This is my first post after being out of the office for about a week and a half. I had taken some time off because, frankly, I needed a break. I was stressed out, exhausted, and dealing with what is called “compassion fatigue,” which is not uncommon for pastors, counselors and social workers, health care providers, etc. After walking alongside three grieving families in less than two weeks along with the other stresses, pulls in different directions, and the persistent need for my attention both at the church and at home, I was just plain spent.
During that week one of the things I did was to drive up to Worthington to see a pastoral counselor at a place called The Wellness Institute. I had called our presbytery office and told our executive presbyter, Jeanne Harsh, “I need somebody to talk to.” Glad that I recognized the pastoral need for self-care, she made a referral and a week or so later I was sitting with a very experienced counselor (licensed medical social worker) who is also an ordained Presbyterian pastor. The issue was that so much grief and struggle was coming into me through walking alongside my parishioners during their struggles, but I had nowhere to express it. It was coming in but not coming back out. That’s a recipe for disaster. Talking about things that bother us is a major key to dealing with those aspects of life maturely and in healthy ways. However, as a pastor, I am really pretty limited in who I can talk to about these matters. For the most part, I cannot talk to parishioners because of confidentiality concerns, which is also the reason I have to stop short in discussing many situations with Danielle. While she is my best friend, she is also a member of this church. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair for me to dump it all on her either. Then who is she going to talk to about it? So that would really just be transferring the problem from me to Danielle. I also can’t really talk to other pastors here in town about many situations because this town is too small for me to talk to one member of the community about what is going on with another member of the community and because the other pastors are just as busy as I am. I take confidentiality very seriously. I do pray about the situations. I pray for the members of our congregation all the time, but sometimes a person just has to talk to another person. You “inhale” so much that eventually you have to “exhale” it or you just might quit breathing. Have you ever felt like that?
After spending a long time with the counselor he observed that (1) I was dealing with some acute compassion fatigue because of the difficult couple of weeks (2) I am not dealing well with the stresses of the pastoral vocation (3) I need to make sure that we’re developing lay leadership that can handle things like the children’s and youth Christian education programs and (4) I am going to have to come to grips with the fact that everything simply cannot happen right now. This fourth item is something that Wilma Dorn has been on me about for several months. “It’s okay if it takes a while,” she says. The counselor stated that if I keep up the pace I’ve been running at during my first ten months here that my motor is going to give out. “Slow down,” he said. “Set some boundaries on your time and attention, get some exercise, eat better, and realize that this is not your church, this is Christ’s church and through Christ this is this congregation’s church. You’re just their pastor.”
One church member told me the first time I ever met him, “If you feel a huge load of expectations on you, that’s coming from you, not from the congregation.” While, I don’t think that’s totally accurate (there were some very real expectations of improvement when I came), the fact of the matter is that I’m doing this to myself. I have such an ambitious drive, so many ideas, so much love for this congregation, that I’m working myself into the ground. You probably don’t notice this because I’m working at my house in the evenings or coming over to the church late at night or taking work with me to work on in the doctor’s waiting room and so on and so forth. That’s not healthy at all, and that is my fault, not yours. My hair has started thinning much faster than it was before, I have a bunch of white hairs growing in my beard at the age of 34 that I didn’t have ten months ago, and I have gained 16 pounds since I moved here, and I cannot blame all of those pounds on Arlene Thompson’s homemade pies. The pies are only responsible for a few of those pounds. The rest is my own fault.
I have been trying to carve exercise time out of my personal/family time like most people do. When I do that, however, Danielle is stuck with keeping the kids on her own for even more hours out of the day than she already does. Every time I have tried to do it before the kids wake up, the kids hear the door close when I leave and they wake up which causes Danielle to have to wake up that much earlier. That’s not fair to her. If I wait until the kids are in bed and the house is straightened up at the end of the day then I don't get any alone time with Danielle and I can’t work out until close to ten p.m., which doesn’t work because the YMCA is closed and that makes me stay up really late. Because of those scheduling difficulties, I completely quit working out and the pounds have been packing on and my body has been tensed up with stress. So the counselor suggested that I begin considering exercise as a part of my work, not as a part of my personal time. “The congregation will just have to understand that if you don’t start exercising to release some tension and to get healthier, you’re not going to be of any use to them.” Today was the first day (a week and a half after he said it) that I actually went to the YMCA and it felt great.
