IT WAS THE LAST ELK HUNT of the season. Three of our four clients had been successful early in the week, and we were hunting hard to make sure the other guy didn’t get skunked. No luck. On the next-to-last day of the season, the snow came: wet, heavy, and deep. Alex, my boss, made the judgment call: “We’ve got to get these guys out of here. We’ll ride out today, then you and I will come back and take down camp.”
We loaded their gear, meat, and antlers on the pack mules and started out. The mules U-shaped feet were better prepared for this winter work than their equine half-brothers. Snow balled up in the horses’ rounder hooves until they were walking on stilts of packed ice, making them prone to stumble—not a good thing on the narrow trail that switched back across several deep canyons. It took most of the day to get down the mountain to Willow Creek, where the trucks and horse trailer were parked. From there we had forty miles of dirt road to navigate before we hit the pavement, then another thirty-five miles to our homes in Apache Creek.
Ten animals would never fit in the trailer, so we left the four mules and one horse behind in a nearby Forest Service pasture to be picked up the next day. We drove most of the night in four-wheel-drive low gear, sliding off the road on two different occasions, having to winch ourselves out of the drifts. We said good-bye to our hunters as we dropped them off at the Rode Inn motel, drove home, caught two hours of sleep, ate breakfast, then started back up the mountain. During the night, the snow had stopped, the sky cleared, and the temperature plummeted. The snowplow had been up the mountain past Rainy Mesa to the Gilson ranch but had turned around about ten miles short of where our animals were. We knew we could never drive back into our camp in the Gila Wilderness under those conditions, but somehow, we had to get those animals out.
So we started walking, carrying halters and lead ropes.
Were I to design the ultimate aerobic exercise machine, it would simulate walking in knee-deep, wet snow at high altitude. This was in the days before synthetic fibers, and our clothes were soon soaked with sweat. We trudged on, stopping only to ease our pounding hearts.
When we finally made it to Willow Creek, the mules were their usual stubborn selves, refusing to be caught without playing hard to get. They were not broken to ride, so we took turns riding the lone horse, bareback, while the other man walked—each leading two half-wild mules. The sun was already setting in the pale, winter sky as we started following our tracks back down the old logging road.
The way back was somewhat easier than the way in; we were going mostly downhill, and the person walking had the benefit of the rider and other animals tromping down the snow. But we were wet, cold, and hungry—perfect candidates for hypothermia. We both ended up walking, it was too cold riding. Hours passed. The moonlight reflecting off the snow created a surreal world in which time stood still. I wondered what death would feel like, imagining it to be warm and restful. We staggered on, falling too many times to count.
The sight of that truck and trailer made us nearly weep with relief. After loading the animals, we climbed into the truck cab and cranked up the heater. Uncontrollable shivering helped keep us awake long enough to get home. Alex’s wife fixed us pancakes, bacon, and eggs while we cared for our hungry and thirsty pack string. A hot meal, hot shower, and fourteen hours of sleep later—I was good as new, except for the frostbitten ears that plague me even now when winter comes to call.
Spiritual fatigue
Acute fatigue is also a reality of pastoral ministry. The busyness of the Christmas or Easter season can put the hurt on us every year—but it passes. And the all-night youth lock-in (which, I’m convinced, is Satan’s tool to drain the small-church pastor) can be brutal—but it’s only one night.
Tougher to shake are the nights in the emergency room with a family while a loved one struggles between life and death. Those periods of intense pastoral care can sap every bit of strength we possess, especially since these events invariably happen late in the week when a sermon must be delivered before we can recharge.
I still grow weary remembering the weekend that began with a Friday funeral, followed on Saturday by another funeral and a wedding, then of course, Sunday. At least the wedding and the sermon had been anticipated. Such experiences can suck pastors dry, and steps must be taken to rest and lay low for a while. Acute fatigue can pass fairly quickly if proper steps are taken.
Far more treacherous is the chronic state of fatigue that sneaks up on us while we are enjoying ministry. It wraps its cold tentacles around us. The slow squeeze begins, and we find ourselves gasping for breath, wondering why we are losing our passion for preaching.
