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: For Pastors' Wives · Balance · Expectations · Spiritual Walk

You Are Made Worthy

Monday, May 02, 2022

By JL Bernard

I hope you as a pastor’s wife will forever know you are worthy through Christ.

Somehow I was marred and perplexed with the idea of defense, being defended that is. A notion of unworthiness of any effort to protect me had taken a hold of me from early on and seeped out of my pores, my language, and my relationships.

Salvation. Oh for salvation. It curbed and squashed that idea in the strangest of ways. Salvation actually confirmed we are all unworthy, guilty in some way, we run into life through the cobwebs of sin and are unable to save ourselves, but the force of a blood-stained cross defies our smallness and kisses our webbed faces. It becomes sin for us. It screams a relentless verdict that we’re worthy of love. And whether we realize or ever even accept it or not, its actions tore into our existence and did it anyway. Loved us anyway, before we were born and before we even cared. Love decided whether we ever respond to the outstretched hand of rescue, or not. “I love you enough to come out to the tempestuous sea,” He said.

That revelation debunked my self-worthless broken mentality. Not neatly, but in an instant and yet over decades of time. It flooded me and is still deconstructing and renewing my mind.

For years I nursed my secret love affair with God. Stepping in and out of the secret place, back and forth to the ‘real world’ not yet reconciling human love and my place in the world with this divine secret love of God. At least no one knew God loved me this much. He loved the confident, the perfect, the gifted, the untouched, the accepted. It was our secret that he would let me access His love daily. I did not comprehend that as forcefully as love had demanded its own cross and laid down its own life love would trickle and then burst its way into every aspect of my thinking and my life until I would “get it.” Yes, I am worthy of the love of my Father, because He made it so.

For our shoulders to unhunch and the apology of being to melt from our eyes we have to experience a knowing that we are worthy through Christ. We only truly believe it when the words fall from the lips and nail embedded hands of a blood-stained hero straight into our inclined ears and heart.

It may take our memories and scars time to soak up its truth like a bomb. And as it does, we do indeed, unhunch, unshift the eyes, we, un-apologize. We “be” differently, because we think differently, because He loves so differently.

We begin to move, see, and live differently.

Because the “made worthy” has work to do.