The Day I Realized I Wasn’t Selling Insurance
Same Calling. Just Before the Funeral
Every now and then I sit through a really good Final Expense training. The presenter is knowledgeable, the information is solid, and the systems being explained clearly work for the people who are using them successfully. Someone is talking about lead flow, objection handling, follow-up strategy, and how to guide a conversation toward a decision, and I find myself nodding along because I understand the importance of all of it.
And then, somewhere about halfway through, usually when everyone else seems energized and ready to conquer the world, a quiet thought slips into my mind:
What exactly am I doing here?
It is not disagreement. I am not rolling my eyes or dismissing the training. In fact, most of the time I respect the people teaching it and appreciate what they are sharing. It's like suddenly realizing you are wearing someone else’s jacket. It fits well enough, but you are aware every few minutes that it was not originally tailored for you.
For most of my adult life, people invited me into their lives as a pastor. I spent decades sitting in hospital rooms where time felt suspended, standing beside families at gravesides trying to find words when there really were none, and sharing conversations around kitchen tables where life’s hardest questions were asked without rehearsal. People asked me to listen, to pray, to help them make meaning, and sometimes simply to sit quietly so they would not feel alone.
So when I hear training language about moving a client toward commitment or learning how to handle resistance, something inside me shifts just a little. Not because the ideas are wrong. They are practical and necessary in any business. But a small voice inside me starts asking uncomfortable questions.
Am I becoming a salesman? Am I pretending to be someone I am not? Do I actually belong in this room? And that is usually the moment the word shows up.
Fraud.
It feels strange to admit that, because I believe deeply in the work of Final Expense planning. I have seen too many families living through grief while also trying to figure out how to pay for a funeral. I have watched spouses quietly panic over finances while still trying to hold themselves together emotionally. I have seen delayed services, difficult decisions, and the heavy burden that falls on families who never expected to be making financial choices at the same moment they are saying goodbye.
I know preparation matters. I know this work helps people. And yet the language of the industry sometimes feels foreign to instincts shaped by ministry rather than sales. Pastors learn to listen longer than they speak and to walk at the pace of the person in front of them, while sales training naturally emphasizes direction and outcomes. Those approaches are not enemies, but learning to live in both worlds creates tension.
I am beginning to understand that the discomfort may actually be a sign that something important is still intact within me. Many people enter this field learning empathy as a professional skill. I am coming from the opposite direction. Compassion has always been the starting point. The real challenge is learning how preparation fits inside that compassion without losing its heart.
I am not trying to sell peace of mind as a slogan. I am trying to help families avoid unnecessary suffering later.
When I look at it that way, the work begins to feel familiar again. I am still sitting at tables listening to stories. I am still helping people face realities they would rather postpone. I am still walking with families through conversations about mortality, love, responsibility, and legacy.
The difference is that now the care I offer happens before the funeral instead of after it.
Maybe the reason I sometimes feel like a fraud is not because I do not belong in this work, but because I will always remember that there are real human stories behind every application and policy number. The tension I feel may simply be the growing edge of learning a new language while holding onto an old calling.
I suspect that feeling may never disappear completely, and honestly, I hope it doesn’t. The day this work becomes only about production numbers instead of people is probably the day I should step away. Until then, I will keep learning the business side of things while remaining grounded in the part of me that believes this is, at its heart, an act of love.
I may never sound like a traditional insurance agent, and perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Maybe I am simply a pastor who now helps families prepare for the moment when love has to carry on without them.
I am still learning this work. Some days I sit in training taking notes and wondering if I am behind everyone else. Other days I sit with someone who tells me about their children, their health, or their quiet worry about becoming a burden someday, and in those moments the purpose becomes clear again.
The titles have changed over the years. Pastor. Celebrant. Now Final Expense Specialist. But the calling underneath those titles feels remarkably familiar. It has always been about helping people face hard realities with a little more peace and a little less fear.
So I will keep showing up. I will keep learning. I will keep listening for the stories behind the paperwork and remembering that this work is not ultimately about policies or premiums. It is about love planning ahead.
And if someday a family is able to grieve without financial panic, if a spouse can focus on remembering instead of worrying about bills, if peace arrives just a little sooner because a conversation happened in time, then maybe this work does belong to me after all.