Passionate preaching is itself physically draining. To invest so much energy and emotion in study, then to funnel that distillation of soul into a single event is to invite an emotional and spiritual crash. Delivering the message two or three times in multiple services simply raises us to a greater height from which to fall later that day.
Common sense tells us to go home immediately after the service and crawl back into bed. If we can manage to work in a nap, experience tells us that someone will call just as we slip into a coma. Our conditioned response, even while still mostly unconscious, is to pick up the ringing object and hold it to our ear, then exhale a hearty “Hello!” in a chirpy tone that says, “Of course I wasn’t sleeping!”
The grating voice on the other end of the line informs us that Mrs. Albright won’t be returning to our church because she was offended by the behavior of two children seated in front of her, and if that’s the kind of chaos that passes for worship, well, she’ll just find another place where people understand that worship means silence and reverence, and people have enough Christian values to discipline their children, and why doesn’t Ruth Peabody sing anymore? Am I upset that her husband now works for the state lottery, and do I think I’m better than anyone else because I. …
Someone’s mad. At me. For something. Again. Major or minor, all gripes feel major in the fog of post-sermon fatigue.
Sunday naps for most pastors are in that same fantasy realm as the call from the megachurch search committee and the heartfelt apology from the deacon board. Sunday is the day ripe for connecting with folks who slow down just a little more on this day than any other. More Sundays than not, my wife and I had dinner guests or were dinner guests.
Churches of my faith tradition have long held that attendance at the Sunday night service is the measure of the true believer. (They even expect the preacher to show up!) For the pastor who has just done battle with the principalities of darkness in the heavenly realm, it’s hard to do much better than a bad imitation of Sunday morning in the evening service.
When I become the Protestant Pope, I’ll declare the Sunday evening service, as it still exists in many churches, anathema. But for now, many preachers still have to stumble back to the pulpit, feeling grateful if they’ve managed to scratch out an outline during the football game. That’s a best case scenario. I’m convinced the majority of pulpit plagiarism happens between two and six on Sunday afternoons. We’re driven to it by our fatigued state.
Why, then, are we so surprised when Monday dawns and we struggle just to stand upright and not drag our knuckles on the ground? Coffee—strong, black, gallons of it—jacks us into an induced state of semiconsciousness.
Just as we’re starting to feel like living another day is an option, the old Steve Miller Band tune runs through our heads: “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.” We stare at the calendar and begin to blubber uncontrollably, because even in a numbed state, we recognize another Sunday is just 144 hours away—and the clock’s ticking. Worse, in many cases, we are expected to bring an inspired word from the Word at the Wednesday evening service, a mere 60 hours from now.
Just as chronic fatigue will kill sexual passion, it can stifle spiritual passion. Worse, fatigue makes maintaining intimacy with God almost impossible. In a desperate state, we start coming to God’s Word for sermon fodder, not to fill our souls.
Passion dies. In its place is either a void, or a hastily constructed, unconvincing facsimile of the real thing.
A thousand times while growing up, I heard my parents or grandparents yawn, stretch, and say, “There’s no rest for the wicked.” To which the conditioned response was always “And the righteous don’t need any.”
With all due respect to my ancestors, what idiot thought that one up?
Even as a kid I knew that maxim was stupid, but a cursory review of my life’s work habits reveals I have come to believe it on some level—either the lack of rest in my life was punishment for my vile ways or the inevitable consequence of doing the Lord’s work.
For the past twenty-plus years, I’ve either had jobs that easily expanded to fill all available hours in the week, or worked two jobs, or had multiple part-time jobs while working on a full-time education.
When I left a full-time pastorate to join the editorial staff at LEADERSHIP, I had daydreams about a Monday-through-Friday, eight-to-five schedule. Within weeks, I was as busy as ever, working late into the night rehabing an old house, supply-preaching many weekends, hustling free-lance writing projects, and hosting and attending barbecues to get to know our new neighbors.
For years I told myself the reason for my fatigue was the pressures of the pastorate. Now I have to face the fact that the problem is somewhere in me.
