When a Pastor Gets Everything, and Nothing Gets Done

Last week I sat in the wrong coffee shop for 20 minutes before realizing I was meeting someone else. I rushed to the right one, apologizing on the way in, and still ended up having a great hour of mutual encouragement with a man I admire.

After the meeting, I looked at the clock. An hour until lunch. So I tried to redeem it with the emails that had been waiting, while preparing to sit down with a couple I'd been praying for. That admin hour turned into bumping into people. Kids saying hi and wanting to talk about nothing in particular. A woman sharing her burden for a coworker while we strategized how to help. A phone call from a man who just wants his wife free from addiction. Should I rush away to get my tasks done?

Then lunch. Everything I was trying to finish had to wait. They needed me to sit across from them without glancing at my phone and remind them of the gospel. Then I finally retreated to my office to get work done, and five people stopped by, each with something worth listening to. All the while, the list kept growing.

I have been on the receiving end of many jokes that I only work on Sundays. I get it. A pastor's work is hard to quantify and hard to explain. Many days, I don't produce a deliverable I can tell someone about.

Here is what I've had to let go of. The checklist. Getting things done. Pushing things forward. Not because those things don't matter, but because on most days they aren't what the day is for.

On days like that, I think about Mark 6. The disciples have just come back from being sent out two by two, and they are worn down. Jesus tells them, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest." So they get in a boat. But the crowd sees them leave, figures out where they are headed, and runs around the lake on foot. When Jesus steps out of the boat, the quiet place is full of people. And Mark says he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things.

So does Jesus retreat and get back in the boat, annoyed they have ruined his alone time? Nope. Jesus doesn't treat the crowd on the shore as something standing between him and what he wanted to do with his disciples. Instead, he looks at them and sees what they are: people with no one to look after them. That is not a distraction from a shepherd's work. It is the work.

So checklist be damned. I would rather have a growing list that never gets done than people who can't talk to me. Yes, I need to get "work" done. But the interruptions are the work. The people are the work.

It has hit me especially this week, as a few people have told me they grew up in churches where the pastor never talked to them. They had a shepherd they could not reach. I don't want to be that. I want to be the kind of pastor who steps off the boat and sits down, even on a day I had set aside for something else.