A Ministry of Vulnerability

            

            As a professional chaplain I am required every five years to do what is called a peer review. This involves writing and reflecting over my last five years of ministry, my strengths and my growing edges. Part of the reflecting is done with a group of my peers. This year I was due, and I just recently completed my review. It is not always easy to condense five years of ministry into a manageable document. It is not always a comfortable process, either. However, it is a valuable one. It is helpful to be able to look back and see how my ministry has grown and been transformed. In this process I have begun to think a lot about the idea of the ministry of vulnerability, and how that has been reflected in my own ministry style.

            I should probably pause to say the last few months since about July have not been the easiest for me. I faced the five-year anniversary of my second child’s death. I have struggled with my own physical health issues and had to face the reality that, yes, I do struggle with anxiety, and found myself in therapy as a result. I have faced many aspects of my own humanness. And along side this struggle I still had to go to my vocational work and be a chaplain to those who were also struggling and hurting, and probably just as broken, or more, than I was. I began to embrace the words of one of my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) supervisors. Essentially they go like this: in the times when you feel you are at your lowest or most broken, that is when you do some of your greatest ministry.

            How true those words became for me. I remember being at work on the actual anniversary day of Hope’s death. I was basically very raw and doing well to survive my day without spewing my own “stuff” all over the place. I visited a patient and don’t even remember the content of our discussion, but I do remember praying for him at the end of the visit with my eyes firmly fixed on his. I don’t remember my prayer, but I do remember the palpable feeling of connection, a connection that could only come from my personal, very current, and intimate experience of brokenness. It was truly a holy ground moment. I have never left a room without saying a word of good-bye until that day. I simply looked in his eyes, squeezed his hand, and left the room, leaving in the space a gentle and healing presence of the Divine joined here on earth.

            That was the start of months of ministry encounters that were more of those Holy Ground moments. Times of by the end of the visit not being quite sure who exactly was doing the ministering and who was receiving (in actuality, probably a little bit of each for both parties involved). Times of sharing more of my personal story than I ever do. Thinking I screwed up the visit, only to find a deeper sharing (in-spite of myself) allowed for a ministry encounter that was the holy ground of story sharing and healing. Had any of these visits happened any other time previous to July, I don’t know that I would have caught the undercurrents that I did. I don’t know that I would have been as open to the guiding of the Spirit as I was in those moments.

            I struggled to put definition to what was happening until I talked with my pastor who gave me the framework of the ministry of vulnerability. My peer review nudged me to continue to contemplate this and what it means for me. I don’t have it all worked out yet, but some of my initial thoughts are that it is being willing to accept my humanness, every day in every encounter. To know the grace that I have been extended in my brokenness and extend it on to everyone else I meet.

            It is being willing to accept that I am not always going to have the luxury of having all my “stuff” together before ministry calls. Sometimes I must go anyway, even if I feel that I have nothing but my own weary, human self to bring to the moment. It is being willing to fully place myself in the guidance of the Spirit at these times. And to be open to engage more equally in Holy Ground story sharing when those to whom I minister ask me for more of my own story.

            I want you to hear me as I mention the following: I am not advocating for a spewing of my faults and foibles for the whole world to see. Instead I am advocating for the ability to recognize wounded-ness in oneself that can then begin to inform ministry if one is willing to embrace it as a whole part of who he or she is. It is being able to accept and believe that even though one is in a place of brokenness, or simply does not have all of his/her “stuff” together, there is still the possibility of being able to provide ministry. It just may not look like it usually does, and it most certainly will need to have greater recognition of God and Spirit at work.

            Only after this can one begin to discern the other part of a ministry of vulnerability, the balanced and appropriate use of story in the appropriate context. This in and of itself is not easy and takes practice and self-awareness.

            At the end of the day, though, what I have carried away from all of this head-and-heart musing, is a greater since of the Holy. There is the realization that sometimes the gift and ministry I have to give in the moment is to allow someone else to minister to me. Whether it be through wisdom gained that they want to share with me, a prayer given for me added on the end of my own prayer, a simple “God bless your ministry”, or more profoundly an “I’m sorry” after hearing part of my story. The ministry of vulnerability is the realization that it really is a two-way street. I just need to open my eyes and heart to the journey.