They All Have A Story

It has been a long time since I've been here. Our soccer season started and we just finished two weeks of pre-season practice. That means I pull double duty and rarely get to this site. Now that school has started I have my days back for the most part.

One of the things our team did this pre-season was go on a mission trip to Nashville. It mainly involved working at various inner-city ministries and we really enjoyed it. I have seen a lot worse poverty than we saw in Nashville but it still wasn't pretty.

One thing that captivated me was listening to the stories of the people we ministered to. One morning we were sent on an assignment to go find a homeless person to take to breakfast. They were all nice guys (yes, all men) though some were a little less sober than others. It was interesting to hear them tell about their families, especially their children. Yet from those homes they ended up on the street. It is agonizing to hear how the situations slowly developed.

I had supper with another guy at the rescue mission. He was from Jacksonville, FL on his way to visit his grandkids in Kentucky when his car broke down. It had taken him two weeks to get it fixed and in the mean time his money ran out and he ended up at the mission. He is a proud man who has served in the military and has a job back in Jacksonville. Fortunately he had everything fixed and was planning on leaving the next morning. A trip like that would not have been precarious for me but he ended up at the mission.

While eating supper with him a couple of young men, 20 years old maybe, were kind of acting up at a nearby table and had to be told to settle down by the mission staff. My dinner guest slowly shook his head and simply said, "They have a long way to go." It struck me as words of wisdom from an experienced traveler.

Getting Worse

Leaders who are looked up to constantly
who give out answers competently
who everyone assumes are living what they are saying
often have acute experiences of dissonance

“Who I am
and what people think I am
aren’t anywhere close
to being the same thing

The better I get as a rabbi
and the more my reputation grows
the more I feel like a fraud
I know so much more than I live

The longer I live
the more knowledge I acquire
the wider the gap between
what I know and what I live
I’m getting worse by the day…”

Found Poem - Eugene Peterson - Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places


I think there are at least two ways for a pastor to respond to this. On the one hand he can enter a spiral of depression and failure that lead to him either leaving the ministry or subsisting in it as a fraud. He will see himslef as a total failure and be unable to come to terms with the case built against him.

On the other hand, the more he learns of the gap between what he knows and how he lives the more he will understand grace and be all the better for it. He will truly be able to love others because he will begin to see them as God does and he will love himself for the same reason.