Then Mom asked Colton an odd question. “Did Jesus say anything
about your dad becoming a pastor?”
Just as I was wondering privately why in the world something like my
vocation would even come up, Colton surprised me when he nodded
enthusiastically. “Oh, yes! Jesus said he went to Daddy and told him he
wanted Daddy to be a pastor and Daddy said yes, and Jesus was really
happy.”
I just about fell out of my chair. That was true, and I vividly remember the
night it happened. I was thirteen years old and attending a summer youth
camp at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. At one of the
evening meetings, Rev. Orville Butcher delivered a message about how
God calls people to ministry and uses them to do his work all over the
world.
Pastor Butcher was a short, bald, lively preacher—energetic and
engaging, not dull and dry the way kids sometimes expect an older pastor
to be. He challenged the group of 150 teenagers that night: “There are
some of you here tonight whom God could use as pastors and
missionaries.”
The memory of that moment of my life is one of those crystal-clear ones,
distilled and distinct, like the moment you graduate from high school or
your first child is born. I remember that the crowd of kids faded away and
the reverend’s voice receded into the background. I felt a pressure in my
heart, almost a whisper: That’s you, Todd. That’s what I want you to do.
There was no doubt in my mind that I had just heard from God. I was
determined to obey. I tuned back in to Pastor Butcher just in time to hear
him say that if any of us had heard from God that night, if any of us had
made a commitment to serve him in ministry, we should tell someone
about it when we got home so that at least one other person would know.
So when I got home from camp, I walked into the kitchen.
“Mom,” I said, “when I grow up, I’m going to be a pastor.”
Since that day decades before, Mom and I had revisited that
conversation a couple of times. But we had never told Colton about it.