CHAPTER 1
Life ... Only Better
The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone.
Oswald Chamber
Date night.
Like many married couples, date night was an important part of our lives. Our busy lives were crowded with T-ball, ballet, gymnastics, and preschool field trips; taking care of the house, and the dogs and the cat, the laundry, the dishes, dinner, school lunches; and then our careers. My color-coded calendar looked like the command post of a general. Date night was a way to connect and take a deep breath. To remember why it is we fell in love.
My husband, Matt, and I met when I was in college at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I was spending the summer of 1988 working for my dad, who managed Marshfield Airport. Matt was a flight instructor — making my dad, Skip, his boss. Tricky? Yes.
I laid eyes on a very handsome, smart young man — and the butterflies I felt were mutual. It was a spark — and I am certain God chose Matt for me and me for him. For both of us, it was definitely a case of knowing each other was "the one." We were engaged within months, at Christmas of that same year (with my dad's blessing, no less). We were young and in love in the season of joy and colorful lights on the tree, tinsel, and the magic of Christ's birth.
Now, years later, married with two kids, we were trying — like many marrieds — to keep that magic alive with date night. We were both busy career people; we'd moved for our jobs, dedicated ourselves to the vocations we chose, him to piloting, me to corporate recruiting. Even more wonderful, a chocolate martini was being shaken. I couldn't wait to taste it. But the bartender with his jigger, the music playing in the bar area, my silk blouse and freshly done hair, none of it could wash away my nerves.
I was jittery.
I had big news to tell my beloved husband. Big news. On a par with "the stick turned blue" news. I was not pregnant. But it was a miracle all its own.
God was calling me. She had big plans for me. In fact, they were bigger plans than I even could have imagined for myself — God doesn't think in limitations. God's visions are limitless. But what I knew that night, as I sat waiting for Matt, was that she wanted me to honor her calling. I was going to become an Episcopal priest.
Yes, I was not sure how I was going to spring this on my unsuspecting husband. Matt arrived at the bar. Handsome as ever. Smiling. He had no idea what I was going to drop in his lap. I didn't think it was going to go smoothly. God, how do I tell him?
Becoming a priest as a mother of two, a career woman, a wife, was not like saying, "I'm joining a gym," or "I'm taking up watercolor painting or ceramics." Being a priest is a calling. It is not a career. Previously, I had been a headhunter, though I sold my company in the economic downturn. Still, that is a job. A calling is part of your being at its most central part of your core. And it requires the sacrifice not only of the called, but of their spouse and family too.
Now, I sat fidgeting in a bar, awaiting the perfect opening.
Matt kissed my cheek just as my chocolate martini was slid across the bar.
"Are you OK?" Matt asked.
I exhaled. Was I OK? I was more than OK. I was filled with a grace I had not known possible. I was filled with a peace that surpassed all understanding. But would Matt understand? Being a priest would mean time away from my family. It would mean, if I passed through the various hoops and requirements, entering a seminary, studying, more schooling. It would mean financial pressures. No one enters the priesthood seeking earthly riches. We had already gone through tremendous financial hardships. In the post-9/11 landscape, being a pilot became an incredibly risky career. Aside from the obvious fear of being blown out of the sky by global terrorism, airlines were merging, pilot jobs were disappearing. Matt's employer, United Airlines, had declared bankruptcy. My business had dried up. Uncertainty was all around us. And now I was going to tell Matt I wanted us to take on loans and debt in order for me to become a priest. Unlike, say, paying for law school or medical school with the hopes of one day having a very lucrative career, I wanted to minister to the sick and the lonely, the poor and the hungry, the disenfranchised and the desperate.
The adage "as poor as a church mouse" says it all.
This call of mine would mean changes. It would mean sacrifices of our family and our bank account. Being a priest is obviously far more than salary, though. A priest, like an obstetrician, comes when you need him or her. Priests don't punch a clock. When someone is suffering and needs to be consoled, a priest can't put them "on hold" until a more convenient time.
But this call was like the clarion trumpet call, so clear, so certain. Clearly God had a plan. Of course God had a plan. God always has a plan. (Well, not as in a predestined plan, but God works through anything we do, to suit God's purposes.) We were living in Massachusetts, where my husband, for the first time in his life, was beginning to find true fellowship and family with the people of the congregation of the church we attended. Matt was changing. God was working in Matt, showing him that God was with us and love in community with church was possible.
But still I had the jitters. My teeth chattered, and I couldn't tell if it was what I had to tell him or the restaurant's air conditioning blasting down on me.
