A Bit of My Story
As I begin my first ministry internship, I have been asked to share my story with the congregation. While I can't tell everything in the time I have, here is a bit of my story.
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When I was a kid, there were only two times when the adults in my family would call me by my full name: when they hadn’t seen me in a long time or when I was in trouble. The one exception was my Grandma Turk. My grandma was a constant presence in my life; there were long summer days filled with baking and trips to the zoo, countless afternoons of drawing and storytelling, and her consistant, if doomed, personal mission to get me to clean my room. While the activities and topics of conversation changed as I grew, there was always one constant: her faith in my ability to do great things. No matter which dream career I was thinking about that day, she would always affirm that I would, in fact, be a wonderful orchestra conductor!. These pronouncements always began with my full name: Christopher Abraham Miller. What they ended with, however, confused me for a long time. She would reassure me that yes, I would make an excellent architect, until I was ready to be a pastor. My responses to that suggestion varried, but were usually a polite, but confident, “Thank you, but no.” After all, I was going to be a pilot or an engineer or a great jazz musician - not a pastor!
It was sometime in the middle of the summer after second grade that I first set foot on sacred ground, although I didn’t know it at the time. My mom, grandma, and I had driven for almost two hours when we finally pulled through the stone and wood beam archway and up the winding gravel road to the dining hall. I didn’t know what to expect; I had never been to camp before, but I knew Alex, my pastor, was going to be there, and I had heard they had horses, so it couldn’t be all bad. We got out of the car and went to check in. Sitting there was a man with a huge smile, who looked down at some paperwork and then back at me and said, “Christopher Abraham Miller - welcome to camp!” I loved camp so much that later that week when my mom and grandma came to pick me up I asked when I could come back. Summer after summer, church camp was a constant. Every summer I knew I would be surrounded by people who loved and cared for me - they would talk and sing about God in a way totally different from anything I was used to. It was the first place I remember feeling that God was more than a distant idea, but was real and present and cared what happened in my life.
For over two decades now, I have returned to camp, first as a camper, then as a member of the college staff, and in more recent years as a volunteer. Through my years of living and working at camp I have learned first hand about God’s love and grace, I have experienced the majesty of creation and the joy of community. It is where I fell in love with scripture, where I met and eventually proposed to my wife, and where I had the first hints that maybe my grandma was right - maybe I was supposed to be a pastor.
About five or six years ago, while I was still working as a high school debate coach in Missouri, I had my students do a project where they researched the meanings of their name. Wanting to know more myself, I did some looking as well. Unlike many of my students, I was not named for family members or friends of my parents - rather my parents, both ordained elders in the Presbyterian Church, chose a name out of their faith. Christopher Abraham. Christopher is from the Greek phrase “one who bears Christ.” Abraham is the father of Israel; one of the central figures in Genesis. At this point, I began to suspect a plot by my family.
It would take several more years for me to come to peace with my calling to the ministry. There were long conversations with my family, my home pastors, and many other mentors. There was a lot of prayer, which often took the form of me trying to convice God that I didn’t really need to be a pastor, after all I had finally found something I was good at in being a high school teacher, surely there was someone else he could send. But slowly and surely, a thousand little experiences slowly fell into place until the nudging of God became undeniable.
Early in the summer of 2011, I was sitting on a picnic table at camp when my mother called. She told me that my Grandma Turk was back in the hospital, the treatment for what we later would learn was cancer hadn’t worked. I made the hour drive to the hospital and sat with my grandmother. We talked about camp, the unusually warm weather, the dissapointing hospital food. Then I told her that I was thinking about looking into seminary. She looked at me with that amazing smile of hers, and said “Christopher Abraham, it is about time!”
Over the next few months, as I began the ordination process and researched various seminaries, we would sit and talk about seminary and look over brochures. As fall settled in, and she began Hospice care, I planned my trip to visit Princeton Theological. In one of our last conversations, she told me that she knew I would get into Princeton and was going to make a wonderful pastor. My Grandmother Turk died seven days before I visited Princeton for the first time.
I am not here because my grandmother wanted me to, or because I went to church camp, or because of my name; although God worked through each of those things to help me discover what his will for my life would be. I am here because, just like Abraham, God has not given up on me, even when I went astray and doubted God’s promise. But I am also here to bear the good news of Jesus Christ. That was the hope of my grandmother, and it is my hope.