What was the best compliment you’ve received?
The best compliment I received was not praise for something I had done, but recognition of something I was becoming.
I went to theological college because I wanted to study the Bible. I was hungry to learn, but I never imagined candidating for ministry. I am a fairly quiet person, and I assumed ministers needed to be extroverts. I also doubted my own capacity with words. Ministers, I thought, needed to have something to say in every situation, and I was not that kind of person.
Still, I wanted to study, trusting that the path might become clear over time.
When I wrote my first sermon, I was very nervous about standing up to preach. I also wrote something quite different from the sermons people were used to hearing. It took the form of a first-person narrative based on some exegetical insights from a class that had impacted me. Somewhere along the way, without any conscious decision on my part, it also took on the style of the British storyteller David Kossoff. I had heard Kossoff in a one-man show in Sydney the year before and loved the way he told a story. As I wrote, that influence surfaced naturally. It was not deliberate. It was simply the form the sermon took.
Looking back, I can see that a gift was finding form before I had language for it.
The response that night was striking. People lined up to greet me on the way out of church. One person simply said, “Wow.” Among the congregation was an older woman I called my aunt — not a blood relative, but my grandmother’s friend. She had made the effort to come to an evening service, and I thanked her for being there. There were only a few seconds for conversation.
She looked at me and said, very directly, “You’ll be a minister.”
It took me by surprise. She could see something I could not yet see in myself.
As it turned out, she was right. I went on to serve for twenty years as a parish minister, then spent twelve years teaching trainee ministers how to preach. More recently, I have worked as the head of a university residential college — not parish ministry in the usual sense, but still deeply people-focused and concerned with spiritual formation.
Perhaps that first moment has echoed through the rest of my life. My own preaching voice, when it first emerged, had a creative edge to it. Over time, part of my calling became helping other people find their own voice in the pulpit.
Sometimes the best compliment you receive is not really a compliment at all. It is an act of recognition. Someone sees a shape in your life before you can see it yourself, and names it with startling clarity.
Sometimes other people can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves. And sometimes, if we are fortunate, they say so.
The Afterword 
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