Dirt Under the Fingernails of Philosophy

 

For most of my adult life, I was a pastor. I spent twenty years preaching, leading churches and trying to help people make sense of their lives. I was good at it. 

I could preach. I could lead. I could walk into struggling churches and help stabilize them. 

By most outward measurements, I was successful. What few people knew was that for half of those twenty years, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there anymore.

The strange thing is that the clues had been present long before I ever entered ministry. When I started college in 2002, what I really wanted to do was teach. I loved books, ideas and long conversations about philosophy, history and religion. I loved helping people see something they had never noticed before. Teaching seemed like a natural fit.

Life, however, has a way of taking unexpected turns. One opportunity led to another. Churches kept calling, and before long, I had built an entire life around ministry.

By the time I reached my thirties, I found myself increasingly drawn to the world of ideas. I pursued graduate studies and eventually entered a doctoral program under Leonard Sweet, where I studied semiotics and future studies.

The work fascinated me. I could spend hours discussing theology, symbols, philosophy and culture. 

I spent much of my life in my head. Ideas were not only something I enjoyed; they became a refuge. If there was a problem, I believed there had to be an idea, a theory, or a framework that could help me understand it.

Crashing Down

The church I pastored in Michigan would become the last church I ever served. At the time, I didn’t know that. I only knew that it was the most difficult revitalization I had ever attempted. The work was exhausting. Every week felt like another uphill climb. 

I stayed because pastors stay. They keep showing up. They keep believing things can improve. Yet beneath the surface, something was changing.

The poems I was writing during those years revolved around darkness, longing, time, silence, and absence. At the time, I thought I was wrestling with theological questions. Looking back, I wonder if those poems were documenting the beginning of a much deeper unraveling.

Then COVID-19 arrived. Churches everywhere struggled, but for me, the pain was deeply personal. 

Over twenty years in ministry, I had pastored churches that were declining, discouraged and, in some cases, on the edge of collapse. Time after time, they found life again. People returned. Momentum returned. Hope returned.

The church in Michigan was different. Despite years of work, it became the first church I had ever pastored that did not turn around. It became the first church I had ever served that eventually closed its doors.

That loss affected me more deeply than I realized at the time. Years of accumulated stress finally caught up with me. 

In late 2020, my family moved back to Alabama, hoping for a fresh start. Instead, everything that had been held together by momentum finally came apart. The burnout I had ignored for years surfaced. The certainty that had guided most of my adult life disappeared. The God who had once felt close seemed silent. 

I was exhausted, angry and unsure who I was apart from the title I had carried for two decades.

Fracture and Repair

In the fall of 2021, I took a job installing refrigeration gaskets. There was nothing romantic about the decision. I wasn’t chasing a dream or reinventing myself. I needed work. My family needed income.

I was little more than a shell of myself. The years that followed were difficult. We struggled financially. Debt accumulated. 

More than once, it felt like we were on the edge of losing everything. Yet somewhere along those highways and inside those restaurant kitchens, something unexpected happened. The work grounded me.

For years, my world had revolved around churches, conferences, seminaries and ideas. Suddenly, I was spending my days with cooks, managers, truck drivers, restaurant owners and maintenance workers.

The conversations were different. The problems were different. A gasket either fit or it didn’t. A cooler either worked or it didn’t. Reality has a way of stripping away abstraction. Somewhere along those roads, I began paying attention again.

The questions never disappeared. If anything, they became more urgent. The difference was that they were no longer living only inside books. They were attached to people.

They showed up at truck stops, on front porches, in cemeteries, at Waffle Houses, and in ordinary conversations. The philosophy got dirt under its fingernails. The ideas I had spent years studying were suddenly being tested against real life.

The Real Story

For a long time, I believed my story was about leaving ministry. The older I get, the less convinced I am that this is true. I think the deeper story is that a gap had been opening for years between the life I was living and the life I was meant to live.

The crisis did not create that gap. It simply revealed it. What emerged was not a new person, but an older dream that had survived beneath the wreckage. The young man who entered college wanting to teach had never completely disappeared.

Neither had the writer. Neither had the student of ideas. 

They had simply been buried beneath responsibilities, expectations, success and the identities I accumulated along the way. It took losing almost everything to find them again.

Today, when I look back across those years, I no longer see a story about failure. I see a story about becoming. 

The roads were longer than I expected. The lessons were harder than I wanted them to be. Some dreams died. Others changed shape.

Yet somewhere between a pulpit in Michigan, a restaurant kitchen in Alabama, and the endless miles of interstate in between, I slowly began finding my way back to the person I might have been all along.