Faithful

This was the Good Doctor's Facebook status yesterday. He's good with numbers and dates. He can tell you the date of our first date, our first kiss, and yes, our anniversary. I'm not so good at numbers but can usually remember the little details like where we were, what people were wearing, and what was said. The fact that the Good Doctor can remember both from our journey to McBIC, says a lot about that time period in our lives. The fact that the details are fuzzy for me, says even more.

Being a pastor's wife was never something I desired to be. Funny, because I can remember a time when we were dating that I looked at him at thought, "He's going to be a pastor someday." We were standing on the sidewalk outside of our dorms, talking I just looked up and new. (Details, right?) It's probably a good thing that my thoughts didn't connect to the next obvious realization: that continuing to date him would lead to me being the pastor's wife someday. I had seen and heard about a lot of churches and watched a lot of pastors get chewed up and spit out. I knew that many of them needed to work second jobs to raise a family. Later, when I taught in a Christian school, I saw their children come through my classroom and observed the effects of overworked and unavailable pastors on the lives of their children. Of course there are overworked and unavailable fathers in every profession but it seemed most unfortunate when it was the church that pulled their dads away. I watched these children leave my classroom and grow up, only to abandon the faith that pulled their fathers away from them. And I saw the effects on the wives of the pastors.

And then one day the Good Doctor dropped his bombshell. "I think I'm being called to be a pastor." If my memory is correct, he took me out to dinner to tell me this news, an attempt to butter me up first. He later admitted how scared he was to tell me. But he couldn't have known that his announcement would not come as a surprise.

Fast forward almost 10 years and here we were, interviewing at this church with the funny nickname, McBIC. The road here was long. And it was hard. It had been about a year since we first started to feel God nudging us to something else, six months since the Good Doctor had interviewed with his seminary professor's church in New Jersey. We thought that's where we were going but they later decided not to hire anyone, after the powers-that-be couldn't decide if the new hire should be the youth pastor or the children and youth pastor or the family pastor. So many events had transpired between that first interview and finding ourselves interviewing at McBIC that my faith that God could actually have a healthy church for us, in a good location, was pretty slim.

But it just takes the faith of a mustard seed, right?

McBIC has been good for our souls. For our faith journey. And for our prayer lives. For our children. For the King's Strings. For Mariana's acting career. For me. And we probably have only seen a few of the reasons why He needed to call us here. But that's enough. And we only need to be careful that we do not forget His deeds in the past. He was faithful then and He will be faithful in the future.