Like My Skin Fits

Many times over the past several weeks, people have asked me how it feels to be switching careers--to be leaving behind the career that has sustained me for the past seventeen years for employment as a full-time pastor.

There are a few different answers that I can, and have, given to that question.

Sometimes it feels terrifying. I am leaving the career that has given me job security, that paid the bills through my graduate studies and once again when my ministry role came to a sudden and unexpected end this fall. I'm leaving the job that has helped to give me some sense of value and worth when my experiences in the Church at times left me questioning who I was and whether I had anything to offer.   And because of the regulations that govern my previous field of work, at some point it will become increasingly difficult to go back and do this again in the future. So, it feels scary.

It feels exciting. I remember vividly how it felt to wait, in the in-between time after the interviews were all completed and when the congregation's response was yet to come. I remember how very much I wanted their answer to be 'yes'--how I felt nothing but certainty that my own answer was a resounding 'yes,' if only they would ask the question.

But most of all, to my surprise, as I have prepared to make this move, I've noticed something in me that goes beyond emotion. The only way I can describe what I've been feeling as I have anticipated the beginning of the month and the invitation to take on this new role, after their 'yes' and my 'yes,' even amid all of the fear and excitement, is this.

It feels like my skin fits.

It feels like something has fallen into place that has long been dislocated, so long that I had ceased to notice that it was rubbing me in the wrong way all of these years.

You see, I have known that this is what I was called to do and to be for almost twenty years. I have been ready to make this move since before I had even graduated from university.

And while I was grateful for the chance to study theology and ministry, and to work in pastoral roles in a part-time capacity, and while I was told by many men who were employed full-time as pastors how fortunate I was to have another career as a fall-back and how bivocational ministry is the way of the future, there was never an opportunity to fully embrace the call to full-time pastoral ministry.

I was never offered the choice.

And I know that this will not be easy--that I have so very much to learn, that there will be many challenges along the way, that there will be hard days, and all the rest.

But right now, it feels like my skin fits for the first time in as long as I can remember.

And for that, I'm beyond grateful.