The Wound I Made Worse, Inflicted

After leaving the church I had been pastoring, I began to attend the church my mentor was at. I was now ordained, so I didn't have an service time I had to keep going to obtain my ordination credentials, and so I wasn't doing any volunteer work with the church, for now I was just attending Sunday morning services. He had accepted the call to pastor this other church, announced it to the congregation, and began to make preparations to move. At the time I wasn't working and I was in the process of dealing with my last church experience, and so we would meet up to talk.

At everyone of these conversations I always had his words from years ago on my mind. So many times he had told me about the potential I had, about my gifting, and my spirit; I kept thinking about how he had told me countless times that he wanted to bring me on staff. He was now going to a church where he had the opportunity to do that. I was available, and the opportunity was there, and I kept waiting for him to bring it up, but he never did.

There were several times I wanted to ask him, but I was too afraid of hearing him say no. At that point I was in a really fragile state, and I'm honestly not sure how I would have handled the rejection of someone I looked at as a father. He moved, and I waited. I offered to help the church through the transitional period of looking for a new pastor, but this offer never went anywhere, and after a few weeks I began to attend a different church that was closer to where I lived, and they had Saturday night services, which freed up my Sunday mornings for sunrise hikes.

My mentor and I had a couple phone calls, mostly me asking for guidance or telling him about a job I was applying for and seeing if he could make a phone call to help me out. Part of me was still waiting and hoping he'd offer me a job, but I had begun to accept the reality that it wasn't going happen.

I was a time in my life when I probably needed him the most. I was unemployed, having been let go from another church, and carrying another wound, it was a rough time; I was failing in every area of worldly success. I saw someone who had the ability to help me, the ability to fix pretty much every issue I was focused on, and we never even had a conversation about it...


Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11

TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!