Beyond the Bible, there really isn’t a guide to life. Our parents can only go so far before we’re on our own - most of the time by our own choice. Our friends get a little closer, but advice can only be heard if we want to hear it. The only guide we have we tend to write ourselves as we age. But some things, we feel like we need the help or the guidance so that we don’t fail, or so that life isn’t completely screwed up.
Most of the time the Bible isn’t even necessarily a guide more than it’s a list of phrases that offer comfort to many. Many times, it’s simply a way to answer the unanswerable questions in life, like “What happens after I die?” and “Why am I here?”. Science offers reasons as to why people die, but can’t tell us what happens beyond our bodies physical decay. That’s why religion is so popular (yet seemingly unpopular). People want to know what lies ahead. Surprises are nice, but routine is less scary.
The messed up part is, there’s no real way to know what you’re getting yourself in to, until you’re already immersed in it, because we can never know exactly what we have ahead of us. Educated guesses can fill in the gaps, but otherwise we are always walking toward the unknown. Even the Bible isn’t specific when it comes to certain questions we have in life, and leaves a lot open to personal experiences and interpretations. Unfortunately this is where a lot of things get jumbled around. They call it the unknown for a reason. I know, not very deep, right? As humans we like to have answers to every question we can muster up. We’re inherently curious, and infinitely worrisome of things we don’t know everything about. That’s why there are educated guesses, because we seek to find possible answers suitable to suppress our worries about that of which we do not know for sure. We can’t just let things remain unknown, we have to attempt to figure them out.
My unknown involved a husband, a bunch of pre-teen and teenaged Christians, a church, a house, and ultimately a new life.
Out of total bewilderment as to what was before me, I hoped to educate my guesses, so I purchased a book about being the wife of a pastor. Unfortunately about 40 pages in I realized it was more geared toward being the head pastor’s wife, about thirty years older than my husband and I are, and it didn’t help me find any answers that would help me deal with this change emotionally, really. I came to that book in hopes it would help me with specific, yet broad problems or life changes that come with being the wife of a youth pastor, maybe coming from someone who wasn’t terribly involved in organized religion until recently. Of course, that was too specific to my own personal needs, although I was hoping it would have at least been addressed in some small fashion. I know it’s hard to write a “How to” book when dealing with that kind of subject, and I definitely know that once thirty years have gone by, it’s probably not very easy to remember how you felt the first month you were “the pastor’s wife”, but I thought maybe, just maybe, the book would help a twenty-something out. But mostly, it told me how to keep my husband from overworking, how to keep him involved with our kids (which we don’t have yet), and how to manage keeping a clean house for our many visitors (which we haven’t had, either). When the author of the book I purchased was my age, there was no internet or Facebook. The internet is definitely something there needs to be a passage on in an advice book about becoming a clergy member’s wife, especially in this day and age, social networking is very prominent in people’s lives. The book was helpful, for prior generations I’m sure, but none of her proved to be immediately helpful, and probably won’t seem that way until many years down the line.
I realized that the only way I could educate my guesses was to see them prove to be right or wrong myself, and learn from the experiences as they came. Every church is different, but I have a feeling many aspects are the same. In every church there are good and bad people, and I know there’s definitely plenty of gossip. I knew those things going in, though, and had to make the rest up as I went along.
(Please forgive the Eiffel 65 title reference!)
(Please forgive the Eiffel 65 title reference!)