This past week I was filling my Jeep with gas, on my way to officiate a funeral, when I saw him. I don’t think he saw me watching, but I did. He was standing off to the side of the parking lot, half-turned away from the store, rummaging through a trash can until he pulled out a crumpled McDonald’s bag. He opened it right there and started eating what looked like leftover fries. Cold. Greasy. Whatever someone else didn’t finish. Cars kept moving in and out. The pump kept clicking. Life didn’t slow down for him. I probably should have walked inside, bought him a decent meal and a Coke, handed it to him like it was nothing. But I didn’t. He went on his way, eating fries from a trash can. I got back in my Jeep, pulled out of the station, and headed toward a room where people would be gathered to remember someone they loved. And somewhere between the gas station and that funeral, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Not just what he was doing… but what it stirred in me. That quiet, uncomfortable mix of heartbreak and guilt and the deep-down sense that something about the world is just not the way it’s supposed to be. And as I drove, a familiar phrase kept finding its way back into my head, like it had been waiting for me to notice it again. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Most of us have heard those words before. We’ve heard them enough that they can start to feel like something soft, something spiritual, something that belongs in a sermon or stitched onto a pillow somewhere. But I wonder if we’ve ever really let them land. Because righteousness, the way Jesus is talking about it, isn’t about being good or moral or checking the right boxes. It’s bigger than that. It’s about things being made right. It’s about the world looking the way God intends it to look… whole, just, restored. It’s about what Scripture calls shalom. Because if you remember who was sitting on that hillside listening to Him, this would not have felt abstract at all. These weren’t people who had just finished a nice lunch. They were fishermen, farmers, and laborers. People who knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry. People who understood thirst not as a metaphor, but as something your body feels when it hasn’t had enough for too long. So when Jesus said hunger and thirst, they didn’t need an explanation. They felt it. And then He takes that feeling — that desperate, undignified, I-will-dig-through-a-trash-can-if-I-have-to kind of hunger — and says that is what your longing for righteousness should feel like. Not polite. Not distant. Not theoretical. But a desperate craving. Sometimes that hunger shows up on a global scale, and it hits you like a fist. It’s the footage you can’t quite turn away from. Children in places whose names we struggle to pronounce, drinking water that would make us sick. It’s the moment when numbers stop feeling like numbers because you’ve seen a face, or a story, or a man in a parking lot eating cold fries out of someone else’s leftovers. It’s the part of you that knows, deep down, that the world has enough — enough food, enough water, enough resources — and yet somehow it doesn’t reach the people who need it most. That gap between what is and what should be… that ache… that’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. That’s a longing for shalom. Sometimes the hunger is quieter than that. I have sat in rooms where a marriage was coming apart, and what always surprises me is how little noise it makes. You expect shouting, doors slamming, something you can point to. But more often it’s just a heaviness. A silence that settles in between two people who used to know how to reach each other and somewhere along the way forgot. You can feel the absence of wholeness like it’s taking up space in the room. And if you’ve ever been there, you know the feeling. That deep, steady ache that things could be different. That somehow the distance could be crossed. That healing might still be possible. That’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. That longing for two people to find their way back… that’s a desire for shalom. And sometimes the hunger is the most personal thing in the world. Maybe it’s not something out there or between two people. Maybe it’s inside you. The habits you keep circling back to. The patterns you’ve tried to break more times than you can count. The quiet voice that wonders if this is just who you are now. And yet… underneath all of that… there is still something in you that hasn’t given up. Something that still wants to be whole. Something that still longs for things to be made right. Even when it’s tired. Even when it feels worn down. That longing… that refusal to settle… that is hunger and thirst for righteousness. And Jesus looks at that person — not cleaned up, not finished, not figured out — and says makarios. Not “happy.” Not “fortunate.” Something closer to… God is with you. God is on your side. Right there in the hunger. Right there in the longing. Right there in the place where you know things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and you haven’t stopped caring. Which means maybe that moment at the gas station wasn’t just something to feel bad about and move past. The hunger itself is an unlikely altar. Maybe the ache you feel when you see something broken — in the world, in others, in yourself — is not something to avoid or explain away, but something to pay attention to. Because that ache might be the very place where God is already at work in you. The place where your soul is learning to want what God wants. And maybe being filled doesn’t always mean everything gets fixed all at once. Maybe sometimes it looks like this: You don’t stop noticing. You don’t stop caring. You don’t stop longing for things to be made right. And somewhere in that hunger… you find that you are not alone. You never were.
