Yesterday I watched a webinar concerning "Healthy Church Leaders."  The leader presented 13 key factors for Clergy Health.  I reproduce it here from a screen shot I took during the presentation.  (You too can find this presentation here.  One of the categories is "The Existential Burdens of Ministry."  This is defined as the minister"—carrying the weight of others’ emotional and spiritual burdens; overwhelmed by others’ needs and the importance of ministerial issues; expected to solve unsolvable mysteries." (You can find more here.)

Yep.  There you go.  That's it for me today.  Two funerals I want to attend, friends who carry large physical burdens of horrible diseases (several now), depressed people (several again), anxious people (ditto) and so forth.  I feel it today.  I need to release that energy and replenish the creative within me.

I find it interesting they determine all this but offer no solutions.  I suppose the solution is up to me. SO - today I am off to find my own unique solution of how to deal with all my Existential Burden of Ministy.

And then tonight I'll watch another webinar - Working Together for Healthy Clergy.  Let's see if this helps.

A Grouse

I don't know if I'm getting old or what.  It's not like I prefer traditional over everything else, but I'm getting tired of being castigated for liking traditional.  I'm tired of having the name "fuddy duddy" and "staid" and "stuffy" being thrown at me like clumps of sticky mud.

So I'm going to say it - I LIKE traditional.  I like traditional stuff, I like traditional worship, I like traditional dinner parties, I like traditional PTA meetings.  I like contemporary/current trends in all sorts of things, but I'm not willing to throw the traditional out the window just because something new comes along.

I like antiques and I like Ikea.  I think a person can like both - even in the same space.

So there.

EDITED: I used a politically charged phrase in the original post. I changed it.  I will blog more about exactly what I mean by "traditional stuff" tomorrow.  I did not mean what some of you thought I meant!  Peace!

Silence

Silence is not a bad thing.  I find myself yearning for more of it. Not just turning off the TV/radio/internet but deeper silence than that.  The other day the power went off and I realized that we are surrounded by noise of our own creation all the time and we don't even hear it.

I want a reprieve of all those things that are below our conscious level of hearing but are still there.  I want a reprieve from the voices that tell me to do more, do less, do differently, be here, be there, butt out, pay up.  I want to revel in that silence. I want to sit in that for a while, steep in it like a weird reverse teabag until I and the Other are as one. Perhaps it's more like I need to steep in the dye until He and I are one.