From Kelekis Restaurant to the freedom of listening-obedience.
In Brief
When I was sixteen, my future wife and I sat together in Kelekis Restaurant in Winnipeg, dreaming aloud about getting married and having twenty children. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t have a career in mind. But I knew I wanted to be married and have children. Looking back, I recognize that I already had a father’s heart.
Recently, while going through some of my old writing, I came across a little poem called Keleki’s Womb. I have no recollection of writing it, or what prompted it. But Kelekis itself has always been associated with that one memory. As far as my memory is concerned, it might be the only time I ever went there.
Our marriage eventually ended, and with it came the painful conviction that two things central to my life had been irreparably damaged: my place as a father and my calling to pastoral ministry. I believed that being divorced disqualified me from becoming a pastor. Words spoken by my brother John reinforced that belief, and I lived under their weight for years.
Recently, while accompanying Pastor Mark to pray for a woman at her mother’s request, I recognized something I had not previously understood. I had been living under a lie. I believe God brought that lie into the light, and I stepped out from under it.
Today I have five children, seven grandchildren, and fifty-six children entrusted to my care on my school bus. Each year some leave and others arrive. The number of young lives that have passed through my care continues to grow.
The sixteen-year-old who dreamed of twenty children could never have imagined how his life would unfold. Yet the heart of that dream has found expression in ways he could not have anticipated.
And through it all, two passages have helped me find my footing: Matthew 6:33–34 and Daniel 3:16–18. Seek first the kingdom. Do not be anxious about tomorrow. God is able to deliver, but even if He does not, remain faithful.
I have come to call this listening-obedience. I need not dictate what my calling must look like. I need to listen and respond to what God places before me.
In Depth
For those who would like to follow the threads of this reflection, the sections below explore the dream itself, the assumptions I carried about my identity, the lie that followed my divorce, and a recent Sunday morning at River Valley Vancouver that brought these matters into sharper focus.
- 1. Kelekis and Twenty Children
- 2. Schopenhauer and the Father’s Heart
- 3. Marion Milner and a Life of One’s Own
- 4. When the Dream Fell Apart
- 5. The Lie I Lived Under
- 6. A Journey with Pastor Mark
- 7. Haley: Remembering the Cross
- 8. Pastor Bish: The Fear of Man
- 9. But If Not
- 10. The Shepherd Without a Title
- 11. Listening-Obedience
1. Kelekis and Twenty Children
Kelekis was a Winnipeg institution, famous for its hot dogs and french fries. For many people, it brings back memories of food, family outings, and a restaurant that belonged to another era. For me, however, the name is inseparable from a conversation I had when I was sixteen years old.
My future wife and I were sitting there dreaming about our future. We wanted to get married, and we talked about having twenty children. I don’t recall the details of the conversation, but I remember the dream. It has remained with me all these years.
What makes this particularly interesting is that I didn’t know what I wanted to become professionally. I wasn’t imagining a career or a position of influence. I wanted to be a husband and a father. That was the future I could imagine, and it was enough.
Years later, I wrote a short piece called Keleki’s Womb. I don’t remember writing it, and I cannot explain the circumstances surrounding it. There are smiling feathers, fluffy green grass, and a peculiar sense of perfect peace. It ends with that mysterious reference to Kelekis.
I am reluctant to assign a meaning to something whose origins I cannot remember. Nevertheless, rediscovering it has brought me back to that restaurant and the two young people who sat there imagining a life together.
2. Schopenhauer and the Father’s Heart
Recently I was reflecting on Arthur Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, particularly his observations about women. Schopenhauer made sweeping generalizations about the differences between men and women, many of which reflect the assumptions and prejudices of his time.
What caught my attention was that I recognized aspects of my own personality in characteristics he attributed to women. His descriptions of women’s orientation toward marriage and children brought me back to my own adolescence. At sixteen, those were precisely the things I was thinking about.
