Called from the Conflict - Unraveling My Story to Pastoral Ministry {{ part four }}

I’m a hard sell when it comes to movies and television. Clichés and shallow plots lose me quickly, and reality TV feels like static to my soul. When I watch a story unfold, I’m not looking for a predictable ending; I’m looking for one that makes the struggle worth it. From the moment I invest in the characters, context, and conflict, I tend to run ahead—trying to predict the resolution or the emotional payoff the storyline might bring. When the narrative offers no hint of renewal, I’m left disappointed... disillusioned. My heart craves restoration.

That longing says something about how I was intentionally created. Perhaps it’s true for you, too. After all, followers of Jesus believe in the restoration of all things—where every fracture is healed, every wrong made right.  Every tear wiped away. As a Christian, the assurance of the coming Kingdom—the new creation—is the deep ache of my heart.

Come, Lord Jesus.

While that hope is sure, it has not yet come. So, living in the already, if I’m honest, this heart wants to see glimpses of that redemption... in the now. 

I’ve been sharing a journey on this blog—a chronicle of my call to vocational ministry. Each post tells how God has continued to clarify that call over time. Called from the Cradle detailed the tenderness of childhood faith, Called from the Pews shared my formation through opportunities within the church, and Called from the Sorrow, the deepening of my calling through the refining fire of grief. I share here not to make a case for myself, but to trace the story of God’s ongoing call—even in conflict and confusion.

This installation brings the story into the present, about a year and a half after following the call to pursue and receive a graduate degree in pastoral care at Calvin Theological Seminary. Yet somewhere between the classroom and the Council room, the story changed. The dream that had grown for decades—the one I believed God Himself had conceived—seemed to stop breathing.

As I have previously shared, in 2010, I experienced a stillbirth. The actual physical delivery of a baby who was no longer filled with the breath of life. In the bleary-eyed and dark months that followed, I now remember something a dear cousin of mine shared as she recalled her miscarriages:

"It was the death of a dream"

Her words were clear and descriptive. The dream of holding my baby and the life that I had longed for suddenly died.  Hope was gone, absolutely beyond my control. I never saw it coming.

There's a strange mental game I think humans tend to play. Or better said, I have noticed this tendency in myself. Many of us fear pain, and in our futile protections against it, we might fool ourselves into thinking once we've experienced a particular sorrow, we grow an immunity to it,  becoming far less likely to reencounter it. 

But life isn't a game; it can't be mitigated, systematized, or even really open to our own curation (as much as it seems it can be for those arrogant enough to presume so).

For the last 2 years, I have been walking through a circumstance that can rightly be described as the stillbirth of a dream. The conception of this dream, or inward calling, if you will, was beyond me and my conscious memory of it. 

As the last trimester of my seminary degree program approached, I was heavily pregnant with hopes and dreams of being ordained as a Commissioned Pastor of Congregational Care. 

The office of commissioned pastor is recognized in the Christian
Reformed Church as a flexible, very localized ordination into pastoral
ministry. As indicated above (Acts of Synod 2001, p. 506), commissioned
pastor is an “umbrella term” for a variety of ministry positions such as
evangelist, chaplain, pastor of outreach, of youth, of congregational life,
and more, and may be understood to have the nature of “pastoral
extension,” serving to extend “the ministry of organized congregations
into specialized areas, including, but not limited to, youth ministry, education,
pastoral care and evangelism.

Yet, the labor pains began too soon, and what I hoped and prayed would be delivered decently and in good order through Holy Spirit discernment -- well, came swiftly and stillborn. Somewhere between my calling and the church’s comfort, the conversation stilled beyond my current capacity to understand or accept. I don’t equate the loss of ministry opportunity with the loss of a child, but the language of stillbirth gives voice to the kind of grief that silences hope.

Should I have known that following God’s call would lead me into conflict with the very church that taught me how to hear His voice? This church, I often say, has done its job very well. For years, my church has taught that all gifts come from the same Spirit. And yet, when the Spirit gives specific gifts to certain women, the church quietly amends its theology in practice. We bless the labor, but not the name; the service, but not the office.  I honor the church’s role in discerning calls; what grieves me is when that discernment becomes inconsistent with the Spirit’s evident work.

I keep serving, planning, praying, tending to the needs of the people I love. But under the hum of ministry is a steady ache: I do the work of a care pastor in a place that refuses to call me one. It is the dissonance between principle and practice, a duplicity I cannot unhear. I have carried this grief to God in prayer and to counseling in tears, asking that someday He might either redeem this or release me from a call that has become both holy and heavy.

I know now, in new ways, there is no one-and-done with particular sufferings and sorrow.
What remains is a tension I carry like a stone in my chest—this knowledge that somehow these truths all remain: I am educated, needed, called, yet restricted. A woman,

Following the stillbirth of our baby in 2010, after some time had passed, I prayed for a new life to conceive within me. We were given our beautiful (now 14-year-old) daughter, Naomi. What was once empty became full. 

Today, carrying a heavily wounded soul, I pray for healing, wisdom, grace, and a Naomi story of redemption. I long for glimpses of restoration—the kind that makes the struggle worth it, the kind that reminds me that no labor, no loss, no calling, is ever wasted in God’s hands.

And still, like Ruth, at this point, I choose to stay.

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). 

I remain committed to the work God has given me, serving His people faithfully, even while my heart wrestles with questions, disappointment, and the ache of restriction for the all daughters of the church.

I do not yet wait fully in hope—but I do wait in obedience. I do not yet see the resolution—but I trust the Author of my story. I do not yet understand the redemption—but I continue in the story He is writing, step by step, prayer by prayer, labor by labor, until He either redeems or releases....maybe the two lie very close. I offer these words not in protest, but in witness. My love for Christ’s church keeps me here, even as I grieve what remains undone. I do not reject her; I pray for her renewal, trusting that the God who calls also sees and redeems.