Because I can't tell any story without adding in this detail, you must know that I met Lucas exactly a week after my acceptance to seminary and 3 months before my college graduation. I was fully committed to pursing student ministry and planned to complete a 2 year degree in Kentucky. The summer before I left, he saw a preview of my heart as I served as a summer intern at another church. He loved hanging with the students and having come from a very small home church, he was immediately drawn to the adventure.
I had two looming faith challenges in this season. The first was learning to make peace with my place as a woman in ministry. Surrounding myself with a variety of theological perspectives had presented me with a void of clarity concerning the blessing on women in pastoral ministry. Most supported my work with teenagers, but as a barrier to having to face known resistance, I avoided all talk of ordination in my denomination. Just to be clear, the UMC had no conflict in this area, this was an internal struggle. My second area of turmoil was my smoldering love affair with all things mind and mood altering. I combated this area by choosing a school that required all students to participate in a life free from the use of alcohol and drugs. For this season, I allowed the weight of this expectation to be my moral compass.
Many plane trips, expensive phone bills and a tiny dramatic pause proved challenging. As Lucas would tell you, I called home and announced that I was coming home after a year in hopes of becoming Mrs. Hilbrich. Spoiler alert, it worked out. After a season of part-time ministry in College Station, another summer at a church in Houston and an Aggie diploma for my man, we moved to League City in December of 1999 with an open mind and a desire to serve.
Within weeks of visiting local churches, we found one with a familiar feel that needed a youth director. I started full time in March of 2000. It was an exciting time, filled with dreaming and planning and students and trips and memories. In this season, in the name of my commitment to students, I placed hard and fast 'rules' on my life. These spoken and unspoken expectations held many of my future challenges at bay. It did, however, solidify a way of living that demanded an exhaustive dual life. Who I was with friends and who I was with the students in our ministry were vastly different people. Additionally, I adopted the belief that the call to ministry was a lonely road where few could really know you. It was my job to lead and that caused a very large chasm between the truth of my life and my Sunday morning face.
This character split only intensified after the birth of our first of our daughter. I fell into a deep depression, and as I began therapy and medication to care for myself, I hit a new layer of hiding. As I was meeting with a church leader one day, I was told, "Don't ever tell the parents what is really going on in your life. If they knew, they would not trust you with their teens."
So I put on my big-fat-happy-liar church face and lived a very lonely existence. I was burned. I was bruised. I had this list of things that I had to do to keep it together and I was barely hanging on. It was a dark season personally, and it solidified in me a deep, deep belief that if you really knew me, you would not like me. I added this to the list of black and white thinking by dividing my life into ministry life and my other life. And, never the two should meet.
But somewhere in this season, I heard a voice that was different. He had a unique view of Church and God and faith and study and well, most things that I needed to have reoriented. And through his words and writings, I began to crack open this small place of hope that maybe this thing that I dreamed of giving my life to might really change the world. I started to talk with people who had similar thoughts. I began to see that the Church did not live and die in a denominational system, but instead in the hearts of people who were committed to changing the world for the One who turned their world upside down. I began praying again. And, listening again.
But I have to tell you, I didn't like what I was hearing. What I heard was a message of transformation that was going to undo the 30 years of history that I had with this thing called Church. It meant that I was going to have to open my eyes to new dreams and the unknown. But I could not walk away from it, so I sat in a scared place until one day we pulled up to our church parking lot and Lucas said, "It's time for us to go."
That's how everything changed. I was living in a frozen space of fear and doing it quite well on my own. I had life compartmentalized in safe, protected buckets. And, then it was time to go.
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