During my school years, I was often more comfortable among girls than boys. My closest friends in Grade 10 were girls. I didn’t understand myself to be anything other than male, but I didn’t particularly identify with some of the behaviour and expectations associated with boys either.
Over the years I have become increasingly comfortable describing these things simply as my character traits. Some may be more commonly associated with women, but they are nevertheless mine. I need not surrender them to someone else’s classification.
Indeed, my wife Cheryl possesses characteristics often associated with men. We are different people, and those differences can complement one another without either of us needing to become someone else.
Schopenhauer’s categories may tell us something about the assumptions of his era, but they do not adequately describe the full variety of human personality. The young man in Kelekis was not less of a man because he dreamed of marriage and children. He was simply expressing something deeply important to him.
3. Marion Milner and a Life of One’s Own
Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, first published in 1934, provides another way of approaching these questions. Milner explored the difficulty of discovering what one genuinely thinks, feels, and desires when so much of life is shaped by expectations imposed from outside.
One of the things that interested me about her writing was her struggle to recover confidence in her own intuitive experience. She had become accustomed to relying upon accepted methods of thinking and the judgments of others. In the process, she found herself losing touch with something essential in her own inner life.
Her work encourages me to consider how easily we can mistake conformity for maturity. We learn what is expected of us, and sometimes we become so occupied with meeting those expectations that we cease to recognize our own experience.
That does not mean every personal inclination is necessarily wise or good. Discernment remains necessary. But there is a difference between examining our character honestly and allowing someone else to dictate what our character must mean.
As a Christian, I understand spiritual formation as something more substantial than learning to fit a particular social mould. The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23 is not divided into masculine and feminine categories. Love, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control belong to the character of Christ.
Perhaps the question is not whether I possess the characteristics expected of a man, but whether the characteristics I possess are being shaped by love and exercised responsibly.
4. When the Dream Fell Apart
My first marriage did not last. The dream we shared at sixteen did not unfold as we had imagined. When my wife left, she told me she was leaving for someone who would give her what I could not. Those words have remained with me. I have often thought that “would not” would have been a more accurate description than “could not.”
There is much history behind those words, and I don’t intend to rehearse it here. What matters for this reflection is what happened within me as the marriage ended.
I believed my role as a father had changed irreparably. The family life I had imagined was gone. I was still a father, of course, but the ordinary daily life of fatherhood had been profoundly altered.
And there was something else. I had come to understand my calling as pastoral. I believed I had a shepherd’s heart, but now I was divorced. According to the understanding I held at the time, that meant I was disqualified from becoming a pastor.
It is difficult to describe what happens when the very things around which someone has organized his hopes seem to have been taken away. I had not simply lost a marriage. I had begun to believe that the future I understood myself to have been called toward was no longer available.
Yet somewhere in those years, Matthew 6:33–34 and Daniel 3:16–18 became particularly important to me. I could not insist that God restore the future I had imagined. I could, however, continue to seek His kingdom and remain faithful to Him.
5. The Lie I Lived Under
My brother John had spoken words to me about never being in ministry. Those words became part of the way I understood myself. Together with my beliefs about divorce, they reinforced the conclusion that pastoral ministry was no longer possible for me.
For years, I lived under that conclusion.
There is an important distinction between the consequences of an event and the meaning we assign to it. My divorce was real, and its consequences were real. But the conclusion that I was therefore permanently disqualified from being useful to God was something more than the event itself.
I had accepted a verdict about my future, and I had allowed it to govern my understanding of my calling.
Recently, I came to recognize that verdict as a lie. I believe God showed me that I had been living under something that did not come from Him.
My brother’s words were his words. They were not necessarily God’s words. Nor was my understanding of what divorce meant for my future necessarily God’s final judgment concerning me.
Recognizing that distinction has been profoundly liberating.
6. A Journey with Pastor Mark
The realization came in a rather ordinary setting. I was accompanying Pastor Mark to pray for a woman at the request of her mother. We were travelling together when Mark began talking about people who had been coming forward for prayer, people who had been living under lies and needed to experience freedom from them.
