One of the joys of ministry for me is writing. I really do love the writing part.

Writing has always been something that came naturally to me. Sit me in front of a bunch of numbers and expect me to make sense of them? Sure—if you want a bigger mess afterward. Give me a pen, some paper, and a prompt, though, and I can usually find my way.

I was the kid who wrote his essays the day before they were due and somehow still managed to get an A. I won writing awards. I wrote and directed two plays during my senior year of high school. I wrote dialogue for a student film that made its way to Sundance, and during those years I even had the extraordinary experience of attending the 1996 Academy Awards.

In my first year of college, I wrote a play for an English 101 assignment about an imagined conversation in which I came out to my deeply abusive mother. I deliberately left the story on a cliffhanger, never telling the audience how the conversation ended. My professor insisted I submit it to the school literary magazine. Later, her daughter produced and directed it at her college, and I was invited to opening night.

For a long time, experiences like those taught me something wonderful: I was a good writer.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I also learned something considerably less helpful:

Good writers get it right.

And if I was supposed to get it right, then critique felt remarkably like failure.

Changing something I had carefully crafted could feel almost painful. I had become so accustomed to being praised for writing that hearing, “This doesn’t quite work,” felt less like feedback about something I had written and more like a judgment about me.

Ministry cured me of that.

Or, perhaps more accurately, ministry continues to cure me of it.

I remember writing an essay that I thought beautifully married my happy pagan self with my UU Transcendentalist self. I loved it.

The response?

Beautifully written. Lovely imagery.

Also: it lacked gravitas and didn’t really have a point.

Well, technically it had too many points, which turned out to be much the same problem.

I remember being given an exercise in seminary: write a sermon in five minutes that would take at least three minutes to preach.

I wrote furiously.

Then I stood up and delivered my masterpiece.

One minute and forty seconds.

“You could have written more,” my professor said.

Apparently so.

Then there was the midterm project I carefully prepared on the Gospel of Mary, an early noncanonical Christian text. I had done the research. I had written the paper. I was proud of it.

And then I discovered that the cloud had not saved it properly.

Five hours before it was due.

What remained was a title page. I rebuilt it with my notes, a prayer, and a whole lot of caffeine.

My husband may have prevented the untimely death of a laptop that evening.

And, of course, nothing quite compares to the experience of preaching a sermon you believe is brilliant, only to have a parishioner approach you afterward and say:

“I didn’t like it. And here are the reasons why…”

Humbling.

Every. Single. Time.

Somewhere along the journey, though, I began to realize that critique is not the opposite of affirmation. Sometimes critique is an invitation.

It is an invitation to look again.

To listen more carefully.

To recognize that what I intended to communicate and what someone actually heard may not always be the same thing.

I have come to think of myself as a recovering perfectionist. I am learning to receive those moments with much more grace than I once did. When someone tells me that I missed the mark when I was quite certain I had nailed it, I can usually resist the urge to defend myself long enough to ask a much better question:

What might I learn from this?

Sometimes I discover that I really did miss something.

Sometimes I realize I tried to say six things when one would have been enough.

Sometimes the critique tells me as much about the listener as it does about the sermon.

And sometimes, after sitting with it, I still stand by what I wrote.

But even then, listening matters.

Because ministry has taught me something that all those writing awards never could: being good at something does not mean that we are finished becoming better at it.

Our gifts are not monuments we are supposed to protect. They are things we continue to shape, stretch, question, and offer in service to one another.

And when I do manage to hit the mark—when someone tells me that a sermon touched something in them, gave language to something they were carrying, made them laugh, cry, or think—the sweetness of that moment is richer because I know how much listening, learning, failure, and revision went into getting there.

And when I miss?

Well.

There is always next Sunday.