Eighteen.

Eighteen years ago tomorrow, I was sitting in a prayer room at Urbana 2000 when I first sensed God

nudging me toward a vocation of leadership in the church.

It was only about a year after I had been baptized, at the time, and I thought that I surely couldn't be hearing God's voice clearly, but even so I can still remember eighteen years later the desk I was sitting at in that little prayer room when I heard God speak so distinctly to my questions that it might as well have been aloud. Even though I had many doubts about whether I'd heard what I thought I'd heard, even though it seemed too preposterous to write what I thought God had said in the journal I was keeping, nonetheless I remember the moment to this day. Even though I had never heard a prayer answered quite so clearly before.

I know it was eighteen years ago, because Urbana 18 is happening right now in St Louis, and I've been seeing periodic updates on my social media feeds, and remembering with lots of emotion my own experiences as a university student attending Urbana.

And this year, more than any other Urbana year, the floods of emotion and memory have caught me off guard.

Maybe it's because, for the first time, I actually feel like I can wholeheartedly affirm that God's call to me, in that quiet little prayer room so long ago, was actually real.

Because, eighteen years later, I'm finally in a place where my gifts have been wholeheartedly welcomed, where I don't have to face a constant fight to defend my role and reconcile it with my gender or my marital status, where I don't feel that constant, painful background dissonance with the larger denomination's stance on women in ministry leadership. Where I feel like my skin finally fits.

Eighteen years.

The length of time that it takes to go from newborn baby to adult.

For eighteen years, I have wondered, on some level, if this would ever happen, or if I had misheard God that day in that prayer room. For eighteen years, I have wrestled with a sense of call to pastoral ministry.

And now, eighteen years later, after many challenges and much heartache and many doubt-filled wonderings, I can see how the seed that God planted deep within my heart that day has been fulfilled.

Eighteen years of hard wandering, taking paths that often seemed to lead in the exact opposite direction to that I thought I should be taking. Eighteen years of questioning, wondering, aching, dreaming. Seasons when it seemed that God had turned God's face away. Seasons when I seriously considered choosing a sensible career path and moving on.

Eighteen years that, I'm convinced, have left me more sure of who I am and who God has created me to be than I ever would have been if the path had been easier. I'm beginning to see the gift in the discomfort that prevented me from becoming complacent, from going along with the crowd because it was the easier path.

So, tonight I give thanks for eighteen years, but also for the profound realization that God has kept God's word, even when there were so many times that I questioned it, and almost turned my back on it.

But most of all, I give thanks for the new thing that's being born.

Because in a couple of days, at the end of this month, I will quietly celebrate a new anniversary. Six months. December 31 will mark six months. Six months since I started serving as associate pastor, six months of learning and growing and coming to love this congregation who has embraced me and welcomed me and invited me to lean into my calling to pastoral ministry.

So, here's to God's faithfulness, and to new adventures yet to come on the journey ahead!