Six months after our wedding, instead of enjoying marital bliss, I sat sobbing on the floor As my husband listened as I described yet another donor meeting gone wrong.

During the meeting, the donor explained, “We believe in the ministry. But we feel that since your husband has a good job, you could just volunteer. So, we are going to stop giving.”

I thanked her, lying, saying, “I understand.”

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand when a college friend said that she was stopping giving because I needed to submit to my husband by leaving paid ministry. I didn’t understand when another donor insisted that they were helping me fulfill my wifely duties by pulling their funding. I didn’t understand when a church said, because I was married, they had decided to donate to other ministries.

I didn’t understand, because I thought the ministry’s donors gave because they believed in the ministry. I could not have imagined that getting married would have meant the loss of so much of our ministry budget and ultimately the cutting of my salary.

It seemed impossible to trust God to provide funding for the ministry when it seemed like everyone was saying they wouldn’t support a married woman in ministry. That day, I made a choice, that I regret. I choose not to trust God and to be bitter about having to raise money for a parachurch ministry.  

Choosing to Distrust God’s Goodness

The current parachurch fundraising models forces many people of color and women to minister underfunded. Throughout my own time in ministry, I’ve learned that it is possible to recognize that this is an unjust system and still trust God to provide. But that is not the decision I made. 

With each phone call, email or meeting where a donor said they couldn’t give, I lost focus on God’s love for me and his past faithfulness. I forgot that for three years, God had faithfully provided for the ministry at the University of Georgia (UGA), where I work. I lost sight that God had created a new ministry with fraternity and sorority students out of nothing and given me the privilege to walk with students as they became disciples of Christ. I forgot that he had faithfully provided for that ministry. And even though some donors were deciding to give elsewhere, God had provided over fifty donors that still faithfully gave to the ministry. I focused on what I lost, ignoring all the ways that God had provided. 

The loss of donors perpetuated a narrative that the evangelical world didn’t support married women in ministry, and it was easier to believe this narrative than to believe in God’s faithfulness. 

When the Hebrews heard that “the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worship.” (Exodus 4:31) But their worship turned to disbelief. Moses went to Pharaoh, asking for him to allow the Hebrews to go into the wilderness to worship their God. Pharaoh responded by forcing the Hebrews to make bricks without enough materials, thus making the Hebrews’ lives as slaves harder. The injustice of slavery was made worse by the cruel circumstances that Pharaoh imposed on the Hebrew people. 

But the Hebrew people decided that their circumstances were more trustworthy than the promise of deliverance from God. Even after God, again, promised Moses that he would deliver his people, the Hebrew people “did not listen to [Moses] because of their discouragement and harsh labor.” (Exodus 6:9) It was easier for the Hebrews to focus on their injustices than to trust God. 

Like the Hebrews, I choose to believe in injustice and the narrative it creates rather than God’s provision. But Jesus made another choice. 

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus starts to become physically ill, as he considers the unjust path ahead of him. He knows that God the Father has chosen for him, a perfect man, to die for the sins of many. Fully knowing the agony of the cross set before him, and with blood in his eyes, he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but you will.” (Matthew 26:39) Jesus did not want to go to the cross. But he still trusts God. In The Good and Beautiful God, James Bryan Smith writes, “Jesus knew he was loved by his Father and was, therefore, able to trust him through the pain.”

Jesus’ ability to trust God came from the knowledge that he was loved by God. However, because of our culture’s obsession with “blessing” and the American church’s flirtation — and in some cases affair — with the prosperity gospel, it is easier for me to believe I am loved by God when everything is going according to my plans. 

When God asked me to trust him to provide for the ministry, I said no. It didn’t seem possible that enough donors would agree to support a woman in full time ministry. Each meeting hurt both my pride and my feelings. And as our support continued to drop, and I lost a significant portion of my salary, it was easier to forget that God loved me and choose not to trust his provisions.

Trusting God does not minimize the horrors of injustice that exist in the world today. But we are still called to remember our Heavenly father’s love for us and choose to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, by saying, “Your will be done.”

Choosing to Perpetuate the Lie

For nearly a decade, students accepted Christ, learned to walk with Jesus, and started ministries in their fraternities and sororities, but my choice to distrust God blinded me to those miracles. I instead became obsessed with my failure in fundraising, doubting whether I was called into ministry at all. Even worse, I chose to continue to perpetuate the unjust system, by leading others to also distrust God.

Sitting outside of a local coffee shop, I listened as a young woman repeated my own words, “I can’t raise money in the south. As a married woman, people don’t want to give to the ministry. It’s unfair.” 

I tried to encourage her, by asking if she wanted help finding new prospects, or if we could go to God in prayer. But she correctly pointed out, “You have amazing prospects. You are well established in your town and you aren’t fully funded. You make it work, by barely taking a salary. My husband doesn’t have a great job, we can’t afford that.”

My husband and I had chosen not to trust God and instead rely on my husband’s salary. It was easier to rely on his salary then to trust God to provide enough for both our growing ministry and my salary. But in making that choice, I had created an example, that to survive as a woman in ministry, you needed to marry a wealthy man, and this aided in perpetuating the injustice around parachurch fundraising models.  

My choice to distrust God led me down a rabbit hole of despair, unaware – or perhaps indifferent – to how I was perpetuating the injustice of fundraising. I could have chosen to trust God to write a different narrative for the women that I trained, mentored and supervised. Or I could have learned how to work within this unjust system, using the resources I have access to and tried to raise money for others.

But I didn’t choose to do anything about the unjust system, except to believe it was more powerful than God and to complain about it.

Choosing not to Learn

These are the choices I regret. I don’t regret the plethora of failures I’ve made through ministry and in my own walk with God, because each failure has been an opportunity that God used to shape me. I don’t regret my failures, because most of my failures have come from me earnestly trying to follow God.

However, my choice to distrust God, did not draw me closer to God. I did not grow as a disciple. Instead, my decision led to choices that took my focus off of Jesus and onto the pain of my experience. I regret how I allowed those choices to overshadow so much of the joy and the gifts God gladly gave me. I also mourn how many of my failures have hurt others. It’s only because of the grace of my community that those failures have given me opportunities to privately and publicly ask for forgiveness. And as God has restored relationships, he taught me to love people more deeply.

Choosing a New Choice

In our fallen world, pain and suffering are realities. The process of learning to trust God when we are facing those realities allows God to mold us. As I am trying to learn a new pattern of trust, I’m trying to follow Jesus’ example in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

I’m choosing to focus on God’s love for me and his past provision. Writing down ways that he has provided in the past has been incredibly helpful. When I feel the desire to complain, I’m trying to choose to find a way to praise God instead. These little choices are helping me to focus on God’s love. 

When I don’t like “the cup” God has given me, I choose to pray. I often struggle to find words for my prayers, so I’m reading Jesus’ prayer as my own: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Jesus’ prayer helps me to remember that God is my father and, as my father, he loves me. Jesus’ prayer also is a reminder that, sometimes, I have to choose to pray for God’s will to be done, instead of mine.

I cannot control the cup God has given me. But I can choose to respond to the pain and suffering by trusting God. 

The loss of donors perpetuated a narrative that the evangelical world didn't support married women in parachurch ministry, and it was easier to believe this narrative than to believe in God’s faithfulness.  Click To Tweet