CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—
Some of the most important events of my life were dead ends. Maybe yours, too.
I wanted to be an inner-city preacher. In college, I was fascinated by the work of William Stringfellow and others in New York’s East Harlem Protestant Parish. They were serious Christians, trying to live out the Jesus lifestyle in a radical way. I thought that since I had grown up in poverty, I could pastor well others who were caught in that plight. But a summer of social work [Howell Neighborhood House] and preaching in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago [the Wycliffe & Halstead Street Churches] taught me that rural poverty and urban poverty are very different. I did not fit in the city. I had no idea what to do next, but I knew my life would not be in the inner city. That was a dead end.
As I began to think that I was a good preacher, I decided I should be a seminary professor of preaching. So, in addition to my three-year seminary degree, I did another three years of graduate school to get the necessary union card—an academic doctorate. But all that work so that I could stand at a podium convinced me that my call was to stand in a pulpit. I learned that my call had been to preach, not to teach. All that academic work was a dead end.
As a parish pastor, I thought it would be neat to be sought after as a pastoral counselor. My seminary counseling professor was Carroll Wise, who had joined Anton Boisen in initiating the pastoral counseling movement, “human help for human hurt,” as he used to say. I liked the idea of sitting in a big chair in my study and listening to people tell me their problems and then giving them solutions. With congregational preaching, you never knew if anything you said was helpful. In one-to-one counseling, it was easier to measure your success. Either she gave up drinking or she didn’t. Either they decided to stay in their marriage or they didn’t. Either he cheered up or he didn’t. [Psychologist joke: He said he was depressed, so I told him to cheer up.]
So I took courses on psychology ad counseling, and read books about psych and counseling, and went to psychology seminars about counseling. But I was a useless therapist. Another dead end.
It turned out that I was a terrible counselor but a pretty good pastor.
Pastors walk the walk, not just talk the talk. They go through stuff with people, whether the stuff be good or bad. I could do that. Counselors do not help folks by giving solutions, the way a physician writes a prescription on a pad. That doesn’t work. But I did not have the patience to counsel. I’m a problem solver. If someone presented a problem to me, I wanted a solution. Now.
When I gave up sitting in the big chair and sagely nodding and providing a prescription after 45 minutes, and started walking through the morass with folks without telling them where to step, I became a useful pastor.
But my dead ends were not wasted. First, of course, they taught me where I really belonged. They also taught me about my limitations. Knowing your limits is as important as knowing your skills. And what I learned as I went down those dead-end roads was useful to me, both personally and professionally.
So, even though we’re past the one day a year that is designated for giving thanks, I give thanks for my dead ends. They cost me a lot of time, but they were important in helping me be who I was really called to be.
John Robert McFarland
