It’s never easy to do important things. Things that will make the world better, more beautiful, more just, or less devastatingly painful often cost us a great deal of time, money, pain, and effort.
Many times our callings fall to us unexpectedly, as if dropped from the clouds above. Few people can walk away from the call that comes like that. Those who do usually stumble on until they return to the place where God plucked their heart with purpose.
I never really felt called to vocational ministry. All Christians are meant to love the broken, the lost, the hurting, and the poor of the world. All Jesus followers are called to go and make disciples of every nation. When I married a minister I stepped out of the marketplace and into the church, but didn’t really consider it a leap of any great distance.
I just loved a man, and loved the God who brought him to me. It seemed obvious and natural that if I was called to be his wife, I was also called to this life of ministry.
But people can make titles like “minister” or “pastor” or “pastor’s wife”, that are meant to define our responsibilities, into labels that swallow our identities.
I read a lovely post by Sarah Bessey the other day that said this:
“I don’t for one moment want to be a Preacher, not really. (And I’m not really good at it, not yet anyway. I have a lot to learn.) Instead, I want to be Sarah, I want to be God’s beloved one, to walk wherever he walks, and follow the scent of his presence, discern where he’s moving and move there.”
I don’t know Sarah Bessey, but she wrote my own heart in those words. This is exactly how I feel about being a pastor’s wife. So many people define my life by this role I am required to play. But all I want is Jesus, all the time, in the deepest place of my heart.
I believe that it is our deep desire for Him that qualifies us to minister, whether it be vocational or not. It is love that makes a leader great in the church and in the marketplace, and it is God’s love that calls us out of the comfortable places into the fray of the broken, messed up places that He is needed most.
If our titles such as mom, or wife, or doctor, or accountant, or minister, or teacher box us in, it is only because we hold what others expect of us too highly, while we place who God has called us to be too low. The greatness is all His, whatever He has asked us to do for Him.
When the burden of the labor intensifies, we must press on, knowing that we can do important things because great is the God who has called us.
