Changes

The last two years have brought a lot of changes in my life. I changed from being a single person to being a married person. That change has required me to adapt quite a bit. I had to learn to share my life instead of live it simply for myself. I had to learn to adapt my ministry style to allow for more family time. I had to learn to be comfortable with less privacy and less of a sense of control. They have been good changes, but they still have been challenging changes.

Following getting married I quickly had a few other changes to adapt to. Changing from apartment living to living in a house was more challenging than expected. It has brought some benefits. It has also brought some unexpected differences. More space to use and fill. More things to worry about. More things to be responsible for. Even though we are living in a parsonage and not home owners yet.

Then we moved. We moved from a suburban sprawl of 500,000 people to a small town of 1200 people. I think adapting to some of this is harder for Jennifer than it is for me. I have lived in small towns before. She has lived in smaller places, but towns that were suburbs and bedroom communities to larger towns surrounding it. Nevertheless, it has taken some adjustment to living life in the fishbowl that is being a small town pastor. In a small town, it is always a challenge to deal with the sense that if you are new in town people are watching you and making judgments and observations about you. But the "fishbowl" effect is amplified when people are watching you and your wife and making judgments about you as the "Baptist preacher and wife".

The adaptation from being an associate pastor and youth pastor to being a "preacher" pastor has also required changes. I have chosen to get on a more sane schedule in doing my work instead of being the nocturnal creature I was as a youth pastor. Which means choosing to get up earlier and work more in the mornings. I still have a reputation, I sense, among some of the more old fashioned folk, of being the type of guy that sleeps later than the average person. But late has meant arriving in the office by 9am instead of noon, and usually being done with work before 7 pm.

One of the most difficult changes for me, surpisingly, was the addition of a dog. It was the situation that made me most frustrated, depressed, and angry. To this day I don't know why, except maybe it was a tipping point. I thought as a man who married later in life, I would retain a little of my more freewheeling single spirit. The dog meant that I lived in the house, worked on the same property, and then had a dog that further tied me to the homefront. Maybe I felt domesticated once we got a dog. But, I think that the bigger issue was that getting the dog was a small issue that forced me to confront and emotionally deal with all of the change I had to deal with in the last year to that point. So I would relunctantly walk the dog and vent while I walked. Dog walking became the obligation that focused all of my negative emotions that I bottled up everywhere else, and it became the reason for any and all emotional and personal difficulty with all of the changes I was experiencing. Strange, I know. It got bad enough I had to take a break from dog walking for a while. Now I am eager to get back in the routine.

The change is pastoral role has also changed expectations of who I am and what I do. I get to do less of being the one that pushes and challenges and stirs the pot for change, and I do a lot more of accepting things the way they are and being more patient and methodical with change and my attitude toward change with the congregation.

I have had to return to work in a collegial relationship with other ministers. This has been a blessing in many ways. In other ways, it has been one of my greatest challenges to self-control. Our community has a strong ministerial alliance, which allows us to work together and accomplish things we might not have been able to accomplish apart from one another. Yet, there are certain collegues and cultural factors which bring a controlling element, and make me feel demeaned, looked on as the "new young pastor", and give me the sense that our church and I personally are thought of as less of than other pastors and churches in the alliance. I have not figured out a way to deal with this.

Perhaps one of my biggest disappointments with myself is that in this rapid transition I have let several habits that sustain me emotionally and spiritually to be put on the back burner. Those habits include a focus on developing my writing skills and thinking skills via this blog, a commitment to reading for spiritual and theological growth, a loss of professional connection with collegues through being tied in with the blogging world, and a commitment to healthier living through exercise and healthier eating habits.

More changes are sure to come. More commitments to different cooperative ministries. More changes for our family. I have considered the possibility that it might be time to quit blogging, or to kill this blog in favor of another blog that will allow me to journal and write in a different direction. I have decided against that for now. For now, I am going to try and be more faithful to this blog with the way that it was intended. Although it will still include some of the picture share, youtube, sermons and random thoughts it includes now, I will be working toward getting back to some sort of regular writing routine that will include theological reflection. This has become harder as my personal life and reading audience have put me in a position where I have to be a little less "raw" and transparent about my thoughts and feelings, but I will do my best to write and think more through this blog.

I am going to try and get into a routine that looks like this (with flexibility):
Sunday: Sermon share
Monday: all things cultural (and not ministerial), review of the last week (or weekend)
Tuesday: Thoughtful spiritual reflection
Wednesday: Quotes, stats, and borrowed stuff
Thursday: Thoughtful spiritual reflection
Friday: At least until February, all things football
Sat: Notes, random thoughts, etc.

All week: Be thinking more about sharing my exercise and diet routine for accountability
Be writing down things that I think of that I dont want to forget
Pictures of fun stuff when I get them