Now why am I telling you this? Firstly, when people find out later that you were stressed out and at your wit’s end, if they actually care about you, they tend to say, “You should have told us!” Well, I’m telling you. Not blaming you, just telling you. Secondly, I want you to know that I am taking appropriately mature steps to take care of myself. Being a pastor is incredibly rewarding, but it also carries with it inherent stress. Thomas W. Currie III writes, “Ministry calls one to proclaim, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ as a family is standing around an open grave. How successful is that? Ministry calls one to enter the darkness of other lives and even confront the darkness of one’s own life armed with nothing more than the rumor of Christ’s victory. That is no romantic quest but a journey where one fails and falls again and again, often looking ridiculous, able only to sigh for what one is unable to see.” That, along with needing to have some working knowledge in things as dissimilar as ancient Hebrew culture, marriage counseling, social services, budgeting, children’s learning styles, church history, and how to work a copier, can wear a person down if that person lets it happen. Just ten months in, I’ve let it happen.
There is a phrase that describes pastors who do not take care of themselves: people who used to be pastors. This congregation, perhaps better than any other, knows that the spiritual, mental, and physical health of the pastor and the health of the church are intricately connected with each other. Unfortunately, because we pastors are sinful human beings like everybody else, some pastors deal (or don’t deal) with these stresses through smoking like a freight train, drinking like a fish, or having failing marriages. I’ve seen some of my colleagues in ministry crack and generally it isn’t just the pastor and the pastor’s family who are hurt, but the congregation as well. I don’t smoke (I can’t even stand the smell of it), it takes me two weeks to go through a six pack of beer, and Danielle and I are in an extremely healthy place in our marriage. Those are not concerns right now, but they could be in the future if I don’t start taking better care of myself. So I’m going to take care of myself as I minister with you. Good habits need to start now, accompanied with a more mature, realistic, spiritual, and historically accurate view of who a pastor is and what a pastor does—the word "pastor" comes from the Latin word that literally means “shepherd.”
The third reason I’m telling you this is because I want you to know that you do not need to be embarrassed to go speak with someone when you are struggling. Going to speak with a counselor is not a failure on your part. It is not a failure of your faith because you couldn’t “pray your way through it.” It is a failure of your self-sufficiency,though, and that is OKAY. Whoever said that we’re supposed to be completely self-sufficient? In Genesis 2, when there is only Adam, we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’” Then God calls a people, Jesus calls disciples, and the church comes together as the covenant community. Here in America we have this false sense of the hero being a Lone Ranger, someone who rides into town, needs no one, takes care of problems herself or himself and then rides out of town alone. That’s just a myth, and a rather unhelpful one at that. It’s okay, wise in fact, to go talk to someone, perhaps a pastor (who has very minimal training in counseling) or a professional counselor, when you are grieving, confused, lonely, or frustrated. For some reason for many people there is a stigma involved with seeing a counselor. In fact, I was just reading a book about marriage counseling that says that most couples do not go see a counselor until it is already too late to save their marriage. They too often go “just so they can say they tried everything,” whereas if they would have gone early on they might not be getting a divorce.
I am here for you (within understandable and appropriate limits) and I can listen and counsel on some things (always on a short term basis), but more than anything I can help you figure out what kind of help you might need, while helping you to utilize the resources of your faith. You might need to have a conversation with someone about something that has plagued you for years. You might need to come to terms with a sinful behavior, repent of it, and ask for God’s help to move in God’s direction. You might need professional therapy and/or medication. You might need to go to AA. Most of the time you just need to get something of your chest and pray about it with your pastor. Or like me, you might just need to get some exercise, eat better, and stop working in bed until midnight.
I want this to be a long-term pastorate, which is commonly defined as seven or more years. As Glenn E. Ludwig writes in In It for the Long Haul: Building Effective Long-Term Pastorates, “long-term pastorates tend to lead to healthier congregations and healthier pastors.” I want that for our congregation, for our community, for my wife and kids, and for me. So let’s all work together to make that a possibility, praying to God through our hope that it will be more than a possibility, becoming a reality.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett
