Spring Thaw....

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
doctor, lawyer.....whatever.
Work is hard. That's why they call it work. There are good days, not-so-good days, absolutely "this sucks" days, and if you're lucky...at the end of any particular 365 day cycle you do the math and find that the good outnumbers the bad and somewhere in that equation gain a sense of satisfaction--maybe even fulfillment.
Notice that ministry is not on that list.
Ministry is an "other." I'm not sure I knew that until late last spring when I departed my church for a one-year sabbatical.
Sabbatical. There's a word. It relates to the Jewish concept of the "sabbatical year." The Law required that every seventh year fields and orchards were to be given a rest...nothing was to be grown on them. It's a great concept for dirt and for people.
But our world isn't wired that way. We left agrarian thinking behind somewhere around the industrial age and haven't looked back since.
Production and results, production and results... that's the mantra. Not production, results, rest.
I broke the cycle. I am resting. After year 8. I was overdue....and frozen.
The big freeze was a gradual process. Layer after layer it came ever so insidiously.
It is the art of the minister to slowly and surely internalize the pain of a world that is broken, a world that so desperately needs a Gilead.
With arms wide open the minister receives the broken and applies the balm and massages the wounds.
Brokenness comes in many varieties.
Some are penitent and needy, sad and empty, alone and complaisant.
Some have thorns, barbs, or hot wires just below the surface.
Some are like the walking dead.
This looks like a job for superman. And it is. But beware the kryptonite.
That slow-growing shell around the heart, the mind, the self that compartmentalizes all of the stuff--- the pissed-off parishioner, the critic, the finance committee, the relentlessly non-productive meeting, the impersonal institution of the church, the wedding that shouldn't happen, the funeral that shouldn't happen, the unemployed dad, the abused woman, the dying child, the battlefield of the family, the battlefield of the community, the battlefield of the world---and deep freezes it beneath some kind of psychic ice field.
Oh, there are days of bliss. Spiritual bliss, personal bliss, familial bliss, communal bliss.
But it's the freeze that gets you. That defense mechanism against the anti-bliss.
The reason it's so bad is that most ministers don't know it's there....sort of like unhallowed black ice.
I have a friend who took a leave from ministry and entered counseling. His therapist put him on paxil. 6 weeks later he said to me, "I was depressed, clinically depressed. But I didn't know it until I found out what it felt to be not-depressed. Depressed had become normal."

There are lots of voices crying in the wilderness, but what are they crying about?
I went to Canada.
I preached on Sunday, packed on Monday and Tuesday, and left on Wednesday. Two months ago.
I rode alongside my husband across God's glorious earth and was not moved by the beauty of the sunset, the majesty of the mountains, or the radiance of the waters.
It took time....time to freeze, time to thaw.
In the fullness of time, a primordial memory began to haunt me...a sensation with which I had lost familiarity: warmth. A warmth born of absolute honesty, nurtured in absolute trust.
Warm conversation. Warm laughter. Warm silence. Warm prayer. Warm heart.
In the breaking of the ice came a realization of its existence and in that realization comes a question.
How many of my brothers and sisters in ministry suffer under similar strain and know not what they do?
I am making my way back from a distant and frozen land and as I come I consider that question and what to do with the frightening truth of its answer.