Karen Stiller - The Ministers Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More

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The Ministers Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More

Copyright 2020 by Karen Stiller. All rights reserved.

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Author photograph by Blair Gable, copyright 2019. All rights reserved.

Designed by Dean H. Renninger

Edited by Bonne Steffen

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Names: Stiller, Karen, author.

Title: The ministers wife : a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship,

loneliness, forgiveness, and more / Karen Stiller.

Description: Carol Stream : Tyndale House Publishers, [2020] | Includes

bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045932 (print) | LCCN 2019045933 (ebook) | ISBN

9781496441218 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781496444806 (trade paperback) | ISBN

9781496441225 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9781496441232 (epub) | ISBN

9781496441249 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Stiller, Karen. | Spouses of clergyBiography.

Classification: LCC BV4395 .S75 2020 (print) | LCC BV4395 (ebook) | DDC

277.3/083092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045932

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045933

Build: 2021-04-21 22:31:45 EPUB 3.0

To Brent

*

M Y HUSBAND, B RENT, AND I were on a weeklong vacation away from our three young kids, our busy work lives, and the dark, cold days of a Canadian winter. We had snatched up the last-minute deal online, taking advantage of visiting grandparents willing to be live-in babysitters. Soon after arriving, we met two other couples who became our fast friends at the Cuban resort. I dont remember now how we met, but I do remember the instant connection. I think we united around a shared aversion to walking on stilts or joining in on the Hula-Hoop competitions or any other group activities led by earnest resort staff. We had simply gotten along, and quickly.

We sat with them around the pool, reading those thick paperback mysteries you take with you on vacation. We rented rickety bicycles from the resort and forced them up rutted dirt roads in the steaming heat, in search of yet another beach. Who knew the bikes would barely make it up a gentle hill? But on a rare tropical vacation in the company of lighthearted people, this just added to the fun.

A few evenings in, we shared a table for dinner at the resort restaurant, and as I excused myself to orbit the buffet yet again, I left everyone gabbing and laughing. When I returned just a few minutes later, plate piled high, they sat in silence, as if the lights had gone out in the conversation.

One look at Brent and I knew what had happened. They finally asked what I do for a living, he said, attempting to break the awkwardness by naming the elephant that had lumbered into the room and now lounged at our table, huge and uncomfortable.

In previous conversations, the subject of work had never come up. But now they knew Brent was a pastor. At a church. And silence fell over the table. We had been having such a good time. I probably tried to say something funny, but nothing could have saved that dinner. We wrapped it up and called it a night.

The next day, one of the couples had grown colder than the January chill we were there to escape. All our laughter and banter screeched to a halt. The other couple broke open and leaned in close, as if they had just been waiting for a minister and his wife to show up on their vacation. Maybe they thought Brent had answers to some of their big questions about life and pain and God, some explanation for all that had befallen them. They trusted he would listen and care. He did, of course.

Our vacation time was drawing to a close by then, and we had only a couple more awkward days where we let the others set the tone while we mostly kept to ourselves. Not everyone wants to hang out with a pastor while on vacation.

The reactions of the two couplesone freezing over, the other warming upare not unusual. Being a pastor, and being married to one, is a complicated life and vocation. People may put you on a pedestal: They assume you are better, nicer, kinder, and more holy than you are. Or they may skedaddle: They assume you are unkind and judgmental, or just weird.

Two of our new (now previous) friends must have thought we were there to judge them. They were marriedbut not to each other, as the old country song goes. We had just listened when they told us that early in the week. Maybe that was the moment when Brent should have told them he was a minister, but it would have felt so awkward, like we were either condoning or condemning when all we really wanted to do was snorkel and enjoy the beach, like everybody else.

***

Is your life really like a fishbowl? a friend once asked. He had heard this about ministers and their families, that people tap on the glass and peer in, hoping to see some stuffmaybe piles of laundry or two people yelling at each other. And I guess they think we are watching them, too, and it makes them uncomfortable.

So yes, I told my friend that I do think some people watch us to see how very good or how very bad we are, and they make assumptions about uswhat we are really like or how we will act. But even as some people watch us, I know that God watches over us. That is what I have learned. Its a very different kind of watching, and it is lovely.

Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

1 TIMOTHY 3:1-3

I THOUGHT we were going to Africa. That was our simple and beautiful plan. We dreamed of living and serving in a place where we could be useful and the good to be done felt huge, right there at your feet and at your fingertips. We longed to live somewhere vast, where love would be pulled and poured out of us and we could do as Jesus said, comforting widows and orphans and feeding hungry people and sheltering them with love and solid ceilings that would never leak. The last thing we wanted was a typical middle-class North American existence. We both loved to travel, and we were attracted to the simplicity of living where you didnt drown in plenty and where plenty didnt tempt you every single day.