Friday, October 05, 2007

Out in the pastures..

Or so it seems.

During the past week or so, it feels like I've had more than my fair share of pastoral conversations.

All of them were with various fellow ministerial candidates, and in most of them, there were elements of me caring for them, and also them caring for me. We are all stressed, tired, and overly busy. Yes folks, it's now officially The Pointy End of the Semester, where we feel the breeze as assignment deadlines go whooshing past, and miss meetings and commitments, as we are too busy to look at our diaries.

But I am fascinated (and more than a little relieved) by a comment made during one of these conversations about what it means to be 'pastoral' in relating to others. We were talking about another student who is managing a very heavy study load, but seeming to keep on top of it pretty well, thanks to having a very organised and focussed personality. As I was thinking that perhaps I should spend more time with this uber-focussed person, in the hope that some of that quality might rub off on me, my friend posed the question:

But I wonder what would happen if someone had a bit of a crisis on the day that this person had set aside to work on a particular assignment? How would they handle it? Whose needs would win- the friend in crisis, or the need to finish the assignment?

An interesting question indeed, and one that I think we all need to ask about ourselves on a regular basis. Made me think about last Sunday's Gospel reading from Luke 16- the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It was interesting that in this parable, the rich man was not portrayed as a bad person, and had not been accused of actually doing anything wrong, yet still he ended up in Hades, whilst Lazarus ended up in a place of comfort. It has been suggested that the rich man's 'sin' was the fact that he just failed to notice the starving Lazarus sitting outside his gate. He was never mean or nasty to Lazarus, just oblivious.

I think that being truly pastoral or hospitable, has an element of allowing the chaos of another person to enter our own lives, even when that might muck up our plans. But then I reckon in ministry there are also the times when we need to be a bit hard with our priorities, and not let pastoral emergencies always take up all the time and energy that they might seem to need (because unlike uni essays, a minister can't exactly get an extension for a sermon when the week has been insanely busy.) I can just imagine it, on Sunday morning:

"Sorry folks, it's been an insane week- I've had 3 funerals to manage, so my sermon isn't quite ready yet. Come back on Wednesday, and it should be done then!"

I'm beginning to think that learning to set boundaries and priorities will probably be more important things to my ministry than all this theology I'm studying. I certainly hope that my progress into third year will bring with it some kind of automatic increase in wisdom and discernment! :-)


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