Living With a Perfect God

There seem to be many competing images of God in the world today; a loving father, a benevolent master, a strict tyrant, a demanding ideologue, holy perfection and many, many more. Ultimately, our image of God is reflected in our own life. We see it in our expectations, in the way we treat others and in the way we think about ourselves. Changing the way we understand God can change almost everything about life.

A World of Expectations

We are born into a world of expectations. People expect us to think and behave certain ways because of who they think we are. There are expectations based on our culture, our gender, our social status, financial status, educational level, age, occupation and religion. When we try to break out of these expectations and discover who we really are we can cause great distress for others.

Recently, in front of a large group I was asked what I disliked the most about being a pastor. My response? That I’m always a pastor wherever I go. People treat me differently because I am a pastor. Some treat me with more respect than they show other people and some treat me with less. Usually the only time people treat me like a regular person is when they don’t know I’m a pastor.

When I first started my life as an ordained pastor I tried to live up to all of the expectations. I dressed like a pastor, wearing shirts with clerical collars on Sundays and other official occasions like weddings and funerals or when I would visit homebound members. I was careful to not have a beer in public or to swear when something went terribly wrong. I worked hard to keep my emotions in check and appear to be in control at all times. As a brand new pastor I also made every effort to convince people that I knew everything there was to know about faith and theology.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t want to live like this, nor could I. People where getting to know Pastor Kevin but not me. Then one day I realized that God didn’t call Pastor Kevin to ministry but that God wanted Kevin. If God was okay with who I was and called me to ministry then it would be okay to be me and in ministry.

That’s when things started getting a lot harder.

It turns out that people don’t want their pastors to be ordinary people. They want their pastors to be shining examples of virtuous living and paragons of faith. And furthermore, they will go to great lengths to make sure you live up to those unrealistic expectations or they will make your life miserable.

One Sunday morning I was preaching a sermon about spiritual gifts teaching about the gift of Mercy. A person with the gift of Mercy has the ability to recognize when someone is hurting and is able to empathize with the hurting person and find ways to comfort them. Many people have this ability, including people who aren’t religious. As an example I told a story about another pastor I knew who was able to look out over her congregation during worship and identify those who were suffering. She would then quietly say something to them after the service or would be sure to call them the following week. I, on the other hand, do not have the gift of mercy. I tend to be oblivious to the signs and the depth of people’s pain. I shared that I was a envious of this other pastor’s ability but I believed that there were people in our own congregation who had that gift and God was calling them to use their gifts.

The following week I met an elderly woman who had been caring for her disabled husband for years as he continued to decline. By and large she seemed to be a rather timid person but on this particular day she attacked me with the tenacity of a mother tiger protecting her cubs.

“Don’t you ever say that you don’t have the gift of mercy,” she said,  wagging her finger at me. “Pastors are caregivers and if they aren’t then who can be? I don’t want to hear you talk like that ever again.”

At first I thought that she was afraid that I was being too hard on myself. As I tried to assure her that it was okay and that I had been given other spiritual gifts she interrupted.

“No! Don’t say that,” she pleaded. “You are a wonderful caregiver and have been great to my husband and me.”

That’s when I started to realize that she had to believe something that was not true about me in order to allow me to serve her. She couldn’t bear to think that she was getting less than the best care in the world.  It was the wrong time to correct her false image of me. But playing along meant that I wasn’t free to be the flawed person I am. It meant I couldn’t live in the truth of who I was.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident. I, and other pastors I know, are constantly bombarded with expectations to be someone or something we are not. Fighting those expectations takes energy that we would rather put into helping people. So too often, we take the path of least resistance and put up a façade and play along with the expectations until we either begin to believe them ourselves or until we are burned out. Either way it leads to a bad end.

Pastors aren’t the only ones caught up in a world of expectations. The only way out is to be honest with ourselves and live with integrity and openness until those who try to make us into something we are not face the issues within themselves that cause them to mold us in their image.

