The Road Not Taken: Trapped

Published 5:00 am Thursday, October 19, 2023

As a spiritual seeker, the driving question for me has always been, how does one know it’s God’s voice speaking? How does God attempt to communicate God’s infinite, infallible desires to finite and fallible human beings? My own experience suggests whatever it takes to do the job.

You may remember my wife and I had found a spiritual home in an American Baptist Church in Springfield, and had been exercising our gifts for the faith in this congregational setting, which began to elicit reactions from others strongly suggesting we would be excellent clergy and we should start thinking in that direction.

This thought terrified me.

First, I had just become elected to the position of “Freshman New Believer” — it was far too early to begin thinking about running for president. Second and far more important, I was under the false illusion that clergy were morally more advanced and behaviorally “perfect” creatures than me. They, like Jesus, had mastered self-control over their animal natures and were thus closer to God than was possible for me, a self-professed Christian who still believed in the appropriate use of the f-bomb from time to time. I just wasn’t pastor material.

God may have been whispering to others in the congregation but not directly to me.

But here’s a lesson I learned that you can take to the bank: If God cannot get your attention any other way, God will speak through your dreams and there are plenty of biblical references to this.

My wife was all for pursuing seminary while I was holding out for the best graduate school offer that came my way, and while my pastor thought I’d be good clergy material, when I asked him for his advice, he rather cryptically said, “Run while you can.” Yes, like Jonah, run, run, run away from this cajoling voice of the divine, for the cross and its pain awaits you.

At that point, one night I had a dream and little did I realize then how prophetic the dream would be. I was running from something that filled me with dread. It was making a loud noise and was gaining on me. I was trying to run through a quagmire and was sinking. Suddenly the noise was upon me. I turned around in terror to face it and what I saw was a trinity of large angels with wings. They were singing to me and the noise I’d been afraid of was now pure harmonic, unearthly beauty. But the supreme irony (as I was to later find out) was that the angels who loomed above me and were singing music of praise were female and Black. Three large Black women angels, singing gospel music. My fear departed and rapture took its place.

I woke up the next morning to prepare for my final U of O, bachelor of arts exam. I told my prescient wife about my dream. She pushed me; “Are you listening?” So I found myself researching where the nearest American Baptist seminary (graduate school for clergy) was and it was in Berkeley, California. A month later, my wife and I attended an open house the seminary offered for prospective students. At a question-and-answer session with the academic faculty, I posed my Rubicon question to these wise, assembled minds, the only question that ever mattered to me: How could I know it was God’s voice for sure calling me to this as opposed to my own deluded sense of grandeur, for, if it wasn’t God’s voice, I wanted nothing to do with it.

To a person, they all said the same thing: God would speak through my church congregation. That is, if my fellow tribal members were initiating the idea, they were speaking with and on behalf of God to my wife and me.

Caught. Three wraps and a hooie, just like that. Crap.

— Matt Henry, a native Buckeye, is a Roman Catholic musician, a retired ABC/UMC pastor, and a volunteer ombudsman for the state of Oregon. No one should be cold, hungry, lonely or unprotected.