Have you ever driven down a freeway at night in a strange land, say, New Jersey, in the olden times before even Mapquest existed? You’re tired, hungry, craving a hotel bed and you pass an exit that every instinct in your gut says to take but you say to yourself, “That can’t be it; the next one” — only to find that was the one you were supposed to get off while the one you’ve chosen says “Next rest stop 60 miles” and “No entrance back on freeway.”

Such it was with me on graduation day from my American Baptist seminary, already employed by an ABC church awaiting me in Roseburg. A year before, I’d wandered for the first time in my life into a Roman Catholic church and rued my parents for never having exposed me to it as a youth when I had the chance to take this road in my life not traveled. But, as they say, it is what it is and now I’m yoked to being a leader in a Protestant denomination until I retire a few decades up the road (or so I thought at the time). As Dr. John so famously said, “Must’ve been the right place but it must’ve been the wrong time.”

So I’m pastoring my first church. Now before I continue, let me share a bit of clerical wisdom that was passed on to me by a much older, wiser, experienced pastor who told me not to be surprised if some people left because of me, some others came because of me while others didn’t really care one way or the other. And in almost every church I ended up pastoring, he was dead on.

Let me also say, I got on famously with the youth of all my churches; it was always the adults that brought on tears. And it didn’t take long: things were going swimmingly until one Sunday I said in a sermon that “homosexuals were the lepers of our time” (2000) meaning they were largely considered “the untouchables” by the conservative culture that surrounded us. I had dared to touch the third rail of WASPism, the other two being abortion and American nationalism. That alone got me ousted in less than a year. Wow. I had been class valedictorian at graduation, awarded a cash prize for having the highest GPA and I couldn’t make it even a year.

Thus it was that my unemployed, ordained wife and I were recruited by the United Methodist Denomination of the Oregon-Idaho Conference where, we were assured, not only would we both be employed as clergy of our own churches but we wouldn’t have to worry much about fallout from preaching on the travails of the Big Three as UMC congregations were seemingly not as concerned about such things and we would have episcopal protection in the form of our bishop should things go awry. This is how we came to Pendleton in June 2000 having jumped ship from our Baptist sojourn.

My wife was assigned the UMC congregations in Weston and Milton-Freewater while I was charged to take on Pendleton First United Methodist Church. And this is where we fell in love with this laid back cowboy town. First off, it was to be my best church ever precisely because the congregation were by and large well-educated and not predisposed to creating issues where they didn’t exist. They were genuinely kind, caring people and we thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company (notwithstanding a bit of flag-waving nationalist pushback when Bush started his two-front war, violence which I vehemently preached against with the help of Jesus).

We loved the “live and let live” mindset of the Pendleton community, the beauty of the surrounding countryside, and the genuine collegiality of our fellow pastoral association. We enjoyed the best of four years until one night we got the phone call notifying us that precisely because we had done such a good job here, the bishop was moving us to Boise to troubleshoot more challenging congregations.

This proved to be true as both churches were live wires with factions vying for power and dominance with us caught in the middle. After five years of eking it out with some real success at the cost of a lot of personal pain and anguished nights, my wife was done. The mental cost to her alone began her push toward the dreaded twin siblings of anxiety and depression, which culminated in dementia and eventually the Alzheimers that took her life. So the bishop moved us once more, back to the land of my first crucifixion of Douglas County, a move which forced the unseating of a lay-pastor for a professionally ordained minister in two tiny churches of Myrtle Creek and Canyonville. This move, which neither the lay-pastor nor I desired, set these congregations against me from Day 1 as they tended to blame me for it. My first day on the job, one of the stalwart male parishioners forthrightly told me, “Don’t preach on homosexuality here, pastor, if you know what’s good for you.” One older female accused me of “preaching Obama” for bringing up the Christian subject of hope.

That was it for me as well. I’d made it 12 years. I was exhausted, disgusted, sad, empty, lonely and done with the job. I notified my bishop of my decision after two years trying to serve these yoked churches and joined my wife in being unemployed for the first time in 30 years. At this point, let me simply say I came to realize being a church pastor is one of the strangest, most grueling yet most rewarding jobs anyone could do, something I’ll wrap up next month. Over the years as I kept in touch with my fellow seminary graduates, I was stunned but not surprised to find out that almost all of them too had washed out less than 10 years in and were now involved in different occupations, which in my case ended up as a social services case manager and my wife a hospital chaplain — both occupations having nothing to do with the Big Three.

As stated, I will complete this lengthy spiritual tale in August. The positive aspect of this transition however was we were now once again free to live where we wanted, no longer under the control of a UMC bishop nor Protestantism. So it was we arrived back in the springtime of 2011 to the land we’d felt was and could be truly our home, this eclectic Eastern Oregon town, an island among fields of green then gold stretching unimpeded to the horizon, the land Dorothy of Oz sings about.