The day I was ordained as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), I knelt on the hard brick steps of the seminary chapel and made promises to proclaim and live out the faith that I had first come to late in my 20s.
“I will, and I ask God to help me,” I vowed.
As the bishop prayed, three pastors came up behind me. Their hands alit like birds on my shoulders and I felt the weight.
I did not grow up in a family that regularly attended church. We were what some refer to as “C&E” — Christmas and Easter — people. Still, even from a young age I was drawn to big questions ― about meaning and purpose, about death and dying, about whether or not there is a God.
When one of my older sisters was diagnosed with breast cancer and died two years later at age 35, the tap-dancing I’d done around the edges of faith landed me at a crossroad — there was either Something/Someone or there was nothing.
I joined a church a friend had invited me to. Since I’d never read the Bible, I enrolled in a two-year study that began with Genesis and ended with the Revelation. A year into the course, my second child, a boy, was born with a heart defect and had surgery when he was four days old. Six weeks later, he died suddenly in my arms.
In the dark time after his death, church friends brought food, showed up to take my two-and-a-half-year-old son to the park, sat next to me on the sofa and handed me tissues as I wept, or simply held silent space for me. It felt like God was there, and in each loving act, I found reason to hope for healing from grief and the strength to go on. Four years later, I entered seminary.
In my time as a pastor, I preached the love of God and the grace of Jesus. I baptized babies and children and adults. I officiated at weddings and sat with the dying, praying with them and speaking of the ever-present Lord of Life. I stood at gravesides and proclaimed the hope of resurrection, and of a heaven where death and suffering are no more.