There’s a certain kind of strength that tends to get most of the attention in this world, and you don’t have to look very hard to recognize it. It’s the voice that fills a room without asking permission, the kind that makes people turn their heads before they’ve even decided if they agree. It’s the swing that tries to send the ball over the left field fence, preferably with enough distance to make people stand up before it even lands. That kind of strength is visible, measurable, and makes for good highlights. Somewhere along the way, most of us quietly absorbed the idea that this is what strength is supposed to look like. But every now and then, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a different kind of strength moving through the very same space, and it’s easy to miss because it doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the person who could say something sharp and decides not to, or in the moment when someone clearly has the upper hand and realizes that winning isn’t actually the most important thing happening in the room. It’s the kind of strength that doesn’t need to prove anything because it already knows what it’s carrying, and if you blink, you can miss it entirely. Baseball has a way of revealing that kind of strength, usually when nobody is expecting it, and I remember one of those moments pretty clearly. It was Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, bottom of the ninth inning, with the Yankees leading by two runs and Mariano Rivera on the mound, which in those days felt about as close to automatic as baseball ever gets. When Rivera came in, games didn’t so much continue as they slowly came to a conclusion. Arizona managed to get a runner on base, which was already more hope than most teams found in that situation, and then Jay Bell stepped in to pinch-hit for Randy Johnson. He was a guy who knew how to swing the bat, fourteen home runs that year, over seventy runs driven in, and enough experience to understand exactly what October pressure feels like when it settles into your chest. And somewhere in that moment, whether it came from the dugout or from some instinct inside him, he squared around and bunted. It didn’t work the way you might draw it up. The runner was thrown out at third, and if you just glance at the box score, it probably looks like a mistake. The kind of decision that makes you wonder what he was thinking. Except the inning didn’t end, and that matters. Because the next batter, Tony Womack, doubled and tied the game, and a few moments later, Luis Gonzalez ended the World Series with a soft single that barely made it out of the infield. Everybody remembers the Gonzalez hit, but almost nobody remembers the bunt, which is often how this kind of strength works. Sometimes the strongest player on the field is the one who knows when not to swing. Even when everything in you wants to, even when it doesn’t work out cleanly, and even when it looks, at least for a moment, like you got it wrong. And it turns out Jesus had something to say about that kind of strength. “Blessed are the meek.” Most of us hear the word "meek" and picture someone who gets overlooked or pushed around. We often think of someone who doesn’t have much presence, while louder people take up all the oxygen in the room. But that’s not what Jesus was describing. The word He uses is praus , a word that was used in the first century for a wild horse that had been trained, not broken or diminished, but still strong. A horse still capable of running full speed, still a warhorse, just one that had learned when to run and when to stand still. And Jesus looks at that kind of person and says makarios . Not “happy” or “fortunate,” at least not in the way we usually mean those words. Something closer to this: God is with you . God is on your side . Not because you are the loudest or the strongest or the one who swings the hardest, but because you have learned something the world keeps forgetting. Jesus lived that kind of strength. He didn’t avoid conflict, but He also wasn’t interested in winning it the way everyone else was. And there’s a difference there that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. He carried power without needing to prove it. That might be the clearest sign that it was real to begin with. Somehow, Jesus knew not only what He could do but when not to do it. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Not conquer it, which is how we usually imagine strength working, but inherit it, which means it comes as a gift rather than something you muscle your way into. I’ll be honest with you, this is one of the Beatitudes I am still learning how to live into, because the bunt does not come naturally to me. My first instinct is usually to swing away, the kind of swing that either clears the fence or leaves you walking back to the dugout wondering what just happened. Restraint is something I have to choose, and I don’t always choose it well. And that might be the clearest sign that it was real all along. Maybe “blessed are the meek” isn’t describing people who have already figured this out so much as it’s inviting the rest of us to keep learning how to choose differently, even when the swing feels more satisfying and even when we have every reason to let it go. The Unlikely Altar for the meek isn’t something you can photograph or circle on a map, because it doesn’t stay still long enough for that. It shows up in the space between what flashes through your mind and what finally comes out of your mouth, in that quiet moment where you realize you could go one way and, almost gently, decide to go another. And more often than we notice, that’s exactly where God meets us, not in the noise of the moment but in the choosing of it, in the restraint that nobody else may ever see but that somehow still changes everything. Blessed are the meek, not because they are weak, but because they know they could swing and choose what matters more. Because sometimes the strongest thing you can do is not swing at all.
