As the new year of seminary started, I was honored to be asked to give a testimony about what God has done in my life since coming to seminary two years ago. Here are portions of my "speech" from last week.
When I was called and asked me to give my testimony, my initial reaction was no way – the story I have to tell doesn’t make me look very good! But I want to, at every opportunity, give God the glory for what He has done in my life. Exactly two years and two days ago, I was like many of you who stood up as being at sem wives for the first time. I know the exact date because the very next day at 4:55 I gave birth to my fourth child. And people were raving over how much faith I must have had to come to seminary pregnant, but in reality I was in a major state of turmoil. As I thought back to that time to prepare for this, it didn’t take much to bring back those raw emotions of pain, fear and homesickness.
That night I sat worried and wondering what I was doing here. In my youth, I had never planned to be a stay at home mom, much less a homeschooling mom and now future pastor’s wife. Would people find out who I really was? If they did, would they kick BW out? What if they knew that we picked our first church because the pews were comfortable? That BW & I weren’t saved until after we were both married and about to start our family? Or that I still don’t even know the exact time that I was saved?
What if they knew that sometimes when I opened my Bible I still had to look at the table of contents to find a book? What if they knew that I loved contemporary Christian music? Or knew about the times when my husband told me that there was something wrong with our church (and he knew it from reading John MacArthur’s website and hearing his teaching on the radio), but I didn’t want to listen to him. In my view, our pastor had gone to seminary, my husband just got some stuff off the internet. As time went on, the relationship between my husband and our pastor became increasingly heated and, if I’m honest, I didn’t always take my husband’s side. In the end, our church hadn’t supported us when we chose to come here and I had just lost the only church family I had ever known. I can now see what a blessing even this trial was – that I didn’t have those ties back home to constantly be tempting us to give up and go home when it got hard. We didn’t have a home or even a church to go back home to!
If I was honest that first night, I wasn’t even sure that I even wanted to be a pastor’s wife because after all it was really just a life of poverty in a fishbowl for the whole world to critique what a bad parent I was. It seemed God was taking all my dreams from me. I really just wished to just be back home and live in the house we owned and had built where my husband had a stable job in the public school system and had good health insurance and a retirement portfolio and be able to eat out when I didn’t feel like cooking and let my kids be involved in whatever extracurricular activities they wanted. What if they knew that I had submitted to my husband’s desire to come to seminary, but I didn’t really want to be here? Well, it all came out eventually and I want to assure you that they didn’t kick us out and we received nothing but love and support.
So at one point, I sat my husband down and told him all the reasons why I could not feel at home here and why I didn’t want to be a pastor’s wife so this whole seminary thing was a waste of our time and money. And while I expected a fight, my husband said ok – if that’s really how you feel we will go back home. Not the answer that I expected and for a second I was elated and ready to start packing but in the next second I knew that it was wrong. Though I didn’t feel called to be a pastor’s wife, I knew BW had been called to be a pastor. At that moment, I realized two things – 1) that if my husband was called, I was called and 2) I have much more influence on my husband than I had ever imagined. I knew I was accountable to God if I took BW away from his calling so I said I would find some way to work it out.
Over the next several months as the Word of God was opened to me I began to see that God’s purpose in saving me wasn’t just to bless me (though He often does by His grace), but that I might live a life of obedience and service out of gratefulness to Him. I began to see that the God of the Bible is a much bigger God than I thought before, and that nothing is allowed to touch me unless it passes through His hand. And that even the trials experienced in my life would be used to refine me and make me more like Christ which is the real purpose of my life. I found that many of the verses that I knew and had been taught from the Bible had been taken out of context or were so much richer when you look at the passage in its entirety. I learned that the Bible does really have an answer for everything pertaining to life and godliness and psychology doesn’t have the all the answers after all. And over time (and I often still need the reminder), I am learning that though there are sacrifices for being a seminary wife, it is an enormous privilege and a gift from God that we have been called to this place. And it is the blessing it is to know that our husbands are doing work that has eternal consequences and we “get to” rather than “have to” support them in that work.
In the past two years, our marriage has become better than it ever has been as we learn more of the Word and have received wise counsel and then put it into practice. Watching my husband’s spiritual growth and the friendships he has made is such a blessing. Our children have learned truths that I never thought they could grasp at such an early age. An often overlooked blessing is that we are in a place where no one looks at me weird because I homeschool and around here I ONLY have 4 kids. And God has sustained us financially. I wish I could share with you all the ways God has come through for us –in little things found on the Magic Shelf(table at the back of the room at sem wives where people put free items, like a garage sale but it's free) that I knew God has placed there just for me because I had waited on Him rather than running out to buy it myself, occasionally in checks coming that we didn’t expect and recently in a ministry opportunity at a local church where our housing is being provided. We have also come to realize that there are many things that weren’t really needs after all though we once thought we couldn’t live without them.
I want to share some practical things that I think might help those of you who have just come to seminary. It’s ok to be homesick and it’s ok to hurt, but don’t allow yourself to stay in those pits of despair. Think of this time as your family’s pregnancy for ministry, a time of growth and development for all of you. Any areas that you might have struggled with in the past, questions you have about anything, disciplines you have not been able to master, issues in your marriage, etc. this is the time God has gifted you to work on those things. You have amazing resources here, especially with the leaders and women in this room who have so much ministry and counseling experience and desire to be a mentor to you. Do not try to do this alone. Make the effort to make friends, even if you think you might only be here 3 years. These are relationships that will be a blessing to you now and in future as we all fan out all over the world in ministry.
Second, document for you and your family all of the ways that God blesses you throughout your time here. Those will be important things for you to cling to when you are in ministry. And, possibly most important, realize that God has given you as your husband’s wife an immense amount of power to make this experience an amazingly positive one or one where you all just get by. I’m not saying we should pretend like we don’t hurt if we do, but I am telling you (and me too) that we are one flesh with our husbands and much of our husband’s growth and success here and in ministry will be based on our own attitudes towards being here.
In closing, I have to share that for someone who came kicking and screaming, I am now pushing for my husband to go all the way through a PHD program so we can stay here, but Lord Willing he will finish this year and we don’t know what God has planned for us, but I will be forever grateful and humbled before God and I praise Him that He took many of the dreams I had from me and exchanged them for something I wouldn’t have chosen have found joy in. Thank you for listening and may God bless your year.
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• Sep. 22, 2007 - Untitled Comment
I can see how this has been an amazing 2 years for you.
~Annemarie