Once upon a time there was a minister who thought he could have it all. He believed that he could be all things to all people—if he could only work hard enough. He also believed that a fairy godmother would eventually reward him for his efforts by whisking him away to the perfect (multi-staff) church, where he could live happily ever after. It was, of course, a fairy tale.
I have never been impressed by "workaholic" ministers, possibly be cause I have known what it is like to be married to one. And yet, at the same time and possibly for the same reason I can sympathize with a minister's task of time management. Although my husband is now a recovered "workaholic," he certainly did not get there overnight.
From the beginning of our marriage we were on the wrong track. We were both programmed to expect ministers to be computerized, walking machines, who wore white suits and shoes and carried autographed Bibles in their left hands. Time was never a problem, we thought. They preached, visited, counseled, studied, wrote books, attended seminars, did a little marrying and burying on the side—and had enough spare time to lead the youth groups. They were securely perched on their pedestals.
Believing in this kind of fantasy world, we plunged into marriage with a whirl wind of activity. We juggled part-time and full-time jobs with college, graduate school, and seminary, and we acted as if we knew what we were doing. Not once during those years did we slow down long enough to ask why we did not know each other. It was not until we had got ten settled into our first church that we began to realize that something was wrong.
I should have been able to define some of our problems long before then. After all, my mother had warned me. "You can marry him," she said, "but don't ever ride in the car with him." She went on to explain that ministers are the world's worst drivers because they think that some sort of clerical guardian angel protects them from all harm.
Several years after that I finally stopped believing in clerical guardian angels and became convinced that ministers are ordinary mortal beings. When they work too hard they become exhausted, inefficient, or sick. They are allowed to bring such things on them selves just like everyone else.
"Oh, no! The charity-fund raisers, the youth fellowship, and the women's circle are all meeting on the same night next month," my husband moaned one night as he was grabbing dinner on the run.
"So what?" I replied.
"They all want me to speak!"
I failed to grasp the full impact of the problem. I figured that, since a person cannot be in three places at once, my husband (being well-bred, intelligent, and college-educated) would simply choose one meeting and explain the situation to the other two groups. I should have known better. Fairy-tale ministers never say No.
"I've got it." My spouse brightened up. "I think I can talk the youth group into changing their night. Then I could have dinner with the fund raisers, give a short talk there, and get to the circle meeting in time to be their last speaker." He strolled off looking relieved.
I kept quiet, but I knew he already had another problem. No minister has ever been able to come up with a working definition of the term short talk.
That is just one example of the kind of life we were living when we were trying to do it all, and I was just as bad as my husband. One meeting after another was checked off my calendar as I pretended to be a fairy-tale minister's wife. Gradually, though, we began to see that relentless schedules and divided interests were not really helping our church. For it is possible to stretch your time so far that your inner resources become depleted. It is possible to neglect your family long enough to force them to leave you (maybe physically, maybe emotionally). It is possible to spend every day leading busywork meetings and never get around to doing the task that Jesus calls us to do, the task of building quality relationships with people. When we began to look around us we saw that other ministers were caught in similar binds. Some of the retired ones told us that their concepts of ministry had been off base—that after they were gone, no one remembered they had worked 22 1/2 hours a day. What the people remembered were the few times their minister had taken a minute to replace light bulbs with them or wash dishes with them . . . and laugh with them.
We talked to some ministers' wives and heard about how lonely it can be to watch their husbands out front getting all the strokes or how resentful they could feel when their husbands spent more time with the trustees than they did with their own kids. Mostly though, we heard about husbands who didn't stand still long enough to see their wives hurting and about wives who were afraid to tell them.
It was obvious that many of our peers were having trouble organizing and managing their time, just like us. We could see that. But it was not until our daughter was born that we really began to search for some solutions.
In the labor room my husband had kept a forty-eight-hour vigil, and he couldn't understand why it was taking so long. He had forgotten that preachers' kids are always born on Sunday. And, sure enough, in the wee hours of Sunday morning our Becky was being welcomed into her new world. My husband was elated. He had just enough time to shower, grab some breakfast, and make it to church.
We were always thankful for our healthy, happy, beautiful child, and we were thrilled with each new task Becky mastered. Her first step was praised from the pulpit and announced on the radio waves as if she were the only one ever to do anything so magnificent.
Parenthood never really caused us to change our old ways, though. We remained much too busy. Then one day we noticed that our daughter had made the transition from baby to toddler all by herself. We had been so busy working that we had sort of missed it. "It was just that we weren't prepared for her to start traveling through life so fast," we told ourselves. She was catching us off guard. Soon we were tucking her into bed at night unsure of how old she would be the next morning.
"I just read that ministers' families spend more time together than other average American families," my husband informed me at breakfast one morning.
"You didn't read the fine print," I said. "Church dinners and committee meetings don't count."
"How about you, Becky?" he continued. "Do you think Daddy spends enough time with you?"
"Who's Daddy?" she replied.
She may have been kidding, but that is when it finally dawned on us. We were not giving the world something it desperately needs, something that we could, in fact, be giving. We were not giving it a good model for a Christian home. From that day on we began to work at solving our time-management problems.
First, we tried to analyze why so many ministers feel so driven. Is it because they think they must change the world single-handedly? Or do they love their jobs too much to venture out into the other challenges and adventures that life has to offer?
