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.