Life at 3 miles an Hour

In recent weeks I've been blessed with a  challenging personal question, followed a few weeks later by an opportunity for some rest and reflection, where the question kept struggling to the surface.  The question in this instance was what I considered to be my greatest weakness as a practitioner of the pastoral arts.  The way it usually works is that a burning personal question appears in one form or another, followed by some brief attention and then a dive deep back into the next thing, resulting in not only forgetting the response, but eventually also the original question.  Ironic because my answer to this particular question was my difficulty in slowing down, backing off, and resting. For twenty four years I've lived and breathed "church".  Although there are some in the world convinced that I only work 30 minutes a week during my preaching and teaching opportunities, multiplied where multiple weekend services are involved and an occasional wedding or funer...

I don’t think that I have really appreciated the depth of life change that has accompanied my career change of seventeen years ago. Seventeen…just writing that makes me wonder where the time went. Even the reality of a child getting married this Spring hasn’t effected me as much as the realization that, what I have affectionately referred to all along as my second life, my ministry life, has really consumed the majority of my adult life. For some odd reason, in my own little universe, I have been lulled into the illusion that my engineering life was primary and this pastoral thing has been a relatively new experience. In fact, it’s only recently surfaced in my consciousness that true reality is totally opposite to my perceived reality. I’m sure that others close to me and some that I’ve dragged along can distinguish the difference quite easily and never would have made that mistake. On thinking about this particularly vexing turn of events, I’m realizing more about myself and, for that...