I was in middle school when I started babysitting for the minister and his wife at the little United church in which I was raised. George and Lois were still just a young couple with a baby boy when they enfolded me into their family. George was academic and bookish, Lois was lively and fun. He patiently answered my many questions about our Christian faith on drives to and from their home for babysitting appointments, she often had home-baked treats waiting. He was passionate about liturgy and readily loaned me books from his own library, she was pretty, had her own career, and adored her family and friends.

I quickly loved them—together with their son, and the daughter and the dog who soon followed. It wasn’t hard to do. They felt like a second family to me, taking me to their cottage in the summer, allowing me to witness the realities of clergy family life, which turned out to be not so very different from my own family’s life. Just like my family, they were not perfect. But they were good people.

I’ve long thought that George’s sophistication, encouragement, and teaching together with Lois’ transparent and joyful faith helped to set the foundation for my own faith journey in the years that have followed. The way they built into my life is no doubt part of the reason I have continued to seek out the various ministers and their wives—in the churches I’ve attended—for wisdom and friendship; I suppose I’ve been inclined to associate the people in such roles with George and Lois’ goodness and grace.

I don’t know when I first learned that my friend Karen was a minister’s wife. I don’t remember if it was a fact that she revealed to me soon after our friendship began to blossom, or whether that information was some time in coming. But I am certain that knowing she occupied that role would not in any way have given me pause to reconsider our friendship. If anything, it probably only made me want to know her more.

Karen is warm and real, loyal and honest, funny and fierce—all of the qualities that make for a good friend. And her newest book, The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More contains all of the very best of Karen.

In it, she reveals, “Being a pastor, and being married to one, is a complicated life and vocation. People may put you on a pedestal: They assume you are better, nicer, kinder, and more holy than you are. Or they may skedaddle: They assume you are unkind and judgmental, or just weird.”

In truth, they are none of those things, because of course, ministers and their wives are just people on a journey, trying to do their best in the life to which they feel called. Like we all are.

I’m grateful for Lois and George’s friendship long ago, for Karen and her husband Brent’s more recently, and for all of the ministers and minister’s wives I’ve been privileged to know in between. My life has been richer because of them.

If you don’t know a minister or a minister’s wife, maybe you should think about changing that. If you read Karen’s book, I think you will want to.