Minister Stuff

When we were still newlyweds, and I was serving my first congregation in Midland Texas, my former wife came home from work one afternoon and asked her daughter "Where's Tim?"

"Oh, he's gone to a motel to meet a girl," my eight-year-old stepdaughter replied, then quickly added as she noticed the change in her mother's expression: "Don't worry mom. It's Minister stuff."

The girl was a sixteen-year-old runaway I'd met the previous evening while working as a volunteer hospital emergency room chaplain. I'd given her my card, and told her to call me when she was ready to be helped. I ended up bringing her back home with me, where she lived as part of our family for about three weeks while I negotiated long-distance with her mother to give Ruth one more chance. As I was taking her to the airport, just before Christmas, I noticed the six-inch Bowie knife she'd been carrying in her handbag while living on the streets, and later in my home.

"You can't take that on the plane with you," I said calmly. Ruth looked a little confused, then took the knife out of her purse and handed it to me. I put it in the glove box of my car, where it remained for years, until I sold that car and the knife disappeared somewhere into a box in my garage.

That was then, in Midland Texas...when I was young and idealistic and full of hope, and my pastoral boundaries were perhaps not quite so well-defined as they are today. Yesterday, I was in my car and called my now thirty-year-old stepdaughter just because I felt the need to talk.

"I'm on my way to the hospital," I told her...then quickly added "Don't worry Hon; It's Minister stuff." A parishioner of mine had fallen from a ladder and struck his head on a rock while helping his daughter and son-in-law build an addition on their new home. He was not going to survive this accident; in an instant, a heartbeat, a blink of an eye his life was over and the lives of everyone who knew and loved him would be dramatically changed forever. The rest of the details aren't really that important. I cleared my calendar for the next few days, and drove for an hour to be with this family as they navigated this terrible tragedy: to help guide them spiritually when I could, to support them emotionally as best as I was able, to represent all of the other members of their faith community who would have liked to have been there to help as well if it were somehow possible.

This is the kind of thing a minister can do in a congregation of only 100 households, at the tail-end of a long, slow summer. Still, it's a helluva way to make a living. I guess I keep doing it because I can, and because I know that it's important. Because after a quarter of a century in this strange and outrageously demanding profession I've experienced some things in life and about myself which make me of service to people who are facing this sort of crisis themselves, maybe for the first time, maybe even for the only time in their lives. And I don't want to make it sound sentimental or melodramatic, because it's not. It's just matter-of-fact life and death in its devastatingly uncompromising simplicity.

Minister Stuff.