I have friends who are professional rodeo cowboys. In their quest to make the National Finals each year, they push themselves to compete in more than a hundred rodeos over ten months, often driving all night to get to the next one. As one said to me a few years ago, “It’s not the bulls that will wear you down, it’s seeing too many sunrises through the windshield of a pickup.” Like other professional athletes, most rodeo cowboys see their careers end sometime around their thirtieth birthday.
Preachers make it a little longer, but the comparison is valid: It’s not the sermons that wear you down, it’s the failure to allow the body and soul to recover from the trauma of preaching.
Several attitudes prevent us from pausing long enough to refuel:
1. Too unrealistic. During the 1997 NBA Championship series between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz, I watched Michael Jordan play an incredible game while suffering from a gnarly case of either flu or food poisoning. Yup, I thought. That’s the way we champions perform, never letting the inevitable ups and downs of life keep us from playing at the top of our game.
That thinking is nothing more than another trip to Fantasy Island. I’m not Michael Jordan, and the inevitable ups and downs of life will keep me, at times, from playing at the top of my game. As much as I love preaching, during some stretches I was simply unable to preach as well as I would have liked. Following the births of both of our daughters, the priority of preaching went into a freefall for a couple of months while I focused on my family. During a year-and-a-half bout with a baffling illness, getting better was my main concern, not homiletics.
I’ve had preacher friends who struggled to keep their marriages intact, others who have had to deal for years with a prodigal son or daughter. Is it reasonable to expect anyone to care passionately about a sermon in such difficult circumstances?
Solomon wrote, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Authentic, passionate preaching may not always be possible when chronic life issues pin us to the mat.
2. Too demanding. They say that self-employed people work for the most demanding bosses. Most preachers face their toughest critics when they look in the mirror. Even more relentless than the ever-approaching Sunday are personal expectations. Those who become chronically weary often swing for the fence every time they preach.
Our best motives are fueled by a genuine passion to see people become passionate about their relationship with God. Unfortunately, our motives are sometimes mixed with grandiosity. This is essentially a theological problem, evidence we aren’t clear about the role of the Holy Spirit, whose job is not up for grabs.
We can forget the efficacy of consistent preaching intentionally focused over the long-haul. Effective sermon planning not only relieves the week-to-week panic of what to preach, it allows us to plan to say in many weeks what we cannot hope to say in only one. While one sermon may occasionally be the catalyst for change in someone’s life, more often lasting change is the result of a steady diet of biblical challenge and encouragement.
3. Too driven. Few books have shed light on the chronic fatigue of ministry like Archibald Hart’s Adrenaline and Stress. 1.I now understand that adrenaline, that necessary and welcome component of passionate preaching, has an hangover effect that can cripple our effectiveness—something I failed to recognize for years.
For much of 1993 and 1994, I lived with a level of fatigue that depressed me and perplexed my doctor. After much blood work to rule out everything else, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a neuromuscular syndrome that results in chronic muscle and joint pain, sleep disorders, and depression—symptoms I still endure on an off-and-on basis.
But after reading Adrenaline and Stress, I’ve wondered more than once if my symptoms were (are) the inevitable result of living too long in an adrenaline-saturated state. If only I had planned for the Monday adrenaline hangovers, if only I had allowed time to dry out between Sunday binges—if only I had taken the Sabbath seriously.
Sabbath yearning
For me to promote the necessity of a consistent Sabbath is like Mick Jagger pounding the pulpit for abstinence from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Who could listen without laughing? That’s why I encourage every pastor to read Eugene Peterson, former pastor and now professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, it’s not that the Sabbath has been tried and found wanting; it is that it has been tried and found difficult. Everyone who fights the passion-draining work of ministry instinctively knows that the Sabbath is the solution. But it seems like a solution beyond our ability to grasp. Compressing the necessary work of a congregation into six days seems an amazing feat, yet research shows many pastors manage to take a day off each week.
How do most of us spend it, though?
Changing the oil in the car, mowing the lawn, reading for a D. Min. course, coaching the youth soccer team, taking down the Christmas lights, giving the dog a lift to the vet to get neutered, and, inevitably, spending just a little time on the next day’s sermon. What separates this day from the other six is not the cessation of work but the focus of work. Work is work, not rest. A day away from ministry is necessary, and may even be enjoyable, but it’s no Sabbath.
