The Small Moments That Change Everything

20 years ago, I was a college freshman working in the snack bar of one of the dorms at the University of Nebraska. I didn't have a job for the summer and was getting nervous. One night, my co-worker Brigette's boyfriend Mike wandered down to walk her home after we closed. He was wearing the staff shirt of the Lutheran camp I had attended as a kid. I told him I'd been a camper there and always thought maybe it would be fun to be a counselor. He handed me a business card for the camp and told me to call them, since they were still looking for male counselors. 

I hadn't been to church since arriving on campus. I didn't think a lot about faith. I was going to be a band director and maybe get a job playing in a symphony on the side. But thanks to a chance conversation with the boyfriend of an acquaintance, my entire life changed. (Said acquaintance is now a friend, and also an ELCA pastor, but at the time we weren't anything more than co-workers. Love ya, Brigette!)

So, I asked my colleagues:  what are the small changes that led you to where you are now?  Here are the answers from those folks who’ve responded.

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I love how God works even (gasp!) outside of the church building! Because of being co workers and then friends, Christ's Church gained a gifted and wonderful leader. And Mike Weier and I gained a life long friend! As many of you know working for Larry Meyer at the UNL campus ministry is a large part of why I am a pastor serving today. His encouragement and persistence moved me to finally accept the call to ordained ministry. -- Brigette Weier, who was the Brigette in my story

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In 2002 I proposed to my fiancee, Christy, with one caveat: I refused to get married in a church. I had grown up Roman Catholic - 12 years of Catholic schooling - and I quit going the day I graduated from high school. I was 17 with an uncanny ability to sniff out hypocrisy (a superpower that belongs to all teenagers, I think, at least insofar as hypocrisy exists in other people), so I just stopped going altogether. Never darkened a church doorway for 15 years at that point. Christy was OK with us getting married in the park where we had spent a lot of time biking and playing tennis, so she began calling around to find an officiant who would be available on the date we had chosen.

She found a guy, who happened to be an ELCA Lutheran pastor. Neither one of us had heard of the ELCA and only knew of Lutheranism in a vague sort of way. But the pastor agreed to marry us if we would come in for three counseling sessions. We went to two of them, and they were fine. Our third session was scheduled for a Wednesday, two days before the ceremony was meant to take place. As we were on our way out the door to head to that final session, we received a phone call alerting us that our wedding venue was closed due to flooding.

When we got to the final counseling session, we told the pastor and he - without hesitation - offered to let us use the church building for both the ceremony and the reception. We gladly accepted and everything went great. The torrential rain even stopped long enough for outside wedding pictures.

A month or so later, moved by the graciousness of this pastor (and of the congregation, who had been really, really nice to us), we went back to leave a donation, since no honorarium was requested. I liked the service. It felt like home minus the "baggage" and we really liked the people in the church. They knew who we were and treated us great. A couple weeks later, we went back again, "just because," and something clicked. I won't speak for my wife, but I was touched by grace in that whole encounter. One thing led to another and I wound up in lay ministry school, and from there discerned a call to ordained ministry. Here I sit 10 years later as pastor of a redevelopment congregation in my wife's home state, blessed beyond all comprehension. -- Anonymous

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Knowing that my father knelt by his bed every night to say prayers before going to sleep and watching him, on Sunday mornings he was scheduled to lector, reading the lessons out loud in living room. And then later, seeing him consecrated as one of the first laymen to distribute the Eucharist in the RC Arch-diocese of Philadelphia. Finally, when I was in about 10th or 11th grade, one night during Lent, at a Stations of the Cross service, when the boy who was Crucifer turned green, he took the cross while the boy's father took the boy. In his tweed jacket, white shirt and bow tie, he carried the cross throughout the entire service. Little things do add up. -- Jane Ellen Jarrell

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When I was in my junior year of college (at a non-denominational, "unapologetically Christian" school), I had a class with a senior I had never met before who mentioned in his introduction that he was Lutheran and had just spent his summer doing a Project Connect immersion, where he basically got paid to discern his call to ministry. When I mentioned that I was Lutheran as well (and was a youth ministry major), he said, "Julie, you absolutely have to do this Project Connect thing." I kind of brushed it off, but he kept at it, reminding me every time our class met that the application deadline was looming. Finally, it clicked that this would be a paying job for the summer, and it would give me a chance to stretch my legs in figuring out what it means to build a young adult ministry. While I imagine that there are other things that might have led me to seminary, that experience was instrumental in my decision to seek further theological education, and it was the external sense of call from a persistent friend that jump-started the whole process for me. -- Anonymous

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Mine is not terribly different from yours. However, I did go to church once a year at college (so I could point out to my parents on their visits where I worshiped - and not have it be a lie. lol) During my junior year, my mother sent me a notice from the church bulletin stating that the camp was looking summer staff as well. I think she was afraid I would either spend the summer at home driving her crazy (like I did after freshmen year) or taking summer classes (aka partying the summer away, like my sophomore year.) Little did she know, it would set me on the path to discovering my call. And my mother didn't have the ulterior motive of directing me toward ministry, because she did NOT think women should be pastors.... until I became one myself. -- Anonymous

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Although very active in ministry my entire life, I was in the video production business for over 15 years. After finding out that my mother was sick and dying, I decided to switch gears, do some freelancing on the side and help her with her Greyhound bus business. After my mother passed and I took the time to grieve and be there for family members, I found out that I was no longer the same person anymore. Shortly after that, I was approached by some friends on the Lutheran Campus Ministry board in Oshkosh Wisconsin. They needed help in promoting a struggling ministry. It was just what I needed. Six years later, I am the Campus Minister and have now begun the process of entering Candidacy and seminary. Whew, What a game changer that time was for me! -- Anonymous

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I used to say that I would never want to be a pastor... after all, who would want to give a speech every week? It did not sound like a good idea to me at all. Then I got two pieces of very sound advice in college. First, a seminarian told me: don't go to seminary until you can't stay away. In other words, if you're grappling with your call, God will make sure that you get to seminary if that's where you're meant to be. If that's not where you're meant to be, you'll be able to stay away and still be at peace. Second, after sharing with a friend that I didn't particularly feel called by God to go in to ministry, he reminded me: God sometimes speaks to you through other people. -- Anonymous

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These were just the responses I got in a brief conversation on the ELCA Clergy Facebook group.  The message is pretty simple:  small changes matter.  No conversation is unimportant.  Lives are changed in moments.  God is indeed in the details.  And not just for pastors, either:  God changes the lives of actuaries, plumbers, farmers, chemists, lawyers, bankers, teachers and all sorts of other folks in the minutiae of everyday life.  "...the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."  Trust in God's Spirit, always - it will work through you to bring about that which God intends.