Against all odds

This is the blog entry I have wanted to write since mid-September. If I had any doubts at that time about whether I was meant to move to St. Paul and attend Luther Seminary, they were pretty well rubbed out by a series of pretty crazy circumstances in the course of one week early in my first semester.

First, there was the day my wife and I walked into a Gander Mountain to ask whether we could buy a replacement cap for our air mattress — we couldn't, but the stocker led us outside to his Jeep, where he handed us just such a cap (which he apparently acquired in a prank on his buddy while camping years earlier). On the way to the Gander Mountain, we stopped at a Toys 'R' Us just in time to grab two Ray Nitschke action figures fresh out of a box to give to our dads for Christmas. The next day, we walked into a Packers-friendly St. Paul sports bar and bumped right into an old friend from my comedy troupe in Green Bay — unbeknown to me, he similarly had moved to the Twin Cities to serve as a youth minister here. A few days later, I attended a training meeting for the seminary's student journal, the Concord, only to discover, in a discussion about how to get permission to use photos from the Internet, that a photo used in a spring 2004 Concord advertisement was taken by another old friend from the Green Bay comedy troupe.

But the most fantastic of circumstances that week in September was an e-mail message from an unfamiliar Luther student named Theresa. She had seen my name in an announcement about this year's Concord staff and wondered whether I was related to a Pastor Behrendt who had confirmed her and whose child she had babysat back in the early 1980s in Pell Lake, Wis. With no small amount of amazement, I e-mailed her back and explained how that pastor was my father and that, since I'm an only child, I had been the baby she babysat. What were the odds that both of us would end up in the same seminary's Master of Divinity program at the same time?

The reason I'm finally writing about this now is that now I can tell the whole story. I got a chance on Wednesday to meet Theresa (the photo is from our reunion in the seminary's campus center), who is in her third year of taking classes part-time while living in Northwestern Wisconsin. She was in town that day to officiate a funeral in her capacity as a part-time hospice chaplain.

The occasion was significant not simply because Theresa was apparently my first babysitter but also because I had heard about her in one of my dad's sermons a few years ago. As my dad recalls it, he was walking door-to-door one day in Pell Lake to introduce himself in his first summer (1979) in his first call as a pastor. He had come across a girl, Theresa, who had gotten the strap of her purse stuck in her bicycle's spokes. While helping to unwind the strap from the spokes, he explained to her that he was the new pastor in town. Soon, Theresa showed up at the church's services, at first by herself, until her parents joined her and renewed their involvement in church. This girl's dedication to God had impressed my dad, and he never forgot about it.

But the "rest of the story" was no less remarkable. When I first met Theresa on Wednesday, it seemed from her confidence, history of devotion and apparent success in juggling her roles as a chaplain, student, wife and mother of four that it had probably been a pretty smooth path that led her to Luther Seminary. Indeed, she had accomplished a lot. Since my dad left her church in Pell Lake for a call in Neenah, Wis., when I was only a year old, Theresa had married a forest ranger, served as an elementary school teacher for a couple years, home-schooled her children and served as director of an Alzheimer's respite and as a certified nursing assistant at the hospice where she now works. All the while, she was involved in churches in the communities where they lived, and people consistently told her what a good pastor she would be (a theme familiar to my own "call story").

But around the year 2000, the path became anything but smooth for Theresa. Grief from her father's recent death from cancer and other family pressures combined with re-emerging stress from her abuse by a relative when she was 6 years old. She became withdrawn and found herself in a terrible darkness — a "black hole," she called it — a sort of hopelessness from which she seemed unable to ever escape. She eventually determined to begin therapy and learned that the problem at root was unresolved pain from the abuse she suffered as a girl (Theresa is happy to discuss all this now).

Meanwhile, the many Christians in her life came through for her in ways big and small, such as providing transportation for her kids and bringing food for the family in the midst of her recovery. As she puts it, each of those Christians offered her a tiny, lit match, one by one, in the midst of her darkness until she had a light in front of her and realized Jesus had been with her the whole time. She emerged from the darkness with an indescribable sense of hope and determination to do something in God's service. Finally, in 2004, while watching a video about the work of clergy amid the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedies, she realized hat she needed to pursue ordained ministry.

Theresa said she isn't sure exactly where the path will lead her from here. She feels well-equipped as a chaplain and has been able to use her own story when counseling people to assure them that, with God's help, they can overcome the darkness in their lives. She figures that after she earns her Master of Divinity degree (probably in about six years, amid her busy schedule), she might work as both a rural parish pastor and chaplain.

It had seemed against all odds that Theresa could have emerged from such a difficult time, but with help from God and the people around her, she did. And it seemed against all odds that my babysitter and I would wind up at the same seminary at the same time, but with help from God and the people around us, we did. Little against-all-odds moments like those I had in September help us to believe more deeply that something special is at work around us and that we, ourselves, have some special work to do. As we shared our stories and fears as fellow seminarians, Theresa shared another such moment that comforted her about her decision to come to Luther: The student mailbox number assigned to her at Luther was the number in the hymnal of the favorite hymn she always hoped to sing when she was a girl in Pell Lake.

Those rare moments can be incredible, but the people who come into our lives everyday can be just as amazing. Getting to meet Theresa and hearing her inspiring story was something amazing in itself, even apart from our brief history more than 25 years ago and the against-all-odds circumstances of our reunion. (Thankfully, she doesn't remember the odds she must have been up against when she was babysitting me.)

I know this is certainly not the only extraordinary reunion to come about at Luther Seminary. Feel free to post a comment and share your own reaffirming moment.