Tag Archives: self care

Better Than Normal

Posted on by
2

Well, my lovely three-month sabbatical is winding down. A pastor friend told me that he’s never more depressed than at the end of a sabbatical. When you’re on sabbatical, he said, you come to realize that a pastor’s life isn’t normal. When you have a chance to taste “normal”, it’s hard to go back to “crazy”.

I know something of what he’s talking about. Still, my sabbatical is having a different effect on me. Having tasted “normal” (or as normal as life in the P-R house is ever gonna get) for nearly twelve weeks, I’m coming back inspired and eager to try some healthier practices, both at home and at church. More on that later.

This week I’ve been holed away at a mountain cabin, writing, writing. Mountain “cabin” is a bit of an understatement. More like a mountain mini-Biltmore. Undying thanks to two dear friends who opened their home to me.

Today I’m doing my best slug imitation, lazing in a rocking chair, soaking up the harmony of wind chimes and ogling the lavender carpet of mountains in the distance. Just off the deck is a bird feeder that seems to be a Circle K for every feathered creature inside a five-mile radius—warblers, plovers, thrushes, tanagers, buntings, chickadees. These birds of the air indeed do not sow or reap. But they do bully each other for Cole’s Special Blend around the feed trough. Here’s a 30-second clip:

My friend Brett Younger says that when you look up the word sabbatical in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of a pastor smiling. Yep, I’m smiling.

And so grateful.

First, to a good God who’s in the restoration business.

Second, to my dear, generous First Baptist Decatur family for giving me time and space to refill my saggy tires and to remember who I am, what the Church is about, and what we’re meant for.

Third, to our selfless staff who’ve covered lots and lots of extra bases all summer. I know, I know…I owe you big time.

And finally, to all the super-dee-duper preachers who’ve filled the pulpit each Sunday. Confession time: It’s a tiny bit possible that in some dank, reptilian corner of my soul, I secretly hoped that at least a few of you might stink a little, you know, for a comparative boost when I got back. You let me down, people.

Next Sunday I fly to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to wrap up my sabbatical, kayaking on Lake Superior with nine people I’ve never met. Back before Easter I saw an ad in the Christian Century for a retreat, sponsored by the Cedar Tree Institute, called “The Spirit of Place”. They had me at hello. We’ll kayak by day and talk about the writings of Flannery O’Conner around the campfire at night. Yes, I’m that lucky.

Two things you should know about the Michigan trip:
a) The ICE PACK on Lake Superior finally thawed just last month. Did I mention there’s been ICE?
b) I’ve never actually been in a kayak.

I’ll keep you posted.

Let It Be: 2014

Posted on by
4

Snowy tree-lined road at sunrise.

Call them resolutions, aspirations, intentions, whatever. I pray that a year from now these will have been true of me in 2014:

1.  She lived in and led from the roominess of God.

“The Good Shepherd leads his sheep out of the tight and tiny boxes in which we lock ourselves into his spacious pastures.”
~ Timothy Radcliff

“All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in the Spirit.”
~ Thomas Aquinas

2. She wore her own face.

“Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…”
~ May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”

“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation… and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but their own vulnerable selves.”
~ Henri J. M. Nouwen

3. She was mindful of each moment.

“We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise.”
~ Robert Farrar Capon

“The present moment, like the spotted owl or the sea turtle, has become an endangered species. Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline.”
~ Philip Simmons

4. She practiced stillness.

“I learned…that inspiration…comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness…The imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
~ Brenda Ueland

5. She operated more often from love than from fear.

“Our fear is in the service of all the little ways we have learned to protect our false self. But love is really who we are. We’ll never see the love we really are, our foundation, if we keep living out of our false self of self-protection and overreaction. We must remember that ‘perfect love casts out all fear’ (1 John 4:18).”
~ Richard Rohr

6. She chose joy.

It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation…
~ Mary Oliver 

7.  She finished that dag-nabbity book!

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ Thomas Mann

Good and gracious God, let it be.

photo cc flickr.com/photos/18_2rosadik36

Absorbing Chaos

Posted on by
2

Dennis C. Golden, president of Fontbonne University in St. Louis, once recalled a visit years ago with a friend who also was at the helm of a university. During their conversation, Golden’s friend described her role as college president in terms of three specific functions.

Basically, she said, I get up every morning and I do three things:  

Absorb chaos.

Give back calm.
Provide hope.

Ministers everywhere will recognize something of our own calling in those words—especially the part about absorbing chaos. Serving Jesus in the church and in the world involves the inevitable sponging up of all kinds of ugliness and pain:  Anger. Gossip. Secrets. Shame. Betrayal. Pettiness. Addiction. And, as most of us have discovered along the way, absorbing chaos takes a very personal toll.

One Thursday in the not-so-distant past I joined some pastor friends for lunch at an Atlanta bistro. We get together every month, ostensibly to discuss books but largely to prop each other up. I was feeling particularly raw that day about some conflict in my own congregation over changes and challenges we’d been facing for a while. My friends at the table were already familiar with the situation, but I shared some updates as we ate.

While scanning the dessert menu, I mentioned that I had a doctor’s appointment later that day. “I need something to help me sleep,” I told them. “My chest feels tight and my heart keeps racing.” Sympathetic nods all around.

From the far end of the table one of the pastors spoke up: “For what it’s worth, I swear by trazodone. My doctor prescribed it for my anxiety five years ago and it changed my life.”

“Have you tried amitriptyline?” another friend asked. “When my depression was at its worst last fall, my doctor put me on that.”

“Yeah, but it dries out your mouth,” announced a third.  “I couldn’t preach while on amitriptyline—it gave me cotton mouth—so I’m giving St. John’s wort a try.”

There was a brief silence, then we all burst out laughing at what a beleaguered bunch we seemed to be. But here is a sad truth: of the ten pastors at the table that day, seven had required medication for anxiety and/or depression, and only two had not experienced some traumatic episode of conflict in his or her church.

Absorb chaos. A person can sop up only so much ugliness before his or her soul begins to turn rancid. Maybe that college president should consider adding a fourth bullet point to her job description: “Wring out sponge.” There are plenty of good sponge-wringing avenues:  prayer, worship, meditation, exercise, therapy, good friends, etc. Why do this? For all kinds of reasons, but I’ll name two:

First:  God has given you and me a name and it is beloved, not beleaguered. You and I were meant for more than a depleted, soggy half-life.

And second:  God has given us a name and it is creature, not Creator. Christ already absorbed the sin and chaos of the world—received the poison and shuddered as it killed him. Why in the world would we feel the need to let it kill us, too?

So for God’s sake, and your own—lift up your sponges. (Say it with me: We lift them up to the Lord!) Lift them up and squeeze till your knuckles turn white. This is a faithful act.