PeaceBang

One of the hardest weeks on my personal ministeria…

September 17, 2006 on 4:20 pm | In Uncategorized |

One of the hardest weeks on my personal ministerial record.

Usual tasks, plus two very large funerals. Some other epically painful things occurring in peoples’ lives.
Six hours of on-campus class time, plus approximately 225 minutes of commute time. Most weeks will have half that.

I got most of my service for our new Second Sunday liturgy written last night before going to M’s surprise birthday party, and returned home at 11:00 pm to finish it up. The computer crashed. I spent an hour trying to get it to boot up, but decided to let the computer rest before I threw it out the window in a rage.
I slept restlessly through a night full of nightmares, then got up at 6 am to salvage what I could of the service.
Thank the gods, the computer booted.

I wrote the rest of the service, made breakfast, and went to church.

If I may brag just mildly, do you know many congregations who wouldn’t react with some negativity to the minister changing around the liturgy a lot? We changed it A LOT, for our new Second Sunday thing that focuses on faith development through service. Whole new order of service. Music Director was a champ. Lay preacher, a champ. Everyone was a champ. That’s my word of the day: champ.

I didn’t get one complaint, but I probably got about 12 smiling thumbs up. Comments ranged from a simple, “Hey, I liked it!” to “That was interesting, I liked it, I think it will find its rhythm really soon” to “I really liked it, I’m going to digest it more and see if I have any specific feedback.”

Excuse me, but I call that incredibly cool.

The trick to ministry, I am convinced, is to have the kind of congegation who, when you have no energy of your own, are great people to vampire off of. I actually and truly don’t think I could have gotten through the service if they hadn’t been who they are.

And now, sleep. Without nightmares, I hope.

[update 3 hours later: I racked out like a champ and feel slightly more alive, but only slightly. I had more nightmares. In this one, I was forced to walk the plank and drop into the water from a big ship as some kind of sacrificial ritual. I was wearing period clothes of a 19th century naval officer or something. It felt like the dream was a more intense piratical follow-up to the dream of the other day wherein I adopted a dog named Jean Lafitte. This will definitely bear some reflection. What would Dr. Jung say?– PB]