Work. Rest. Two commandments of equal importance.

“Work is the reward of work, just as rest is the reward of rest.” –Aviya Kushner in The Grammar of God.

            As I’ve been reading through this wonderful book on Hebrew grammar and the way it informs how a person reads the Bible I’ve been struck by the ideas of language and how it changes our attitudes, our beliefs, and even how we act. This is evident enough in the politically-charged world we see in the media. Words matter. And half the war is in how they are arranged to paint a certain picture.

            But, ultimately, the way things are portrayed on TV, the radio, and the internet is not the only story. As we enter into Advent and eventually Christmas, now is the perfect time to reflect on all the ways we can paint a different picture of the world around us. Now is a great opportunity to think differently. For me, it starts with the quote at the beginning of this article. Work is the reward of work; rest is the reward of rest. To me, this means that even though there are many things outside of my control—wars and refugees and terrorism and the economy and the political issues du jour—none of that out there offers me any reward. That sounds selfish, but what I mean by this is simply: Doing things is what will leave me fulfilled. This can be work done for me and for my family, and it can also be work done for somebody else who I don’t know as well or at all. It’s the work itself that is the reward, because that’s what we were created to do.

            But there’s also a second part of this that some of us forget: rest is the reward of rest. It’s easy to think that work is where all positive contributions happen, but I think this is not at all the case. I believe there is a very good reason that God commanded rest (Sabbath)—right alongside not killing and not stealing and all of that business. Rest is reward to you and also where we are primed to work again; it’s where we are reset and reminded that work is actually a reward; not tedium, not pointless, but it all serves the good of our fellow friends and neighbors.

Why this youth trip meant more to me

For all I write I'm usually not very personal. This is mostly by design. I mean, I never much cared for pastors who preached all about their own lives, and I'm not much into self-promotion on the blog. There is a danger in not talking about myself--at a certain point I lose my humanity and become a thinking-head, a writing-automaton. It's posts like this that will hopefully keep me from becoming that. This is going to be more personal than most, and for that I do not apologize in the slightest.

This year marked my third mission trip/service trip/cultural immersion/whatever you want to call what we do with our high school youth each summer (personally I prefer service trip, generally, though this year was more of a cultural immersion). And this year was different than every other year--as it tends to be. Some parts were rough; some parts were great. We persevered and had what I would consider a great trip.

But the reason this trip meant more to me than years' past had little to do with what we actually did. It had far more to do with the relationships built over the course of three years, and (maybe more importantly) it had everything to do with the roller coaster ride I've been on professionally since Natalie was born. Things have been fine at home, but my time and energy has been sapped, and we have had a string of rather serious events in the life of our parish since I returned to the job in April. A change of secretary was tough, especially given the circumstances, then a spate of deaths, including a suicide of a man with a young family and a murder involving family of our congregation were tougher. Finally, in the last month we've lost a couple members who lived good long lives, but, frankly, they always made me happy to visit and, selfishly, I was very sad to see them go.

Service is a joy and those who think differently haven't tried it

Scripture: John 13:1-17

            I was given orders this week to make this as short a sermon as possible [since we're showing off a baby at church and that's going to take some time]. But part of my job is to not always give you exactly what you want but what you need to hear, so consider this your Lenten discipline for the day—that can wait. Although, come to think of it, this whole baby thing does kind of color everything I read here—like I can no longer read Jesus saying “Not all of you are clean” without resisting the urge to point at Natalie, because I know different.

Eli: A priest in need of the cross

Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1-21

            There are worse fates in life than to be born a pastor’s kid, but then again there are many better fates, too. I’m not one—a pastor’s kid—but I’ve seen them firsthand, and since I’m kind of going to have one myself soon I’ve been thinking about this some lately. Pastor’s kids, by no fault of their own, are held to an entirely different standards from other children; this is true of police kids and teacher’s kids, too, to different degrees. Because of this, these kids either rise up to that standard to become good, but often sheltered, children; or they fail to rise up to that standard and go the other way, doing pretty much anything they can to distance themselves from that responsibility unfairly entrusted to them.

            This is not a new problem. Eli, the priest in today’s scripture, has two of the worst pastor’s kids you can imagine. The two of them were doing the B.C. equivalent of spray painting the sanctuary, smoking behind the bleachers, and stealing mom and dad’s car. They went the “other” way, and for it Eli and his family are cursed.

This is basically a parent’s worst nightmare.

We all find different things in life challenging: Moses' calling, our calling

Scripture: Exodus 4:10-17

            In Nadia Bolz-Weber’s new book, Pastrix, she tells a story of her time as a down-and-out alcoholic comic in Denver like this: “When I was working as a comic, normal noncomic people would often say, ‘Wow, I don’t know how you can get up in front of all those people with just a microphone.’ To which I would reply, ‘Wow, I don’t know how you can balance your checkbook and get up for work each day.’ We all find different things challenging in life. Speaking in front of hundreds of people was far less challenging for me than scheduling dental appointments.”