Matt smiled at me. "You OK?" he asked again, sliding onto the bar stool next to me.
I nodded. God, I loved his smile. But how do I tell him?
When you marry your best friend, sometimes they know you better than you know yourself. I decided the truth just had to be stated. Just lay my cards on the proverbial table. That simple. "I have something to tell you," I said. Then I took a big sip of my martini. A little liquid courage could be part of God's plan, right?
Matt looked me in my eyes. "You're going to become an Episcopal priest, aren't you?"
My mouth dropped open (after I swallowed). We had never discussed this. My calling had been deeply inner and private. It was not any one thing God said to me in this perpetual conversation I share with him as part of my spiritual life. It was many things.
When you are a mother, your children — when they are small — are there tugging on your sleeve at all times. You can't even go to the bathroom by yourself before you hear that familiar, "Mo-om," which all mothers of young children know is a two-syllable word. When you wake up in the morning, your children are the first thought in your mind. When you fall into bed at night, you ask for blessing upon them. In the waking hours in between, your children chatter at you nonstop. I think that I was constantly tugging on God's sleeve, always talking to her. To him. (God is too vast and wondrous to assign a gender.) And at some point, God began whispering back. Then her voice grew more insistent. But the message was always the same. Becoming a priest was my path.
However, it hadn't occurred to me that God had clued in Matt as well. Oh, how often we underestimate God. We sell her short. That is a message I deliver daily. If we only knew what God had in store for us, we would relax. We would exhale. We would let God do the driving, not us.
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
Jeremiah 29:11
When Matt knew what I was going to say before I uttered a word of my anxiously prepared little speech, in which I was certain I was going to have to "talk him into" this choice, I remember the laughter escaping me, like the bubbles of champagne tickling the sides of a champagne flute.
"What do you think?" I asked.
And in typical Matt fashion, he simply offered me his support. "It makes sense," he said. "It is you, Jennifer, only ... better."
And that is faith.
Life. Only better.
And so I embarked, with Matt's blessing, on a journey toward the priesthood. Only there were going to be challenges I could never have imagined.
Because, of course, before I was ordained, I was going to be diagnosed with ALS.
But before I even got that point, there were other challenges, not the least of which was, first, a period of discernment. In secular contexts, the word "discernment" means the ability to "judge well." Do I want to trust this person or that one? Am I meant to take this job or that one? Should I move forward with whatever plan I have for my life, or should I opt for this shiny new opportunity put in my path?
However, in the Christian realm, discernment is that plus much more. In the Christian context, I don't "judge well." I let God do the judging. I get out of the way.
Discernment is instead praying and contemplating the "call." Without getting in the way and butting in. We all need this form of discernment. I think we spend our lives, as Christians, no matter the denomination, praying to know God's will. Only we would like to give God some guidance. Remember the old television show Let's Make a Deal? We tell God, "I would like what is behind Curtain Number One or Curtain Number Two." We want to control the choices so they lead to what we want (or at least the runner-up choice). But I have seen over the years that God instead offers you what's behind Curtain Number Three. Or maybe in the fancy big box with the bow over there.
In terms of the priesthood, there is also the real possibility that people seriously wounded and damaged, filled with a great love for God, will choose the priesthood. Feeling it is right for them, they may not do the difficult work of healing their own pains and emotional scars so that they are truly ready to serve God's people.
After I told Matt about this call I felt, the couple we were meeting for date night strolled in. They were two of our closest friends in Massachusetts. I was beaming as I prepared to tell them the news. After all, I had Matt's support, and now I wanted to shout it from the rooftop. Like Jeremiah, I knew God had plans for me.
"I have some kind of big news to share," I told them.
"You're going to be a priest?" my friend asked with a bemused grin on her face.
Now it was both Matt's and my turn to be speechless. God was tugging on my sleeve now.
I had a calling. But making that become a reality meant many more twists and turns. I don't know that my path is any more twisted than the next person's. Life can sometimes bring you to your knees. And it is on your knees that you sometimes hear God more clearly. However, just because God has plans for you doesn't mean they come easily.
It's a good thing then that through Christ all things are possible.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13
And so, to do Christ's bidding, I would move my family states away. I would go into debt. I would pare down my belongings. I would change directions so profoundly. But it was always with this quiet confidence that God had my back.
That night, we celebrated. But there was so much to come, both miracles and heartache.
