wifi. Part of it was comparing my ministry to other people on the squad’s- while they were visiting widows and handing out Bibles, I was emailing people in America. But part of it was insecurity, a nagging feeling that I was going to fail at this job.
See, the year I turned 20 I did a lot of things. I learned another language and watched all nine seasons of The X-Files. I lost my old faith and learned how to write better and bolder. I also got fired.
I got fired from my job at the Wesley, the campus ministry where all of my friends went and I worshipped every Thursday night and my backpack had a permanent spot by the intern desk. I got fired the summer before my senior year of college, so I spent that summer going to class and lying on the floor of my apartment reading War and Peace.
When I applied for the Race, it had only been four months since my boss (who was also my minister) had called me into his office and said it was my last day working for the Wesley. On the phone with the AIM office, I told Kate from admissions that being fired had been traumatic, but ultimately a good thing. It had taught me about myself, I said. It had made me look at where I put my worth.
Here’s the thing: I believed those things at the time. But I also knew that going on the Race meant I didn’t have to work an office job for at least a year. I was safe.
But the Lord didn’t promise safety- he promised freedom.
Every day this month, I put on my jeans and thrift shop sweater and walked down the street to the church, where I sat in the back of the sanctuary and worked on my computer.
Every day, my squadmates would say, “You’re doing a great job” and I would scoff a little on the inside. If only you knew, I would think, if only you knew how bad I really am at this job.
Every day, something inside me said that I was failing. I was not good enough, this was not real ministry, and that single failure from the year I was 20 defined me. Go sleep less, work harder, do better.
But one day, the Lord reminded me that I was made for better than that. I was reading a book and flipped the page to my favorite poem, unexpectedly in the middle of the narration:
If thou couldst empty thy self of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might he find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, “this is not dead,”
And fill thee with Himself instead.
But thou art all replete with very thou,
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when he comes he says “this is enow
Unto itself, ‘there better let it be,
It is so small and full,
There is no room for me.”
Sir Thomas Browne wrote those words in the seventeenth century, possibly just to slap me back into reality in October of 2015.
I work better when I remember that the Lord promises freedom, not safety. I work better when I’m not all replete with very me, and this month it was all I could do to keep waking up and thinking about God, I was so overflowing with my own insecurity.
But I don’t hate that I got fired anymore. It doesn’t define me, like it did even as I told AIM it didn’t. It’s just a part of me, and not even a very important part.
Because of this month, there is a little more room for the Lord in the shell that is my soul. So even if I feel empty now, I am holding out hope that it’s because someday I’ll feel a little more full.
*Name has been changed