            We all find different things challenging in life. There’s a lot of wisdom in that short sentence. I can resonate with that quite a lot. It’s not that I don’t find this whole preaching thing a challenge some of the time, but compared to, I don’t know, tending a garden or changing oil or cooking dinner I’ll take preaching most any day. Some of you would prefer those things to preaching—I don’t know why. I’m clearly normal; all of you are clearly strange… or maybe we are all challenged by different things.

What happens when pastors get asked what they do

Text: Luke 10:25-42

            For those of you who don’t know Kate and I have been on a delayed honeymoon, cruising the Caribbean, and I’m going to flaunt that for all its worth today. We had a great time for a week on sunny beaches and reading outside and, of course, stuffing ourselves with food on a boat that didn’t break down; it was all just about perfect. But there is one thing that happens whenever we travel that doesn’t thrill me, even though admitting it might make me out to be a bit of a vacation scrooge. I don’t like talking with new people. Well, you might say, that’s me just being a good Scandinavian Lutheran, but it’s not that I don’t like meeting new people; instead, it’s tiring to have specific conversations about life back home—you know how these conversations go. Where are you from? Where’s that? That far north? Do you have polar bears? And then, inevitably, what do you do?

Temet nosce: A model of self-care for people who work too much

"Remind me not to invest in your company," said my dad to my brother.

My brother, Isaac, works for Northern Tool + Equipment, which is a store that sells basically what you would expect from the name. Isaac works in the business end of Northern Tool and he was explaining how the staff do not allow him (or any of their fellows employees) to work late. They also cut short Fridays--sometimes making it a 5 or 6 hour day. This is a somewhat unusual thing in the working world.

My dad's response, though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is also a classic comment of the Protestant work ethic that drives Americans to work weeks exceeding 60 or 70 hours. We take pride in the virtue of hard work. But we sometimes, wrongly I believe, equate hard work with long work. I want to point out firstly that my brother's company is not suggesting that quality of work isn't important; in fact, it is quite the opposite. They are strongly suggesting that there needs to be a balance for the best work to be done. Quality of work is not achieved by quantity of hours; instead it is based on the focus, intensity and care taken in the time it takes to get the work done. Product may develop slower but you will get a better product in the end from a well-rested, well-cared-for workforce. That, at least, is the principle behind this model of vocational self-care.

This is particularly apt for pastors, because we work at the intersection of two groups that have a tough time walking away: the self-employed and the service sector. In some sense, pastors are employed (called) by their congregations or their church councils or their larger church bodies, but in the day to day workings of our vocations we are often left to decide how long and how hard we want to do this gig. We also tend to have a bit of a messiah-complex common to those in the service sector, who have most often entered into their particular vocations in order to help people and to make the world a better place. This is a never-ending job and many in these careers treat it as such, never truly walking away from the job.

But we do ourselves a real disservice when we fail to recharge. I could work 70 hours every week. I absolutely could. I don't, because I have enough self-awareness and a spouse who would bash me over the head for doing it, but it is easy enough to drift in that direction. Above the door in my office is a variation on an ancient Latin aphorism that reads simply, "Temet nosce" or "Know thyself." To know yourself is the first step in treating your vocation with the respect and dignity it deserves, which is often to step away from it and recover.

I don't judge my weeks by the hours I work; that simply doesn't work for the kind of vocation I have. I've heard it said that most jobs are task-oriented with relationships embedded; pastors' vocations are relationship-oriented with tasks embedded. For us, counting hours is a challenge. So are boundaries. When I meet a member at the grocery store in one sense I'm not working any more than they are, but in another sense my every word and action is as their pastor. In that way I am very much on the job.

A couple of months after starting my work as pastor I developed a metric to chart my "stresses" and "rests." For the mathematically-challenged, this may not be for you, but I hope you can still see the use in it. It was difficult to tangibly measure what I do, but I think this comes close. I score points for working in the morning, afternoon, or evening, and I also score points for additional stressors: working early or late, funerals and weddings, sudden deaths, short lunches, long drives, leading worship, and having multiple meetings. These are all weighted based on how much of a stress they are to me (each pastor's stresses would inevitably look different). Then, I tally my "rests," which include long lunch breaks, work-outs, and family time; I subtract my rests from my stressors and get a composite score. Any single day could have a score from 0 to... well, a lot. Each week I tally the daily scores and get a composite for the week. If I'm being healthy, I'm in the 8-10.5 range, but I've been as badly over-working as a 14. I've been told by pastor friends who have checked out this same metric that they score well over 16 on a regular basis. This, my friends, is not good.

A sample week of "normal working" for me

All of this is merely to say that it is hard to find balance. I appreciate places like Northern Tool for valuing that. I hope more workplaces do. I should say I have felt nothing but encouragement in this regard from the congregations I serve. Nobody complains when I leave work at 3 in the afternoon to take a long bike ride, go for a run, or get in a round of golf. They know I need it more days than not. Honestly, I rarely stay in the office until 5 because my production wanes more and more and my vocation becomes less and less relational for the sake of greater and more bland tasks. I'd rather re-charge, and I think my congregation would rather I re-charge as well. I already have a job that is difficult to turn off. Why would I spend more time in intentional stress than is necessary?

Why would any of us?