That year was the making of me.
I’d never before been on the receiving end of such unabashed hatred and vitriol, though the haters and the vitriolics hadn’t necessarily aimed their weapons at me. I was married to the man they hated, making me a not-so-innocent bystander because I’d chosen to give my entire adult life to being by his side. To their probable dismay, I wanted to stand next to him. I chose to. Proudly. Resolutely. Permanently. With, as it turned out, my heels dug in deeper than theirs.
I was, after all, the pastor’s wife.
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My husband and I keep a running tally of all the things seminary didn’t prepare us for. The list includes ordinary things like always being the first ones there and the last ones to leave for every church event and gathering. But the list also includes the very extraordinary things like figuring out where to send the check for an ankle monitor for the twenty-year old next door to the church who was arrested and falsely accused of gangbanging. Somewhere in the middle of the ordinary minutia of ministry life and the unusual things seminary never mentioned, we found ourselves the objects of disdain, gossip, and slander—something seminary absolutely should have prepared us for. And maybe it did but we weren’t listening. It’s hard to hear when your ears are stopped up with the all the things you just know will fix up a revitalization project. Eventually, you realize you didn’t know nearly as much as you thought you did.
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When I was fifteen, I read a book about a young woman who was martyred for her faith in Jesus, and I was so compelled by her faithfulness that I told the Lord I would do anything for him. Anything at all. If I suffered in my adult life, surely it would be at the hands of the government, those in the secular world, or atheists, or foreign entities. It would come from outside, from those out there who didn’t believe in Jesus. But suffering inside the church? I didn’t have an inkling of how destructive friendly fire would be. I wasn’t prepared for it, I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t know how to respond to it.
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When I was thirty, my husband had been pastoring for six years, and at that moment in time, his steady, faithful preaching of Scripture had distilled the membership down to a fraction of what it was when we’d arrived. I don’t know what we expected but one church member later told us that they had known it would go very, very badly for us. This was an occasion of a sinking ship that needed bailing out. And what did we come in and do with our youthful vim and vigor? We set the sinking ship on fire. Of course it didn’t go well. One issue after another piled up, stacking all the cards and a lot of church members against us. Dark days, they were. And darker nights. Many days we were sure my husband wouldd be fired; a few days I was sure he’d be shot. You think I’m embellishing for the sake of prose, but I’d seen something that triggered my nervous system into fight or flight every time I made eye contact. For a long summer there were meetings at the church multiple nights a week, a committee that disintegrated under the pressure of staunch opposition.
On those long nights, I’d tuck my three-year-old in bed, and then sit cross-legged on my couch with my Bible in my lap, waiting out the meetings. With a knot in my stomach, I prayed without ceasing, maybe for the first time in my life. I prayed until I heard the familiar thunk of my husband’s truck hitting the bump in the driveway. I’d listen in the stillness of the night for the sound of his voice as his housekeys jingled on his way to the back door. My husband is a singer in the sense that he is always singing. He sings as he does anything the way people whistle while they work. When we lived in Tennessee and he was still single, he used to balance his checkbook every week at the desk for customers at his bank. The tellers knew him as the one who sang the whole time. It bugs our kids these days, but it’s the way he has always been and the way he will always be. There’s coming a day when he is seventy-five and walking into church singing “Calling Out Your Name” to a generation of people who will have never known Rich Mullins.
It was the songs I listened for when he walked the twenty steps from his truck to the back door. If there was a song, the meeting hadn’t been so bad. In the absence of it, I knew it had been a proverbial bloodbath, and we’d spend the rest of the night putting his heart back together. Instead of sleeping, we’d figure out what it meant to stay.
I’m fifteen years removed from those nights, but when I think about the hardest days of pastoral ministry, I don’t see Sunday mornings or Wednesday night prayer service. I picture myself late at night, sitting cross-legged on my couch in my living room with my Bible in my lap, turning the pages of Psalms for hours, praying, crying, calling out for the Lord to help us endure. I prayed so desperately then, hungry to do what was right, to be wise and also innocent, to figure out when our errors were the problem and when the truth was the problem, how to bend when we were wrong and how to stand up when we weren’t. It was such an awful chapter of my life. For such a long time, we attended church with people who absolutely loathed us. But that’s when I learned how to pray, how to really pray. How to take false accusations to Scripture, how to swallow criticism, how to bend low and realize that the only way to persevere was to let go of all the things you thought you knew. I learned that the gifts you thought you brought to the table wouldn’t matter much if you weren’t buried in your Bible first.
Those weren’t the last days of ministry trouble, not by a long shot. The pages of Psalms in my Bible are filled with dates of ministerial stress. After we survived the 2011-12 era, we met 2017, 2018, and 2020 with trials of various kinds. And, to be frank, 2026 has been hard for us thus far. I’ve seen a look of pity in more than one face when I realize word has gotten out about our more recent troubles. But here’s what they don’t know—I am not ashamed. We’ve been here before and I’m sure we’ll be here again. This is the way of serving in the local church. When you say yes to ministry, you say yes to suffering. But this is when the Lord will inscribe his words on your heart and you will cling to them with all that you are. And it will be your making.
Ministry is hard, but God is good, and the Lord will keep us as he always has.
Success in ministry is rarely measured with the right instruments. Fifteen years ago, my soul nearly melted away in grief, but it wasn’t shame pulling me in two. It was the Lord making my heart bigger and sturdier. Bigger so I could understand what faithfulness looks like, sturdier so I could learn to obediently walk in it.
My husband is the most faithful pastor you’ve never heard of. Twenty-one years have come and gone, and we’re still here. I used to think it’s because we had dug our heels in, both of us too obstinate to leave.
But as it turns out, we were planted.
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Daleth
My soul clings to the dust;
give me life according to your word!
When I told of my ways, you answered me;
teach me your statutes!
Make me understand the way of your precepts,
and I will meditate on your wondrous works.
My soul melts away for sorrow;
strengthen me according to your word!
Put false ways far from me
and graciously teach me your law!
I have chosen the way of faithfulness;
I set your rules before me.
I cling to your testimonies, O Lord;
let me not be put to shame!
I will run in the way of your commandments
when you enlarge my heart!
Psalm 119:25-32
Author’s note:
This is the fourth essay in a series of reflections on Psalm 119. Each article bears the title of the stanza of the psalm from which it draws inspiration. This is 4 of 22. I’ve written more in depth about my experience of healing from church hurt in the same church context where it occurred in my first book, The Promise is His Presence.
Photo by Amy Benton Blake on Unsplash
