A pastor sings the blues – sort of

“I’ve never actually talked to a priest before. . . . You’re not what I was expecting.”

In the early years of the job I would have tried to explain I’m not a priest, but experience has taught me that my explanation would be meaningless to him. He thought he might be Catholic but he was pretty sure his girlfriend was Protestant. He would ask her when he got home. They were, after all, having their son baptized at some big church.

As far as he was concerned, I’m a priest.

“And what were you expecting?” I asked. It was a tough question, put that way, and after a few false starts the answer was that I was too ordinary and could be mistaken for just another person. This both intrigued and bothered him.

Between hitting on the young waitress and taking a couple of cellphone calls he told me it was time for his life to change. After working seven days a week for 20 years, he’d picked up his newborn son and a light went off in his brain. There must be something more.

Then it was my turn to field a tough question. Something had really bothered him for a long time, he said.

“So, what do you do all week?”

It’s hard to imagine that this is the question that keeps pagans awake at night, but there it was – his big question.

No matter how many times I’m asked it though, I still stumble on my answer.

“You sell carpets, I sell good news. You run your office, I run mine.”

It made enough sense that we moved onto safer ground. “What do you mean, sell good news?”

If the truth be known, when “selling” the gospel, I’m more comfortable being mistaken for a carpet salesman, teacher, land developer, carpenter, lawyer, anything other than pastor. But I’m not any of those. I’m a pastor and the baggage of my profession quickly comes out of the closet.

The biggest baggage? I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years and still haven’t figured out a good answer to this simplest of questions, “What do you do all week?”

Maybe the problem is how I grew up. Work was defined by results: how many acres you plowed, how many cows you milked, how many rows of berries you weeded. Lazy people produce little and hard-working people produce a lot.

Later I worked in construction. At the end of the day I could look back with satisfaction on fresh excavations, walls raised, shrinking stacks of lumber, plans drawn. Even the years in school were about producing papers and exam scores.

But at 35 I stepped out of those worlds and entered the disconcerting world of pastoring. Suddenly days, weeks, even years rolled by and I’d frantically look around for evidence that I’d been working. I soon realized the rules had changed – and it almost made me quit. I struggled to say, “Yes, this is what my efforts produced! This is what I do!”

Oh, there are days when the sun shines and stuff happens. Those are the days when the church is full and vibrant and the testimonies of God’s grace are declared. On those days no one, not even I, considers asking what I do all week. Things are being produced; everyone can see it. And we applaud each other.

But the sun doesn’t always shine and the birds don’t always sing. And I’ve been doing this long enough to know that neither the full nor the empty church, neither the testimony that brings tears of joy to our eyes nor the slide into spiritual and personal calamity that we watch helplessly, tell the whole story. Both are just moments on a long journey. The end, the final product, remains hidden. We don’t know if these will be the stories of Timothy or of Demas.

So what keeps me going on days when I crave the satisfaction of a raised wall or the pungent smell of freshly poured concrete?

I remember why I’m doing this strange job.

I may not always know what I’m producing but I know my assignment: “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season” (2 Timothy 4:2).

The blues do come and there’s a strange satisfaction in their melodies but it’s the assignment that keeps me going.

James Toews is pastor at Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.