“How does that make you feel?” As a Clinical Pastoral Education graduate, I’ve been asked that question more than a few times. It never set well with me. You can only come out as a clear ENTJ on the Meyers Briggs so many times before it is painfully obvious that you don’t enjoy being asked how anything makes you feel.
It’s not that I don’t have feelings, but I don’t enjoy people poking around in the most vulnerable and raw parts of myself. I got through a great portion of my CPE training without crying. I determined this to be a great success, since the ongoing joke was that you were not allowed to graduate until you cried in front of your peer group. I ultimately failed at keeping the tears at bay and, like almost all CPE folks I know, ended up a blubbering puddle in front of my colleagues before it was all said and done.
Baily Edwards Nelson
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It has been nearly three years since that experience, but I now find my backbone bowed and teeth gritted, once again resisting the question, “How does that make you feel?” It’s a fair enough question when one resigns a pastoral position after only 19 months. It doesn’t make the question any more welcome — or any easier to answer.
How do I feel? It depends on when you ask me. I recently took to re-watching a certain “Robot Chicken” cartoon short that features a giraffe experiencing the stages of grief after getting stuck in quicksand. It used to just be funny — now it’s relevant. The disbelief that anything like this could really be happening. Pure, unadulterated anger against all the forces of the universe that landed you in this spot. A desperate attempt at making bargains that could relieve you of this tragedy. Curled-up-in-the-corner kind of anguish at the now unavoidable fate before you. And finally, heaving that heavy sigh of release, giving yourself over to whatever may come.
I’ve felt it all. Correction — I feel it all. There are days when I can hardly believe that I am no longer pastoring a church. After all, it had been years in the making — years filled with heart-ache and disappointment, struggle and frustration, and many, many successes and mo-ments of joy. Years of not caring what people thought or believed about me, or at least moving forward in spite of it all, had led me to embrace an identity that I had known would be mine since I was just a girl. Stepping down from the pulpit? Resigning my pastorate? Never.
There are days when there is nothing but anger, and as the giraffe says, “I just want to bite someone’s face off!” These days it can feel like “they” won. The people who put up signs around town reminding us that “women are not to be pastors, according to God’s will”; the people who damned me to hell right next to the frozen peas at Walmart; the people who intended on tearing our congregation apart from the outside — and worse, from the inside. Anger — yes, oh yes.
There are days when setting up a few sweet deals with God sound like a good plan. If I manage to keep it together, hold my peace, can you just get me out of here unscathed? I mean, you brought me here and look what happened. At least make me a better deal this time. Shine a little light on that dimly lit path in front of me and I promise, God, next time we can make it work. Look out, world, here we come again!
There are days when the sadness threatens to overtake you, when the ache in your soul is so real that all you can do is go and sit in that corner that you swore you would never visit. These are the days that feel most like CPE all over again, the days when this ENTJ doesn’t know what to do with herself. It’s nothing but emotion, raw hurt over all that you have endured — and anything you may have inflicted. These days are the worst.
Then there are the days when it is finished and you can release the breath that’s been held captive for so long. I am here and this is happening. Nothing played out the way I had planned. Pastoring is as hard and hurtful as I knew it could be. Calling or not, you are human — and so are they. These are the days I ask, “What now?”
As humorous as the giraffe’s journey through grief is, there is a moment at the end that gives me something other than laughter. As the animal embraces its impending death, it’s feet touch the bottom. That gives me hope. Just when all seems lost and this swirling, out of control ride threatens to drag you under — you touch the bottom. That is the day when the Almighty gives you a buoyancy that you did not believe was possible, insisting that life — your life — goes on.
How does that make me feel?
Empowered, thankful, loved, called, healed.
Bailey Edwards Nelson ([email protected]) is a pastor living in North Carolina.