Out of my hands...

When I was a Baptist Pastor I remember the annual meeting where, when the topic of salary came up, my wife and I were ushered out of the room to wait, somewhere, until the discussion was over and the votes taken. What do you talk about while you're sitting alone in a room knowing that folks are talking about you, perhaps in unkind ways (this was a Baptist church after all) and deciding whether or not to give you a raise that maybe kept your head above water.

It is a recurring theme, that so much of what you do as a servant of the church is out of your hands. You can do a marvelous job, and I can't always say that I have, and still see the same people staring back at you with the same glassy eyes. You can paint a picture for them of what they could be, where they could go, and what God could do through them, and the next Sunday you will see them, physically and spiritually, sitting in the same pew as last week.

All you can do is pray, hope, and do the best you can, and serve with whatever strength is left. Your average parishioner is a good person, sometimes a great one, who struggles with trying to be a faithful person in a decidedly unfaithful world. The spark that lights them never comes from you, it would be preposterous to think so, but only from the Holy Spirit who touches them as they allow and always works with them, as with you, by taking them from where they are to where they should be.

It just out of your hands, and in better ones for sure, but that doesn't always make it easy.