17 days & a few lessons

I've been at this Pastor Mom business a whopping 17 days, and already I've gleaned a few lessons from my experience. My baby is sleeping, so I'll get right to the point...

1. A work-from-home and on-the-road Pastor Mom must be okay with variable and undefined working hours. This creates a number of scenarios:

• Church meetings occasionally supersede my desire to put my baby to bed every night.
• If Briggs comes along on a pastoral visit, I must either plan accordingly for nap time or deal with a cranky baby.
• Saturdays spent completing a sermon and Sundays spent preaching & engaging congregants makes for less than relaxing weekends.
• Consequently, I must learn to accept and appreciate a mid-week "week-end."
• Getting into the groove of sermon-writing happens when I least expect it (not only when Briggs is napping) thus I need to be prepared to record my thoughts at any given time.

2. Speaking of sermon writing, this elusive--impossible to justify the time I spend-- art of delving into God's Word, hoping for a few words of my own to illuminate the scripture each Sunday. This, my friends who have never had the privilege of writing a sermon, can be excruciatingly time-consuming & burdensome (my friends who have will likely relate). Take for example my sermon prep last week. I read the text (over and over), consult a few commentaries and reflections, write my thoughts down, think about it all week long in the context of my congregation (including during what would otherwise be leisurely walks or sleep-filled early hours of the morning), then on Friday afternoon while Briggs is napping I erase my previous thoughts and write more. Finally on Saturday I tweak and re-tweak my sermon until I say a prayer of blessing and print it. Done- that is until I hear a few nuances during the Sunday morning reading itself (as I’m reading the text, by the way) and ad lib these thoughts into the manuscript.

Why does it take so much time, you ask? I ask the same question, and here are my thoughts...

• I am essentially trying to do the impossible, which is give explanation of God's Word to folks who can also read God's Word for themselves just fine. This is said with the understanding that God's Word is a source of light and truth for all who read in the Spirit of God, only my congregants expect that my 3+ years of training have somehow endowed me with a slightly more direct line to this light and truth. This, I suppose, it what we refer to as a calling.
• Whenever I attempt to write down my thoughts, I am often struck by the realization that perhaps what I am saying is not what God is saying. Humans attempting to explain God? Yep, you get the difficulty. It's a delicate balance of allowing God's Word to speak THROUGH my words, rather than claiming to speak the Word of God directly.
• I find myself wondering if I am attempting to make the Word of God accommodate my agenda. We pastors all have biases, and whenever I re-write my sermon, it's because I sense that I have attempted to make God's Word say what I want, rather than what God's Word is truly saying. And here I am left ever-wondering, all week long, am I being true to the text?

3. This post is getting long, and I suspect I have already lost a few disinterested folks, so I will end by saying that I rely on my husband as a source of love and acceptance SO much as both a Pastor and Mom. Thus, I am learning to be particularly intentional about creating space to nurture our marriage and prayer life. Home and the people I love (including this cute little guy below) are truly the wellspring of energy and resolve I need in this crazy journey of being Pastor Mom.