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I Am Weary

I have grown so weary.

It was supposed to get easier after Easter.  For some pastors it did.  My problems seem to not stop.

When do I get to rest?  When do I get to breathe?  Why am I so worn when I am not anything but a worship leader?

My therapist told me to not minimize my own struggles, but how do you not?  All I do is put together a worship service.  I do not go to hospitals and care for patients, I do not risk my life to stock groceries and check customers out for garbage pay, I work from home – a quite comfortable home – and have no schedule.

Why am I so weary?

Why do I put in so much effort?  Do I actually do something more than people who put in less?  Do my offerings match the effort I put into them?

Why do I worry so much about it?  Why can I not just be okay with enough?  Why can I not see my offering as enough?

If I actually put this into the public, someone will tell me I am enough and to not beat myself up.  Someone will try to make me feel better.  Someone will read it and wonder why I wrote this to complain.

Maintaining my pastoral identity – and my professional identity – makes me weary.  The amount of work I must put into to maintain my identity as a pastor makes me weary.  The energy I must give to be myself in this time makes me weary.

Nothing just works.  Zoom meetings randomly decide to not let me in.  Facebook crashes.  I forget to change a setting on my router and lose the service halfway through on Easter – a service I put many hours and much stress into.  On-the-fly corrections do not really work in this space.  Flexibility has gone from ministry because I cannot just change someone last minute.  Everything must be planned and executed, and then something not working will destroy all that work and planning.

I just want to stop.  I just want to be done.  I just want my home to no longer be my chancel and my office.  I just want to preach again in my physical pulpit.

I want to be seen.  I want people to understand the sheer volume of work I do – work I never excelled at and clearly should not do professionally.  I want people to see that I am making an offering that will be insufficient by the world’s standards but is so much more than I could be doing.  I want people to see how much I struggle to balance my need for a sustainable ministry and my call to provide a full worship service – and not chastise and scold me for it.

And I want to be enough.  But I am not.  God makes me enough, somehow, but I am not, and my offerings are inadequate.  I want people to just hear that, not try to fix it, not try to explain it away, but just hear my struggles and empathize with them.

I am weary, and I do not know how to not be weary.

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Do Something

I awoke at 6:30.  Yesterday my big toe hurt a little; today it was killing me and, come to find out, I am struggling to walk (and Dr. Google diagnosed me with gout, which is a bit deflating, not going to lie).   The dog was very sluggish this morning, which caused me to worry until she finally decided it was time to wake up and want to go walk right that instant (and don’t forget the toe).  She got a very short walk.

I got to the office and went to update the printer firmware that I’ve been meaning to update for months but kept forgetting to bring a USB cable with me.  I went to the printer, and could not for the life of me remember what I set the administrator pin to.  I spent 20-30 minutes kicking myself, trying to find how to factory reset the printer, and then finally remembering the incredibly simple and easy to remember pin that I set up.

THANKFULLY the firmware update went without a hitch and Google Cloud Print set up super easy.

That gets me to about 20 minutes ago.  I don’t want to do anything.  The office is cold – I really thought we were done with needing the heat last week – and my toe is still killing.  I’m out of filtered water and the tap water is questionable most days.  I think I slept well – Nora was complaining about storms and I’ll tell you, I have no recollection of a storm last night – and I have caffeine in my system, but I feel exhausted and all I want to do is curl back up in bed and try again tomorrow.

I have work to do.  I hadn’t even considered Sunday in a concrete way until right before I typed this sentence.  Computer games and distractions are calling my name, and it would be so easy to succumb to that temptation and get nothing done today.

I was ready to walk out the door and go to lunch WAY early when something just kind of starting gnawing at me:

Do something.

Sometimes we get to the point where there is too much to do and we just don’t know which task to tackle first.  Sometimes there is a LOT of things that are outside of your hands and you are just twiddling your thumbs, waiting for it to others to take action so you know where you stand.  Sometimes you just can’t focus and the office you actually kinda like becomes oppressive and draining.

Sometimes you just want to curl up and give up for no particular reason.

Do something.  Do anything.

That’s part of why this blog is a thing for me.  It’s something real, tangible, helpful to do.  Is it the work I have to accomplish today?  No, no it is not.  Is it going to impress some church looking at my PIF?  Very unlikely.

Is it something that I did, that I accomplished, that I can say to myself that I was capable of working on?  Absolutely, and I can already feel my motivation coming back and getting my mind ready to do the work after lunch.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll post it and take it down tomorrow, but for me, those two words kind of got me out of the rut and back onto the path of accomplishing actual work today.

Do something.

Peace,

– Robby

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Tired and Weary

I find myself weary today.  Part of it is that damn exegesis exam*, part is that my wife has been sick and not sleeping well, which makes me not sleep well, and part is because coffee isn’t doing it right now for some reason.

I mean really, coffee is supposed to wake you up, not put you to sleep like it has been doing to me today.

But I find myself more than just tired and drained because of my own life.  I find myself weary because I see darkness in the world and I’ve found myself helpless.

I find myself tired and weary as I think about Baltimore.  I struggle with knowing that racism is alive and well in our country.  I am weary because I see what I find to be senseless violence because I don’t understand having a history that tells me I am only not an animal, a monster, 3/5 of a person, or worse to the legal system because I was born in the right time.  I don’t understand being followed by cops because of the color of my skin.  I’ve never been told that my culture is bad and that I need to follow another culture to not be a bad person.

I don’t feel or understand the anger that lead to the violence, so all I see is the violence.  I see what seems to be mindless and undirected and needlessly hateful, and I can’t wrap my mind around anything else.  I hear pundits and activists try to explain why it is happening, and I hear pundits and activists try to explain why it is wrong and evil, and I hear pundits and activists say why it is good and righteous, and I don’t understand.

It makes my head swim.  I am a logical person, seeking to understand not just with the heart but with my mind.  I try to understand the logic of something, the reason, the buildup and the systems and the anti-systems that lead up to something.  I try to assign blame, assign righteousness, assign the best course action and judge the current actions upon them.  I try, but I can’t.

All I see is anger and hatred and pain.  So much pain.

I sit in my office and I actually feel the urge to weep.  I won’t – professionalism is important and my door is always open – but weeping seems to be the only decent response.  Even if everything that the rioters did was wrong, what lead them to be so angry to do it?  How much pain have they been caused, have they felt, that this is the only way they could respond?

I don’t understand it, and I never will.  My logical and organizing mind tries to rationalize it but I can’t.  I so just want to get it, to know what is going on, but I can’t.  All I want is to know how to ease the pain of those who are in pain, and I can only kneel, praying that God can provide healing because I cannot.

I am weary.  And tired.  And hoping that my prayer is sufficient.

I don’t feel your pain, but I can see your pain, and I want nothing more than for it to be relieved.  May God’s loving arms give you comfort in peace in this time where there is nothing but pain and violence and anger.

Let us also bow for the relief of pain, for love to win, for people to love one another, and that we can feel empathy for all, not just those who we understand.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Peace,

Robert

* As a side note, holy crap I was a gun shy about that exam.  Exegesis was probably my strongest area in seminary – except may Presbyterian Polity because I’m awesome like that – and yet it is the exam I did the absolute worst in.  I feel like the exam is set up not to test your actual ability to exegete a passage but do the busy work of someone else’s exegesis and then someone be creative with a sermon using, again, someone else’s process.  That’s all to say, please let me pass this time 😦