How itinerancy taught me to give up the illusion I’m in charge

It’s no secret that being a pastor involves some sacrifices — and so does being married to one. You give up a little of your privacy, a little of your autonomy, and your right to say what you really think on Facebook. But the hardest thing for me as a United Methodist pastor’s wife has been giving up my five-year plan.

Many Methodist denominations, including the United Methodist Church, follow a practice called itinerancy. Under this system, pastors are periodically moved around within the geographical area of their conference. This practice began with the circuit-riding preachers of the denomination’s early years, but it still serves a purpose today: both pastors and congregations benefit from the sharing of different spiritual gifts. It might also be said that relatively frequent changes help prevent churches from becoming cults of personality.

Though I have come to believe that itinerancy is a net good for the church, it can create some serious difficulties for families. There are the inevitable sacrifices of moving — leaving jobs, schools, friends and community behind. Sometimes the challenges are more acute — a family’s savings evaporating when they have to sell their house at a loss; a couple making the tough choice to live separately for the sake of a child’s education or a family member’s medical care. Church leadership works hard to take pastors’ and their families’ needs into consideration, but ultimately, when and where we move isn’t up to us.

To be fair, I knew what I was getting into, and there are countless blessings in my husband’s vocation. We have been abundantly welcomed and supported in our community, and we are so grateful. But we are also human. And I find myself especially aware of my humanness when I think about the fact that I have no idea what our life will look like even a year from now.

This relinquishment of choice, this unknowing, has proved such a challenge for me that I’ve begun to think of it as a spiritual discipline. (Perhaps this mental framing is itself an attempt to regain control, but I won’t even try to go there.) For me, a spiritual discipline is a practice that helps align me to God’s will and alert me to God’s reality — and a lack of control is surely more real than any illusion that I am in charge.

As a hospital chaplain, I have seen countless instances of someone’s life taking a turn they would never have chosen and could never have predicted. Whether this is the premature death of a spouse you were supposed to grow old with, the loss of a child you were supposed to see grow up, or simply the decline of a physical ability you’d never imagined living without, world-shattering events happen every day. Of course, our lives can also change through unexpected opportunities and beautiful gifts.

It was a moment of such sorrow and joy that caused me to really break down crying for the first time during my chaplaincy training. The patient and his wife — I’ll call them Damien and Ava —­­­ were a middle-aged couple who had found each other only a few years prior. Each of them had experienced deep hurt in their romantic past, so they referred to their love as a miracle.

Damien’s condition seemed to improve for a day or two, and then suddenly he was gone. As soon as I heard the news, I realized how much hope I’d set on his recovery, how optimistic I had been despite myself. I took a moment to dry my tears before heading to his room.

I expected Ava to be in shambles. I was indignant on her behalf. This was the furthest thing from fair — she had waited so long to find her partner, only to have him ripped away. But in the minutes after his death, she simply commented what a blessing their precious little time together had been.

Ava had a Christian maturity that I did not understand then, and still aspire to now: she was living in a posture of gratitude and obedience. She saw her marriage as a miracle, an extraordinary divine gift. God had carried her through the turmoil of her life before she met her husband, and she trusted that God would carry her in her grief now that he was gone.

The plans we make are never more than tentative projections. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t make plans, or even that holding our present joys and future hopes lightly will save us from heartbreak. I have no doubt that Ava went through excruciating pain following Damien’s death, and, as I often tell patients and families, the Bible fully endorses our right to lament when the rug gets pulled out from under us.

But perhaps a posture of obedience, being aware of the not-controlling and not-knowing, helps us to focus on God rather than making idols of our five-year plans. Indeed, Duke Divinity School’s Clergy Health Initiative found that many of the pastors who flourish despite the challenges of ministry are those who “focus on working in alignment with God.”

Instead of laboring to meet their parishioners’ expectations, or even their own, they see ministry as a chance to collaborate in a divine project whose outcome is not up to them.

Rather than an ascetic form of self-discipline, I think of the practice of obedience as a form of self-care, cultivating the kind of peace that is not dependent on circumstance. Learning to “accept the things I cannot change,” as the Serenity Prayer puts it, frees us to rejoice in our blessings; and in the parts of life where God gives us agency, we can trust that God’s “power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

Itinerancy makes me face my frailty, fear and need. In facing these things, I witness the ways God tends to them. While I reserve the right to mourn future moves — I can and will complain at clergy spouse retreats — I also appreciate the gifts in this system. As prognostication fails and I sit on the edge of the unknown, I am reminded that the One to whom all things are known is an infinitely better planner than me.