The beauty of what is before us

When I was in college and in law school, I was sure that God had plans for me to work with kids. But the problem was I didn't really like kids that much. So I tried different things. I worked at a Montessori school while in college. For three days. Because I hated it and I wanted to pinch their little lemon heads off.

I tried different areas of children and youth ministry in the church I attended in law school, working with different age groups in different programs. But I just didn't like it and I just wasn't good at it. And I wondered what I was doing wrong because the call seemed so clear.

It wasn't until I had been doing attorney ad litem work with abused and neglected children for a number of years that I realized I actually was working with kids. Not at all in the way I had expected, but in a powerful and effective way, all the same. And unlike all those ways I had tried, when I was doing things my own way, I was very good at it.

In the same way, I felt, for many years, since I decided in college that I was going to go to law school, that I was supposed to be a judge someday. I took steps toward that goal more than once in my career but it never worked out the way that I was sure it was supposed to. It’s only been within the past probably 4-5 years that I’ve realized I don’t feel that call anymore.

And then this past summer, I realized a call to ministry that I never would have dreamed or imagined, which has led me to beginning seminary this past January.

On this past Christmas Eve, I attended the midnight candlelight service at the mother church my church is associated with. On Sundays, I go to church in an elementary school cafeteria that is converted each week to worship space. It’s a very different setting than the beautiful church sanctuary with the stained glass windows. And so for only the second time, I saw my pastor wearing a clerical robe and the Christmas stole I had made her. While I had seen her wearing clerical stoles before at women’s retreats, and I had seen her in her full clerical attire at last summer’s annual conference, I had never seen her in the full attire, living out her pastoral calling, in a church setting. Black robes and silk stoles are a bit dressy for a converted elementary school cafeteria, you see.

And so, as I was sitting in this beautiful sanctuary, on this sacred night, listening to the lead pastor of the church, I noticed his robe, and that of one of the male associate pastors, and that of my own pastor. And because I tend to have random thoughts, even when I’m sitting in church, I began to think about the way the robe looked different on my female pastor because of the different cut and style and because of the shirts and ties the men wore underneath their robes. And I thought about Judge Caton who was the first female judge I ever practiced in front of. She always wore a shirt with a bow or a scarf or something to feminize her robe. And I thought about how my pastor’s beautiful and colorful stoles had the same effect as Judge Caton’s scarves or bows. It was then that it occurred to me for the first time that if this ministry call leads to ordination that there will be times I will wear a robe. Very similar to the robe I would’ve worn had I become a judge, as I thought had been God’s plan for so many years.

As with the call to work with kids didn’t turn out to look the way I expected, the call to wear that black robe looks a bit different as well. I was right about God’s call both times. I just didn’t have the vision to see it the way that God saw it. It is both the same and yet very different, all at the same time.

This job of representing CPS that I have been blessed with for the past 2.5 years was one I was pretty sure I was supposed to be doing for 1-2 years before it finally ended up working out. Doing this work has taught me so much, and has given me so much. It has given me back my confidence in my abilities as an attorney that I lost somewhere along the way and has, in so many unexpected ways, taught me compassion for those people most people would not feel compassion for. The difference in how I see this work now, as opposed to how I saw it when I began, is huge. Rather than my heart becoming jaded, it has grown softer. The grace that I extend to the parents with whom I work is far greater than it was before I started this job. I am far more attuned to the hurt and the damage that is suffered by these parents and their children. I see more clearly than ever in what ways our system is broken, but at the same time, I recognize all the amazing people who work within the confines of that wounded system.

It is the recognition of the wounded hearts of the children, the parents, and the professionals within the system that lead me to write about them from time to time. What if the calling to be in this job has nothing to do with the job itself but has a larger purpose in making people aware of the things in this world they may know nothing about?

What if learning to be compassionate to those most people would have no compassion for has nothing at all to do with being a great lawyer and everything to do with learning to become a great pastor?

I have realized over the past months that the transition from being an attorney advocate and mediator to being a pastor in some fashion isn’t as odd as I initially thought. So many of the skills that I have learned over the past 25 years of practicing law and mediating lend themselves so well to ministering to people who are hurting. While I have done some good in these 25 years, maybe the real reason I’ve done the work I have done was for reasons I would have never imagined when I started this journey.

Sometimes the call on our life changes. Sometimes the actual call God has for us doesn’t look at all like what we thought the call was.  

Sometimes the plans that we make for ourselves aren’t always the ones that God has in mind. We can become so disappointed and disillusioned in what should have been but wasn’t, that we miss the joy in what actually is. 

We miss the beauty in what God is doing if we are so busy holding on to the vision we have of what was, or what we thought was supposed to be, instead of focusing on the beauty of what is before us.