Photo by woodleywonderworks

By Joy Wong

In the beginning of September, I felt like I was finally on my way.  After years of undecidedness after completing an MDiv, I finally knew, deep down, that I wanted to be in pastoral ministry.   Then, after months of investigating and deliberating over various ordination tracks, I landed on the PCUSA track.  Within a month, my husband and I found a PCUSA church and I attended a helpful orientation for Presbyterian students.  We were each given a neat little flowchart showing how each step of the ordination process was expected to be completed in the coming few years.  There were a lot of steps — courses to be taken, exams to be prepared for, a committee to be assigned to, etc. — but I found the flowchart strangely comforting.  I am a planner, so I find a sense of relief in timelines and schedules.

And then, it happened:  In mid-September, shortly after the PCUSA orientation, I found out that I was pregnant!

It was happy news for us.  My husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for the past few years, and we had a miscarriage this past year.  So this is something we wanted and were hoping for.

However, after about a day of thankfulness for the news, a panic started to creep in.  What about ordination?  It had taken me so long to get to a place where I finally knew where I was going, and now, would those plans be derailed?  I stared at that ordination flowchart, trying to imagine how to fit a pregnancy and motherhood in that neat little timeline, and my head was dizzy with the unknowns and “what-ifs”.  In fast approach of freakout mode, I sent out an email to multiple women I knew who had experience balancing career and children, asking for their advice.  What could I reasonably expect to complete in the ordination process during pregnancy?  And after?

What’s interesting is that in all the responses, I didn’t get one standard piece of advice; there were variations, and sometimes, one opinion outrightly contradicted another.  But overall, I gained a bit more wisdom and perspective.  Somehow, reading their responses made me realize that some things couldn’t be planned for, and that was okay.  Moreover, they assured me that it was alright to plan along the way, and that I didn’t have to have it all figured out from beginning to end (much as I would like to).

In the end, I dropped all my fixations on whether I was going to complete such-and-such a step before or after delivery and whether I could handle a certain workload in a particular time period.  Instead, I stepped back from it all and asked myself the question, Did I want kids or not? and I knew the answer was yes.  And then I asked myself, Years from now, will it really matter whether you got that ordination step done before or after delivery? and I knew the answer was no.

Big picture speaking, I know I want to be a mom and an ordained minister.  Clearly, now is the time for me to have kids.  I’m used to going through life driven with an urgent inner voice that tells me I’m behind schedule and that I need to hurry up.  But stories of people who produced their life’s most impactful work at an old age, and even the fact that all that Jesus needed to complete in his ministry was done in just three years’ time, encourages me to give up keeping time.  I’m now learning how to hold onto my goals a little more loosely, and let God be the Timekeeper of my life; for then, I can rest assured to be right on schedule.

Joy Wong is a contributing author to Mirrored Reflections: Reframing Biblical Characters, published in September 2010.  She has an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary, a BA in English from Princeton University, as well as four years’ experience in industrial distribution management.  Joy and her husband Will attend Northland Village Church.