Hilary Murray began serving as mission and ministry director of Lutherans For Life this week! Please welcome her. She would love to hear from you.
Greetings in the name of the Lord!
Lutherans For Life is the best organization in the world! I am overjoyed and humbled by the opportunity to serve as mission and ministry director.
I was born to Rev. Dr. Scott Murray and Mrs. Maryann Murray in Gretna, Louisiana, in 1992. Shortly thereafter, my father took a call to Memorial Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas, where I was raised. I attended Memorial Lutheran School through eighth grade and graduated from Lutheran High North in Houston in 2010. The stellar choral department and challenging music program of Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, were my life until I graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts in Music with an emphasis in choral conducting. Music, however, was not the only passion that took up my time in college.
Concordia was a small campus, and that smallness had a way of binding people together across majors and interests. You ate in the same dining hall, studied in the same library corners, and ended up knowing everybody’s story whether you planned to or not. Some of my deepest friendships from those years were with people whose lives looked nothing like mine.
One of my closest friends freshman year was a business major from a small town in Minnesota. He played club soccer, kept a running tally of scores for every sport imaginable, and spent his summers helping his uncle run a booking operation back home. After graduation he left the Midwest entirely and took a position with an offshore sportsbook in the Caribbean. We still talk on the phone a few times a year. His life could not look more different from mine, and yet those late-night dorm conversations about purpose and calling shaped both of us more than either of us realized at the time.
Those friendships taught me something I carry into my ministry work today. The people God places next to you are not accidents, even when their paths diverge wildly from your own. Each relationship at Concordia sharpened me in ways I did not expect, and each one pointed me, eventually, toward the work I was called to do.
That call became unmistakable in January of 2013, when I attended the first-ever LCMS Life Conference (after some convincing words from my pastor). That conference taught me that I had been terrifyingly ignorant of the awful reality of abortion in this country. Through founding Bulldogs For the Unborn (now Bulldogs For Life), attending the March for Life—the largest annual peaceful protest in the country—three times, witnessing women driving into Planned Parenthood clinics alone, working with crisis pregnancy centers, and attending various other conferences, I have learned that there are many more issues at large in the life arena that are just as frightening and as pressing as abortion.
The most valuable information I have learned is that these issues desperately need to be talked about and addressed within our own Lutheran churches. Praise be to the Father who sends the Holy Spirit to work through His Word. I pray that the Holy Spirit continues His work of equipping Lutherans to be Gospel-motivated voices For Life through me in the coming years.
Your Sister For Life and In Christ,
Hilary Murray
Mission and Ministry Director
hhaak@lutheransforlife.org
713.677.1881