I wrote a few weeks ago about the Profound Disappointment I was feeling after hearing that I did not pass the interview portion of examination for Commissioning in the Cal-Pac Conference of the UMC.  And the responses have been overwhelming!  More than once, I have been moved to tears…  In that manly way of course.  ;-)

My initial Facebook/Twitter post garnered dozens of responses plus a whole bunch of individual wall posts, direct messages, emails, and telephone calls.  I can’t begin to say thank you to all of you.  I don’t have the words.

I do want to share one specific message here.  A friend emailed and said that she had recently been doing some video interviews with church members about their church, faith, and experiences of God.  When one youth – one who I knew when I served that congregation, and who is now enduring a life-threatening disease – was asked about his favorite church experience, he said that (quoting from the email):

it was when PASTOR Bob Rhodes (and he went on to describe your role) invited me to join the youth group. He said that it was his best and favorite memory of this church.  To me, that was such an affirmation of your love and ministry, Bob. You are surrounded in love and prayers.

And so I come to understand that the Grace of God is present in and through this difficult time.  I don’t believe for a second that God intended for me to endure this profound disappointment – that’s not my theology.  I can’t bring myself to say or think that God intends hurt and despair on anyone.  What I do believe is that God has been reaching out in comforting and enduring grace (some might even call it prevenient grace) before I – in my anger and hurt and disappointment – was willing to acknowledge God’s presence.

Again, my thanks to you all.  You consistently show me that God continues to work and to call goodness out of everything.

In this process toward ordained ministry, I underwent a psychological assessment that determined that I top out the introvert/extrovert scale.  And guess which end I was on?

<insert my best imitation of a smile here>

So it may make sense that I begin to process this profound disappointment in an outward way.  To be honest, I do this for a couple of reasons (though I’m not sure which ranks higher for me right now).  One is that I haven’t blogged in quite a while and this is a pretty solid subject to talk about.  Second is that I know I’m not the only one who has experienced this kind of disappointment, and often the simple act of sharing (and reading about) similar experiences can be comforting.

And so yesterday was the day of bad news.  I found out that I didn’t pass the interview that I’ve spent a great deal of time and energy preparing for.  When I say interview, I really mean that it’s very much an oral examination.  The way the process went is that there are three separate 30-minute interviews with three separate groups.  Later, they get together to have conversation and eventually take a vote.  And I didn’t receive the required 75% to pass.

So what went wrong?

That’s a hard question to answer today, because today I’m angry.  In that anger, I find myself wanting to lash out.  I find myself short-tempered.  I find myself wanting to blame the process or the people or the politics or any number of factors.  And yes, I surely blame myself.  Whether or not I hold this blame equally is something that changes roughly every few seconds.  Likely I’ll end up blaming myself most.  That’s what I do.

And don’t take that to mean that I’ll go to that dark place of not being good enough or giving up.  That’s not what I mean.  The simple truth is that the people conducting the interview didn’t hear the things they needed to hear from me to vote positively.  That’s the truth.  And it sucks.