making a way

a nod to a dream

It’s not often you get to revisit a dream.

A lifetime ago, as a young woman in my first pastoral staff position, a speaker at our church said we should write down our dreams. To what might God be inviting us? So I did. Wrote down several.

And as the years went by, I mostly forgot them.

A decade or so later, I was stunned to be elected to our denominational district executive. I remember sitting alone at that conference trying to look professional while dying of tension. I hadn’t known the nomination was coming, so it was a shock, and then the election took multiple rounds of slow voting - paper ballots, mind you, counted by hand - which went right into the next day.

I learned later that I was the first woman to have ever been at that table. They welcomed me wholeheartedly.

Back then I would have been against what I understood as tokenism. My district superintendent was very clear that I had been elected fair and square, no tokenism involved, and that was fine with me. I was raised in a generation and a family that said girls could do anything boys could do (obviously), and I just wanted to see that applied. I assumed most of us were aiming for that, more or less. I didn’t understand that just by being female, my lived experience was different, and that’s why a female voice mattered.

After all, for example, how else would anyone ever know about the challenges of mic pack placement when women’s clothes overwhelmingly lack functional pockets?!

A few years later, I froze when the General Secretary-Treasurer’s name appeared on my phone. The Second Biggest of the Denominational Cheeses. What could I possibly have done to get on his radar? I answered with caution, and he cheerfully informed me that I was being invited to sit on the General Executive. My mind went completely blank and I sputtered something unintelligible. Amused, but always kind, he suggested some questions I might want to ask him.

And there I was at another table, not the only woman, but definitely in the minority. They welcomed me there too.

Fast forward to last week’s General Executive meetings, which were my last. I had been there a long time. I wanted to make room for someone else, a younger or different voice.

On the last day, I woke up full of gratitude and joy, in a “look what God has done,” kind of way. It took me a minute to figure out why. And then I remembered that young woman, earnestly writing down dreams so long ago. The dream I remembered on this day?

“I want to help make a way for other women in ministry in our denomination.”

It’s a way that becomes overgrown fairly easily, and I wanted to be one who helped to keep it clear for those coming after me.

So I smiled, as I went to my final meeting, offering a quiet nod to a dream written long ago. The path will likely always need clearing. In some ways, it’s harder now than it was then. But we’re still here. Women following God’s call on our lives, right alongside our brothers.

“Don’t mess with God’s daughters,” said one of our conference speakers last week. If you were there, that burst of laughter was me.

As I post this, I’m glad to be home. I have a delightful church to pastor. A degree to finish. An executive to serve in my current district, where I am welcomed — a linguistic minority at a French-speaking table. (How cool is that?!) I’m longing so much to get back to Ukraine, the land where my heart lives. And after a year of healing from a broken ankle and all of its complexities, I’m hoping to finally get back to running this summer.

And I’ll probably dream a little too.