Halftime Reading

I've been reading my first Kindle book during halftimes of the NCAA basketball games: The Pastor, by Eugene Peterson. I'm rather spellbound, and the Kindle can even read the book to me (aloud) in the event my eyes grow tired.

I'm no Gene Peterson, but I have been especially taken with Peterson's seminary experience at New York vs. mine at Duke. Like Peterson, I went to Duke with the expectation that I would continue studying for a Ph.D. in Biblical studies, but like Peterson, ended up a parish pastor instead. Peterson, like me, was immediately taken in by Semitic languages, and he spent much of his seminary classwork engaged in reading Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Arabic, and Syriac texts. That was me, too. I studied small, squiggly lines for some six years, including my undergraduate years, and ended up doing quite well with Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac especially. But it was not to be.

I can still read the Semitic and Greek languages aloud, but I can't do a lick of translation work. I haven't used the languages in decades, and all of that hard work in the seminary has gone to pot under a tsunami of sermons, weddings, funerals, counseling sessions, teaching, and meetings, meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Oh, and did I mention I've had a lot of meetings over the past thirty years? Sometimes, I feel I've spent my lifetime in meetings.

This, unfortunately (or fortunately?) is so much a part of the pastoral life. Table talk. Conversations. Pencil pushing. People pushing. It's all part of the equation.

Still, when my daughter Chelsey was in first grade, we fathers were invited to come to the classroom so our children could introduce us and talk about their father's jobs. That morning I met lawyers, doctors, and salesmen who were introduced by their children with clarity and aplomb. "My daddy makes people well," one little girl said of her doctor father. "My daddy sells lots of cars," another child gloated.

When my daughter introduced me she said, "This is my daddy, and he is never home. He goes to lots of meetings."

As Eugene Peterson makes clear in his excellent book on the pastoral life, it's a tough gig. Long hours, low pay, and the many stresses associated with the human condition are part of the daily grind of pastoral experience.

But as Eugene says, he's glad he answered the call to do God's work. So am I. Even though the work might eventually kill me and I won't live long enough to write a book about it.