CHAPTER 2
My Garden Moment
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
One of the most haunting stories in the Bible is that of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Abandoned by his friends — even he who loved him most — and facing death, he asked God for some other way, some other path, some other life. I have walked in the Garden, at least as it existed over two thousand years after Jesus's moments of despair, on a trip to the Holy Land. As I walked the grounds, I could easily imagine the scent of blooming jasmine, perhaps mixed with cedar on that long-distant night. I pictured him praying amidst gnarled olive trees, their branches bent and strangely entwined, as if both strangling and struggling to give life.
I imagined the meal he just had eaten. He sat, sharing bread with his friends over the Passover supper, loving them, not wanting to leave them. But now he was in the darkness of a silent garden, utterly alone, with a grief that none of us can know — and yet a grief we all can know. Who among us hasn't had a night, a day, a moment when we felt so utterly alone that it defied words?
My own private Gethsemane was a windowless room. In a dreary, drab basement. In a world of agony that I can barely articulate. And yet even in my Garden moment, I knew God was with me — and that knowledge has allowed me to counsel people in the depths of their gardens of pain, to assure them that yes, God is with them too.
My garden moment actually began long before the day in the windowless room. It began with ALS's first symptoms. Those first symptoms were benign enough. A weak hand in my final year of seminary. I could tell something was wrong, but it was so vague — and hardly frightening. In one hand, I could grip as tightly as ever. But the other hand, my left hand, was quite pronounced in its weakness. It was also strangely clumsy. Motions I had long taken for granted now required effort — as if directing a hand that wasn't quite mine.
Carpal tunnel syndrome. That had to be it. With the advent of Google, pop in a symptom, and you can find your answer. I also mentioned my weak hand to a congregant at the church I was attending and was told, "Go and see my hand specialist."
So I set out to find the cause of this odd little symptom. It was a nuisance, in my mind, not an alarm bell. However, as I was preparing to graduate from seminary and move toward ordination, I found myself simultaneously embarking on a medical odyssey.
There is not one definitive test for ALS. Diagnosing the disease begins as a process of elimination. I think, too, that even the white-coated people who try to remain emotionally disengaged wish fervently for something, anything, but ALS. And so vial after vial — after vial after vial — of my blood was taken and sent to labs all over the United States.
They hunted for the most obscure of things.
Anything but ALS.
Metal poisoning. That could be the cause. I was asked hundreds of questions over and over and over again. Some were so obscure — like out of a mystery novel. Each time I met a new physician's assistant, nurse, or doctor, I had to repeat my medical history and symptoms all over yet again, until I felt I could recite my history in my sleep. Could I have been exposed to high concentrations of nickel? Arsenic? Did my home have well water or municipal water? Perhaps the very water I drank had been poisoning me.
Anything but ALS.
What about my marriage? Was there any possibility — no matter how "crazy" it sounded — that my own husband was poisoning me? The medical profession turned over every rock, poked at every creepy-crawly underneath it, searching for something that could explain it.
Anything but ALS.
Somehow, it was as if a woman being slowly murdered by her husband, or poisoned dose by dose, day by day, was easier to accept than the disease that sends a shudder through all who hear that three-letter acronym.
Eventually, I was sent for a consultation at the University of Virginia, a respected teaching hospital near the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was there, in a windowless basement room, where I underwent an electromyography, or EMG.
An EMG measures the electrical activity in the muscles. In a healthy person, those muscles react when "shocked" by an electrical stimulus. The test, while not agonizing, is certainly not comfortable.
The person administering my test had an excellent poker face. I tried, through prayer and contemplation, to leave that windowless room, to go to my "happy place." Because of Matt's schedule, he could not be with me that day, but I didn't have a sense of dread. I knew they were looking for serious things, but in the end, in my mind, I think it was easy to deny the worst diagnoses. These were the people, for example, who were looking for poisoning. Surely, this would end up being something ... not so serious.
With each electrical stimulation, I felt a shot of pain. I breathed in and out, trying to be "one" with my breath, to disappear in that breath, to disappear into prayer. Breath. God. Amen.
After the test concluded, I was left alone in my drab surroundings. The crinkly paper on the examination table beneath me was annoying. I dressed and sat in a hard-backed metal chair, reading my Bible. Spiritually, I was in a place of such awareness of God's grace. I had spent, now, years, first in discernment, and then actually in seminary, immersed in God's Word.
I gazed down at my left hand as it rested on my thigh as I read the Bible. That one hand was betraying me. But the rest of me was ready for the work to be done — I had accepted a call at Church of Our Saviour, where the beautiful Rock Chapel also sits. I was ready to do God's work. Frankly, I had no time for this medical mystery.
Still, I waited in that little room.
I waited as the second hand on the oversized hospital clock ticked around, marking what ended up being hours.
