The Tough Times

There's so much I didn't understand. When I first planned this sabbatical almost two years ago, I didn't understand how hard it was going to be to walk away for three months from the church I had planned for and prayed over and struggled with for 7+ years. It was like ripping out a part of myself to leave the people I loved and to allow someone else to be their pastor for the summer months. As I wrote previously, one of the most painful parts of that decision involved hiding the posts of my Living Water Facebook friends. I knew that if I read about a health scare or job loss or end of a relationship, I would want to pick up the phone, send a note, go see them. I would want to let them know that I CARE - as a friend and their pastor.

But I knew enough about the theory of sabbaticals to know that it wouldn't be healthy for me to weave in and out of pastor mode. It would be too tempting to override whatever the other pastor - Rev. Trish Winters - was trying to do with them. It would derail her attempts to be their pastor and my attempts to find out what a sabbatical is and why I needed one. So I made a clean break. What made this even more difficult in my situation is that my mother-in-law and sister-and-brother-in-law all continued to provide leadership at Living Water all summer. In addition, my immediate family worshipped there a couple of times over the summer.

It was especially difficult to decide to stay away on the day that Living Water had a special blessing for my daughter Bethany as she prepared to leave for seminary. This church, her church, gave her a study Bible and a whole pile of cards with well wishes and blessings. She preached that day. As her mother, I should have been there. As the pastor of Living Water Christian Church, I was not. It wasn't a hard and fast rule I was following. I don't think there is a sabbatical handbook that says you have to stay away the Sunday your daughter is being commissioned and blessed for vocational ministry. But I knew it would be hard for me to step into that congregation for one Sunday, to worship, to hear prayer concerns shared, and not want to respond as their pastor. Besides, one of the things that I knew had to happen while I was gone is that the church needed to discover who they are apart from me. What better way than for them to celebrate and commission one of their own into vocational ministry - and not have it be "this is Pastor Laura's daughter so we need to make a big deal out of this."

But going back has been tough, too. I am going to write a post in the near future about all the wonderful things I discovered about myself and life and ministry while on sabbatical, but for now, I'll just say that I truly felt the mantle of pastoral responsibility lifted from me for three months. Please understand - I love being a pastor. I love my church. I don't want to do anything else with my life. But the weight of carrying pastoral concerns, church financial stress, worship planning, sermon writing, etc. all day and all night for seven years had worn me out more than I realized. So for three months I didn't have to think about finding sermon illustrations or solving building repair issues or filling the calendar with fellowship and mission events. I was just Laura.

Last Wednesday night, I met with Rev. Trish Winters, and we began the passing of the mantle back to me. She filled me in on all the important news from the summer - who had been sick, who left the church, who joined the church, who wasn't around all summer, what events were successful and what events were not and on and on. It needed to happen. It was part of the plan. She did it with all gentleness. And when I drove home two hours later, the mantle was firmly back on my shoulders and I felt the weight of it. It feels heavy, but that's ok. I can carry it now. I'm ready for it. But I'm much more aware of it than I used to be.

Leaving was tough. Coming back is tough, too. I have found that it's often in times when God upsets the status quo that the Spirit speaks most clearly. This upsetting of our status quo is what we all needed - me and the church. I needed to let go for a while. The church needed to hear a new voice and their own voice. And now we are back together, ready to share with each other what we learned.

I'm not sure we did the whole sabbatical experience thing perfectly, but I think we did it pretty darn well. Thanks be to God for a church willing to let their pastor go, for a pastor willing to set boundaries, for a sabbatical pastor willing to experiment and challenge the congregation, for church leaders who dream together, for the Lilly Foundation for providing the funding for this to happen, and to God who brought all of it together for our good. Amen.

The Best of Intentions

There was so much more I wanted to write about in this blog. There are things I didn't get to talk about at all - like my retreat at Tall Oaks where I spent time in silence, in prayer, walking the labyrinth and worshipping at the outdoor chapel. I didn't get to tell about my home improvement project - transforming my home office with its awful 70s wallpaper into a sanctuary space where I can pray and write and surround myself with art from all the places I've visited (this would have been an interesting post since early on in the project I discovered ugly black mold hiding behind the ugly wallpapaer, thus requiring a LOT more work and money than I originally planned.) And, it may seem a strange thing to brag about, but I read NINE books while on sabbatical. NINE books in three months. About half of them were ministry-related; the others were for pleasure. Since leaving seminary, I don't think I've read nine books in a year, and if I did, they were all for sermons or small groups at Living Water. How wonderful to re-discover the joy of reading!

I could also write about the things I didn't accomplish that I wished I had (besides the home improvement project mentioned above that is still underway). I had thought I would find time to try out a writing project, maybe working with a sermon series I did on the fruits of the Spirit a while back. But my head was never in the right place to begin that project. I had hoped to map out a year's worth of sermons and chart a course for the next five years at Living Water. I have fragments of ideas, the beginnings of things but nothing like a complete plan that I hoped to have. I also had hoped to write much more regularly in this blog. But once I got back from Africa, the things I had to say seemed very mundane and hardly worth mentioning.

I had thought I would spend the rest of the summer re-visiting the Africa experience and reflecting on it in this blog. So much happened so fast while we were there - and we didn't have access to most of our photos to post - that I was only able to give the briefest outline at the time. But moving out of that experience into the rest of my sabbatical - General Assembly, my visit to the farm, moving my daughter to Ft Worth, home projects - I never felt able to truly go back to all that time in Africa meant to me. Clif and I are currently looking through all the hours of video he took of the services I preached in Dodoma. Watching them, it seems as if it just happened yesterday. I want to find a way to share all my thoughts, everything I felt and saw and smelled and heard, but I'm not sure there is a way to capture it. I will share some of the video as part of future sermons, but I don't know what to do with the rest.

I hope to post a few more sabbatical-related thoughts in this blog. I want to share with you what it's like coming back. I want to tell you what the sabbatical experience was like for me, how it blessed me beyond what I imagined. But it's Sept. 1. I am back at work, albeit alongside Trish Winters, the pastor who served Living Water while I was gone. It is a time of transition, but I already have a to-do list waiting for me. The sabbatical is over. The memories remain. Thank you for sharing this journey with me.