In Kansas I expected cold, and weather, I expected cultural differences, I expected bad ethnic food, and good ol’ boys in pick up trucks. I mentally prepared myself to adjust to these changes, but I never predicted that I would need to adjust to being taken as a spiritual leader.
…After all I was already a pastor in California, that sounds pretty impressive even compared to CSM for InterVarsity. And even before that I’d been in professional ministry since 2005 with extensive volunteer experience but always in and around people who knew me when I wasn’t.
In Kansas that sounds impressive. In California nobody even really knows that about me, and those that do don’t think of it that way, They knew me in high school, and I was a Jesus Freak then, and I’m a Jesus Freak now, apparently at some point along the line somebody started paying me for it.
Now I’m Ryan The InterVarsity Guy. And that’s it, nobody knows me outside of a professional ministry context. It’s crazy!
Pastors want to meet with me, and they do so as peers, people want to get to know me as a missionary, and everybody who meets me in this entire state is meeting a minister first, and any modifier of “strange”, or “intelligent”, or “handsome”, or “neurotic” or “heretical” gets added onto that base noun “minister”
Whereas in California “minister” was typically an adjective modifying something or somebody else people knew me as “handsome guy, who is also a minister”
I don’t have a point to make. That’s the story, I just thought I’d share. It’s an interesting contraposotive of Mark 6:4 of course, but you got that from the title.
Please be in prayer for me as I strive to be deserving of this reputation.