Could a minister's drive have anything to do with an inflated ego? Or do some ministers work long hours because they don't really like (or know) their families or even themselves? Are some of them victims of environmental pressure—pawns of the people who say that preachers work one day a week and play golf the other six?
In our case, my husband and I decided that our ridiculous schedules had a lot to do with habit and environmental conditioning. And, although the reasons for "workaholic" behavior are probably as diverse as the people involved, I suspect that we are not unusual. There was nothing magical about our solutions, either. They just happen to work for us. I think they work mostly because we finally made the decision to change—and because we took it one step at a time.
First, my husband admitted that he could not do it all—a humbling, but necessary, confession. It had become increasingly clear that ordination had vested him with no superhuman powers. He could not by a snap of his fingers manufacture instant Christians, for in stance. Having accepted that, we opened our Bibles to Ephesians 4 and read the real job description for pastors. It says, of course, that pastors are supposed to equip people to go out and minister, which is a lot different from doing their ministering for them.
Before long we were putting our priorities down on paper. We both agreed, for example, that God wants us to reach out to people and try to meet their needs. So ministering to people who have immediate needs was high on our list. However, in order to do that effectively and have time left for the other things on our list, we could see that we were simply not going to have time to visit every member of the church every year. (Did they ever want us to?) We could see why a minister might have to let the deacons do some of the shut-in visitation. We could see that the annual church blueberry festival would bite the dust if lay people were not willing to take the responsibility for it.
There were several other priorities on our list that we had expected to see there. My husband felt that he needed to give a lot of time to premarital counseling, for example. And he wanted to spend time building up the church school and organizing group Bible studies. Some of our other priorities, however, were fairly new to us. We felt, for in stance, a great need to build a deep, dynamic love relationship with the child we had brought into the world.
So we began to incorporate that sort of time into our schedules. At first we had to plan for it, even write it on the calendar. (No one can really grasp the difficulty of this chore until he has written "tea party with Boo Bear" on his calendar.)
We also felt that we needed time to be together as a couple, to learn to communicate better, to help each other become the people God created us to become. We decided that the only way we could be good parents was to be the best possible spouses we could be. So, we revived the forgotten art of snatching fugitive moments. We dangled our feet in streams and shared chocolate ice-cream sodas with two straws. We discovered, almost by accident, that these really are the things that make work meaningful again.
Soon we had even learned to appreciate the precious gift of silence. When we began to draw away from the noise and bustle around us we were finally silent long enough to listen to God (who speaks in a still, small voice). It made all the difference.
We have learned to appreciate other things, too—like the restorative power of rest and sleep. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? After all, even God rested one day of the week. But it was a new revelation for us, because ministers don't live that way. Even if they do get tired enough to agree (begrudgingly) to take a Monday off, they usually end up sneaking over to the church to "check their mail." We decided it was time to change all that. And when we began to limber up and take time for each other and set our priorities straight, we found every phase of our lives improving (including our ministries).
Managing our time more wisely has not solved all our problems, of course. The pastorate still has its ups and downs, inflation still eats away at the paycheck, and we are still busier than most of our friends down the street. And yet there have been so many positive changes in our lives.
Now my husband finds time to jog several times a week just because he wants to. He has also been known to turn down speaking engagements be cause he had promised his family a bike ride to the park to see a puppet show. I say No more easily these days too, and I weigh my activities as carefully as I weigh myself. Well, almost as carefully.
The time we used to spend dreaming about a fairy-tale ministry is now spent reading to our daughter. That is the way it should be, for there was no fairy god mother all along. There was, instead, a God a God who was calling us to be something other than perfect people. He was calling us to be genuine, open, and honest so that He could add all the other things as He saw fit.
Yesterday I was reading to Becky. "You know," I said to my husband when I finished the book, "I guess we have finally found something better than the elusive search for 'happily ever after.'"
"I think so," he said, tickling his daughter mercilessly. "It's much better to be happy now."
Prayers from the parsonage
by Cherry B. Habenicht
Here is a note from a society suggesting I sacrifice for the poor in Appalachia. Another letter asks me to sponsor a needy child each month. A third request is for funds for Somalian refugees.
Lord, how should I respond to the steady stream of appeals flooding my mailbox? Should I toss the envelopes into the wastebasket without a second thought? Should I open them and read with skepticism, rationalizing that administrative costs and postage gobble up most contributions? Should I close my eyes to the pictures of a small girl showing her empty cup and a worn mother holding her baby?
I wish, Jesus, I knew how to interpret the blessings and curses of Matthew 25. Am I to see You in these strangers? Am I to fill these stomachs and clothe these bodies? Is it up to me to restore the delinquent and to bring health to the diseased?
Bless, I pray, each organization that helps the needy. There is food to dis tribute, medicine to dispense, material to provide. There are schools to build, tools to share, fields to cultivate. I thank You for men and women with courage to envision improved standards of living.
Please give me the right perspective. I know I need a world view, a concern for unfamiliar countries and people.
First I want to work through my church. But does it hold a monopoly on all worthy causes? Impress my judgment so I give wisely and without bias.
If even my selfish heart is touched by famine, ignorance, and pain, Your loving heart must break under the weight of a desperate world. Let me not forget that no government, no agency, no work corps, can offer a complete solution. You alone are the Bread of Life and "water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).