The Preacher’s Wife Talks

Josephine White Lightner Todd will soon once again become Charlotte Duncan’s big sister when the Todd family moves back to a town of 18,000 in Tennessee and into the bosom of her family. ”But for Jo Todd, the move is emotional as she leaves a town that she has grown to love. ‘I will miss good friends,’ says Todd, who cried with joy when John reversed his plans to leave the Palisades 10 years ago and transfer to another parish in Delaware. ”When she moved to Southern California in 1983 as a single mom, she had never been west of the Mississippi. After she left home for college, first at Agnes Scott in Decatur and then Vanderbilt, she got a job that took her to Atlanta and eventually to Los Angeles. ‘I didn’t know what the trees were and when people said ‘That’s an oak,’ [not accustomed to the scrubby small-leafed coastal version] I said, ‘That’s not an oak!” ”Todd still retains the soft tones, but lively vocabulary of her native Tennessee and she’s familiar with Presbyterian clergymen; her uncle and her great grandfather were both ministers. ‘Being married to a clergyman, I understand the hours and calls in the night, it’s part of the job. But John is a regular guy. If he had held himself in some high and mighty position, we wouldn’t have been married.’ ”Until last year, Jo worked, most recently as an analyst in the financial reporting department at Rand. She also served as treasurer for Paul Revere’s booster organization, PRIDE, where she oversaw a $200,000 budget. ‘It turned out to be a lot bigger than I realized.’ The Todd’s 13-year-old son Michael attended Marquez Elementary and Paul Revere. ”’I knew that some churches expected the pastor’s wife to doooo something,’ says Jo, who also is the mother to 29-year-old Katy. ‘This church has been fantastic in respecting me as a person. I don’t feel as if I’ve been treated as pastor’s wife. This year at the annual mother-daughter tea, they honored me. That was really sweet. I picked up the good stuff of being the pastor’s wife.’ ”Despite working outside the home, Jo has been very much a part of the church community. She has been in and out of the choir, depending on her work and John’s work schedule. ‘One of us has to be home,’ she says. ”She also joins John greeting parishioners after the Sunday service. ‘It helps keep it a family time, a social time instead of a time for counseling.’ Jo is gregarious, funny with an agreeable easygoing nature. She says the hardest adjustment she had to make was not having say in John’s work. ‘I can’t make suggestions. Once, I remember suggesting Hymn 500, ‘God Is Working His Purpose Out.’ It talks about the people throwing their nets in the Sea of Galilee, and they all die. Nobody liked that song, so that was the end of my suggestions.’