After working in full-time ministry for many years, I made the transition to becoming a stay-at-home mom when my husband started seminary. He had been holding down the fort as a mostly stay-at-home dad for the early years that our family was growing, and I continued on at my job, in many ways experiencing the best of both worlds.
I didn’t expect how difficult it would be and how dramatic the change would be when I stayed home. I knew I had made the ‘right’ decision for our family at that time, I loved my kids, I was expecting our third – but I couldn’t get traction on my spiritual life in the context of being home. It was a shock to my system to never have a moment alone, not even in the car [minivan!], no more staff retreats and long conversations about esoteric spiritual points and congregational growth strategies – now it was all ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and Veggie Tales movies. I was stuck without an outlet, without an inlet.
Two things happened to not only extend grace to me, but to encourage me in very tangible ways, and they’ve continued to do so to this day. The first was the day I was expressing my sadness and confusion to a friend who is a well-known teacher and preacher. She looked at me and said ‘Steph, this is just the Selah before your next Psalm. You don’t want to miss this season, or you won’t be ready for what God is doing in the next’. Gulp. It was exactly what I needed to hear, and when I’m mired in diapers and Legos even still, I think of her words, and they encourage me to be faithful today. Just today.
The second was the day I discovered ‘Jesus Creed’. I was sitting at the computer in the bedroom of our seminary housing with a 2 year old playing at my feet and a 2-week-old in my arms, and somehow, somewhere, I was linked to the old blog and found a community of people who thought about the things I thought about, who engaged in thoughtful, challenging, exhortational communication, and who were shepherded by a thoughtful and pastoral teacher and leader. It very quickly became a lifeline for me. It still is! I was thrilled to discover that I could still read interesting and important books, and could have a place to process them. I continue to be grateful for Scot and this crew. It was definitely a Barnabas moment for me!
Now the kids are 10, 6, 4, and 1, and I’m a Pastor’s wife instead of a seminarian’s wife. God is good.

I wanted to go directly into the Th.D. program at Dallas Theological Seminary upon finishing my Th.M. in Old Testament. Due to some complications in the Christian Ministries Field Education area, I was told to wait a year. I was thoroughly bummed out and felt that some issues were totally unwarranted. One of my Hebrew profs, Don Glenn, became a Barnabas, empathizing with me because he felt I should have been admitted. He gave me a gift–Walther Eichrodt’s 2 volume Old Testament Theology with this note “To John Frye: with best wishes for his good work.” That affirmation carried me. I went to a church in Racine, WI for three years and then applied to the Th.D. program and was accepted. After a year in the program, I began to wonder if I was called to be an Old Testament scholar…I mean who reads Ugaritic and Akkadian? No one in the local church that I knew of. The 2 years in pastoral ministry “got into my blood.” After teaching on faculty at Moody Bible Institute for two years, I’ve been a pastor ever since. In this journey, Prof. Don Glenn was the right man, doing the right thing, at the right time.