When my ministry adventure faltered, I found spiritual help from unexpected direction.

by James Walters, guest columnist

My grand ministry adventure out west was not turning out the way I’d hoped. My wife and I were so excited. With a sense of God’s leading, we packed our stuff and moved 3,000 miles away from our families and friends and everything we knew. But it turned out we’d made some fatal assumptions. We thought we were moving to the progressive, cutting-edge, free-thinking West Coast, but the town we were moving to was in many ways more conservative than the Bible Belt where we grew up. And though we often associated Washington with near-constant rainfall, the area where we landed was a bona fide desert—eight inches of rain a year!

It was a spiritual desert for me as well.

It was then that I found a scrap of paper with a name and phone number. A friend had recommended a spiritual director to my wife. At the time I’d never heard of spiritual direction. It sounded a bit vague to me, might even be New Age for all I knew. But I was starting to get desperate.

After talking on the phone with this woman a few times, I realized that I didn’t really feel comfortable with her. I told her so and asked her if she knew of other directors in the area. She graciously recommended a Lutheran pastor the next town over.

The first time I made the 45 minute drive to Paul’s office, it just felt right. It felt right to be intentional about doing something proactive to tend my own soul. It felt right to head out of the town where I knew so many people. As I drove, I reflected on how I had succumbed to one of ministry’s classic pitfalls: I had gotten so busy doing things for God that I had neglected my vital connection with God.

This is not counseling

I hardly knew what to expect the first time I sat across from Paul. (His clerical collar threw me off a bit.) I’d had some counseling before and halfway expected it to be like that. It was and it wasn’t.

It was like counseling in that Paul listened well, something I sorely needed. But Paul talked a lot less than the average counselor, so much less that there were sometimes long silences in our conversation. It took me a while to get used to that. But in hindsight, I was grateful for the silences, because I really wasn’t looking for a diagnosis. I just needed a safe place to process the joys and frustrations of life and ministry. I needed someone to do that with who wasn’t expecting anything of me, someone outside of my ministry circle. Paul provided that.

Unlike a counselor, Paul let me (the “directee”) set the agenda. My desire was for spiritual growth, rather that identifying and overcoming some particular dysfunction, as is the goal in counseling.

As a spiritual director, Paul welcomed God into the process as a fully active third party, and kept the focus on what God was doing in my life, in contrast with counseling, where God may or may not be acknowledged in the process.

Because spiritual direction is rooted in our unique stories, I handed him a detailed spiritual autobiography. It felt vulnerable, but I knew that for Paul to help me, it would be crucial that he understand me, my spiritual journey, and my sojourn in the desert.

If I had to distill to one word what impelled me to make the long drive to see him each month, it would be “presence.” Paul was someone who was fully there when I was with him. As Thomas Merton describes it, “Spiritual direction is, in reality, nothing more than a way of leading us to see and obey the real Director, the Holy Spirit hidden in the depths of our soul.”

Hard lessons learned

About four months into our time together, my supervising pastor was dismissed for “conduct unbecoming … ” Like the rest of our church body, I was stunned. Not to mention saddened, confused, bitter, and angry. We all had broken hearts.

As Paul helped me unpack the effects of my boss’s sin, I found that when he did talk, he usually had amazing things to say. As I would vent my anger and struggles to forgive this man, Paul would remind me of Jesus’ example—that the only way to truly forgive another is to bear the weight of his sin and to grapple with its ugly consequences. Most of the time, we dodge this unpleasant process, Paul said. It’s just so much easier to rent a movie, check the to-do list, or inhale another cookie. But if we choose to bypass this hard work, we risk inflicting our repressed anger on innocent others. “All violence is unsuffered suffering,” was how he put it.

Ironically, it was this advice, in part, that led me to resign my position several months later. I realized that for me to accept the consequences of my boss’s sin meant admitting that my family and I were emotionally exhausted. It also meant, in spite of some recent “successes,” admitting that I didn’t have the mental and spiritual reserves to pull off another busy ministry season. It meant that we needed to move back to the East Coast, take a break from vocational ministry, and regroup with the help of our family and friends.

I wish I could take credit for having the wisdom to seek out a spiritual director or for selecting one as skilled as Paul. But the whole thing was a gift I merely stumbled into.

I am grateful to Paul for his investment in me, for being a lifeline in the desert. I’ll train to be a spiritual director next year.

James Walters lives and ministers in North Carolina.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.

July 30, 2007