A No Win Situation

    Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation in
    which there is no possible way to succeed. What
    are we supposed to learn from those experiences?
    To avoid them? To endure them? To make the best
    of them? Or is there another lesson lurking in the
    failure?

One of the hoops that I was required to jump through in seminary was a 10 week stint as a chaplain intern at a hospital. Clinical Pastoral Experience (CPE) was designed to introduce us to working with people who were sick and/or dying. But CPE was also used as a means to expose each intern to the personal issues within us as we ministered to people. In addition to meeting patients and serving their spiritual needs, six of us would meet with a full-time Chaplain to review our work. The goal, it seemed to me, was to have each intern break down and sob in front of the group so they could be lifted up and supported. Definitely not my learning style.

 I didn’t like being a chaplain. I didn’t like going into a room and asking if someone needed some kind of spiritual tending. I am extremely thankful for the men and women who do this kind of ministry every day in the military, at hospitals and at care centers. But for me it seems too impersonal. It’s spiritual care based on the model of medical care in our culture. Each component of a patient’s health (mental, physical and emotional/spiritual) is handled by different teams of experts that are each trying to fix what’s wrong with the patient. Maybe I didn’t understand what was really expected of me but it seemed like I was being asked to join in a team effort to treat what was wrong with each patient.

Feeling ill-equipped for this role I spent my days  doing the bare minimum to pass my CPE course. I would see the people who requested visits and chart anything I thought was significant to help the doctors. I would meet the new patients on my assigned floors. Then I would hide out in the medical library or a visitor’s lounge and write verbatims (word for word transcriptions of visits I did with patients) for my group of peers to pore over and critique.  

 I feel bad about hiding when so many people needed help but I was certain that a 10 minute chat with a seminary student wasn’t going to do much more than calm them down for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe that was enough for that moment but I could see they needed more. Most patients on my floors were dealing with life-threatening ailments like cancer, brain tumors, diabetes or emphysema. Whenever I entered a room I frequently sensed two competing expectations: One was the expectation that I was there to heal them. The second was that I would do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. What they wanted was a  quick fix. What they needed was a healing presence that lasted more than 10 minutes. Very often, what they needed was for someone to walk with them slowly through their suffering.

The trouble was that I wasn’t able to do either of these things.

I have seen the power of grace at work to calm and relieve an anxious heart instantly so I know that spiritual healing can come quickly. But all too often a carefully chosen quotation from the Bible can come across as trite and meaningless, especially to someone struggling with their faith. We tend to use Bible verses and theology like spiritual Band-Aids when the patient is hemorrhaging.  We want them to work like magic because we are just as uncomfortable in the presence of suffering as the person to whom we seek to give aid. While I was comfortable reading scripture to those who requested it, I didn’t have a go-to verse that miraculously set everything right.

Neither did I have the time to sit and chat about seemingly trivial matters and let the bonds of companionship grow. I know I can’t be all things to all people. But I met a lot of people who had no one in their lives who truly knew them. Sometimes it was because the person who did know them passed away. Sometimes it was because they were guarded and didn’t ever let anyone get to know them. Sometimes it was because they had been abandoned by family and friends for various reasons.  All I know is that I couldn’t give them the time and attention they needed to feel loved.

In CPE I was put in a situation where I was set up to fail. It was not possible for me to give people what they wanted the most and what, at some level, they needed the most.

I thought that parish ministry was the answer to that dilemma. In parish ministry I would be able to take the time to get to know people. But I am finding that the conditions that existed in CPE now exist in the congregation. The demands of my job restrict the time to truly connect with the 1300 people in my congregation or even a significant fraction of them. And while applying scriptural Band-Aids is all that many people seem to want; something to patch up their spiritual dis-ease, I don’t feel comfortable leaving it at that. I don’t believe faith is meant to work like that.

So is there some lesson that I’m missing in all of this?