My second ministry job came with an office on the second floor, at the end of a hall, away from where the other offices were. The reasoning was practical — they didn’t want teenagers wandering through the suite where the grown-ups worked. So they put me and the teenagers up where we wouldn’t be in the way.
It was an interior room. No window. Not much bigger than a broom closet, and I’ve never been sure it hadn’t been one.
I decorated it. Spent real time on that. Got it set up the way I wanted, because I was going to be in there studying and praying and planning, doing all the things a person does when he’s twenty-two and has been handed the thing he asked God for.
I sat in that room for two years and I was lonely in a way I didn’t have words for at the time.
I came in hot. Ideas, energy, plans. I’d done two years as a music and youth pastor already and I was going to do this one well.
Those two years turned out to be exactly enough experience to be dangerous. Enough that I stopped thinking of myself as somebody who needed to be taught anything, and not nearly enough for what this job actually was. The gap showed up fastest in the places I wasn’t looking. I was barely older than the kids, which felt like an advantage right up until I needed to be an authority and had no idea how to become one. The adults were harder. The volunteers who’d been serving in that ministry for years saw the job as something we’d figure out together. I saw it as mine. They offered feedback and I heard interference.
I wasn’t lazy. I worked hard the entire time. I just worked hard at the parts I already knew how to do and quietly avoided the parts I didn’t, which is the most convincing way there is to be failing while feeling productive. It didn’t take long to be noticeable.
By the second year I knew. Not in words, but in the mornings — sitting up in that room, unmotivated and miserable, and aware it had started to affect the one relationship the whole job was supposed to be about.
When they finally called me in, the decision was the right one. I’ve never once argued with the outcome. Quit or be fired. I quit.
What I’ve turned over for twenty-five years is that it was the first conversation. Two years, and the first honest exchange about how it was going was the one that ended it.
I want to be careful here, because this is where a story like this usually goes looking for a villain, and I don’t have one to give you. I was not an easy person to help. I was headstrong, I was defensive, and I’d have bristled at half of what needed saying. The version of this where someone sits me down in month four is not a version where I make it easy on them.
But I’d have taken a directive. That’s the part I know for certain. I respected the chain of command enough that if someone had said here is what we actually need from you, here is what we’re seeing, here are the three things that have to change — I’d have gone and done it. Nobody ever had to guess whether I’d follow an instruction. They only had to give me one.
What I needed was a mentor. I could not have told you that at twenty-two. I didn’t have the word for it. I just had the loneliness, and the ideas, and the closet with no window, and no idea that what I was missing was a person who’d already been where I was.
Years later I ended up in corporate data work, and I picked up the word fungible. It means interchangeable. One unit is any other unit. You don’t repair a fungible item — you replace it, because nothing about the individual one is worth preserving.
I’ve spent two decades arguing the opposite for a living. That the record has attributes. That identity is the thing you can’t reconstruct once you’ve lost it. That the expensive failures are almost never the loud ones; they’re the quiet ones where somebody decided a thing was generic when it wasn’t.
I don’t think I chose that work because of a room on the second floor. But I know exactly why the word lands on me the way it does.
We left and started attending somewhere else immediately. That part I’m glad about — we needed to be in a church instead of at one.
And then I sat in a pew and did nothing for years.
I didn’t volunteer. Didn’t sign up. Didn’t raise my hand for anything. We picked seats where we wouldn’t be noticed and we weren’t. If you’d asked me at the time I’d have said we were busy, or that we were resting, or that it was somebody else’s turn. What was actually true is that I’d learned it was safer to be no one in particular.
My desire to help people never changed. What changed was needing to get paid to practice my faith.
Here’s the part I only see clearly years later.
There was a man on that staff — the senior adults pastor, in his seventies and full of life, the kind of person who’d already survived everything I was in the middle of. I knew him. I liked him. I never once thought of him as someone I might learn from, because he worked with the old people and I worked with the kids and in my head those were different countries.
He’d wanted to take me under his wing. Wanted to, thought about it, and decided against it — because he didn’t believe I’d accept.
He was almost certainly right. Whatever version of that offer he was drafting in his head, I’d have heard it as a critique, thanked him, and kept walking. He read me accurately. That’s the thing that sits in my chest. He read me accurately and the accuracy is exactly what stopped him.
He died my first year there. His wife told me about it after he was gone.
So I ask.
It’s not complicated and it isn’t a program. When I can tell somebody’s struggling — at work, at church, a guy I know — I say the thing out loud. What’s going on. Tell me about it. What can I actually do. If they’ll let me, I tell them what I see, as kindly as I can manage, which is not always as kindly as I intend.
Some of them want it. Some of them look at me like I’ve asked to see their tax returns. I’ve stopped trying to predict which.
That’s the whole reason I say it out loud. A man once had the answer to my twenty-two-year-old problem and kept it to himself, and he had good reasons, and I never got to be the one who decided.
David Willis 