Calling 911

In the late summer of 2005, I returned to my parents' home in rural Oregon. I'd graduated college a few months earlier with absolutely no idea what I would do with my life. Well, really I had too many ideas. I'd gotten a degree in History and Creative Writing and was considering graduate programs in anything from Journalism to History to an MFA.

But after graduation, before I made my way back west, I moved to a Christian camp a couple hours away from Atlanta to work as a cabin counselor. During the handful of months I lived at camp I was immersed in Scripture and surrounded by kids who had grown up just like me, in fundamentalist Christianity.

They were a pretty broken lot. Beset by the usual buffet of adolescent angst, insecurity, and hormones, the guys in my cabin, week after week, were often on the verge of falling apart. They were misunderstood by their parents, misdiagnosed by their pastors, lost in their own religious heritage, floundering on Guilt Sea in nothing but the flimsy dingy of their own behavior.

I can still remember some of them breaking down in tears, frustrated and failing. They'd ask me things like "What is faith?" or "How does righteousness work?" Basic stuff that someone like me, one who'd grown up in the church, gone to Christian school kindergarten-B.A., should know, should be able to explain. But I couldn't. Not really. The answers that I'd always given my Sunday school teachers weren't satisfying to these kids. They wanted something deeper, something rooted in experience.

The call

That summer changed me. By the time I'd made my way back to Oregon I was beginning to form some wild tenacity, some strange grip on a dream I'd yet to see. Until one day, I sat in an Adirondack chair in my parents' back field, staring out at the acres of orchards rolling over the hills in every direction. The colors of autumn had already found their way into the trees. The air was crisp, like an apple fresh from one of the hundreds of trees spread out before me. I was reading the Gospel According to Matthew.

The only reason I can remember any of these details is because this was the moment that the growl deep in my gut started to speak with anything resembling language. I was crying and crying and I felt split open like firewood before an ax.

The only way I've been able to describe this moment to anyone since, even just to myself, is that God was calling me to be a pastor. He was speaking the words inside my stomach, only they weren't words. I'm sure sociologists could give me a definition of what was happening that day, but to me it just felt a lot like bleeding.

I came away from that moment, unable to explain it, but with a clear, compelling notion: God was calling me to be a pastor. A full-time, vocational, pastor. Whatever that means.

Running

I knew I needed to get prepared, needed more education, more formation. But I got scared. I ran and I spent the better part of a year in the belly of a whale called Phoenix, Arizona, emptying bottles, chasing girls, and making money almost as fast as I could spend it.

For months I could hear my Bible whispering to me from across the room, daring me to pick it up, to feel that strange fire inside my stomach again. I'd just have another drink, go to another show, hangout with another new friend. It wasn't that I was just running away from a calling; I was running away from Christianity altogether. I'd been surrounded for so many years by such strict moralism, weighed down by never-ending guilt, that it honestly began to feel lighter, easier, to just ignore all of it. I was in a desert in every way imaginable.

For some reason, in the midst of this desert, I stumbled into a new church plant in downtown Phoenix and was greeted by a sharp, young pastor named Vermon Pierre. As Vermon and I got to know each other, I confided in him that I'd felt a call to ministry myself, but wasn't following through. Vermon would just listen. He'd ask good questions. He'd give me roles or tasks here and there designed to work out, in little movements, the calling I was trying to drink away.

Vermon remains to this day the man who saved my life. There was something about his generosity, something about the way he poured into me when I was clearly a bad investment. Something or Someone in Vermon pulled me back from the edge of falling away from faith, away from Jesus.

Into the fog

Something switched. So I packed up my 4Runner a few days after Christmas and drove away from Phoenix, unable to shake the feeling that I was still supposed to be a pastor. Only now, it was a feeling that I was supposed to be a pastor in Portland, Oregon.

I drove for hours straight, until I found my friend Joe's one-room cabin in the mountains outside of Santa Cruz. I sat in a coffee shop at the edge of Scotts Valley and opened my Bible. It was like the wind coming off the ocean was waking me up from a coma. I could hardly wait to get to Oregon and start school and get to work.

I got to Oregon a few days later and immediately met a girl who'd already been giving her life to the church for years. We fell in love and within a few months got married and started our life together in Portland while I started seminary. We had nothing but this strange dream covered in fog that we were supposed to do church ministry in Portland.

I'd been in seminary over a year when we had lunch with a pastor and told him some of the vague contours of our dream. He asked me what I saw myself doing in the church. I told him I figured I'd be some sort of teaching pastor. He asked if I'd ever preached before. Nope. "How do you know you'll be any good?"

That was a good question. And it is one I'm sure kept me up a few nights. I couldn't answer it. But I kept working at school, my wife and I kept piecing together life on a shoestring budget, still sure that somehow we were doing what we were supposed to be doing.

By the time I was finishing seminary, my wife and I had both been working with a youth group, me at least on an interim basis. Our time there was hard. It wasn't a good fit for us, and our time was winding down. It felt like we were sailing toward the edge of the world, nowhere to turn and no idea where we'd land if we met the horizon.

A flexible calling

But the horizon never came. Within a few weeks we went from zero options and an expiration date on our paychecks, to getting hired and working toward ordination at a church in downtown Portland.

It felt like home. It felt like our dream finally had a shape, and it was the shape of this church. The people were like lifelong friends we'd only just now discovered. I was able to develop my pastoral gifts. I loved the staff and going to work every day felt like the greatest gift in the world.

There were hard things, too, all along the way. Heartbreaking things. Things my wife and I can't talk about openly outside a small group of trusted friends. The congregation was shifting, and we watched many of our friends move on, sometimes with joy and longing, other times with resentment and heartache. Money was always tight. We'd wonder for six months out of the year if there'd be enough in the bank to keep us on. Every year we'd make it, but barely.

Until this year. This year we didn't make it. We were laid off in August. While that wasn't easy, it felt like it was time, like we were being called on to the next thing. We'd already been interviewing with a sister church in Portland for months, and it seemed like things were falling into place again.

But they didn't. The sister church told us no a few weeks ago. Our severance runs out at the end of the month and we'll be giving birth to our second kid a week or two after that. And yeah, it's as stressful as it sounds. Trying to figure out how we're going to pay bills and buy food, not to mention raise two kids under two in a fixer-upper house that we haven't been able to finish fixing up. Seeing that look of glazed-over stress in my wife's eyes, as her body aches with third-trimester pregnancy coupled with toddler-chasing, is crushing.

To be honest, though, all of these stresses seem small compared to having to sift through my calling. I'm rethinking my answers to the question, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" for the first time in a decade. It's like I'm trying to triage my callings to family, place, and ministry. And no matter which direction I move, it somehow feels like a failure of one kind or another.

This isn't really an issue of calling confusion. It's more about the muddiness of faith, the strange turmoil necessitated by serving a God who became flesh. "Christ is contingency," writes the poet Christian Wiman. What he means is that because of the incarnation, because God tied himself to his world in such an eternal way, that to follow Jesus is to walk in uncertainty. I think he's right. Wiman continues:

"To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn't begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs flexibility."

Here's to a flexible calling.

Steve Hall lives in Portland, Oregon.