The Sabbath restores energy, hope, and passion. Observing the Sabbath means refraining from the work that saps us of energy, hope, and passion. Sabbath means putting the myth of “busy is better” to death. It means a new way of thinking about time, priorities, and recreation.
My theological default setting is on Legalism. My first thoughts on Sabbath are that it must be spiritual, a day spent on my knees in a prayer closet, pouring out my sins, my grief, and my anguish to God. A few years ago, at the point of a critical decision, a friend let me use his mountain cabin, where I spent forty-eight hours in prayer and fasting. I counted those days as my days off for that week. While it was a significant time, I came home exhausted. It took weeks to get back to normal. On reflection, I’d say that time away was a necessary and welcome spiritual exercise but no Sabbath.
In the days prior to the technological age, work for most people meant physical labor. The idea of Sabbath rest for those people meant a cessation from physical labor. The normally taboo options of sedentary activities or even inactivity were lifted for one day a week. The mind was set free from the mundane business of labor to explore theology, music, and conversation.
For pastors, as well as many others whose work is defined by physical inactivity and mental flurry, perhaps the Sabbath should involve sweat and sunshine and the cessation of reading, thinking, counseling, and relating.
During my years in Arizona, I found Sabbath in the most unexpected source, by getting back into the cowboy sport of team roping. Once or twice a week, I’d practice for a couple of hours with some of the other local ropers at the Silver Creek Sheriff Posse arena. Most Friday nights or Saturdays throughout the summer found me competing somewhere in northern Arizona. My first published piece of writing was for Super Looper, the official magazine of the United States Team Roping Congress.
In the summer of 1991, my Sabbaths were interrupted when a horse fell with me, and I suffered oblique fractures at the left wrist of both the radius and ulna, chipped the navicular bone at the base of my thumb, and split my chin wide open. I preached the following Sunday with fourteen stitches in my chin and a cast to my armpit. Over the next three months, the cast kept getting progressively smaller. I cut away much of the palm of the short cast, so I could hold the bridle reins and the coils of my rope in the left hand, and got right back, literally, into the swing of things within about six weeks.
From the beginning, I took a lot of grief about roping from a handful of church members. Rodeo cowboys have a sometimes deserved reputation of being shiftless, unfaithful drunks. Several were especially concerned that their pastor was frequently seen in the company of such vermin.
I had no one to tell how much I appreciated the unpretentious relationships I found among those men. They all called me “preacher,” and though it was not my primary goal, I had ripe opportunities for ministry while hanging around the roping chutes. But just as important, my soul was refreshed. Tensions melted. Anger subsided. Worries were put into perspective. I laughed. Joy was renewed. And more times than not, I went home with a warm heart and a joyful spirit.
When I lived in the Chicago suburbs, I had a hard time finding anyone to play cowboys with me. I experimented with different ways to recharge. I ran, fished, and went for long walks on the Prairie Path trail. Today I continue to look for ways to integrate the Sabbath elements of laughter, solitude, submission, worship, and recreation into my life.
Sneaking around
You’ve heard the old jokes about pastors sneaking off to find a Sabbath: The golfer who told his secretary he was going to visit the Greens; the fisherman who named his boat Visitation, as in “I’ll be out on Visitation for the rest of the day if anyone calls.”
I’m not advocating sneakiness; it bothers me that the disapproval of a handful of cranks can make us resort to such behavior. But if people could only hear us preach with a fresh spirit, in contrast to the sermons we preach when we’re chronically fatigued, perhaps we’d never again have to resort to sneakiness.
I waited for years for someone to notice and say, “Pastor, we’ve been watching you work, and it’s making us all tired. We’re so concerned about your physical and spiritual well-being that we’re going to insist that you ease up enough to recharge your batteries. You can count on us to pick up the slack.”
Another episode of Fantasy Island.
So I started giving that little speech to myself every week. At least the first part. And no one noticed. I couldn’t believe it. I cut my workload by 20 percent, and no one complained. I still showed up when it counted, made myself visible at strategic times and places, and, most every week, preached with the passion that comes from being fresh.
Archibald Hart, Adrenaline and Stress (Dallas, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1995)
Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell
