This morning I awoke to sound of rain on our roof. Its not the hard driving rain and wind of thunderstorm, but the soft gentle steady rain of a Spring shower. You know, the kind of rain that doesn’t wake you up but the kind that lulls you to sleep. Its soft pitter patter on the roof that is steady constant and almost memorizing. As I awoke with that sound, I began to think about the rainy days of my life serving as a pastor, how that rain is often compared to challenges and hardships and have decided to write a few thoughts down.
There are the days of intermittent showers. These are the days that you don’t get enough rain to really soak the ground but enough rain to keep you from doing anything of value outside. It was like that this past Sunday as we ended our afternoon service. It rained and then quit, rained and then quit, and so on throughout the afternoon. I had some things I wanted to accomplish outside but every time I went outside to accomplish them, the rain would softly send me back inside to stay dry.
As a pastor there are times that we want to move our ministry forward for Christ. We want to challenge our people to soul win better, to seek more missionaries to support, and to generally accomplish more for the cause of the Kingdom of God. So we pause to pray and plan how to present this to our church and just then the phone intermittently rings. These calls are not a major catastrophe type of situation such as a death or accident, just simple calls of folks needing some encouragement or direction. So we rightfully stop the planning and make the visit…and I add that we gladly make it and gladly serve in that capacity. This is really why we are in the ministry in the first place - to help those who want our help. We immediately drop what we are doing and go. We spent sweet time talking and praying and then return home to restart our forward planning. But after the visit is done our wife shows us a Facebook post from a member who has another issue that they felt was important enough to say publicly but not important enough to call directly. It’s urgent but not life threatening. Its the kind of situation that we clearly need to follow up. So once again the planning stops and off we go to communicate with this precious family. And so on it goes. One after another. There is nothing major in these situations that stop our ministry in its tracks, just intermittent needs that we need to help, but, enough to stop the forward progress we were hoping for.
Then there are the steady rain days. These are the steady soaking rains like we are experiencing as I write this post. These kind of rains start one day and don’t end for two or three days. They are not filled with lightning, thunder, and wind, but just constant moment by moment rain. These are the Spring rains that when they come, we know that we will not be mowing the grass or working in the garden at all until they stop and thing dry out some.
These are the ministry days where a pastor in the flesh doesn’t want to answer the phone because they just know that it’s going to be another situation that require immediate attention. It’s the time where you leave one hospital visit to go to another hospital and while you are at the second hospital a message is left on your phone to go back to the church because the well pump has stopped working and the church has no water just before a youth activity. You head over the church, diagnose the water issue just in time for your wife to say someone has just called the house looking for you for some unannounced reason, and so you dutifully call them and you discover that they need to talk to you about a situation with their neighbor. And so you go, day after day. Once again these kind of situations are not ministry halting or church wide, and they really are situations we would call the ministry itself. But these things are what a pastor seemingly sometimes moves from one situation to another without any break. However, the danger with these kind of “rainy days” is that we can easily get indifferent to the fact that these are real needs and these are the people we are trying to ministry to in those needs. The problems come so fast that we move from one to the next to the next without thinking which ones are life changing crucial and which ones are casual in scope. The needs fall constantly like a steady rain and we can easily forget that there are people’s lives at stake.
Then finally there are the thunder storm ministry days. These are the huge rain clouds filled with thunder and lightening and wind and hail and...well you get the idea. NOTHING else gets done when these kind of days hit. We sit in our houses just waiting for the storm to pass, hoping that we do not lose our power.
These are the ministry days that you don’t know whether you or the church will survive. The problems are HUGE and the answers sometimes seem so distant. These kind of “rains” are completely unsettling and usually are so overwhelming that we cannot think about anything else as they consume every waking, and even sleeping, moment. They impact EVERYONE on the church and in my years of pastoring there are have been only two or three of these kind of events, such as when our current church was destroyed by Hurricane Irene or when our previous church was almost split in two due to an intern’s behavior with a woman in the church. These storms hit and hit hard. They swamp the ministry so that everyone in the church family is directly impacted and as a pastor you simply have to ride the storm out while trying to save everyone you can.
Now I want to be clear that I love serving the Lord. I love being a pastor, but sometimes the rainy days can be a challenge to your life. As a human being I want sun and I want nice easy days, but God always allows rain, because ministries without rain are deserts.
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