I Didn't Sign Up for This

A few years ago I was honored to be invited to Pennsylvania to participate in the ordination into ministry of a wonderful young man I had been coaching. It was a great day in Scott’s life and in the life of his church. The look of joy and pride on the faces of his wife, Brenda, and his parishioners was a thing of beauty.

In preparing to deliver the ordination message, I could not pass up to opportunity to look again at the words of Jesus as he sent his disciples out to do ministry. “As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matthew 10:7-8) Everything about Scott’s ordination day reminded me of my call to the ministry. I was reminded that I didn’t sign up for the job it has become. “Heal the sick and raise the dead”: you must be kidding.

Have you ever felt under qualified for a job? I have… for many years. It is called the ministry. One of the voices in my head (Don’t worry, this one is just me talking to myself.) keeps saying, “You can’t do this.” I have found that voice to be eerily and consistently correct.

As I began preparations to answer God’s call on my life, my hope was that going to seminary was going to prepare me for ministry. Wrong! Three years and a master’s degree later and still the mocking voice in my head was correctly assessing my ineptness. Like most students, I spent a couple of my school years serving a student church. The experience was supposed to help prepare me for ministry. The only thing it did for me was verify that I was totally incapable of doing the job. Let me give you an example.

It was a lovely spring day during my last year of school that I received a call from one of my parishioners. In a rather agitated voice she explained that she was having a problem with her husband and wanted to know if I could come over and talk to him. Even though I had no idea what I was going to say, feeling obligated, I agree to make a visit. Upon my arrival at the family home – a farm, I discovered that I had arrived on the scene without all the pertinent facts at hand. One of the several potentially helpful facts the dear lady failed to mention was that her husband, who had been drinking all day, was up in the loft of their hay barn with his deer rifle taking shots at anything that moved. And when I pulled up in the barn lot and headed for the house, I was something that moved. Fortunately he was drunk enough that none of the four shots he took at me came particularly close to hitting me - which, considering my size, was pretty much a miracle.

While amazing myself with my foot speed from the car to the house and observing that I ran faster that day than my high school football coach would have ever believed, I again mentioned to myself that I was not capable of doing this thing called ministry. As I was heartily congratulating myself on surviving the trip to the house I also thought that I should give deep consideration to going back to college and picking up the courses needed for a teaching certificate.

I am embarrassed to admit that while in seminary I did something I had never done before. I read the Bible. It was an unnerving experience. It was in the Bible that I read Jesus’ instructions to a group he was sending out to do ministry. He told them to heal the sick, raise the dead and cast out demons. The casting out demons part sounded like a particularly good idea during this home visit on this day.

If healing the sick and raising the dead were included in the job description for doing ministry, you could count me out. I had developed a couple of skills and hoped to develop a couple more, but healing and raising the dead were not in my repertoire.

Well, one thing led to another and I ended up in the ministry. Fortunately I started out in a pretty safe place, as an associate minister at my home church. No pressure there. That congregation had known me all of my life, had watched me grow up, which was not a pretty sight, and knew just how inept and incapable of doing any meaningful ministry I really was. Expectations were not running high.

Then one hot August day, just a few days before I was to leave the church and move to Iowa to take a church in a small town there, God and I had one of the first conversations we had ever had. It was Wednesday and my day to make the hospital calls. I was on my way to my first stop to visit a woman I had known for years. She was the mother of a good friend. Martha was in the hospital suffering from a ripping case of lupus and she was not doing well. Lupus is a disease that affects the immune system and causes the body to attack itself. One by one Martha’s internal organs were shutting down.

So I’m tooling on down the road, minding my own business, thinking about nothing much in particular when I get the strongest impression that I should pray for Martha to be healed. I mentioned to whomever or whatever was giving me that impression that I don’t do healing. I hadn’t signed up for healing. I had some hair back then, but I was no leisure suit wearing, high volume talking, money raising, television faith healer. If they had healing classes in seminary, I must have missed them.

I had been trained to go to the hospital, be pleasant, not stay too long, don’t sit on the bed and pray with people before I leave. The prayer I prayed was always a nice, generic, blah, blah preacher prayer. It was a nice prayer but not a prayer for healing. I could be pleasant, but I don’t do healing. The “impresser” clearly spoke into my thoughts and said, “You don’t heal people, but I do.” I explained that to pray for healing would make both Martha and me uncomfortable. I had learned early in my ministry that my job was to make sure everyone remained comfortable. And even though I had not seen it in the church’s Policy and Procedure Manual, I was pretty sure that praying for healing was against company policy.

Involved in this “conversation” I had lost track of time and where I was. It seemed that suddenly I found myself in the hospital parking lot and the impression that I needed to pray for Martha’s healing was stronger than ever. I wasn’t really great at calling on people in the hospital but I must tell you that never in my life had I been more uncomfortable making a hospital call as I was making that particular hospital call.

When I entered the room I was shocked to see how bad Martha looked; how sick she really was. She could not have weighed more than 80 pounds and she was too weak to sit up in bed. “Oh great”, I thought, “Nothing like a bit of a challenge when confronted with my first prayer for healing.” We visited for a few minutes. As I prepared to leave I asked, as was my habit to ask, if she would like for me to pray for her. She said that she would like that. I then admitted to her that I felt like God wanted me to pray for her healing and asked if that would be okay with her.  She smiled warmly and said it sounded like a good idea to her. So I took her hand and prayed. I don’t remember the exact words but I do remember that the prayer was very short and very direct in asking for God’s healing hand to touch her. She smiled and we said our goodbyes.

Just a couple of weeks later my family and I set sail toward the adventures God had in store for us in pastoring a church I a small town in Iowa. I figured I would never see Martha again. The next few months were hectic as we found ourselves settling into a new home, a new culture and a new church. For us, with two young children, being 600 miles away from home was difficult. December rolled around and we were excited to be going back to Louisville to spend Christmas with the extended family. My home church was kind enough to invite me to preach while I was in town for the holidays. I think the invitation had more to do with them wanting an excuse to give a young preacher with two little children and another one on the way a little money and less to do with them wanting to hear me preach.

There was a nice crowd at the early service and we were able to see lots of friends. As usual, the attendance at the late service was much larger. Greeting the several hundred people as they poured out of the sanctuary was almost overwhelming. As the crowd thinned down a nice looking middle aged lady approached me. I greeted her with a handshake and a hello. She smiled at me and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?” I had to admit that I didn’t. She said, “I’m Martha. I have been looking forward to coming to church today to tell you that God answered your pray. From that day you prayed for me, I have been getting better every day. God healed me.”

I am embarrassed to admit that I was shocked. She had not been prayed for by a great man of faith. No, it was just me, Rev. Incompetent. And she was exactly right. I didn’t heal her, God did. But God was kind enough to let me be a part of a miracle. The lesson I learned that day is I am not capable of healing the sick and raising the dead. And that is not my job. My job is to expose people to the God who does those things.

I am still looking forward to the day I perform a funeral and everybody goes home afterward.

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved