Thirty years ago this month, I sat in the balcony after the service of death and resurrection while the rest of the gathered community milled about in the adjacent social hall during the reception. We had just said farewell to Eugene Mitchell Forrester, my ninety-one-year-old paternal grandfather and my last grandparent to die. My brother Michael and I had spoken in the service.
The church was a small brick building with a sizable cemetery behind it surrounded by trees, as well as a smaller, confederate cemetery off to the side set in the rural farming and fishing community where my family had lived and worked for generations. My parents had been married in that church’s sanctuary, and I had grown up going to countless Easter sunrise services there throughout my childhood.
As I sat in the balcony, I was wrestling with something I had not shared with anyone: a call to pastoral ministry. I had been running from it for about two years and now, I was looking down at the chancel where my grandfather had just laid and the pulpit where I had just stood, imaging spending a life behind that sacred desk, and I prayed this corny prayer of surrender to God:
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