I spent the first ten years of my marriage trying to turn Cynthia into me. (Can you think of anything worse than a female Chuck?) Finally, she’d had enough.
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I’ll never forget when she said to me,
I don’t want you to keep telling people we’re ‘partners’ because we’re not partners. I bear your children, and I cook your meals, and I clean the house, but I’m not really your partner. You’ve never accepted me for who I really am.
Yes, I have.
No, you haven’t.
Yes, I have.
No, you haven’t!
Let me ask you a tough question: Is there someone you need to forgive? Someone in your family? A parent . . . a sibling . . . your spouse? Or possibly someone in your congregation . . . an elder or deacon?
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What keeps you from taking the initiative and making things right?
How long have you allowed the resentment to fester? My friend, you and I both know that harboring bitterness can have lasting and devastating effects on you, your family, and your ministry.
When America’s thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, began his administration, he instructed his aides and his executive assistant that there should be only two stacks of papers placed on his desk in the Oval Office.
By Юкатан (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The first would be a stack of those things that were urgent, and only the extremely urgent. The other was to be a stack of the important, and only the extremely important.
He said years later that it was interesting to him how rarely the two were one in the same. He was right.
The conflict between the urgent and the important is inescapable. How easy to get the two confused! Staying busy and working hard can make us feel as if we’re managing the important. But that’s not necessarily the case.
Too often, we pastors tend to wear our smiles upside-down. The burdens of ministry—especially during the busy holidays—often cause our joy to droop into deep-wrinkled frowns.
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The remedy? We need to reflect on God’s good gifts to us. And often!
In case you need a little help with this assignment, read through this psalm . . .
Exactly what does our heavenly Father want to develop within us as pastors? Well, rather than getting over my head in tricky theological waters, I believe the simple answer is found in Christ’s own words.
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Read His declaration of His primary reason for coming:
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)
No mumbo jumbo. Just a straight-from-the-shoulder admission. He came to serve and to give. It makes sense, then, to say that God desires the same for us.
In the ministry, monotony and mediocrity often mesh like teeth in gears. One spawns the other, leaving us yawning, bored, and adrift. In referring to monotony, I do not have in mind a lack of activity as much as a lack of purpose.
Even as pastors, we can be busy yet bored, involved yet indifferent. Ministry can become . . .
- Tediously repetitious
- Dull
- Humdrum
- Pedestrian
In a word, blah.
I know, I know—“ministry is serious business.” If I hear that one more time, I think I’ll gag. I fully realize that too much humor can be irritating, even offensive.
By BerLin (Nikon) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I recognize that it can be taken to such an extreme that it is inappropriate. But doesn’t it seem we have a long way to go before we are guilty of that problem?
I think so.
Are you open to change? People who make a difference can be stretched, pulled, pushed, and often changed. You heard it from me: traditionalism is an old dragon, bad about squeezing the very life out of its victims.
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So never stop fighting it. Watch out for those age-old ruts!
Let’s be careful to identify the right opponent. It isn’t tradition per se; it’s traditionalism. I’m not trying to be petty, only accurate. The right kind of traditions gives us deep roots—a solid network of reliable truth in a day when everything seems up for grabs.
Among such traditions are those strong statements and principles that tie us to the mast of truth when storms of uncertainty create frightening waves of change driven by winds of doubt.
If some ministry position is the god of your life, then something terrible occurs within when it is no longer a future possibility. If your ministry, however, is simply a part of God’s plan and you keep it in proper perspective, you can handle an unwanted dismissal just as well as you can handle a promotion.
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It all depends on who’s first and what’s first.
Breaking the magnet that draws things ahead of God is a lengthy and sometimes painful process. But God loves us enough to wrench from our hands everything we love more than Him.
Can you remember a recent “gray slush” day? Of course you can. So can I. (For us pastors, it’s often a Monday.) On such days, the laws of fairness and justice are displaced by a couple of Murphy’s Laws.
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Your dream dissolved into a nightmare. High hopes took a hike. Good intentions got lost in a comedy of errors; only this time, nobody was laughing.
You didn’t soar; you slumped. Instead of “pressing on the upward way,” you felt like telling John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, to move over as you slid down into his Slough of Despond near Doubting Castle, whose owner was Giant Despair.
Discouragement is just plain awful.