Over the years, I have stood at countless gravesides, either as a pastor or as a celebrant, I have learned a profound truth. Every family handles grief differently. And you can see it in the way they stand and in the silence that sits over them like a pall. And even though I have witnessed it many times, I am never ready for the parents. I have watched a mom and dad lower a casket so small it breaks something in the air around it. There are no words. No theology can make sense of it. The flowers on top of the casket seem almost cruel in their brightness. And the dirt - well, it is just dirt. Then there are the parents who stand on the edge of that hole, trying to make sense of the senseless. When I watch the family and friends standing at the grave, I feel the full weight of what it means to be human, which is to say, the full weight of what it means to love something you cannot keep. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in those moments, I hear a question I have never been able to answer, standing there in the grass: What does God say to this? Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them…Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. If you have ever stood at a grave and someone turned to you and said those words, I imagine you might have felt something catch in your throat. Please understand, not because the words are wrong. But because in that moment, with the dirt still fresh and the flowers still bright and the people you love still unable to make their feet move toward the car, comfort feels very far away. And if someone had leaned over and whispered, "Happy are those who mourn,” — you might have said a few words you would regret later, then walked away. And you would have had every right to. But please know that is not what Jesus said. He said makarios . And makarios doesn't mean happy. It never did. It means something closer to — God is with you . Right here at the grave. Right now, in the midst of the hurt and the questions. In the moment when no words can make any sense. Jesus says, Makarios … He doesn’t say, "Let's wait till the grief gets easier. ” He doesn’t say, “Time heals all wounds.” And He doesn’t say, “You will get over this.” He simply says, “Blessed are those that mourn…” The theologian Frederick Dale Bruner said that when Jesus used the word makarios , which is translated to blessed , he was reminding the people that God is with them. It is as if God taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, “I am with you.” And you know what I hold onto every funeral I stand with families? I hold on to the belief, in ways I can’t fully understand or explain, that those words are true. Okay, maybe God doesn’t just whisper them, He proclaims them in a big voice, bigger than the smallest casket even. He states them in such a way that they echo through every graveyard and every tomb. “Even in this moment, especially in this moment, I am with you. I am on your side!” You see, I believe that because the God of Easter is not a God who watches grief from a distance and then sends an email. He is a God who came down, who stood at His own Son's grave. Who knows what those parents are feeling — not as theology, not as doctrine — but from the core of His being. That is what Easter means even at the hardest grave. Not that death didn't happen. Not that the pain disappears with the sunrise. But that the God who walked out of the tomb on Sunday morning did it for exactly this moment. For the parents at the smallest grave. For the widow who can't make her feet move. For everyone standing in the grass, wondering what God could possibly say to this. He says, "I am with you." Even now. Maybe especially now. And I'll tell you something I don't always say out loud. When I get in my Jeep after a graveside service and drive away, I sometimes wonder. And I hope. I hope that God does more than whisper. But then I remember Easter. It doesn't look like holy ground. It doesn't feel like it either. But it is. But maybe that is exactly where the God of Easter shows up. Not after the grief passes. Not when the marker is finally in place, and the grass has grown back, and people have stopped bringing casseroles. But right there in the silence that sits over a family like a pall. In the moment when love has nowhere left to go. The grave is an Unlikely Altar . But Easter was an unlikely morning. On this Easter, may we know, may we remember, may we never forget — we have a God who doesn’t watch from a distance. Our God comes down and stands at the grave. And in a voice bigger than any casket, bigger than any grief, bigger than any question we have ever carried, He proclaims: I am with you. Even now. Maybe especially now. He is risen. And that changes everything.