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I can’t really tell you about my call to seminary without also telling you about my struggles with infertility. They are forever linked together in my heart, and they’re probably also the defining personal situations of my late twenties. This story gets a little messy, y’all, but I’ve come to learn that the very best things often do.
To tell this the right way, we have to back up to 2012 – my husband Ethan and I got married six months after college graduation with the intention to move back to our hometown (we’re high school sweethearts) settling down close to our families, and raising babies. We were good Southern Baptists, and that’s what good Southern Baptist couples do. Ethan got a job working in the IT department of a local bank, and I started teaching middle school.
I’d decided on teaching as a career in late high school, but what I really wanted to do was be a youth pastor. When I was 14, I first felt God’s call. However, a handful of well-meaning folks at the church where I grew up told me that I must have misheard because women were called to be wives and mothers. Occasionally Sunday School teachers or Vacation Bible School directors, but certainly not pastors. I wanted to do the right thing in God’s eyes, so I accepted that and decided that I could teach. Teaching allowed me to hang out and influence middle school kids and be a heavily involved youth group volunteer. This was a great life, and it’s worth noting that I’m not angry at the people who told 14-year-old me those things. They are good, kind people who helped raise me and genuinely believed they were leading me in the right ways.
My faith in God’s path for our family didn’t start to crumble until 2016. That summer, my husband and I had been trying to have a baby for almost a year. I’d asked about it at my yearly OB-GYN appointment, and they ran some tests. We found out that I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. This is a big name for a disorder that basically means that my hormones are nonsense and don’t do anything they’re supposed to do. It’s extremely difficult, and often impossible, for women with this disorder to get pregnant and carry babies to full-term. Hearing it out loud – that I might never get pregnant without the help of procedures that we couldn’t afford – was devastating.
I had it out with God.
“Why would You make my body incapable of doing the one thing that everyone says is supposed to be my calling?”
“Why would You give me this overwhelming desire to love, and shepherd, and disciple children and then not give me any children? What is Your problem?”
Trust me. This is a sanitized version of the conversations I had with the God of the universe.
To handle this pain, I threw myself into more volunteering at our current church, and I eventually left teaching to take an administrative staff position there. That job allowed me to build relationships with local and state associations of Baptist churches. In 2018, I had the opportunity to take part in a leadership cohort through the Baptist General Association of Virginia called Uptick.
Even though I wasn’t sure what I was doing there, because I was one of only two non-pastors in our group of 12, it’s fair to say that the discipleship I received in Uptick turned my world upside down. Uptick allowed me to hear God’s voice in a way that I never had before.
It gave me the tools to say, out loud, that I had not misheard God at 14 and that God was calling me to youth ministry full time. It gave me the courage to claim that calling and to smile when people who loved me told me that they weren’t sure it was a good idea.
I knew that I needed more training, so I hesitantly started looking for online seminaries. There was a seminary that was fully affirming of women about an hour from our house in Virginia, and we decided that we could probably move up there so that I could attend classes.
Ethan never once questioned my calling when I told him that we needed to find a way for me to go to seminary. He has been nothing but supportive from the time I started talking about it. When I said, “Hey, I think God is calling me to seminary and full-time ministry,” his immediate response was, “I think He has been for a while now.”
After 14 years of sitting on my hands and trying so hard to fit into the Southern Baptist box, I could no longer deny that God was speaking directly to my spirit. It was helpful that I was introduced to the fact that there are many interpretations of scripture and that I wasn’t flying in the face of God’s established order. Just one understanding of it.
We were all geared up to make this move when the seminary shut down for financial reasons. I was disappointed. But I knew that I still had to go to seminary somewhere – at this point, I could not turn back.
Ethan and I had made peace with the fact that we might not ever have any children. Maybe this was the reason? Maybe we could move out of state for seminary because God hadn’t given us any babies? Maybe we would adopt, or foster, or just parent the daylights out of the kids that would one day be in my youth group.
It was all good – we could go wherever God called us.
On a swing for the fences, I applied for a full scholarship to Truett Seminary at Baylor University. It was 1400 miles from everyone we loved. I didn’t expect it to happen, so it didn’t feel that risky. But, two months later, I was awarded the scholarship. Ethan and I both felt that, even though it was outrageous, this was God’s voice telling us to go to Texas.
We knew we’d make our families and friends sad. I’m a classic people pleaser and spent a good part of those months in which we made the decision agonized over leaving people I loved. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was letting them down. All the while, I felt an overwhelming peace that we were doing the right thing.
In April of 2019, I flew down to Waco to visit Truett before officially committing and finding an apartment to lease. I was blown away by how perfect it felt. I knew it was right even as I cried myself to sleep in the hotel over the massive support system we’d be leaving behind.
I remember calling Ethan that night and telling him, "This is it." He agreed without even seeing it.
We signed a lease on an apartment, put our house on the market, and fully committed to this move – all while I was battling a stomach bug that seemed to come and go. About two weeks into regularly throwing up and not knowing why, it occurred to me that stomach bugs probably didn’t mysteriously disappear in the afternoon and return the next morning.
A test the next day and a doctor’s visit the following week confirmed what I was too scared to even dare hope for – I was pregnant. After years of trying – of changing my diet, of taking supplements, of meticulously counting cycles and days with no results – we had a baby on the way. The doctors warned me that I was a high-risk pregnancy. It was likely I would have gestational diabetes or other scary complications. With nothing more than lots and lots of morning sickness, our healthy baby boy, Russell James, was born on January 8th, 2020. Smack in the middle of my first year at Truett Seminary in Waco, TX. He’s playing in his playpen while I’m writing this, and I just had to pause to shed a few tears and kiss the top of his head because there are days that I still can’t quite believe that God gave him to us.
The sum total of my 20s was stumbling around, trying to do the things I thought were God’s plan. When the traditional route – babies and church volunteer lady – didn’t work out, I concluded that God was calling me to do something a little bit wild. Moving across the country for seminary may not seem that wild or progressive, but it was compared to the life I always thought I’d lead. I figured that if God didn’t want me to be a mother, then God wanted me to live outside the box. It wouldn’t be the first time God had called someone to live outside the box, so maybe that was our family’s path.
As it turns out, the situation was never so starkly either/or. When I was demanding to know, “Lord, do you want me to be a mother, or do you want me to be a pastor?” the answer was an ever-loving, ever-constant, bigger-than-I-ever-dared-dream, “Both.”
About the Author:
Carlisle Davidhizar
Hometown: Newport News, VA
Undergrad: Longwood University
Favorite Verse: 1 Peter 4:8 "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."
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