Sometimes the Only Person You Have in the World is a Stranger

Twenty years ago, I drove a cab for a living.

It was a cowboy’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss.

What I didn’t realize was that it was also a ministry.

Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a moving confessional. Passengers climbed in, sat behind me in total anonymity, and told me about their lives. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, and made me laugh and weep.

But none touched me more than a woman I picked up late one August night.

Read the rest. As I process all that I have experienced in the past year, I try not to overreact and overcorrect so that I reject the good with the bad. What did I experience in the Church that was actually good, and should not be tossed out with that which was exploitative and manipulative?

A co-worker asked me if there was anything that I missed about pastoring. And I said "Hell, no!" and then modified the statement. I missed being important in the lives of hurting people. I remember once, about two hours before Sunday morning worship, getting a call at the parsonage from a community resident that I didn't know about her suicidal child. I remember sitting with people mourning their lost spouses. I remember being present while several people died. I remember being present in the midst of suffering and helping people heal.

That was good work. And as I've written before, it is a universally needed work. It was certainly more important than what I'm doing now.

Still, I'm taking care of myself and my family, and getting paid for it rather well. And I don't lie awake at night in terror at whatever salacious lie some "saint" at the church is going to say about me, nor wonder what dumbass thing my DS is about to do next. Nor does my wife have to put on a fake smile and perform to the demands of others at my workplace.

It is a return to sanity and normalcy, and I had forgotten what those things were. Reflecting on the past year, it's amazing what I had allowed to become normalized in my life -- the lies, the manipulation, and the fear that never fully unknotted in my stomach. And even though I'm not helping the hurting anymore, I wouldn't trade it for that hellish existence for a minute. I'm still hurting badly from what happened to me in the past, but I like where I am now.

So I guess that someone else will have to drive the taxi from here on out.

HT: Grow-A-Brain

Theodicy on the Margins, Part 1

I've never read Terry Pratchett, but my wife is reading Interesting Times and recently commanded me to read the first page. I'm glad that I did. The novel starts out with these lines:

This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world.

And Fate always wins.

Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until too late that he's been using two queens all along.

Fate wins. At least, so it is claimed. Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate.*

Pratchett attaches a footnote to this section. It reads as follows:

*People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

For many years and for a variety of reasons, whenever I've heard someone say "Dude, whatever happens, it was meant to be," I've suppressed a strong desire to slap him. Fortunately, in seminaryland, theology this bad is fairly rare. But I have often heard among my fellow Christians, including myself, the sentiment "God did X for me as a blessing."

But as I grow older, I am increasingly disinclined to attribute anything that happens to me, as either blame or praise, to God. Just as misfortune sometimes ends as a blessing, so does good fortune sometimes ends as a curse.

For example, when a charismatic and talented woman joined my last church and began engaging in ministry enthusiastically, I said confidently, "God brought this woman here to bless us and bring us revival." She said this, too -- in fact, that God had appeared to her in a vision and told her to join that church. But when she turned out to be a manipulative charlatan whose only interest was power and essentially destroyed the church, I did not say "God brought this woman here to curse us and destroy a Christian community." My earlier confidence that a particular event was the blessing of God proved to be totally incorrect. And if we accept the premise that God never smites followers who are faithful to him, then the arrival of this woman was not induced by God.

My point is that perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to attribute incidents in our lives to divine activity. If we can't say that a happening in our lives is either good or bad, then we really don't know whether or not anything that happens to us is actually God's intervention. Just as Henry Neufeld recently argued that we should be humble about accrediting our own thoughts to God, maybe we should also be humble about our own ability to even perceive what God is doing in our world.

Responding to Grief

Brett Royal has a good question about how people respond to good and bad fortune in praising God (or otherwise).

Here's my general rule: theological precision is less important than effective pastoral care. The last thing that you should ever do with grieving people is get into a theological argument with them. Work with them where they are, emotionally and theologically.

Question of the Day

Pastors, have you ever provided pastoral care to a person facing trial and/or incarceration? How should such an ordeal be handled by a pastor?

Question of the Day

Joseph Yoo has thoughts about pastoral care when suicide strikes.

Pastors, have you ever provided pastoral care after a suicide or overseen a funeral for a suicide victim? How should such trauma be handled by a pastor?

The Universality of Pastoral Care

In the spring of 1998, I was deeply grounded in my atheist non-belief, but on one dark day in that time, my thoughts were not on belief in the divine or a lack thereof.

I had had my first romantic relationship, and it had come to an end. I was thoroughly in love with this girl, and she had ended our passionate love affair. I was beyond devastated, and wandered the streets of Delaware, Ohio in a numb, agonized haze.

At one point, I found myself at the office door of the University chaplain. I was not a Christian at all, but there I was. He looked at me and said "John, what's wrong?" I told him, and collapsed on his shoulder weeping. This man didn't try to convert me. He just listened to me and mourned my loss with me.

I wasn't a Christian, but I needed a pastor, and somehow, I knew it. Some embedded knowledge had seen through the pain and guided me to the chaplain. Looking back (now that I am in CPE), I don't know how I knew that this man would listen for me and care for me. But I did, and went.

At some point in our lives, we will all need a pastor. The cannot shield ourselves, outwardly or inwardly, from all of the slings and arrows that will come our way. In our broken world, pastors aren't just useful -- they're critical.

What Do You Say....

I'm presently doing CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) for the summer. One of the Chaplain Residents showed me a poem that Kathie Rataj Mayo, a mother who lost her child at birth at this hospital, wrote in response to heartless, tactless platitudes spoken to her.

What do you say when a baby dies and someone says...
"At least you didn't bring it home."
What do you say when a baby is stillborn and someone says...
"At least it never lived."
What do you say when a mother of three says...
"Think of all the time you'll have."
What do you say when so many say...
"You can always have another..."
"At least you never knew it..."
"You have your whole life ahead of you..."
"You have an angel in heaven."
What do you say when someone says...Nothing?
What do you say when someone says...
"I'm sorry."
You say, with grateful tears and warm embrace,
"Thank you!"