I’ve been pretty open with you about the fact I didn’t really want to be a preacher. Given my history in a family of preachers, entering “the family business” felt cliché. And boring, frankly.

Who would voluntarily take that on?

I remembered that my dad had gotten out of the ministry when I was still young because he was an introvert—and ministry is about nothing, so much as about people. He found it exhausting and frustrating. As an introvert, I didn’t figure I’d fair any better than my father.

“Nuts to that noise,” as my college roommate used to say. I decided that I wanted a more scholarly, less people-y vocation. I wanted to teach. I was pretty sure that that’s what my scholarly father should have done anyway. So, in a way, I guess, I thought I was taking up his legacy by never getting into the preaching racket in the first place.

I’ve told you all that, and I’ve said that when it came time to make an *actual living as an *actual grownup, it finally dawned on me that I had no marketable skills. Instead, my brief foray into assistant-managership at a Speedway in Detroit had proven that I needed what I would have generously (and perhaps, arrogantly) called a more contemplative vocation.

I’ve told you that I then had an epiphany: When my wife finally got fed up with me going to school endlessly, she told me I was going to need to get a job—and preaching was the only way I could think of to make a living.

All of that is true—both my rejection of the idea that being a minister would work for me and then my grudging admission that I was probably doomed to do it anyway.

But what I probably haven’t told you is that my limited marketability as an employee wasn’t the only thing that motivated me to enter the ministry. I had other people influence my decision, leading me to reconsider the whole “family business” thing.

When I attended an evangelical Bible College, I didn’t major in preaching. Instead, I double-majored in New Testament and Biblical Languages … you know, the whole “teaching” thing. But my Hebrew professor, who’d been one of my dad’s friends in seminary, stopped me in the midst of a translation of the book of Ruth after I’d made some irreverent aside or something.

He said, “I’m not sure ministry will suit you. You seem to have to do everything the hard way—rebellious and sarcastic. If you take that with you into ministry, you’re going to find life exceedingly difficult.”

“Pffft! What does he know?” I thought. “If anybody could pull that off, it would be me.”

Now, I didn’t want to become a minister any more than I had, but I sure didn’t want to be told that I *couldn’t be one.

Later, in seminary, we had to take the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory. Now, I’m aware that the Meyers-Briggs test has come under fire as a kind of academically dubious Facebook Quiz to determine what kind of potato you are or which character from the Lord of the Rings you resemble. But at the time, it was all the rage.

My test scores came back, which meant I had to have a conference with one of my professors to interpret my test scores for me. I was an INTP—which, for those uninitiated in Meyers-Briggs Esperanto, means: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving. Here’s one description: “INTPs have a rich inner world and would rather focus their attention on their internal thoughts rather than the external world. They typically do not have a wide social circle, but they *do tend to be close to a select group of people.”

Here’s what I was told: INTP is one of the rarest types in the Meyers-Briggs model; only 1-5% of people fall under this designation. In ministry, it’s even rarer—fewer than 1% of INTPs find ministry a workable vocation.

Then my professor said, “Maybe being a minister isn’t for you. If you go into this, it’s going to be extraordinarily frustrating for you.”

Now, whether any of that is true, I’m not in any position to judge. But, nevertheless, that’s what I was told and, therefore, what I believed for a long time: Face it. You’re probably better suited to being a night watchman at either a library or a mortuary than being a minister.

Okay, fine. I didn’t want to be a minister but don’t tell me I couldn’t handle it—that I wouldn’t be any good at it.

Another time in seminary, I had just preached my senior sermon in chapel—something we all had to do. The whole thing was kind of fun. I don’t remember what I preached, to be honest. What I remember, though, was telling some stories I thought were funny and having people laugh. I liked that. In fact, I felt pretty preacher-y following my chapel debut.

Standing at the front of the chapel afterward, people came by, telling me how good they’d thought I’d done. So I was feeling pretty good about myself and my homiletical aptitude.