Why being a pastor is a strange profession
1. For starters, almost all my friends and family start to get more excited for the weekend, as Friday approaches. Even if I have Saturday away from work, the impending sermon to preach on Sunday morning is never far from me.
2. Then, Monday morning arrives and almost all of my family and friends are off to work and school, while I am doing my best to practice Sabbath
3. We pastors spend a lot of time talking about and being around stuff that most people try to avoid - sickness, death, brokenness, divorce, addiction, loss of faith, etc.
4. This is not a job - if I were an accountant, most likely, I could stop counting beans at the end of the day. If I were a construction worker, I'd come home and be a mom, a wife, and all the other hats a woman wears, but I'd probably no longer do stuff that resembled being a construction worker. However, as a pastor, the role and the person don't separate very easily. Even if I can extricate myself internally, as soon as I step out my front door, and encounter another person, I most often am treated as pastor.
5. The chain of command and assessment of one's work is often elusive and intangible.
6. I get paid to do stuff like pray, read, talk to people, listen to people, pray some more. That doesn't sound like a job to most people.
You may wonder what has led me down this path of reflection....well, today was Monday, my day off. However, a beloved and significant member of our congregation had open heart surgery today. So, after some down time in the morning, I found myself in a hospital waiting room with family members, hoping for good news. The news was good. A first hurdle - coming out of surgery, having the doctor say he was "pleased" with the results, etc. After some time, the family going into see their father and husband, I left to resume my day off. I was distracted by my Blackberry and missed the fact that an elevator was open and a man asked me if I was going down. He probably asked me a couple of times before I came to. I joked about the question should be am I even awake and alert. When we got to the lobby and got off together, he stopped and commented how crazy this was. He said his mother was having open heart surgery, and he was going downstairs to meet his brother-in-law who was in emergency. I could see the look of distress and sheer panic on his face. Without skipping a beat, I told him I was a pastor and asked him if he would like me to pray with him. What!!????? Oh my gosh, this was not me, Gail, asking this, it was surely God. This is who I have become, not who I am! I was standing next to him, hand on his shoulder, and praying something, before I even had really thought about the implications of such an offer, or what I would say. His wife and daughter were just coming around the corner when I was finishing and I'm sure that must have been shocking to see some strange woman with a hand on their father/husband, but once they got the story, their faces were both relieved and grateful.
Then, I walked on out the door and to my car and hoped that I was going to resume my day off...but at that point, doing so with much less certainty because being a pastor is a strange profession.