Keeping Your Role in Perspective.

The pastor’s role is lived out in an atmosphere of devotion to Gods people and commitment to nurturing them in His precepts and pinciples. It can all be very fervent and intense. But when it when it comes to an end it can feel as though what was seminal and far reaching at the time, is no longer.

Thats how it felt for me in January 2007, almost a year after my resignation, and how I recorded it in my journal:

“How much I made of that which now seems to mean so little.

This thought came to me yesterday at church while watching a DVD with a group of kids.I smiled as I watched the mechanical antics of the movie “Robots”. I realised I was smiling for another reason as well.  I was releaxed,  at ease, emerging from the fog of confusion and recrimination that have engulfed me over the months.  Now, seated on the floor with 40 kids watching a movie during a holdiay sermon, and later, seated at lunch with a couple from church, I felt safe, accepted, loved once again.  I felt something of my own conversational self returning.

 But I also realised something else as I mused on a recent visit (my first for 6 months) to the small town where I pastored. 

Walking around the garden with a former congregant, our conversation centered in his new plants, I realised how life goes on. The things that mattered once are submerged in the passage of time and in the need simply to “go on”.  The imperatives of the past become mere entries in the pages of a journal and the ‘players’ involved have dusted themselves off and moved on.

 How much weight Christian leaders may put on their place in the scheme of things and how quickly all that ministry and administration can be gone.  The relationship and arrangements of one’s ministry life, everything that has such import, intrigue, intensity and significance dissapears like the vapour from a coffee cup.   

The words of Psalms 103 are apt!

‘As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more … (v 15, 16)”