On Juggling

If you are going to serve as a pastor, you better learn to juggle.

You have multiple responsibilities:  child of God, husband, father, son, pastor, community member, churchman. 

As a pastor you have multiple tasks:

• Preach
• Lead
• Worship planning
• Strategic planning
• Financial planning
• Teach adults
• Teach young people
• Teach children (these three are dramatically different)
• Grief counseling
• Pre-marriage and marriage counseling
• End of life counseling
• Boss
• Scholar
• Occasional plumbing and electrical work
• Lawn mowing and snow shoveling—sometimes
• And so on…

Being a pastor is more like being a homemaker than any other job.  They too have a wide variety of responsibilities.

You will never get it all right all the time.  It helps to do the following:

• List your priorities and loyalties in order.  (Remember, God and the congregation are not synonymous)

• List your goals.  Goals should include personal, family and professional goals.

• Make sure that both of these lists are consistent with the Word of God and your gift mix.  Also make sure that these are consistent with your confidence that you will live forever in heaven and do not need to create it here!

• Add as few extraneous activities and hobbies as possible.

It is hard to balance all that you need to do.  To date, I have not found that it is ever not hard.

One Thursday one of my members asked me to come out to an event Saturday morning at 8:00 a.m. to lead an opening prayer for a community building project.  He thought it was important to have the pastor present—just for a prayer.  I declined. It is not that I am not an early riser on Saturdays.  I did some Bible reading at 5:00 a.m.  Plus I had to drop a daughter off at a sporting event at 6:00 a.m.  I wanted to get a half hour on the tread mill done as well. 

With all that, I still really had plenty of time if I hurried to run over and do what he requested before a 9:00 new member class. 

I made Saturday morning breakfast for my wife instead.

Here’s how I juggled things:  I needed to start the day with the Word.  That came first.  Also, I needed to make sure that I cared for my family; so they came second—a ride for my daughter and breakfast for my wife.  Third, I must care for my body so I chose to get a run done before I got too far into the day.  Fourth, I needed to teach that new member class because that is something that pastors are specially trained to do.

Praying at a community building project would have been nice.  Probably it would have been good exposure.  It clearly was possible.  But I figured:

• Someone else could do it just as well as I.  It would have been nice, but surely not necessary.

• My motivation for going would have been more self-serving than anything—if I had gone it would have been so that this member who asked me to do something was not ticked off at me.

• It may have taught people the wrong thing:  prayers only matter if the pastor does them.

• There are enough other times that I have to choose to let one of the other priorities (walk with God, care for family, care for self) come in second—at least for a time.  This was not a crucial time to do that for the preceding three reasons.

So that day I let that ball drop.  Someone else said a prayer.

You can take this to the bank:  you cannot juggle all of the balls that you and others would like juggled all at the same time all the time.  You MUST let some drop.  Choose wisely, prayerfully, honestly.  Your choosing will impede or speed your path toward significance.

A friend from church sent this.  It should help.  It is a quote from the author James Patterson:

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls.  The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity.  And you’re keeping all of them in the air.  But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball.  If you drop it, it will bounce back.  The other four balls–family, health, friends, integrity — are made of glass.  If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.  And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.

God bless the juggling!