By Rodetta Cook

Rodetta Cook has been a pastor’s wife for over 40 years. She and her husband, Ron, have actively served the Lord together in ministry during the entire time and are co-founders of Care for Pastors. She understands the expectations, loneliness and how hard it is to find balance in ministry as a pastor’s wife. Rodetta also leads the pastor’s wives initiative at Care for Pastors called The Confidante and ministers to hundreds of wives each week. She strives to share blogs with other pastors’ wives that will help them in their ministry walk.

Posted by Rodetta Cook

Topics: Balance · Expectations · Family · For Pastors' Wives

Did I Really Sign up for This?

Monday, October 22, 2018

We recently had our 2nd Confidante Retreat for pastors’ wives and our theme was “Did I Really Sign up for This?” Balancing Marriage and Ministry. We had a wonderful time together and look forward to doing it again.

I would like to share one of the wives testimony about the weekend.

The 2018 Confidante Retreat at the Renaissance Hotel in Orlando is now just a pleasing and satisfying memory. Knowing that The Confidante is there to support and encourage women who happened to be married to a Pastor, their hard work in planning and executing this retreat paid off! Personally, I feel appreciated, loved, encouraged and filled up!

My favorite part of the retreat was meeting many of the 24 other participants, some whom I met at last year’s retreat, and being reunited with Rodetta and Patti. My second favorite part was hearing Ron Cook speak to us so directly and lovingly about who we are in Christ and our true identity. “Because of Christ’s redemption, I am a new creation of great worth. I am deeply loved, completely forgiven, fully pleasing, totally accepted by God and absolutely complete in Christ.”

We laughed, we cried, we prayed, we worshiped, we painted, and we ate. We met beautiful 19 year old Gracyn Denbesten, who literally shared her heart story with us. We heard Kit’s wisdom, she’s also too young to have such wisdom but has been so blessed by God to be full of great takeaways. “You cannot put on the full armor of God when your perception is, it doesn’t fit.”

I had to miss the closing devotions by Patti to catch my plane, but was blessed to speak with her at breakfast and learn what she would impart.

How awesome is our God that everyone who spoke at the event echoed the same theme and confirmed what God wanted us to hear! Being married to a pastor is a joy (most of the time) but living our lives out for our audience of ONE brings us great satisfaction. Marriage and ministry can go together beautifully, when the Author of Marriage is in His rightful place in our lives. Thank you all for being a part of such a wonderful experience, thank you to Care for Pastors for loving us so well!

– Christy

Being a pastor’s wife comes with many challenges and can be tough on our marriage. However, if we work at keeping boundaries in place and keeping God, family and church in the right order it makes it much easier.

We are here to walk this ministry journey with you and help in any way we can.