Dear Pastor’s Wife: The Word Will Sustain You
By Glenna Marshall
I was only twenty-four when my husband of two years became the full-time senior pastor of a church. Before that, I was in a healthy church with lots of solid, biblical teaching and didn’t see the need for additional time in the Word. That was still true when my husband and I left our home church for him to begin his first pastorate. Our lives were built around church involvement; we’d uprooted our lives and moved across state lines for the church. I had a lot of teaching in my life. I thought that as the pastor’s wife I should be reading my Bible and praying regularly to set an example for others, but I was oblivious to how much I personally needed God’s Word.
Our church ministry was tough from day one. We had no idea what we were doing, and we had walked into quite a difficult situation. What followed were a dozen broken years. It seemed that everything we touched failed, that every hope for the church was met with resistance and criticism, and I struggled with chronic loneliness.
In the midst of a particularly rough year that involved slander toward my husband and a mass exodus at our church, I found myself sitting on my couch night after night with a stomachache and insomnia. I couldn’t control what people thought about us, I couldn’t shield my husband from all the hurtful untruths floating around, and I couldn’t know for sure who to trust with my broken heart. In desperation, I began opening my Bible to the Psalms for comfort.
Night after night—and eventually—morning after morning, the Lord met me in my despair. Though I felt battered by waves of changing opinions and relationships, the words of Scripture became the anchor that steadied my heart. Those words of the psalmists penned so long ago were vibrant with meaning, hope, and promises. If everything continued falling apart in our ministry, the Lord would still prevail, and He would preserve His church as He saw fit. If that didn’t involve us, then we could trust Him with our future. If it did involve us, then He would sustain us through any humiliation and pain that might come. The Psalms helped me to see the constancy of God when everything else in my life felt uncertain to me. I learned that His constancy would always uphold me.
Those years of ministry were incredibly hard to live through. The Lord has graciously preserved us and our church family here, and we are seeing miraculous fruit after years of famine. While I would never want to relive those years again, I am grateful the Lord called us to endure them for I came away forever changed by the ministry of the Word. In desperation, I called to Him, and He not only sustained me with His words, He changed my appetite for them. I could never get enough. From that point forward, I knew that I could not function as a believer, wife, mother, friend, or church member without drinking regularly from the deep well of Scripture.
I can’t explain my early resistance to opening my Bible each day beyond ignorance (and perhaps a good dose of laziness). Corporate Bible intake is incredibly important. We must take part in regular preaching and teaching of the Word with our churches. Spiritual growth happens in both the individual and corporate settings. But, we often reject one for the other. In my case, I had so much spiritual food in the corporate setting that I didn’t feel particularly inspired to study my Bible on my own. It is not legalistic to say that we should be reading our Bibles regularly. How else will we know God who has revealed Himself to us through His Word? How can we share the gospel with our lost friends without a regular study of the gospel? How else can we minister to the suffering if we have no truth with which to comfort them? Though our lives in ministry should be full of corporate learning, there is no replacement for individual learning. We cannot grow in our relationship with Christ through only secondhand conversations. We need Him in all the secret, quiet, lonely places of our hearts, too.
Personal Bible intake doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be consistent. It will definitely feel like work at time, and until you are in the habit of study, you’ll have to work to be devoted to it. But eventually, your heart will catch up to the practice. You’ll find joy that will sustain you through sorrow, hope that will uphold you through fear, correction that will speak to your sin, and comfort that will minister to your hurts. With time, you’ll fill your empty well with truths about God’s good character, with the hope of Christ’s finished work at the cross, and with comfort to endure suffering. You’ll have what you need to comfort and minister to your church family.
It is no easy calling to serve the local church as a pastor’s wife. The rewards are deep and eternally rich, but the day-to-day living in ministry can feel lonely, unappreciated, and overlooked. The most difficult days will cut like a knife through your confidence and friendships. God knew what He was doing when He planted you in your church. He knew it would be hard. He also knew it would be worth the sacrifice (see 1 Cor. 15:58). Therefore, He promised to be with us through both the sweet and sorrowful days of ministry (see Matt. 28:19-20). We will be most certain of His constancy when we are daily opening up His Word to be reminded of it. When we fill our hearts and minds with Scripture, the words of the Lord will eventually change the way we think. We’ll be able to equate suffering with blessing, to persevere through sorrows with joy, and to love others more than we love ourselves.
Take it from me, a pastor’s wife who came to the Scriptures the hard way, the Word will sustain you through every difficult day of church ministry. And you’ll love Him more because of it.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence: Why God is Always Enough (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World (Crossway, June 2020).