As he spoke, I began to recognize something about myself. I was one of those people. I had been living under a lie concerning my calling and my place in God’s service.
I believe the Holy Spirit brought that recognition to me. It wasn’t the result of someone presenting a new argument about pastoral qualifications. Nor had someone offered me a position in ministry. I simply recognized the lie for what it was, and I stepped out from under it.
There is something rather striking about the circumstances. I was on my way to pray for someone who needed care when I recognized that I had been living under the belief that I was disqualified from ministry.
I was already participating in an act of service. Yet I had been carrying a judgment about myself that suggested such a calling had been lost.
Nothing about my history changed that day. What changed was the authority I had been giving to an old conclusion.
7. Haley: Remembering the Cross
During a recent Sunday morning service at River Valley Vancouver, Haley, one of our worship team members, led the congregation in communion. Her message came from Hebrews 10:11–18, where the writer contrasts the repeated sacrifices of the old covenant with the single, sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
She drew particular attention to Hebrews 10:14, which describes those who have been perfected through Christ’s offering while continuing to be sanctified. The sacrifice is complete, yet the work of spiritual formation continues in our lives.
Haley then shared a sentence she had encountered in a book she was reading:
“To remember our sin is to forget the cross.”
She did not suggest that Christians should ignore their wrongdoing or cease examining their lives. Rather, she distinguished the honest recognition of sin from the continual rehearsal of guilt and shame. Christ has dealt with sin, and believers need not remain trapped in condemnation.
She spoke of people who had become stuck, unable to move forward because of the shame they carried. She expressed her belief that God wanted to bring freedom to those living under such burdens.
Her message brought to mind the distinction between remembering what has happened and continuing to live under the condemnation we associate with it.
I do not need to deny my divorce or pretend that it had no consequences. But neither do I need to continue treating it as evidence that God’s purposes for my life have been permanently cancelled.
Haley reminded us that Jesus instructed His followers to remember Him. Communion directs our attention toward Christ and what He has accomplished, rather than leaving us endlessly occupied with our failures.
This section reflects Haley’s communion message at River Valley Vancouver. The application to my personal history is my own reflection.
8. Pastor Bish: The Fear of Man
Later in the same service, Pastor Bish continued a series of messages dealing with fear. His particular emphasis that morning was the difference between the fear of man and the fear of the Lord.
He began with Proverbs 29:25:
“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe.”
Pastor Bish described the fear of man as giving greater weight to what people think of us than to what God thinks of us. He spoke about the ways people can become trapped by the desire for approval, even when that desire interferes with their willingness to follow Christ.
He referred to Galatians 1:10, where Paul asks whether he is seeking the approval of people or of God. Bish also acknowledged his own struggle with wanting to please people in his pastoral responsibilities.
He then turned to the fear of the Lord, explaining that biblical reverence is not simply being frightened of God. It involves taking God seriously, living in awe of His holiness, and allowing that reverence to shape our conduct.
Drawing from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and finally Isaiah 6, he described a life in which God’s character and authority become more important than the judgments and expectations of others.
His message caused me to think again about the authority I had given my brother’s words. I had allowed a human judgment to become part of the framework through which I understood my relationship with God and my future in His service.
That doesn’t mean every concern about pastoral qualifications is merely the fear of man. Scripture deserves careful attention, and churches have legitimate responsibilities when recognizing leaders. But there is a difference between discerning qualifications responsibly and allowing someone’s pronouncement to become an unquestionable verdict over another person’s life.
Pastor Bish concluded with Isaiah’s vision of God’s holiness. The seraphim declare in Isaiah 6:3:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
The central question is one of authority. Whose judgment ultimately governs the way I live?
For me, the answer returns to listening-obedience. I want to take God seriously enough to listen to Him, rather than allowing either my ambitions or another person’s conclusions to determine the course of my life.
