24/7 or 25/10

People these days often talk about being open or busy "24/7". In other words, they are fully engaged or on-call 24-hours a day, seven days a week. It's a sign of the times. However accurate that is, it's probably not a very healthy or sustainable way to live, even if it's just an attitude about availability for work, rather than actual performance.

Benedictine Christian spirituality asks us to exert ourselves, not with workaholic obsessiveness, but with a virtue they call "stability". It is defined as a long faithfulness in a particular direction. It is the willingness to stay with a course of action, a calling, a cause or a community for the long haul. Not to be getting blown off toward new ventures every time the wind shifts, or someone disappoints us, or whenever we are restless, or when we think the career grass is greener elsewhere.

This June, Pastor Mary Keen and I both celebrate twenty-five years in pastoral service with the Minnesota Annual Conference with what we hope has been twenty-five years of pastoral fidelity. At the same time, I am also marking completion of my tenth year with the Northfield congregation. Friends in the church have kindly noticed this, and offered their thanks and encouragements for the future.

What I want to say about this is, simply that I am glad to have served not 24/7, but 25/10, not with creepy perfectionism, but with real-life commitment. I am happy to continue to minister with each of you, and with others from other churches.

God has been kind to give me all of you as companions in the Spirit. Such friendships, encouragements and enthusiasms always deeply affect the work and the heart of any pastor. With them, pastors will joyously strive for the impossible. Without them, we will ordinarily only limp and ache, as anyone else would.

God has also blessed me with Mary Lynn, my wife, who has been my enduring, extraordinary, bright and loving side-kick throughout our years of ministry. She has kept her own life and person, and yet she has been my wise advisor and sounding-board. Much of what I have done well, I owe to her counsels in our kitchen conversations at home.

Much as I hate to admit it, God has also blessed me by means of failures and sorrows, taught to me by people who at one time or another, found me really annoying, disappointing, or unworthy of their trust--how difficult it is to be seen in that way by anyone, and how hard to listen when someone tells you those truths! Humility is the most difficult lesson to learn.

Anyway, let us be a "stable" people faithfully serving God and neighbor, not doing this under compulsion, as Paul says, but because we are loved and able to love.