This section summarizes themes from Pastor Bish’s sermon on the fear of man and the fear of the Lord. The connections to my experience with my brother and my understanding of pastoral calling are my own.
9. But If Not
Two passages became particularly important to me following the breakdown of my first marriage. The first was Matthew 6:33–34, where Jesus instructs His followers to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and not to be anxious about tomorrow.
The second was Daniel 3:16–18, where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand before Nebuchadnezzar and refuse to worship his image. They acknowledge that God is able to deliver them from the furnace, but they do not make their obedience dependent upon that deliverance.
Those words, “But if not,” became especially meaningful to me.
Even if the marriage I had dreamed of could not be restored, I could remain faithful. Even if the pastoral ministry I had imagined never became a reality, I could remain faithful. Even if the future looked nothing like the one I had hoped for, I could seek first the kingdom of God.
There is a freedom in refusing to make obedience conditional upon receiving a particular outcome. It does not mean abandoning our desires or pretending that disappointment doesn’t hurt. It means that our desires need not become the masters of our lives.
My calling could not become something I demanded from God. Nor could the dream of fatherhood become the condition upon which I would follow Him.
I could listen, and I could obey.
10. The Shepherd Without a Title
Today I have five children and seven grandchildren. I also drive a school bus carrying fifty-six children. Some of those children graduate or move away, and new ones arrive each year. Over time, the number of young people who have been entrusted to my care continues to increase.
It would be a mistake to confuse these relationships with one another. My own children are my children. My grandchildren belong to another generation of our family. The students on my bus have parents and families of their own, and my responsibility toward them is professional and limited.
Nevertheless, there is something common to the way I understand those responsibilities. I want to care for people faithfully. I want children to be safe. I want to exercise authority without humiliating those entrusted to me. I want to be fair, consistent, patient, and attentive.
These are qualities I associate with having a father’s heart and a shepherd’s heart. They do not depend upon occupying a particular office.
Looking back to Kelekis, I can see that the dream of twenty children was never simply about reaching a number. It expressed something about the kind of life I wanted to live and the relationships I hoped to have.
In a curious way, my life has brought me into caring relationships with far more young people than the sixteen-year-old boy could have imagined.
But I don’t need to turn that observation into a claim that everything happened as it was supposed to happen. The losses were real. The pain was real. And the life I have today is not a mathematical compensation for what was lost.
It is simply the life I have been given, with people before me whom I can love and serve.
11. Listening-Obedience
There is a difference between having a calling and insisting upon what that calling must look like. For many years I associated pastoral ministry with a particular role, and when that role seemed closed to me, I believed something essential had been lost.
Yet the desire to care for people remained. It was there in the sixteen-year-old dreaming of children. It was there through the difficulties of marriage and family life. It has been there in my work, in my friendships, and in the ordinary opportunities to come alongside people who need care.
Perhaps one of the most important things I have learned is that I need not spend my life proving that I have a calling. I need not demand recognition for it, nor must I allow another person’s denial of it to become the governing truth of my life.
There is work to be done today. There are people to love today. There are responsibilities immediately before me. And there is a God whom I desire to know and obey.
That is where Matthew 6:33–34 continues to meet me. Seek first the kingdom. Let tomorrow attend to itself.
And Daniel 3:16–18 reminds me that faithfulness is not a bargain in which I obey God provided He gives me the future I have imagined.
Even if not.
I can still listen. I can still obey.
The boy in Kelekis dreamed of twenty children. The man writing these words has five children, seven grandchildren, and fifty-six young passengers on his school bus, with many more having passed through his care over the years.
And perhaps the most liberating discovery is that I no longer need to measure my life against the dream of that sixteen-year-old boy, nor against the words of someone who once told me what I could never become.
I can receive the life before me and respond faithfully to it.
Listening-obedience.
Related reading: Keleki’s Womb, a little poem rediscovered among my earlier writings.
